1st Edition
Opera Outside the Box Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain addresses operatic “experiences” outside the opera houses of Britain during the nineteenth century. The essays adopt a variety of perspectives exploring the processes through which opera and ideas about opera were cultivated and disseminated, by examining opera-related matters in publication and performance, in both musical and non-musical genres, outside the traditional approaches to transmission of operatic works and associated concepts. As a group, they exemplify the broad array of questions to be grappled with in seeking to identify commonalities that might shed light in new and imaginative ways on the experiences and manifestations of opera and notions of opera in Victorian Britain. In unpacking the significance, relevance, uses, and impacts of opera within British society, the collection seeks to enhance understanding of a few of the manifold ways in which the population learned about and experienced opera, how audiences and the broader public understood the genre and the aesthetics surrounding it, how familiarity with opera played out in British culture, and how British customs, values, and principles affected the genre of opera and perceptions of it.
Introduction: Opera Outside the Box
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Chapter 1. Of Shreds and Patches: Operatic Commonplaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Edward Jacobson
Chapter 2. Perceptions of Verdi in Victorian Britain
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Chapter 3. Opera and British Choral Culture: Verdi’s Requiem in London
Chloe Valenti
Chapter 4. "A Carnival or a Sacrament, a Fair or a Funeral:" The Prima Donna at the British Musical Festival, 1810-1834
Charles Edward McGuire
Chapter 5. Adelaide Kemble and Opera Arias in Concert and Drawing Rooms
Matildie Wium
Chapter 6. Marie Wilton, La! Sonnambula! and the Opening of the Prince of Wales’s Theatre in 1865
Valeria De Lucca
Chapter 7. Friends and Visitors: Chamber Music, Concert Aesthetics, and the Conundrum of Operatic Song
Christina Bashford
Epilogue
Roger Parker
Biography
Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a professor emerita of musicology at the Massachusetts (USA), affiliated Professor in International Studies at the University of Iowa (USA), and associate general editor for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. She studies Italian opera of the nineteenth century with an emphasis on the reception and performance of Verdi’s operas in Victorian Britain.
This fascinating collection offers a new and unfamiliar view of (mostly) nineteenth-century operas we thought we knew, focusing on their general spread through British culture by means of what the editor calls "operatic experiences outside the opera house," and "operatically flavored activities." Edited flawlessly by pre-eminent Verdi scholar Roberta Marvin, the volume includes contributions by leading scholars of opera and of Georgian and Victorian musical life, as well as by a few new voices of compelling interest.
Ruth Solie, Professor Emerita, Smith College
