Music on Stage presents papers from the interdisciplinary “Music on Stage” conference series held biennially at Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, Kent, since 2006. Three main streams of music theatre are covered in each conference: opera, the Musical, and performance practice. The collection of papers here on opera covers a wide spectrum of operatic debate from historic (contextualising Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov) to contemporary opera; the current debate about Werktreue and Regieoper; investigation into the genesis of one of opera’s most iconic characters, Wagner’s Wotan; exploring Nono’s Prometheo, Maher’s The Hunchback Variations Opera and Jennifer Walshe’s music theatre pieces; and also interrogating the use of animal characters on stage and their perceived threat to the human voice.

Papers on the Musical explore Reich’s The Cave, Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, the musical synthesis between Spanish Copla music and the Anglo-American “book” musical, and one stage not often considered in its own right when discussing music theatre—television—a domestic stage which is immediately available to all.

Rose Bruford leads the world in actor-musician training, and the papers here further explore and debate this aspect of performance and its impact on stage by interrogating the whole gestalt of music and text, as well as the process of actor-musician training. Basarab Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity idea of embracing and unifying multiple performance disciplines within the singer’s training concludes this selection of papers.