In 2002, film director Lars von Trier agreed to stage Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The project was abandoned, however, after two years of preparation. For this article’s research, I conducted interviews with key persons involved with the project, not least Lars von Trier himself, and I was given access to unseen materials (documents, videotapes and other items) from the archives of Lars von Trier’s film company, Zentropa, which shed light both on the director’s plans for the production and on the process that would eventually spell the end of the project. The materials, however, turned out to illuminate not only what the opera world lost, but also what von Trier’s later films gained from his immersion into Wagner’s creative world. In this article I seek to map both the ill-fated process and explore the later benefits from it in the films Antichrist (2009), Nymphomaniac (2013) and, above all, Melancholia (2011), with its echoes of Wagner’s apocalyptic Götterdämmerung.

This article utilises a nearly unique collection of material (theatre box office data) and the reports of Soviet bureaucrats charged with overseeing musical theatre to analyse the programming and reception of operetta performed in the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1948, a period during which Soviet society shifted from world war to Cold War, and music, musical life and musical theatres underwent ideological scrutiny and endured intervention by the Communist Party’s Central Committee. It argues that although official programming and audience preferences were rarely in sync, their disjuncture followed a surprising pattern according to which Russian operetta-going audiences proved both more conservative and more patriotic than those responsible for the programming in operetta theatres. Marked differences between this Russian pattern and patterns observable in other republics – Ukraine gets particular attention – also attest to the diversity of taste and official ambitions for musical programming in the postwar Soviet Union.

The myth of Mikhail Glinka still divides the history of Russian music, to the point that any influence on the creation of Russian opera before him is considered part of ‘prehistory’ in artistic terms. This is certainly true for the works of Catterino Cavos, a Venetian composer who made his career as a music director at the St Petersburg Imperial Theatres. The main purpose of this article is to compare Cavos’s opera Ivan Susanin (1815) with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836), in order to highlight aspects of continuity in the process of creating the Russian operatic tradition. In this analysis, both Western and Russian traditions will be taken into consideration, which will enable a better assessment of Cavos’s contribution to the evolution of Russian music within a European frame.