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Over the past hundred years, the operas of Claudio Monteverdi have become iconic symbols of the early music movement and have entered the canon of so-called great operas. The conventional explanation for their iconicity is that they are historically important works, the first to fully realise the potential of the operatic genre, and that they speak to us and relate to contemporary concerns. These definitions, though, are contingent on surrounding socio-cultural factors. Rather than trying to explain their immanent and autonomous greatness, this thesis examines how Monteverdi’s operas have actually been received and performed on stage, going beyond mere description and providing a deeper analysis of the political, cultural, and social contexts of their performative instances. There is no single explanation for why performers and scholars have so frequently engaged with Monteverdi’s operas, but it is clear that Monteverdi opera is now, as it was in the seventeenth century, a fluid entity. In the current stage of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’ this fluidity and lack of single answers is particularly apparent in operatic performance. But where Bauman sees liquid life as a negative and troubling state, this thesis will show that, at least regarding early opera, not having one answer leads to great invention and thoughtful engagement with the contexts of the past and present. The thesis consists of five case studies, each examining in detail one particular issue brought up by the early opera revival. First, an examination of Monteverdi’s place in the earliest stages of the revival in the first half of the twentieth century challenges the view of the early music movement as primarily antiquarian. The thesis demonstrates the revival’s highly politicised underpinnings in France, Germany, and Italy and the varied effect politics had on how and why Monteverdi’s operas were performed in those countries. Next, audio and video evidence is used to investigate three aspects of modern Monteverdi performance in more depth, examining how stage directors have placed notions of community on stage in their interpretations of L’Orfeo, how stage and music directors have reshaped Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria for widely varying dramaturgical and musical ends, and how singers have interpreted the role of Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea vocally and dramatically. Finally, I examine three recent productions of L’incoronazione di Poppea from the perspective of a participant observer, focusing on how the opera functions in the real space of an opera house, and how the presence of performance is conveyed in early opera today through the use of directorial attitudes, space, and the staging of gender relations. This wide-ranging thesis demonstrates that the concept of a ‘Monteverdi opera’ is fundamentally fluid. This fluidity involves not only the texts themselves (cuts, rearrangements, transpositions, orchestrations, etc.) but also their medium (the stage, film, recording), their ideologies (nationalistic, fascist, communitarian), and their performances (in various singing and playing styles). While a large amount of valuable and rigorous work has been done in studying the early music movement, few of these studies find a significant place for early opera, and few recognise the basic fluidity and cultural contingency of performance and reception. This thesis hopes to correct those omissions, and to show how this fluidity manifests itself in the modern production of Monteverdi’s operas.

This thesis analyses the background in folk music, folk literature and folk art of Rimsky-Korsakov's sixth opera Sadko (1897). Attention is especially focused on the folk genre of the bylina, or Russian legendary and mythical oral epic narrative, from the field of which, uniquely in Russian opera, the plot of the opera is drawn. Furthermore, many incidental details of libretto and staging are derived from these epics, and, too, lengthy vocal extracts declaimed in the style of a typical Russian peasant bard. Rimsky-Korsakov also drew, however, on many other genres of folk music and folk art for his opera, and this thesis demonstrates that there is hardly one detail of this work, including cast list and stage directions, which does not derive from the Russian folk tradition. However, some critics have maintained that the measured oral unfolding of an epic narrative does not lend itself readily to adaptation for the stage, and that there are long periods of stasis in the action of the opera. The thesis rebuts this assertion by examining Rimsky-Korsakov's artistic and aesthetic conceptions, and by demonstrating that, through his adaptation of such epic material for the musical theatre, the composer was attempting to create a new genre of stage art, in which the conventional dramatic canons were to be set aside. This thesis, therefore, firstly analyses the genre of the bylina in detail, then studies Rimsky-Korsakov's background in the culture of his period, which led to his profound immersion in Russian folk culture. Subsequent to this, the other major sources of the opera Sadko are examined, as are Rimsky-Korsakov's collaboration with Mamontov's Private Opera Company, which premiered this work, owing to the composer's difficulties with the Imperial Theatres. Following an analysis of the score and libretto to ascertain how the composer incorporated his sources into his work, the thesis concludes with an evaluation of the alleged dramatic weakness and static quality of the score, and an analysis of whether the attempt to transfer an oral linear narrative to the stage was in fact successful.

Though the castrato has been absent from the operatic stage since the nineteenth century, this voice is often described as the mysterious link in understanding the vocal techniques attributed to bel canto. The mystery lies in the fact that the voice of the operatic castrato cannot be heard by modern ears; and yet its legacy can be seen in the vocal tuition of several successful opera singers at the turn of the nineteenth century. What is unusual about this period is that some of the most successful singers of the day, including Nancy Storace, John Braham and Elizabeth Billington were British and shared the same vocal teacher. The castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) began his career as a primo uomo on the continent and while he established himself in various areas of musical activity, his main contribution and legacy was as a vocal teacher. During his residency in Britain from 1774 until his death, he trained several leading British professional singers who were the stars of opera in London and on the continent. They each demonstrated a use of techniques associated with the castrato vocal aesthetic and popularised a new vocal style, which can be traced to Rauzzini. Through this thesis, I will draw attention to the importance of Rauzzini’s impact on vocal teaching practice in Britain and his wider influence on the development of vocal style. I will demonstrate that Rauzzini should be considered part of the vocal teaching canon to which Pier Francesco Tosi (c.1653-1732), Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) and Manual García II (1805-1906), three other foreign vocal teachers, who were resident in Britain, already belong. By examining exactly what the expected vocal aesthetics were for all singers, castrato, non-castrated male and female during the period in which Rauzzini was active, I will demystify the castrato technique and provide a more tangible understanding of what this encompassed, demonstrating that many of these techniques were learned, performed and popularised by other voice types such as the female soprano and the male tenor.

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