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A definitive text of the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes is here presented. The process by which it was created is revealed in detail. All the extant versions are collated and significant differences between them displayed. For the first time the scenarios written by Britten and his partner Peter Pears and the first surviving draft versions of scenes by the librettist Montagu Slater are published in full. Additions to the draft and final libretto texts and revisions throughout this process by Slater, Britten, producer Eric Crozier and, in the final scene, poet Ronald Duncan, are clarified and a critique provided. Marked differences in stage directions between the libretto texts and music scores are shown and versions selected or created which offer the best indicative detail for performance practice. The edited text is similarly enriched by the inclusion of performance indicators from various sources added by Britten, Pears and the work's first conductor, Reginald Goodall. The edition is introduced by three 'Perspectives' sections which consider (1) Britten's relationship with Slater and working practice with librettists; (2) the relationship of the work to its original source, George Crabbe's poem The Borough, the difference in the portrait and treatment of the character Peter Grimes and the reasons for the difference; and (3) the particular contribution and features of Slater's writing. Thereafter follow an account of the rationale, principles and practice of the edition and introductions to every scene in which the use of source material, the evolution of the text, the plot development and performance issues of the scene, the presentation of characters and the set are delineated, the latter with reference to photographs of the original set hitherto unpublished.

Existing accounts of the music profession argue that between 1750 and 1850 musicians acquired a new identity as professional ‘artists’ and experienced a concomitant rise in their social and cultural status. In the absence of sustained investigation, it has often been implied that these changes affected male and female musicians in similar ways. As this thesis contends, this was by no means the case. Arguments in support of female musical professionalism, artistry, and their function in public life were made in this period. Based on the gender-specific nature of the female voice, they were an important defence of women’s public engagement that has been overlooked by gender historians, something which this thesis sets out to correct. However, the public role and professionalism of female musicians were in opposition to the prevailing valorisation of female domesticity and privacy. Furthermore, the notion of women as creative artists was highly unstable in an era which tended to label artistry, ‘genius’ and creativity as male attributes. For these reasons, the idea of female musicians as professional artists was always in tension with contemporary conceptions of gender, making women’s experience of the ‘rise of the artist’ much more contested and uncertain compared to that of men. Those advocating the female singer as professional artist were a minority in the British musical world. Their views co-existed alongside very different and much more prevalent approaches to the female singer which had little to do with the idea of the professional artist. Through examining debates about female singers in printed sources, particularly newspapers and periodicals, alongside case studies based on the surviving documents of specific singers, this thesis builds a picture of increasing diversity in the experiences and representations of female musicians in this period and underlines the controlling influence of gender in shaping responses to them.

Welche Bühnenfigur konnte in italienischen Opern um 1800 als Liebhaber oder als Verführer erfolgreicher sein als ein Counter oder ein Kastrat? Höchstens die als Mann verkleidete Frau. Auf sie flogen die Frauen in Frauenkleidern. Wer quer zum üblichen Geschlechterunterschied stand, war auch kompositorisch besonders attraktiv: Züge des einen Geschlechts mussten mit stimmtechnischen, d.h. auch körperlichen Bedingungen des anderen erreicht werden. Auf andere Weise sah sich der Komponist von einem den Geschlechtscharakter der Bühnenfigur gerade nicht verwischenden, sondern explizit festlegenden Genre herausgefordert, der Wahnsinnsszene. Der Text hatte nicht nur davon zu reden, dass die Figur wahnsinnig sei, die Musik musste es zeigen oder: es selber werden. Wahnsinnig wurde in den allermeisten Fällen nur die von einer Frau dargestellte Frau, und zudem war das Privileg solche Szenen zu übernehmen an eine oft besonders hohe Stimmlage gekoppelt. Welchen Schwierigkeiten der Komponist begegnete, wollte er das Genre von dem weiblichen auf das männliche Geschlecht transponieren, wird an einer der seltenen Opernszenen gezeigt, in denen ein Mann, zudem einer mit tiefer Stimme, wahnsinnig werden darf.

As a popular historic work with constant and worldwide performances, the sexist and racist narratives disseminated by Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly causes harmful social and political ramifications. Many scholars point to this opera specifically when discussing the fetishization of Asian females, and mention the title character as the quintessential example of damaging stereotypes. Thus, I conduct a postcolonial and feminist reading of Madama Butterfly, through analysis of the opera's libretto, the libretto sources, and the opera's score. I unravel the Orientalist assumptions that make up the foundation of the Butterfly narrative, and trace them as they make their way into Puccini's opera. I re-read Madama Butterfly as a metaphor for imperialism, and its effects on the colonized psyche. I examine Lieutenant Pinkerton and Butterfly's characters with specific attention to the power dynamics of their relationship in the context of colonization. I emphasize gender, race, and class tensions evident within the white male and white female gazes on the bodies of third world women of color. I present Puccini's musical choices in the operatic score as supplementary to my postcolonial-feminist reading. Puccini's use of pentatonic scales to evoke "Oriental" sounds, as well as his appropriation of Japanese folk tunes and "The Star Spangled Banner" into the score serve to supplement my basic contentions that Madama Butterfly is a product of Oriental discourse and a metaphor for imperialism and its effect on the colonized psyche.

Castration has a long temporal and geographical span. Its origins are unclear, but likely lie in the Ancient Near East around the time of the Secondary Products Revolution and the increase in social complexity of proto-urban societies. Due to the unique social and gender roles created by castrates’ ambiguous sexual state, human castrates were used heavily in strongly hierarchical social structures such as imperial and religious institutions, and were often close to the ruler of an imperial society. This privileged position, though often occupied by slaves, gave castrates enormous power to affect governmental decisions. This often aroused the jealousy and hatred of intact elite males, who were not afforded as open access to the ruler and virulently condemned castrates in historical documents. These attitudes were passed down to the scholars and doctors who began to study castration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, affecting the manner in which castration was studied. Osteometric and anthropometric examinations of castrates were carried out during this period, but the two World Wars and a shift in focus meant that castrate bodies were not studied for nearly eighty years. Recent interest in gender and sexuality in the past has revived interest in castration as a topic, but few studies of castrate remains have occurred. As large numbers of castrates are referenced in historical documents, the lack of castrate skeletons may be due to a lack of recognition of the physical effects of castration on the skeleton. The synthesis and generation of methods for more accurate identification of castrate skeletons was undertaken and the results are presented here to improve the ability to identify castrate skeletons within the archaeological record.