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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article examines the furore aroused by Il furioso's simultaneous triple Neapolitan premiere in 1834. Situating the opera's unusual reception in the context of the complex and vibrant theatrical life of Naples, I describe how the coexistence of multiple versions of Il furioso—prose as well as operatic—inflected the meanings of Donizetti's work. Close attention is paid to the opera's interaction with local performance traditions, notably those obtaining in the city's less prestigious venues, where factors such as the permeability of the “fourth wall” brought the work into dialogue with local urban preoccupations. After considering the close parallels between the buffo slave Kaidamà (played blackface) and Pulcinella, the stock Neapolitan mask, I demonstrate how aspects of Kaidamà's representation unnervingly recalled the class of urban beggars (lazzaroni) that personified Neapolitan backwardness. At the hands of local conventions, Donizetti's work took on a form that, by evoking pervasive discourses of Southern inferiority, raised uncomfortable questions about Neapolitan self-image. The contingent and unpredictable meanings thrown up by Il furioso's reception suggest the potential importance of vernacular performance traditions as a line of future research.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article examines German and English reactions to Felix Mendelssohn's 1836 oratorio, Paulus. German Protestant audiences recognized Paulus's devotional, or spiritual, quality, which derived from its incorporation of well-known Lutheran chorales. In using chorales and reflective arias and choruses, Mendelssohn followed the model established by Johann Sebastian Bach in his St. Matthew Passion, a work that Mendelssohn had reintroduced to German audiences in 1829. When Paulus was premiered for English audiences in a translation called St. Paul, it was enthusiastically received. But these audiences misunderstood St. Paul's devotional elements, for several reasons. Not only were English audiences unfamiliar with both Bach's music and the Lutheran chorale, they also expected oratorios to follow the model established by Handel. As such, English audiences were confused by those places in St. Paul where the present-day audience is called to reflect and attempted to attribute these numbers to characters in the drama. Mendelssohn responded to this confusion when writing his next oratorio, Elias (or Elijah), in which he hewed more closely to the Handelian model.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article considers a number of Tchaikovsky's songs—specifically those with texts by Apukhtin, Romanov, Heine, Goethe, and Tchaikovsky himself—to explore how silence constitutes a powerful yet elusive form of expression. It argues that Tchaikovsky's songs, an underappreciated and underexplored aspect of his output (at least in the West), are characterized by a degree of literary and musical sophistication seldom attributed to the composer. Their self-consciousness is held to be the product of a combination of three main social and aesthetic forces characteristic of Russian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing first on the work of Bakhtin, the article argues that the nature of Tchaikovsky's songs as lyric forms in an age dominated by the realist novel invests them with a creative tension between the need to conceal (an imperative inherited from the lyric poetry of the 1820s and 1830s) and the need to reveal (a feature of the novel's tendency to intimacy and confession). Then, turning to the work of Foucault, it traces how a coherent discourse of homosexual identity (as opposed to an otherwise unrelated series of individual homosexual acts) arose in the later nineteenth century, forcing queer artists to address (whether consciously or otherwise) the question of how best to relate this identity to their creativity. Finally, it looks at the evolving status of the artist in late Imperial Russia and suggests that an uneasy relationship between revealing and concealing was imposed upon personalities in the public eye by an audience that wished to feel close to the artist, yet also required discretion and the avoidance of scandal.</jats:p> <jats:p>At the heart of the article lies a study of silence as a particularly expressive form of apparent non-expression, dealing with frequent instances in Tchaikovsky's songs of silence as a poetic trope, as well as with equivocation on matters of gender and identity in lyric forms as indicative of a potentially queer sensibility. Also, the article refuses to reimpose a categorically and reductively homosexual reading, posited on some presumed opposed heterosexual norm. Rather, it argues that Tchaikovsky was able to discern the peculiar appeal of lyric forms as referentially incomplete yet aesthetically self-sufficient fragments, and that he approached such lyrics in a way that emphasized qualities of ambiguity, allusion, and the uncanny. Although drawing extensively on literary models, the article also considers how music is paradoxically well placed to enact poetic silence. The relationship between words and music, and between composition, performance, and reception, is a further instance of how song became an apt medium in which the thoughtful composer could explore issues of personal and creative identity in an age of profound artistic and social transformation.</jats:p>