This collection offers a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the operatic culture of nineteenth-century Britain, one that extends beyond the elite milieu of London’s major opera houses to uncover the genre’s interdependence with print media within and beyond the capital.Footnote ¹ It has become almost obligatory for those working in nineteenth-century print culture studies to acknowledge the great transformation brought about by the digitization of periodicals and newspapers in our own century. The accumulation of this digital archive has brought with it unprecedented accessibility and immediacy, restoring the nineteenth-century press as a defining presence of the age, while fundamentally altering the scholarly methods by which we encounter and analyse print sources in the present. As James Mussell reminds us, ‘we now need to cultivate two sets of skills to understand the nineteenth century: familiarity with the forms and genres of the periodical and newspaper press; and the ability to interrogate the resources that present them in digital form’.Footnote ²

In their introduction, Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero acknowledge both the opportunities and problems brought about by digitization, including the presence of paywalls limiting access to data, the neglect of non-digitized sources, and the fallibility of keyword searches, which can encourage a mode of reading snippets in isolation from their surrounding context. Of more pressing concern for their argument, however, is that ‘digitized data can also lull us into viewing print as an uncomplicated representation of reality’. Print sources and digital resources, they contend, are far more than merely repositories of information about composers, works, performers and productions; they are ‘active agents in shaping perceptions of opera’ (p. 2).

In adopting the category of print culture (rather than ‘criticism’ or ‘the press’), this book thus decentres an older model of reception studies that relies on the opinions of a select group of professional male critics writing for mainstream newspapers or specialist musical journals. Instead, the authors make room for a wider range of material besides periodicals and newspapers, including scores, librettos, playbills, programmes, advertisements, memoirs and novels. Similarly, opera in this context emerges as a permeable and mobile genre, encompassing adaptations, excerpts, popular theatre, domestic music-making, concerts and festivals. As Fuhrmann and Mero point out, ‘in some ways, nineteenth-century Britain was still far removed from a canonical model, in which authoritative versions of opera were enshrined in print and entered the “museum” of musical works’ (p. 4). Indeed, if critical engagement with nineteenth-century British print culture and its modern digitization has long been the preserve of literary scholars and historians, the diversity and messiness of operatic print paraphernalia during this period poses its own unique set of questions and challenges. After all, the operatic ‘work’ as a sounding performance event in the nineteenth century took on a multitude of forms and has always stood in an ambiguous, uncertain relationship with the idea of a fixed ‘text’.Footnote ³

Three particularly rewarding essays – by Fuhrmann, James Grande and Phyllis Weliver – address questions about opera’s status by interrogating its contested and sometimes unruly relationship with literature and print culture in early nineteenth-century London. Fuhrmann’s chapter, Giovanni in Print, focuses on the phenomenon of popular burlesque adaptations that followed the British premiere of Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the King’s Theatre in 1817. Fuhrmann shows how various forms of print – including playbills, scores, librettos, popular song sheets, novels and news reports – enabled theatrical adaptations and shaped their reception and afterlife. Rather than read these sources as a mere commentary on the opera, Fuhrmann argues that the everyday media encountered by ordinary Londoners played an active role in reworking and subverting the production of Don Giovanni experienced by the upper classes at the King’s Theatre. But even as such sources provide us with a lasting record of the overlapping boundaries between operatic production, popular theatre and print media, they also serve as a reminder of the gaps between ephemeral performance and printed documentation.

Like Fuhrmann, Grande also takes the British premiere of Don Giovanni as a point of departure, this time focusing on the reception of Mozart among radical literary writers. In Music and Magazines: Dissenting from Opera in the Print Public Sphere, Grande revises our understanding of the reception of opera among the Romantic literary community of ‘Cockney’ writers and Protestant dissenters that included Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Henry Crabb Robinson and Amelia Opie. Existing narratives of this moment of operatic reception have emphasised a conflict between an aristocratic preference for the virtuosity and spectacle of Italian opera seria and an emergent middle-class championing of Mozart as embodying the aesthetic-moral values of liberal reform.Footnote ⁴ Going beyond an over-arching image of class conflict, Grande explores the internal debates and tensions that unfolded within the ‘dissenting public sphere’, where discussions about opera were shaped by underlying anxieties about the role of music, speech and drama in the pursuit of rational enquiry and sensibility (p. 235).Footnote ⁵ Interactions between literary print culture and the musical world of London’s non-patent theatres are further explored in Weliver’s chapter Wanting More: Oliver Twist as Beggar’s Opera, which repositions Dickens’s novel within its original publishing context as serial instalments in Bentley’s Miscellany. Weliver’s contextual close analysis of the serial publication of Dickens’s novel in Bentley’s reveals how individual instalments of Oliver Twist were ‘interactive with framing “songs” and an emblematic musical cover’ (p. 251). As well as showing how Bentley’s Miscellany evokes in printed form the musico-dramatic world of illegitimate theatre and opera, Weliver draws out an explicit connection between Oliver Twist and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera by attending to the ubiquitous presence of noise, cries and diegetic sound in the novel.

Another important theme running throughout the book concerns the influence of London as a global operatic centre from the standpoint of colonial and provincial cities and towns. Although opera houses in Britain were centralized in the capital (at least compared with a more devolved model of operatic production in Italy, France and Germany), touring continental and English troupes performed throughout the British Isles, and audiences experienced operatic excerpts in concerts and as arrangements, ranging from brass bands to keyboard transcriptions. Three central chapters – by Jennifer Oates, Timothy Love and Maria McHale – reveal how the influence of London on operatic life in Scotland and Ireland worked in tension with the formation of local practices and the production of native works, including new operas in English and Irish Gaelic. These chapters examine how coverage of opera in the press contributed to shaping audience tastes and projecting cultural nationalism and Celtic revivalism. As Oates reminds us, the musical press in these cities was itself strongly networked with London; public discourse on opera in Edinburgh came both from Scottish press outlets (such as The Scotsman) and from correspondents writing for London-based journals such The Era or the Musical Times. Meanwhile, Love and McHale – in complementary chapters on opera in Ireland during different periods of British colonial rule – reveal how polarizations and tensions between competing representations of Irish and Anglo-Irish cultural identity played out both on the operatic stage and within the musical press.

Approaching operatic dissemination and taste-making from different perspectives, Charles Edward McGuire and Julia Grella O’Connell explore the variety of ways in which audiences in Britain encountered Wagner’s operas and ideas. Whereas existing accounts of British Wagnerism have centred on the composer’s diverse influence on composers, artists and writers, less attention has been paid to the performance history and wider reception politics of his operas and music dramas. As McGuire points out, the gradual assimilation of Wagner excerpts and segments into Britain’s long-running provincial festivals helped to popularize his operas with audiences outside London, while also fuelling critical debates about the aesthetic and moral influence of his music dramas and the boundaries between secular and sacred music. O’Connell discusses further the intersection of Wagnerism and Victorian Christianity in her reading of two popular novels by George Moore: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).Footnote ⁶ While O’Connell reads the depiction of Wagnerism in these texts as entwined with narratives of religious conversion, she also emphasizes their cultural work in widening access to high art, observing that such novels are ‘unique in their secondary function as middlebrow, mass-produced exegetical texts of British Wagnerism, mediating between the high art of the composer and the popular tastes of the reading public’ (p. 229).

The remaining chapters offer micro-histories and close readings of overlooked areas of operatic production and reception. Peter Horton’s opening chapter on the music publisher and man of the theatre, William Hawes, is one of the few chapters to focus on the commercial world of operatic publishing, revealing the social and economic conditions underpinning the cultural transfer and translation of continental operas to London, in this case Weber’s Der Freischütz. Jennifer Hall-Witt’s chapter on John Ebers’s popular account of London’s Italian opera, Seven Years of the King’s Theatre (1828), encourages a sceptical approach to historical print sources by approaching this ghost-written ‘managerial memoir’ as an emerging genre in the publishing marketplace, one that capitalized on fabricated authorship, celebrity anecdotes and unreliable narration (p. 65). Similar issues concerning the (un)reliability of printed sources are at stake in Matildie Wium’s essay on the press coverage surrounding the English contralto Mary Shaw, whose experience of vocal trauma in the early 1840s was subject to multiple narrative interpretations during and after her lifetime, culminating in the Romantic mythification of her lost voice in biographical accounts of the later nineteenth century. Michelle Meinhart picks up the theme of femininities in her account of the coverage of opera in two high society women’s magazines of the turn of the twentieth century, The Gentlewoman and The Lady. The focus on a sequential close reading of individual periodicals here provides an opportunity to trace in microcosm the long-standing cultural association between opera and female aristocratic audiences in Britain amidst the social changes and upheavals of the fin de siècle and the First World War.

With some notable exceptions, therefore, much of this book maintains a focus on discourse about opera in Britain, leaving room for future research to explore further the burgeoning of sheet music and the amateur market in mediating opera, as well as the increasing globalization of print and publishing networks in shaping operatic culture both within Britain and beyond its borders in the wider Anglophone world. At the same time as this book reflects growing interest in the history of opera in Britain and the British Empire, it also points to the richness of nineteenth-century print culture studies as a cross-disciplinary field, something that is explored in an Afterword by Leanne Langley. As one of the first musicologists to recognize the value of sustained attention on nineteenth-century British periodicals, Langley gives a long-range reflection on her experience of pursuing archival and bibliographical work amidst disciplinary developments in ‘New Musicology’, social history and material culture studies. If the trajectory of Langley’s research serves as a lesson in the cyclical nature of academic trends and the importance of persisting with independent scholarship, it also sets into relief the methodological gains and losses at stake in our current reliance on digitized historical sources, as well as the sheer pleasure of encountering the musical past through the multivocal and often unpredictable medium of the periodical press.