In the perception of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin and in scholarly discourse on it, the legend associated with the tales of the Knights of the Grail prevails. But the romantic element in opera had a political and even revolutionary meaning for Wagner. The historical layer of the operatic action in Lohengrin draws on the Deeds of the Saxons by Widukind of Corvey and recounts the birth of the Yrst Germanic parish, united by Henry the Fowler, the “Father of the Fatherland” — and the Yrst Germanic emperor. The Romantic generation of German revolutionaries — Wagner's peers and associates — excavated the ancient history of Germany and German mythology from old manuscripts and established it in the minds of the aedgling nation. Lohengrin was the Yrst German opera to give artistic life to the revolutionary and patriotic ideas of the German Renaissance. The peculiarity of the opera lies in the interplay of the original Wagnerian principles of composition with operatic forms of Italian origin. The composer would later cite Johann Sebastian Bach as the ideal example of the “Germanic” in his ludicrous French wig and his fundamentally Italian style. By combining the rhetorical principle directly derived from Bach's music with a variety of German melodic sources from chorales to Romantic songs, Wagner had fully mastered his musical language. This article examines the compositional symmetries, supports, and arches that build the integral structure, new duet forms, and other Yndings that had a continuation in operas aber Lohengrin, as well as the main feature of this work: the combination of lyricism and tragedy, history and myth, which opens the way to countless interpretations of meaning on the modern opera stage.

The image of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as the “national composer” was formed in Russian musical historiography through the eforts of musicologist Boris Asagev and under the inhuence of autobiographical narrative, including Korsakov’s Chronicle of My Musical Life. At the same time, the composer’s words about his work were carefully selected and censored under the ideological climate of the USSR. As a result, Rimsky-Korsakov still appears in many ways as a national musical curiosity outside the European musical tradition. Explorations in the territory of omissions and censors reveal the composer as an inquisitive (and jealous) listener of the musical ideas of others. Having a keen ear for reminiscence, Korsakov regularly incorporated what he had heard from many and very diferent European composers, including Richard Wagner, Frédéric Chopin, Gaetano Donizetti, Édouard Lalo, Johan Svendsen, and Edvard Grieg, into his music, and above all, into his operas. Rimsky-Korsakov’s self-suicient originality turns out to be a hoax. What is manifested in Korsakov’s claim for the truth about himself is the hitherto actual canon of “the composer himself.” That is, the belief in the truth of the composer’s will, intentions, words about himself and his art, and as a consequence, the chimerical equality of the composer with the author.

A key feature of the study of Russian opera has been its interest in ‘page-tostage’ adaptation of canonical works of literature. Behind this research story, in many respects, there is only the fact that a significant number of Russian operas are really based on literary primary sources. The contribution of philologists who have studied this subject on a par with specialists in the history of music also played a role in its credibility. This logocentric approach overlooks, however, another tradition, one in which the libretto is the product of a negotiation between agents and where the relationship between the source text and operatic adaptation is attenuated. The work that most fully subverts the ‘pageto-stage’ tradition and fully incorporates the librettist as a co-creator of the finished composition is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman. It may seem eccentric to see The Rake’s Progress as a Russian opera, yet as this chapter argues, it is certainly an opera shaped by aspects of Stravinsky’s Russian origins, upbringing, and education, and somehow spoken ‘in translation’. In particular, it engages in a series of intertextual dialogues with the legacy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

The article focuses on the phenomenon of Wagnerism in Russia at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries and its impact on the culture of the epoch, whose impact is widely recognized. As opposed to the established tradition which considers this impact at the level of the creative elite of the Russian Silver Age, including major intellectual and artistic jgures, this paper raises a question about the role played by the reception of mass audiences in the spread of Wagnerism. Performances of Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen by the troupes of the Imperial Theatres in 1900–1914, which caused a great public response, were chosen as material for the inquiry. The article reconstructs the reception of these productions by mass audiences based on reviews in the press, as well as memories of participants and witnesses of the performances. The undertaken analysis led to the conclusion that at that time the performances of Wagner’s tetralogy were, in many respects, regarded by the audience as part of mass entertainment and attraction culture that experienced heydays in early 20th-century.

The article is dedicated to the emergence and development of the phenomenon of interpretive theatre direction in opera as an art form. The author investigates the historical roots of director’s theater in relation to opera, the inevitable interaction of theatre and society, and the audience’s experience in relation to comfort and discomfort. Various aspects of the relevance of interpretive opera direction are presented to the reader. Discussions of the ways in which direction and the theater and music industries have developed show the problems of opera as a theatrical form. The article analyzes the cultural differences in the existence of director’s theater based on the demands of the state, society, and existing theatrical traditions. It offers an overview of the fundamental trends and a gallery of the most important personalities in the history of director’s theater. In the final part of the article, the author provides a forecast for the future.

In the 20th century, the composer’s music score acquired the status of the firmest and almost sacred core of the opera in stage performance. Battles between traditionalists and Regieoper lovers are still ongoing both online and offline. However, oaths of allegiance to it and accusations of wrongdoing against it show that it is almost impossible to maintain the inviolability of the score in theater practice. The history of opera presents various approaches to this problem. From the birth of the art of opera, the composer was an equal contributor to the show, just like the set designer, stage manager, or impresario. However, their position underwent changes until the 19th century when the phenomenon of repertoire theater emerged, and the operatic canon began to establish itself. From then on, music started to be considered a sacred element of every opera evening. Nevertheless, even the most traditionalistic opera houses nowadays modify the original scores by removing especially long passages, changing original arias, and rewriting default music or text.
This article o5ers a historical essay on the relationship between composers and the opera industry, and discusses types of modifications to opera scores, such as cuts, inserts, and the pasticcio phenomenon.

In the opera episode of Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), the alien Diva Plavalaguna performs an aria in which a fragment of the Mad scene from Act III of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor is replaced by a vocalization composed by Eric Serra. This article examines the relationship of the vocalization to the opera number and the unified form of the aria, created by combining seemingly incompatible parts. The Diva’s aria, in a concise and elementary form, is la solita forma, the traditional form of the Italian aria of the first half of the nineteenth century. Even though most of Rossini’s, Bellini’s, and Donizetti’s operas — solo and ensemble — and many of Verdi’s numbers up to his mature operas, including his most popular arias, are based on this form, la solita forma is often not perceived by the modern listener. The Diva’s aria, whose structure is wittily emphasized by its cinematic solution, offers a visualization and a lesson in hearing the central nineteenth-century operatic form. In addition, the article discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century operatic practice, the way opera, and in particular Lucia di Lammermoor, are performed, and the transformation of the operatic work from performance to performance, as well as from era to era. The inclusion of the vocalization in the aria of the Diva of Plavalaguna is considered in the context of the changes introduced into the Mad scene by the author of the opera and the opera divas of past centuries.