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The fragments of Alexis’ comedy Agonis or Hippiskos suggest a scenario based on a love intrigue: a young man is in love with a hetaira but is impeded by a foreigner; he therefore puts to practice a cunning scheme, which involves duping the obstructing character with a false display of wealth. The hippiskos, a kind of garment, probably functioned as a recognition token. The use of an item of clothing as a means of anagnorisis — instead of more standard objects, such as necklaces and jewels — was Alexis’ deliberate innovation, intended to breathe new life into the trite topos of recognition by tokens. Alexis drew attention to his innovation by naming his comedy after a garment, a virtually unique phenomenon in the Greek comic canon. A key scene of Agonis or Hippiskos may be illustrated on a calyx-krater of the Varrese Painter (Naples, 118333, ca. 340 b.c.), in which the main love triangle of Alexis’ scenario is shown on stage. No other South Italian vase showcases a piece of clothing offered in this way, and the uniqueness of the image matches the singularity of Alexis’ unconventional title. The elderly man’s figure in the vase-painting suggests that the foreigner of Alexis’ play was not a miles gloriosus but was either a pimp or a senex amator. The Agonis or Hippiskos must have been produced in Magna Graecia soon after its original performance in Athens in the 340s. The vase-painting provides an interesting testimonium for the evolution of comic costume and footwear in the later phases of Middle Comedy. In combination with the textual fragments, it indicates Alexis’ skill in the representation of dramatic characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a diverse and colourful cast of animals, birds, insects and human villagers, Příhody lišky Bystroušky (known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen), is one of Leoš Janáček's most popular, if peculiar, operas. Though nowadays Bystrouška is typically characterised as a charming portrayal of the continuous renewal of life in nature, this idea emerged only gradually from a tangle of competing and occasionally contradictory views in which, however, the complexity of the moral laws by which the opera's inhabitants live was frequently central. By tracing the history of the opera's stagings in the Czech Republic; drawing out themes that developed in the journalistic and critical discourse around those performances; and reading the opera's music and stage action closely, this article argues that the amoral codes of Bystrouška's world not only inhere in the story, its text, and even, perhaps, in the idea of nature's cycle of life itself, but that at certain times in the opera they are also given expression through particular correlations and disjunctions between the opera's music and the physical actions and gestures of the singers on stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay discusses multi-vocality in composer George Elliott Clarke's jazz opera "Quebecite." The opera focuses on the stories of two multicultural couples who experience familial and personal prejudices towards cultural difference in their relationship. The author examines the two female characters in the play, who have caused extensive critical debate on the issue of performing cultural identity, to analyze how the opera calls for a rethinking of critical approaches to sound as a medium for improvisation.

The article offers the author's insights on the final act of the opera "Manon Lescaut," composed by Giacomo Puccini. The author mentions that operas "Manon," by Jules Emile Frederic Massenet and "Manon Lescaut" both contained final scenes which differed considerably from the novel of Antoine François Prévost. She says that Puccini tried to forge into a new artistic territory by heightening emotional tension in the opera. She states that Puccini also deals with the heightened expressions of mourning, in which the death of Manon in the opera, the character Des Grieux maddened by grief and falls in a swoon on her body.

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This article examines Amfortas's talking wound in Richard Wagner's opera "Parsifal." The discourse of the wound is the framing of the action. Amfortas speaks from the depths of his wound as Titurel speaks from the depths of the tomb. Detached from the subject said to suffer from it, the wound as object is a grotesque prosthesis for the substance of what is suffered. Extracting the wound from the body both reveals and neutralizes the symbolic value it assumes within the body. The imagistic context of the opera's film version and the musical context are explored.

The figure of Macheath in John Gay's Beggar's Opera has sometimes been identified with Jack Sheppard. The article suggests that Sheppard is not a plausible model for Macheath, and that other escapees such as the well-known criminal Roger Johnson fit the case more squarely. A wider history of gaol-breaking, from the time of the Jacobite lords, underlies the use of this motif in Gay's drama. Moreover, a real-life model for Lockit can be found in the career of William Pitt, who was keeper of Newgate when many well publicized escapes took place. In the background lies an eminence grise, the Recorder of London, Sir William Thomson. A conclusion is that the satiric economy of The Beggar's Opera depends on an undertow of reference to these issues, which carried important political resonance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]