...Lesley Hughes The opera Mathis der Maler (1935), based on the sixteenth-century German painter Matthias Grünewald, is Paul Hindemith’s most iconic work. Because of its artist protagonist, scholarship on Mathis has traditionally focused on how Hindemith may have used the figure of Grünewald...

... of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar . Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages...

...John Romey In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Parisian théâtres de la foire (fairground theaters) gave birth to French comic opera with the inception of the genre known as comédie en vaudevilles (sung vaudevilles interspersed between spoken dialogue). Vaudevilles were popular songs...

...Monica A. Hershberger In 1945 Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein began working on The Mother of Us All , their second and final opera. If the pair’s chosen subject matter—the life and work of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)—was radical in and of itself, so too was the librettist’s approach...

...Carlo Lanfossi Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense...

...Emily Richmond Pollock In 1944 with Nazi Germany just months from defeat, a curious and now little-known book was published in Regensburg: a collection of essays and biographies that strove to define the contemporary state of opera. Titled Die deutsche Oper der Gegenwart ( German Opera...

...Austin Glatthorn In July 1786 Prince Carl Anselm of Thurn und Taxis concluded that he had no choice but to dissolve his Italian court opera. This owed in part to the success of the German theater, which had been established in 1784 to rival the Prince’s Hoftheater and contest his position...

...Valeria de Lucca This article sheds new light onto the process of transformation of the figure of the opera patron in Rome during the mid-seventeenth century. Following the travels of Giovanni Filippo Apolloni's libretto Amor per vendetta, ovvero L'Alcasta , I trace the dissolution...