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The image of Aniuta (likely from French Annette) proliferated the eighteenth-century Russian comic operas, played in private theatres by serfs troupes and aristocratic dilettantes. These comic operas revealed three types of social cross-dressing: 1) in operatic plots, a countess could be disguised as a shepherdess; a peasant heroine might rediscover her aristocratic origin; 2) a real princess or countess could play a rustic girl, imitating her accent and manners; a young beautiful serf actress impersonated a noble matron; and 3) social transgression spilled from the stage to a real life when actors or aristocrats attempted to navigate across polar social divides. One particular case that relates to all three levels of cross-dressing is the story of the serf actress Parasha Zhemchugova and the owner of a famous serf troupe and the actress, a member of one of the prominent families, Count Nikolai Sheremetev. Strong social and gender biases and at the same time a certain ambivalences and “dangerous” possibilities associated with the culture of masquerade illuminate the sensibilities of late eighteenth century Russia, as reflected in sentimental and comic operas and in figures such as Prince Ivan Dolgorukov.

Mandarin Theater’s opening in 1924 was remarkable for it was the first Chinese theater built after the 1906 earthquake and fire. This chapter provides a detailed look at the first three years of the Mandarin Theater’s music, performers, and productions as it evolved from a small, struggling theater into a significant cultural institution. In particular, from the elaborate architectural details, to fundraising activity, and to the city tax paid by the Mandarin Theater during the first ten months of the theater, it was clear that the theater was extremely ambitious.

Arthur Sullivan left for the south of France, crossing over from Calais on a “special” boat with the Prince of Wales and Reuben Sassoon. After supper with the prince in Calais, Sullivan and Sassoon continued their journey to Paris, and Sullivan then went on to Monte Carlo. By now, Sullivan's reputation as a gambler was being talked about in the press. Visits to the casino did not improve his mental state. He was still in low spirits, with the pressure of having to do another comic opera weighing on him, whereas he much preferred the idea of writing a grand opera—with William Gilbert, if that were possible. If Sullivan wanted to write a grand opera, Gilbert suggested Julian Sturgis as the “best serious librettist of the day.” This was not the reply Sullivan expected or wanted; it did nothing to lift him out of his despondency.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of the first two decades of the twentieth century, when musical forms were both consolidating and evolving. Musicals were either romantic or satiric, but the two extremes borrowed from each other so casually that at times it became difficult to tell comic opera from musical comedy. Sometimes even the manager—or, as he was often called now, the producer—did not know which of the two forms he was producing.

This chapter concerns eighteenth-century comic opera, which emerged as a metatheatrical commentary on the conventions of aristocratic, serious opera. In its mockery of neo-classical mimesis, comic opera forced critics to articulate what was new about its musical style. It therefore precipitated a huge pamphlet debate known as the querelle des bouffons, in which certain theorists began to understand music’s aesthetic appeal differently. These thinkers cleaved music’s affective power away from the operation of mimesis, offering instead a materialist account of vibrational attunement predicated on sympathetic resonance. The chapter concludes with a reading of Diderot’s contribution to the debate in his celebratedtext Rameau’s Nephew.

This chapter focuses on the Boston Ideal Opera Company, a comic opera troupe. Its founder, Effie Hinckley Ober, was not a performer, but a businesswoman who owned one of the first musical management firms in the country. Her success in a male-dominated business provides valuable insight into how an ambitious and enterprising woman could navigate a distinctly competitive, virile world in the post-Civil War American social landscape. This chapter covers the Boston Ideals only during the Ober period (1879–1885) and illustrates techniques of management, a hitherto unknown relationship between opera production and the emergence of lyceum bureaus, and performance practice. The company mounted both operettas (Gilbert and Sullivan) and some of the standard works that had been performed by English-language troupes for decades; after Ober’s retirement it continued until 1904 under a new name (the Bostonians) and new management.

As Congress aimed to legitimize itself as the colonial political authority, it published numerous articles and declarations written in a dignified style of eighteenth-century state papers. Loyalists accordingly debunked that authority by lampooning and parodying Congressional expression. This chapter examines one important parody of the Articles of Association, published in Philadelphia in 1774, as a way of showing the transatlantic literary strategies employed to “lower” a political body they believed was unlawful. This chapter analyzes the distinctive cultural positions the ancient Chevy Chase ballad held on each side of the Atlantic by comparing Loyalist satire with British satire written in ballad form.

In a letter to Alfred Watson, William Gilbert suggested that the ghost music was “out of place in a comic opera. It is as though one inserted fifty lines of Paradise Lost into a farcical comedy.” Reacting to criticism, Gilbert changed the spelling of the title to Ruddigore. The impression of failure with Ruddigore dogged Gilbert, even though in his heart he did not believe it. Its comparison with The Mikado, the onslaught of adverse criticism, his discomfiture with some of Arthur Sullivan's music, and his recognition that the second act as originally performed had serious weaknesses all contributed to the feeling of failure. It was nothing of the sort, despite the difficulties, but it was hard to lay that particular ghost to rest. In later years, Gilbert made several attempts to have Ruddigore revived, but was unsuccessful. It was left for later generations to enjoy.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of the nineteenth century. The discussions include the development of the burlesque; the first American musical (at any rate, the first famous one): Edward Everett Rice and J. Cheever Goodwin's Evangeline; or, The Belle of Acadia (1874); and the emergence of the pantomime, the farce, and the comic opera.

This chapter presents the The Three Fra Diavolos that opened at Mitchell's Olympic Theatre in 1884. It told the story of three rich young gentlemen who are smitten by three rich young ladies. The Olympic was the first theatre in the city to specialize in comedy: farces, burlesques (or operettas), and trimmed-down versions of comic operas (the Three Fra Diavolos was preceded, for example, by a one-act version of Mozart's La Nozze di Figaro.) The Olympic, a “bandybox temple of Thespis,” spearheaded the theatrical naissance of the 1840s in New York. What its success signaled, to all who paid attention, was the emergence of a new taste for popular entertainment.

This chapter is about Kane O’Hara’s Midas as a performance of the myth found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As a musical theatre piece it was first performed in Ireland in the 1760s. As a relatively short afterpiece the burletta became a London hit and was still in production in the 1830s. The chapter sets this forgotten blockbuster in its historical, social, and cultural context. It introduces the reader to the presence of the classical in British and Irish comic opera and puppet theatre traditions. The burletta of Midas and especially in his puppet fora, just as other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century burlesques, provided access to classical culture for those who were by formal education excluded from it. In this way, Midas supplemented as well as fed on the classical experience of a newly diverse culture-consuming public, including middle- and lower-class citizens and upper-class women.

This chapter asks why Aristophanes' Lysistrata has been so successful in the last centuries, and why is this success still lasting. What reasons have persuaded so many playwrights to put new words into the mouth of this remarkable heroine? And what reasons have induced so many musicians to set those words to music? The chapter traces a short history of the English, French, German, Italian, American, Greek, as well as Romanian and Hungarian sisters of Lysistrata, all much younger than the Aristophanic original but, in one way or another, similar to their old relative.

The critical reception of the 2018 recording of The Light of the World oratorio marked a milestone in the rehabilitation and rediscovery of Arthur Sullivan’s sacred music. Whereas in his lifetime, he was recognized as a serious composer with a strong commitment to church music, the twentieth century saw an almost total focus on his comic opera collaborations with W.S. Gilbert to the exclusion of virtually all his serious and sacred work. Allied to this, recent biographers and commentators have suggested that he had no real religious faith or commitment. In fact, there is clear evidence from his correspondence and diaries that, although naturally reticent and private about such matters, Sullivan did have a sure and simple faith and was deeply committed to sacred music, as his contemporaries recognized.