The Jewish impresario Awsay Strok（АвсейДавидовичСтрок; b. 1876 in Dvinsk, Latvia, d. 1956 in Tokyo, Japan） lived in Shanghai between the 1910s and the 1940s. During this period, he invited world-famous musicians and dancers from Europe, Russia, and the United States to Asia, and organized numerous “Asian（ Oriental） tours” that included Japan in their itinerary. The main cities covered in his Asian tours were Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and several colonial cities of Southeast Asia.
Strok was an impresario and a music manager. Different accounts of his activities exist in the biographies of touring artists and in articles and books detailing how Western music was received in East Asia. However, there are no studies on his life and activities. The misconception that Strok invited eminent artists only to Japan persists in Japanese publications, even though the artists he invited to Japan inevitably visited Shanghai both before and after their Japan visits, using regular travel routes. In fact, visits to Tokyo, Osaka, and Shanghai were planned as part of the set itinerary of Strok’s Asian tours.
To find information on Strok’s tours, the author searched for Strok’s name, as an impresario, in advertisements and articles about theatre in English and French newspapers published in Shanghai, namely The China Press and Le Journal de Shanghai. Moreover, information on concerts and performances produced by Strok was extracted from articles in the database “ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chinese Newspapers Collection（ 1832─1953） .” These articles revealed that Strok organized more than 50 Asian tours during the period from 1918 to 1940. His Asian tours allowed people to experience Western music, opera, and dance performances by leading international artists, transcending national borders.

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Contemporary opera staging is a new issue in musicology. In German-speaking countries, the controversial Regietheater（ theatre of direction） has gained much attention among opera lovers and theorists. This type of staging allows the director to change original elements of the libretto in respect to geographical settings, chronological order and the characterizations of the figures and plots. Regietheater tends to be criticized for causing strained readings of an arrogant director with no respect for the concept of Werktreue（fidelity to the work）. For those who support Regietheater, however, the demand for Werktreue is simply pointless because from the semiological point of view, opera consists not only of the libretto and the score, but also of the performance.
Contemporary opera staging can be compared with New Musicology in the 1990s. Both of them belong to academic-artistic practices. If the former is the performance of opera musicologically revisited, the latter is the subjective and rhetorical discourse about music produced by scholars. These two also try to put the meanings of musical works into motion. Though not musicians, directors are capable of reimagining an opera by their mise-en-scène. It is with the same purpose that New Musicologists describe a piece in their language which adds something new to that piece.
In other words, both contemporary opera staging and New Musicology have hermeneutic aspects. The Germanist Gerhard Neumann calls Regietheater a window through which hidden and contradictory meanings contained in an opera should be understandable. Based on a similar idea, Lawrence Kramer, one of the leading New Musicologists, defines his musical hermeneutics in terms of “hermeneutic windows”（Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900, 1990）. In conclusion, contemporary opera staging is a theatrical and more persuasive version of New Musicology, in that we cannot distinguish the work from its interpretation in the theatre.

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