This dissertation examines four operas created by the composer Franceso Cavalli and the librettist Giovanni Faustini at the Teatro Sant'Apollinare in Venice in 1651-1652 with regard to the relationship between musical dramaturgy and stage performance. All four operas--L'Oristeo, La Rosinda, La Calisto, and L'Eritrea--are preserved in manuscript scores that are part of the Contarini Collection in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Annotations in these sources document the complex process of rehearsing at the Sant'Apollinare and the ways that multiple considerations of production (including vocal casting, staging, and scenography) interacted with the evolving musico-dramatic structure. Several of these operas were revived later in the seventeenth century in new theatrical circumstances: L'Oristeo was revived as L'Oristeo travestito in Bologna in 1656; La Rosinda was reworked and presented under the title Le magie amorose in Naples in 1653; and L'Eritrea received multiple productions (including a Venetian revival at the Teatro San Salvatore in 1661). These case studies provide a fuller view of the relationship between Venetian opera aesthetics and the exigencies of performance on the seventeenth-century stage. Modifications to the original dramaturgy--such as inserted arias and sinfonie, added secondary comic characters, and cuts to recitative--were made with careful regard to the scenography of each production. This analysis demonstrates the critical importance of stagecraft in the interpretation of this repertoire both historically and in modern edition and performance.

The censorship of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a familiar story to musicologists, but reception of the opera is not frequently mentioned. Examining the reception of a work can bring a work's relative importance into focus. In this thesis, German literary and reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss's model of the horizon of expectations is applied to reviews of American productions of Lady Macbeth. Curiosity about communism following the Great Depression in 1930s, America and American music critics' knowledge that Soviet composers worked for the Soviet regime led to the belief that Lady Macbeth was officially approved export from the Soviet Union. When the article condemning the opera as a Western formalism appeared in the Soviet magazine, Pravda, Americans needed to adjust their understanding of Lady Macbeth as a socialist expression. Following the work's revival in San Francisco in 1981, the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony is prevalent in many reviews. Many reviewers use Volkov's narrative of Shostakovich as covert dissident of the Soviet Union to assert that the censorship of the opera was about the content of the plot and not the music. Following the Soviet rejection of the work, American critics tried to claim Shostakovich for the West based on the values of individual freedom and feminism set forth in Lady Macbeth.