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<jats:p>In 1978 dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen published an essay in Dance Research Journal called “In Search of Satanella.” It lamented the loss to the repertoire of a once-popular ballet about demonic love. Cohen asked a series of questions about the ballet’s 1840 genesis, reception, and transformation over time. Finding answers requires taking up bigger issues about the ballet canon, ballet taboos (including angelic dancers doing devilish things), and ballet reconstruction projects. Perceptions of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet rest primarily on its sturdier, hardier creations, much less so the looser assemblages, the bric-a-brac entertainments intended for diverse audiences. To search for Satanilla is to find more than just this one ballet. It is to discover an entire realm of the repertoire.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In January 1851, Robert Schumann wrote to Richard Pohl with an idea: “I would like to write an oratorio. Perhaps you would lend your hand? I thought of Luther.” Pohl enthusiastically agreed to write the libretto and the two began discussing their ideas for a musical work depicting the life of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther in an extended correspondence. Ultimately, despite two years of intermittent planning and deep investment on the part of Schumann, the project fell through. That there is no libretto or musical sketches for the proposed oratorio has meant the project, apart from brief mentions, has gone largely unexamined in scholarship about Schumann. Nevertheless, the letters between Schumann and Pohl give valuable insight into what drew both composer and librettist to this subject—and into the questions of identity, confession, and politics that captivated them and their contemporaries. In this article I argue that the Luther oratorio plans offer a prime example of what Alexander Rehding calls “historical monumentality,” characterized by the harnessing of historical figures into symbols of collective political, religious, and social identity. Drawing on perspectives from religious studies to visual culture, I argue that Schumann and Pohl sought to create a musical monument of Martin Luther as a symbol of politically liberal and confessionally Protestant Deutschtum. More broadly, I aim to demonstrate that Schumann’s interest in Martin Luther exemplified the complex interweaving of historicism, confessional legacy, political revolution, and emergent nationalism that guided Schumann’s compositional efforts during his tenure as municipal music director in Düsseldorf (1850–54), with particular emphasis on his active engagement with questions of religion and confession in German society in the years following the 1848 revolutions.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) was a notorious failure at its world premiere: condemned by Italian critics for its “decorative” surfaces and apparent repetition of earlier Puccinian tropes. The first of the composer’s two operas based on works by American playwright David Belasco, the opera was soon revised and received its belated New York Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1907 as part of a festival of the composer’s works organized in his presence. The decision to visit New York was timely: not only had Belasco’s source play been premiered there in 1900, but New York was by then emerging as the global center of the operatic gramophone industry, with recordings of Puccini’s works made in Camden, New Jersey, frequently featuring performers from the Metropolitan Opera. This development echoed wider operatic power shifts between Italy and the United States at this time, which informed evolving attitudes to new sound reproduction technology on both sides of the Atlantic.</jats:p> <jats:p>This article re-examines Madama Butterfly from the perspective of Puccini’s 1907 tour. In particular, it focuses on the composer’s interactions with the U.S. gramophone industry during and before his New York visit, examining them in relation to broader questions of the Italian operatic future and ideas of Italian vocality. While Madama Butterfly has long been addressed in relation to its Orientalist depiction of Japan, reframing Puccini’s Belasco-inspired opera within this transatlantic context can illuminate the fraught cultural politics of the gramophone industry, as well as their intersection with the wider musical dramaturgy of Puccini’s opera. Ultimately, I argue, Madama Butterfly emerges as a vital document of a changing auditory culture ca. 1900, as well as of an ambivalent colonial imagination.</jats:p>