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Led by Bogusƚawski, Elsner, and Kurpiński, the National Theater — the locale of major operatic productions — became the central cultural institution in Warsaw. It featured a rich repertory of French, German, and Italian operas. The operatic genres of operas performed in Warsaw ranged from Singspiel, through opéra comique, tragedie lyrique, opera seria, and buffa, to grand opera. This chapter discusses the introduction into Warsaw of the newest foreign works, ushering in the Romantic aesthetic in opera. At the same time, the librettists and composers associated with the National Theater created vernacular operas, which often addressed subjects from Polish history, and conveyed patriotic sentiments though text and folkloristic music. The history and repertory of the national theater is presented, and Chopin's involvement with Warsaw's operatic scene is explained.

The songs in Chapter 2 describe the celebrity status of Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini from the viewpoint of the working-class Italian immigrants whom these stars attracted to the Metropolitan and Manhattan opera houses. They highlight the contrast between those immigrants' sincere but noisy appreciation of opera and the more refined by less genuine response of elite operagoers. Gus Edwards's “My Cousin Caruso” emerges as an influential model for the topical operatic novelty song.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to present the history and music of Shanghai opera to students and scholars of ethnomusicology. Chinese music, despite being much researched by a large body of scholars, sometimes seems to remain in a peripheral position within the discipline as a whole. This study also aims to re-evaluate certain aspects of current ethnomusicological theory and practice. The chapter considers the use of the term ‘opera’ in the Chinese context followed by a discussion of Shanghai opera. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Scholars of Shanghai opera accord their tradition, huju, a history of some two centuries or more, typically describing its rise in terms of a development from local traditions of folk song to balladry, and from ballad-singing to staged and costumed opera (in the 1920s). This chapter begins with a brief summary of the history of opera in China to provide initial orientation for the subsequent evaluation of how huju relates to and contrasts with other dramatic forms. The analysis draws on surviving primary and secondary source materials, such as the memoirs of old singers, to assess the question as to how much huju changed as it gained acceptance in the city of Shanghai. The data suggests that the generally cited model of development through stages of folk song-ballad-local opera is in need of revision, and new models are generated.

This chapter and the next examine novelty songs that use both opera and ragtime to express tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, racializing them as tensions between white and black America. Chapter 6 is an in-depth treatment of a single song, Ted Snyder and Irving Berlin's “That Opera Rag” (1910). Through a close reading of the music and lyrics, an examination of the song's use in a stage comedy, Getting a Polish, and a consideration of the stage persona of May Irwin, the actress who interpolated the song in that comedy, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary audiences could perceive multiple levels of meaning that interact in a complex piece of social and musical commentary.

A central element of the history of huju in the 20th century is the emergence of female performers: this in a tradition formerly dominated by men, some of whom impersonated female roles. This chapter focuses on issues pertaining to and associated with these new performers. Treated as a case study in the field of music and gender, and drawing on theoretical proposals from several fields, the chapter begins in the same historical area as that discussed in Chapter 1 but ranges beyond the former chapter's historical confines to consider some later data also.

This chapter develops the historical consideration of Shanghai opera begun in Chapter 1, looking now at huju in mid-20th-century Shanghai. Other than the appearance of female performers, in the period from approximately 1920 to 1949, there was an expansion of troupes with a concomitant increase in specialization; the rise of new performance venues and media, most obviously recorded sound and radio broadcasting; the influence of other artistic forms, such as the spoken drama and film; and changing modes of musical learning. Distinctive schools of performance were created, several of which remain significant in terms of musical style today. Discussion of these factors is enclosed within an examination of musical place.

This chapter examines some of the conventions involved in representing the erotic in music, and reveals the ideological character of these conventions. The disparity and mutability uncovered by a comparison of representations of sexual desire in three differing musical styles (Baroque opera, the Victorian drawing-room ballad, and Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s and 1930s) show that a genealogy of sexuality in music needs to address disjunctions rather than developments, historical contingencies rather than evolutionary questions. There is certainly no progress to be discovered in the way eroticism has been depicted in music: representations of eroticism in contemporary music are not more real now than they were in the 17th century. The fact that the latter can seem cool or alien to us today points to the way sexuality has been constructed in relation to particular stylistic codes in particular historical contexts, and is therefore cultural rather than natural.

The opera The Sugar Reapers (1962–5), by Alan Bush (1900–95), is doubly outside the communist bloc: the work of an English communist, set in the remote South American colony of British Guiana. Yet far from being an isolated curiosity, it addresses crucial aesthetic issues in post-war communism. As an enthusiast for the call for nationalist socialist realism that emanated from the Soviet Union in 1948, Bush faced particular difficulties in composing a work for British Guiana. What did national music mean in the context of an ethnically and culturally diverse population? And how was the danger of exoticism to be avoided? Tracing Bush's use of Guianese music, this chapter reveals a work indicative of the paradoxes of socialist realism, and creative in navigating these paradoxes. The work's political context and performance history are addressed as starting points for further investigation of communist cultural engagement with the Third World.