One of the great accomplishments of seventeenth-century culture was the development of a vocabulary by means of which dramatic characters and actions could be delineated in music. The techniques for emotional and rhetorical inflection we now take for granted are not, in fact, natural or universal: they were deliberately formulated during this period for the purposes of music theatre. Monteverdi's descriptions of how he invented the semiotics of madness for La finta pazza Licori or of war for the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda reveal how very self-consciously he designed methods for ‘representing’ affective states.

‘Dramaturgy’ is one of those vogue words to which frequent use lends the appearance of being increasingly well understood, whereas the wear and tear to which it is subjected actually makes it ever harder to understand. When a word has lost almost all meaning through overuse, the simplest way to make it usable again is, of course, to try to restore its original meaning. It should be possible to agree that dramaturgy is the composition of dramas tout court, and there can be no serious objection if that basic definition is understood to include the theories and principles of dramatic composition (as Lessing did in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie). In that sense ‘dramaturgy’ is to drama what ‘poetics’ is to poetry: it denotes the essential nature of the categories that form the basis of a drama and can be reconstructed in a dramatic theory.

Claudio Monteverdi may not have been ‘the creator of modern music’, as Leo Schrade has styled him, but he did play the leading role in the creation of opera. Lacking illustrious predecessors and pre-existent generic prescriptions, he moved confidently as an innovator: the first great opera composer. But he was also a madrigalist, the last great contributor to a genre that was clearly on the wane by 1600. Here he was a follower. Numerous composers had defined and developed the madrigal before him: Rore, Marenzio, Wert, Luzzaschi, Pallavicino. His contribution lay not in creating the genre but in stretching it to its limits.

In his trilogy of masterpieces composed to texts by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart radically changed the musical and theatrical nature of Italian opera. The dramma giocoso became a true ‘comedy in music’ through the use of psychological realism: a vivid representation of life in continuous transformation and in all its naked immediacy is now the real protagonist of the story, an all-embracing totality within which each character represents a separate feature. This influx of a non-rationalist sense of life into the classical proportions of sonata form (whose tonal relationships and free approach to thematic development controlled the vocal set pieces) made for an explosive mixture. Even before his collaboration with Da Ponte, Mozart himself seemed well aware of his uniqueness: ‘I guarantee that in all the operas which are to be performed until mine [L'oca del Cairo] is finished, not a single idea will resemble one of mine.’

We are used to thinking of ‘opera singer’ as a profession. But no such profession existed when opera emerged as a genre at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, or for three or four decades after that: operas were too few to occupy most of anyone's time. In the early seventeenth century not even ‘singer’ was as yet a clearly defined trade. Many singers were also instrumentalists: some accompanied themselves (and some also composed their own music), while others switched between singing and playing; the commonest Italian term for them all was musici. Others again were actors or actresses who could sing, like Virginia Andreini, drafted in an emergency to create the title part in Monteverdi's Arianna of 1608.

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeare's play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘that's a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.

Three hundred years after his death in 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lully's reputation is entering a new phase. Only a minority of opera-goers today have had the opportunity of seeing one of Lully's operas performed in the theatre. French music, always a degree less accessible to a non-French public than the music of its Italian and Austro-German neighbours, remains the last corner of the seventeenth-century repertory to make a popular appeal to twentieth-century audiences. There are indications, however, in the appearance of a new collected edition, in the small output of new recordings, and in the greater volume of scholarly investigation associated with the tercentenary, that the distinctive sound of Lully's music will soon become at least as familiar as that of his contemporaries Purcell and Cavalli. And familiarity will surely engender popularity: the music needs no special pleading.

‘Librettology’ has begun to acquire a working vocabulary. Critics now investigate the relationship between a libretto and its literary source in terms other than fidelity; a text adapted for musical setting no longer disappears from the realm of the ‘literary’. Historians and musicologists are considering the role of opera librettos in cultural history, with special attention to librettos that rework historical, national or mythic themes. How operatic texts transpose and thus ‘re-accent’ a nation's literary classics is emerging as a fruitful and still unexplored field.

Before returning to Paris in 1874 after his eventful four-year stay in England, Gounod embarked on a comic opera based on Molière's George Dandin. Recuperating in St Leonard's-on-Sea from a ‘cerebral attack’ he wrote a lengthy Preface, dated 10–11 April 1874, from which the following is drawn:

The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions which will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based […]

The pre-history of a nineteenth-century composer's first opera often required labours more arduous and frustrating, more time-consuming by far, than the work of composition itself: the search for a suitable libretto or the source from which a libretto could be fashioned. The chronicle of Beethoven's travails before work on his Schmerzenskind could begin, his rejection of plays and poets both before and after the Bouilly-Sonnleithner text of Fidelio, is not the only instance of its kind. Later composers with operatic ambitions and without a court-sponsored coterie of librettisti had an even harder time. The difficulty of locating a good text was not the only or even the principal reason for Brahms's famous quip, ‘Better to marry than to write opera’, but it was certainly a contributing factor and a stumbling block for others. For those who, unlike Wagner, did not trust their own poetic skills, the doleful refrain, ‘A good poet is hard to find’, was a leitmotif more insistent than anything in the Ring.

By all accounts the premiere of Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera on 11 February 1907 was a triumphant success, with the presence of the composer adding special lustre to the brilliant performance of a distinguished cast. Amidst the general acclamation, however, a foreign visitor named Jihei Hashiguchi raised a dissenting voice in a letter to a local newspaper:

I can say nothing for the music of Madama butterfly. Western music is too complicated for a Japanese. Even Caruso' celebrated singing does not appeal very much more than the barking of a dog in faraway woods.

All Puccini's biographers tell the story of how the eighteen-year-old composer, in the company of two friends, walked the nineteen miles from Lucca to Pisa to hear Verdi's latest opera, Aida; and how the impact of that opera – the first that he had ever seen performed – was such that he determined from that moment on to make a career as a composer for the theatre.