Continuing in paths away from composer-oriented approaches that once dominated the study of opera, editors Hilary Poriss and Roberta Montemorra Marvin have brought together eleven short essays that consider diverse transformations of Italian opera – mostly of the nineteenth century – in a range of geographical, performing, and interpretive contexts. As announced by the word ‘fashions’ in the title and the colourful, dust-jacket photograph of white gloves and opera glasses, the volume's essays embrace voguish subjects once the domain of album-cover writers and music journalists, such as opera in the parlour or opera in popular galas. But they also attempt to assess the impact of changing ‘fashions and legacies’ on past and present interpretations, even to consider extreme alterations to an opera's ‘text’ that were formerly considered corruptions unworthy of study. As the editors state in the introduction, a central aim is to discover ‘what happens to these operas once they have escaped the control of their authors’ (p. 3). This release from control is not total, for several essays emphasize the composer's (and librettist's) authority or at least mediate with it. Another overarching goal as noted by the editors is to raise the basic question: ‘how has this music retained (or sacrificed) its powerful messages in the face of deconstruction and recontextualization over time and place?’.

One such ‘recontextualization’, punningly titled ‘Partners in Rhyme,’ adds to the growing research on the revamping of Italian operas in nineteenth-century Paris. In this essay, Mark Everist offers a case study of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, a central team of translator-arrangers who helped to bring to the Paris Opéra four works by Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi between 1839 and 1847. Everist categorizes the types of adaptation, from little more than a ‘simple’ translation of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor for Lucie, with some musical reworking, to the creation of a nearly new libretto from Verdi's I Lombardi to Jérusalem, as well as for Robert Bruce, the pasticcio set to music drawn from several Rossini operas. Insightful assessments appear in Everist's contrasts with modern concepts of ‘fidelity’ for translated works and his description of French dramatic sensibilities that guided Royer and Vaëz to honour the original literary source more than the original libretto, particularly evident in their adaptation of Rossini's Otello for an 1844 production. Encouraged by French critics, who viewed the opera as dramatically weak, they rewrote all recitatives with the help of chef du chant François Benoist and borrowed music from other Rossini operas to create a more acceptably ‘Shakespearian’ work for French audiences.

In wider geographical contexts, Hilary Poriss considers a particularly ‘fashionable’ practice in ‘To the Ear of the Amateur’ – that of performing excerpted acts or scenes from different operas in a single evening – which she labels, rather jarringly, ‘piecemeal productions’.Footnote 1 Distinguishing such productions from non-staged opera galas performed in concert halls or from pasticcios, she attempts to give a broad, though non-evolutionary, view of the practice, concentrating on performances in Italy from the late 1820s, but offering hints of similar ones in London (as early as the 1790s), Paris (in the late 1820s and 1830s), and New York (at the Metropolitan Opera, beginning 1883–4). In Italy, occasions included benefits for individual singers or emergency performances to replace failed works or remedy a theatre's financial straits. Not surprisingly, she finds profitability a common motivation, as large audiences could be drawn to the theatre through the showcasing of singers. Although the juxtaposition of fragmented works did not demonstrate a particular concern for ‘narrative consistency’ or complementarity (pp. 111–12), it represented continuity with the full operas already familiar to audiences; in fact, Poriss insists that this familiarity, newly obtained during the season or refreshed over many seasons, was fundamental to the choices and reception of the excerpts. While acknowledging critical denigrations of the practice as ‘mutilations’ for the amateur (p. 120), she ultimately deems it a rewarding – and still living – practice that lends the ‘charm of novelty on many old productions’ (citing the Countess de Merlin, p. 122).

Three essays focus on staging, the operatic component generally considered most distant from the composer's authority, but two of these highlight the composer's contributions to visual action. Francesco Izzo reflects on staging directions contained in Luigi Ricci's autograph scores of opere buffe, arguing that they reveal the composer's changing creative role in Italian opera, c. 1830–50 – although he admits relatively late in the essay that attribution cannot be certain without extant manuscript libretti against which to compare. Nonetheless, Izzo generally credits Ricci with indications for performers’ movements and responses in recitativo secco as well as numbers, and notes that they add to, but sometimes challenge, the librettist's descriptions. These include shifting positions and gestures, facial expressions, or even physical contact in ‘dramatically static’ sections such as the stretta of the Introduzione, the slow movement of the Act I duet (Barone–Amalia), and the pezzo concertato of the Finale Primo in Il nuovo Figaro. In duets for buffo characters, Ricci calls for continual movement; in ensembles, he coordinates music and movements and distinguishes between more active male gestures and passive female expressions. Izzo speculates that Ricci's detailed directions may have reflected Neapolitan practices, but he also proposes, in an undeveloped addendum, connections to period writings about acting and gesture.

In Andreas Giger's essay, ‘Staging and Form in Giuseppe Verdi's Otello’, the author returns to Ricordi's staging manuals that have grounded studies by several Verdi scholars, re-examining the disposizione scenica for this well-studied late opera. Although Giger's findings may be less revelatory than Izzo's for a lesser-known composer of primo ottocento opera, his discovery of correspondences between musical form and large-scale blocking or ‘patterns of motion’ (p. 196) is illuminating. Within the famous opening storm scene, Giger locates defined forward movements of the chorus that synchronize with the arrival at tonally stable sections with lyrical, regular phrasing; in the Act I love duet, he draws parallels between the blocking structure and the conventional duet form that Verdi modifies, noting its underscoring of Otello's dominance in the tempo d'attacco and cantabile, and Desdemona's power over him in the tempo di mezzo and cabaletta.

Perhaps more fitting to our age of directorial prestige, David Rosen outlines interpretations of an early-twentieth-century director who worked without benefit of composer consultations: Konstantin Stanislavsky, the famed theatrical director who spent over 20 years directing and thinking about opera. Centring on Stanislavsky's 1927 production of Puccini's La bohème, Rosen draws upon recollections and notes in Stanislavski on Opera to present the director's concepts about the opera's ‘main idea’, characters, and setting, his scepticism of the libretto's stage directions and his willingness to cut what he considered dramatically extraneous and ‘merely an operatic tradition’ (p. 223).

Roberta Marvin moves away from theatres and into the parlours of Victorian England, examining arrangements of arias in published sheet music that were not only ‘Englished’ through translation, but through replacement texts that excised or softened allusions in the original libretti deemed too immoral, indecorous, or emotionally intense for Victorian sensibilities. (For example, ‘La donna è mobile’ of the licentious Duke in Rigoletto emerged as ‘Fair shines the moon tonight’, with references to the ‘tinkling’ of serenading lutes and the ‘twinkling’ of ‘pale stars’.) Marvin frames these arrangements in cultural terms, viewing them as conduits between public and private arenas and social classes and ‘commodities’ for the ‘consumption’ of opera by a middle class desirous of being cultivated, without threatening its mores. She suggests, perhaps a bit too strongly, that they represented a ‘cultural necessity’ for negotiating ‘elite foreign opera’ (p. 56), as well as a fashion that helped to canonize Verdi's operas in England.

In a far different sort of modification, Fabrizio Della Seta traces – with less suspense than promised in his subtitle, ‘A Case of Espionage’ – the creation of a counterfeit score of Bellini's I Puritani, possibly used for productions in Milan and Florence in 1835–6. He speculates about the ‘principal suspect’ or ‘falsifier’ as well as his sources, and then compares his ‘falsifications’ with Bellini's original score, pointing out banal, conventional orchestration and uninspired substitutions. Of greater interest than the falsifier's specific alterations is the author's suggestion that this counterfeit score was probably one of many in the early nineteenth century, when Italian publishers and impresarios operated with little to no notion of copyright.

Will Crutchfield broaches another type of counterfeit, in relation to performance practices of Italian opera, although he chooses the word ‘caricature’ to depict what he views as falsifications of the tradition in the twentieth century and since. In his provocative chapter, he bemoans the ‘rigid conventions’ of a ‘caricature tradition’, established primarily through recordings between the 1920s and 1950s, which have not only distorted the true Italian legacy, but have caused the once-malleable, ‘self-transforming’ art to atrophy, and parts of it to die. He cites the well-known practice of singers repeatedly using the same cadenzas – for example the replication of Caruso's now-iconic cadenza for Donizetti's ‘Una furtiva lagrima’– in recordings of over 200 tenors, the fixing of ‘standard versions’ with common omissions, interpolations, and interpretations and the extensive addition of high ‘money notes’, which he finds especially damaging. While Crutchfield does not wholly dismiss textual transformations, he invokes value judgments on those he considers too distant or disconnected from the composer's intentions or from original practices and aesthetics revealed through scholarship.

In a strong essay that builds on the author's previous studies of orientalism, Ralph Locke compares nine ‘literal’ to ‘metaphorical’ readings of Aida, from standard notions familiar in programme notes, to Edward Said's orientalist-inflected interpretations and responses to them. In a comparison of readings, he elucidates a range of influences and ‘unspoken premises’ behind certain views, as well as the effects of the opera's ‘inherent, productive tension’ that resulted from the cross-purposes of the Egyptian khedive's scenario and Verdi's political-ideological sympathies (p. 163).

Two essays somewhat peripheral to the general orientation on nineteenth-century Italian opera are those by Ellen Harris and Jeffrey Kallberg. Harris, however, situates her study in the century by viewing Handelian opera through the lens of Pauline Viardot's performances and private studies. She attempts to describe the famed mezzo-soprano's performing style, with sharply contrasting emotions, in ‘Lascia ch'io pianga’ (Rinaldo) and ‘Verdi prati’ (Alcina), and briefly discusses Gounod's reorchestration of the latter aria. But she also devotes space to Viardot's transcriptions of cantata arias, in order to bolster her thesis that the singer played an important role in reinvigorating early music in France. Harris underscores shared ideals with those in Viardot's artistic circle, particularly Gounod, Meyerbeer, and Berlioz, as well as Chopin and Georges Sand. Curiously, however, she does not refer to the many examples of the presence of la musique ancienne in France of earlier decades. These include choral concerts of Handel's music in Paris in the 1820s and early 1830s led by Alexandre-Etienne Choron (who cast a powerful shadow over Berlioz), concerts historiques of music journalist and historian François-Joseph Fétis, and François Habeneck's attempts to perform Handel and the publication of Handel oratorios by Edouard Rodrigues (see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2005): 22–9, 67–8). Harris makes no reference to the Conservatoire's reverence of past traditions, exemplified by the longstanding Prix de Rome requirement that its competing composers write a French cantata, or scène lyrique, based on classical texts, although she generally notes nineteenth-century interest in literary inspirations. Without references to a fuller French context behind Viardot's reinterpretations of Handel's music, Harris makes her efforts appear somewhat restricted to an ‘elite group of musicians’ in the 1850s and 1860s rather than part of broader historicist trends in the whole of the nineteenth century.

Kallberg's essay, ‘Peeping at Pachyderms’, is easily the most provocative and least relevant to the Italian operatic focus of the volume. To begin the discussion of ‘convergences of sex and music in France around 1800’, it offers as ‘emblematic’ of visual-musical convergences throughout the culture, a lengthy, rather tasteless tale of a Parisian experiment charting the effects of music on elephant behaviour (p. 134); it then considers the use of song in erotic literature and depictions of sexual peeping, with allusions to Rousseau's Le devin du village, in Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux (1772), and ‘concludes’ with Stendhal's sexually explicit responses to Rossini duets c. 1820, which reveal ‘habits of thinking about sex and music’ that also hint at the ‘trope of peeping’ (pp. 143, 145). Sociological study this is not, but a set of loosely tied references whose forced connection to an unfulfilled thesis is hidden by an excess of titillating images and vocabulary.

Perhaps the restricted length of these essays curtailed some discussions, or made it difficult to question fully the retention or loss of ‘powerful messages’ in the music that was promised in the volume's introduction. Topped off with an epilogue on intersections between performance and scholarship by John Mauceri, the essays generally prove, however, that investigations of operatic ‘fashions and legacies’ beyond authorial control can enliven the expanding scholarly discourse as they reveal the unbounded nature of opera as a captivating cultural force.