From his dissertation, ‘Music and Drama at the Académie Royale de Musique, 1774–1789’Footnote ¹, to important work on Piccini, Gluck, Mozart, Berlioz, and ElgarFootnote ², Julian Rushton has been a powerful force in British musicology, known not only for his ‘scrupulousness’ as a scholar and editor, but also for his ‘humanity and generosity of spirit’ (p. 1). In this Festschrift, colleagues at Leeds University, former students, fellow Francophiles, and family have come together to celebrate Rushton's seventieth birthday and his life-long passion for opera. While there are no contributions on Rushton's composers (except for two on Mozart) and none on musical editions, his spirit permeates the volume, particularly through the questions that he reflected on throughout his career. The editors – Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown – have organized these into three broad categories that range from national identity to otherness in music. Within these, authors also return to Rushton's interest in dramaturgy, the genesis of works, tonality, music and poetry, operatic voices, and especially opera and politics, the theme of one of his most popular courses at Leeds. As the introduction points out, ‘Rushton has always been alert to questions of power and representation’ (p. 1). In this remarkably coherent volume, contributors not only investigate such issues anew, many of them in little-known works, but also deconstruct them, juxtaposing liberal and conservative agendas, western and middle-eastern characters, and resulting in a renewed sense of ambiguity in these operas and ambivalence toward the concept of nation.

Part one, ‘Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Opera’, builds on Rushton's concerns with ‘What is English Music?’ and with composers, such as Berlioz, whose complex musical identity raises the question, ‘Nationalist or Internationalist?’Footnote ³ Essays on three British composers in this section take seriously the attempt to create English opera, despite its ‘lukewarm reception’ abroad (p. 123). At the same time, they suggest that it often involved foreign influences. Bryan White explains how Purcell's dramatic operas borrowed from Lully through Louis Grabu's music, especially the ‘structure and length of choral movements and French-style dances in his Albion and Albanius’ (p. 27), and through Betterton's scenic design, modelled on scenes from Phaeton. David Cooper looks at Stanford's Shamus O'Brien as an opera on the failed Catholic rebellion in Ireland that left the social order in place. How are we to understand this work ‘composed by a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry who had established himself as a mainstay of English musical life?’ (p. 99). Dublin-born, the protestant Stanford identified more with the British than with the Irish, complicating the notion of the opera as about Irish nationalism. Moreover, it seems to comment on ‘how the “Gaelic” (or Catholic) Irish population should be treated by the British state apparatus’ (p. 100). Holst, a student of Stanford, preferred to avoid nationalist implications altogether. Instead, perhaps inspired by his stepmother's interest in theosophy, he took interest in Indian mysticism and Sanskrit tales, setting several to music. One might imagine that these would propose a kind of ‘fusion of Eastern and Western philosophies’ or portray ‘the British empire as the implicit enemy;’ instead Sita and Savityri attempt a kind of ‘timelessness that approaches Debussy's writing’ and emphasize internal rather than external narrative (pp. 128–9). With Holst's music lacking any overt ‘Englishness’, it's ironic that Vaughan Williams claimed to have owed much to his example.

For Clive Brown, musical nationalism is a much more straightforward affair. Even if ‘Mendelssohn's own writing provides few clues as to his intentions or motivations in composing Camacho’, Brown is convinced that the composer, ‘thoroughly familiar with the musical features that were central to the concept of German national opera in the 1810s and 1820s’, would have taken a ‘keen interest’ in what was required for ‘a truly German opera’ (pp. 42–4). Although the essay draws attention to a little-studied work, ‘inspired perhaps by the example of Mozart's great operas’, the notion of what constitutes Germanness in music is left aside (p. 45). In his chapter, John Tyrrell uses a strongly ideological critic, Zdeněk Nejedlý,Footnote ⁴ to articulate what was ‘distinct’ about Czech music, as exemplified in Smetana, but, again, it is difficult to know exactly what was necessary for “a true national art” with a single unifying thought’ (p. 105). Tyrrell argues that this concern, more than the music of Charpentier's Louise and other foreign music performed in Prague, was the backdrop for Janáček's shift from writing Moravian-Slovak opera for audiences in Brno to composing Jenůfa for Prague. Tyrrell traces Janáček evolution from his nationalist to internationalist agendas as he defied Nejedlý's attack of Jenůfa for being overly formalist and influenced by Balakirev and increasingly sought an international audience. Katharine Ellis's study of funding grand opera in France likewise examines the tensions between the tastes and practices of regional towns and the nation's capital. However, she focuses on who should pay: government subsidies or market forces. The organizational structures she outlines can also be seen in the colonies later in the century and the debates surrounding theatre deregulation in 1864 indeed have preoccupied French institutions up through the present.

Part two, ‘Opera, Class, and the Politics of Enlightenment’, is a bit of a misnomer. The music examined here ranges from the Sadler's Wells dialogues of Charles Dibdin in the 1770s to the London premiere of Verdi's La Traviata (1856) and Carl Nielsen's Maskarade (1904–1906). The book's cover image evokes the common association of grand opera with elites, but it features the grand staircase of the Palais Garnier on its inauguration in 1875, with a seated, crowned queen and miscellaneous royalty mounting the stairs, as large crowds of men in black suits and soldiers look on. Yet France had no king and had just voted in its republican constitution. Nonetheless, as she notes that class was not always defined by birth, Mary Hunter takes the aristocracy seriously in response to Rushton's sympathy for aristocratic characters in Mozart's operas, particularly Ottavio in Don Giovanni, ‘the very epitome of Enlightened nobility’ (p. 176). Operatic nobility, she points out, manifested itself through certain virtues: honour, generosity, self-sacrifice, eloquence, refined feeling. Still, given his dependence on noble patrons, we should not see in Mozart's portrayal of noble characters his own attitudes toward them or his own political views. In other words, opera does not necessarily represent the opinions of its composer. Concentrating on the early London reception of Die Zauberflöte, Rachel Cowgill takes inspiration from Rushton's entry on the work for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, in which he acknowledges that, in addition to its representation of freemasonry, ‘there is no reason for different significations not to coexist’ (p. 196). In fact, London audiences got to know the work from 1772–1814 through excerpts, especially the overture, and the premiere in 1811, in German, was given ‘without its key rituals and symbolism’ (p. 217). Not surprisingly, the work did much better in an English translation in 1819, when it was billed as a ‘Grand Romantic Opera’. Her conclusion: ‘Die Zauberflöte was a blank slate onto which contrasting and contradictory visions for European society were inscribed’, in London a model for reconciling divisions in taste and ‘more broadly between radical and reactionary elements in society’ (p. 220–21).

While continuing to complicate the notion of national identity in music through examining how the English came to grips with Italian opera in their theatres, the essays in part two draw attention to the other classes. As Peter Holman explains, Dibdin modelled his dialogues on Italian intermezzos he would have seen in London, but replaced the commedia dell'arte characters with those from English working-class life – street vendors, milkmaids, and so forth. Holman concludes that the success of the ‘simple and charming galant style’ that Dibdin assimilated from continental music documents ‘polite society's increasing interest in working-class life and popular culture’. Pointing to the impact of ‘Victorian notions of decorum and morality’ on theatrical life in London in the next century, Roberta Marvin shows how London censors cut La Traviata, particularly ‘verses ennobling the heroine’, in order to curb any sympathy audiences might have for the prostitute Violetta, ennobled by her honourable behaviour, we might say after reading Hunter's chapter. Echoing Rushton's fascination for operatic voices,Footnote ⁵ Marvin then looks at two of the sopranos who performed the role in London, one who, though in reality an upper-class woman, ‘looked the part of the French courtesan to perfection’ and was known for her ‘mysterious fascination’ and ‘indefinable charm’, the other more ‘quiet and lady-like’, ‘a picture of sweetness and gentleness’ (p. 234–9), both images threatening in their own ways. Daniel Grimley returns to the theme of nationalism to suggest that Denmark has never really been the picture of liberalism and tolerance often associated with it and has long had social division and class unrest beneath its surface. In his Maskarade, Nielsen, a part-time violinist in the orchestra of the Tivoli gardens (a kind of Danish Sadler's Wells), not only embraced both French and Italian models – Offenbach, Bizet and Verdi – but also forged a mixture of ‘vaudeville, opera-comique, ballet, and classical chamber works’ similar to what one would have experienced at Tivoli. Grimley points out that the work can be heard in multiple ways: as a ‘poised and witty adaptation’ of a Danish eighteenth-century classic, a development of the Danish vaudeville tradition – ‘a legacy of Tivoli's carnavalesque egalitarianism’ transplanted into the opera house – or a ‘mythic restaging of a Nordic cycle of destruction and renewal’ (p. 261).

Part three, ‘Opera and Otherness’, also challenges narrow interpretations of opera, especially in its relationship to empire, a subject Rushton wrote about in 2006.Footnote ⁶

Important here is the question of who is the ‘other’ signified. Ralph Locke's award-winning article, ‘Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ is Aida?’Footnote ⁷ suggests that Aida can be heard as representing the problem of empire in general, as Verdi understood it, the ‘tensions between West and East, Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere, the developed and non-developed worlds’, etc. (p. 275). Locke also discusses what can be learned from early recordings. Domingos de Mascarenhas points to the Russo-Japanese War during the Milan premiere as motivation for the changes Puccini made to Madama Butterfly thereafter.Footnote ⁸ He argues that the work, as transformed, presents ‘a political statement about the new Japan embodied in Butterfly’, someone with agency (p. 298). In other words, we need to think of otherness as shaped by specific historical contexts. David Charlton and Stephen Muir then examine the ironies of orientalism in two little-known operas, Bizet's Djamileh and Rimsky-Korsakov's Pan Voyevoda. In his study of its literary source, Musset's Namouna, with its allusions to Molière's Don Juan and Hugo's Les Orientales, Charlton draws out ambiguities in a tale that, on the surface, seems so thin. Muir, complicating the theme of nationalism, shows how Rimsky-Korsakov increasingly rejected the imperial ideology and the ‘Russian’ style of music in his earlier works. The 1863 Polish uprising coincides with the composer's turn to more liberal political views and his embrace of subjects promoting liberty, particularly in Pan Voyevoda where a polonaise adds ambiguity in its reference to both Polish and Russian musical tastes.

The last two essays shift to the twentieth-century where notions of otherness move beyond orientalism. For Peter Franklin, the Austrian composer Franz Schreker has long suffered as an ‘other’ to the British public, his ‘regressively tonal’ language pushed aside by ‘various cultural and political forces’ in favour of the historical necessity ascribed to Schoenberg's serialism (p. 351–2). Ironically, Franklin returns to Rushton's ambivalent review of a 1992 performance of Schreker's Der ferne Klang in Leeds to suggest that having ‘unclear feelings about a piece … more dependent on colour than on theme and harmony’ was at least more ‘honest’ than most modernist dismissals (pp. 359, 361). J.P.E. Harper Scott takes a novel perspective on the otherness of Peter Grimes. When Grimes dies at the end of Britten's first opera, Harper-Scott sees this as an ‘authentic’ gesture, in the sense of Heidegger's ‘Dasein choosing its own authentic Being’ (p. 366). In other words, ‘he cannot be the perfect citizen, the perfect husband to Ellen, without ceasing to be Peter Grimes’ (p. 380).

In a touching postlude by family members, we learn that Julian Rushton was born into a musical family and began as a choral singer, clarinettist, music critic and composer, his works from 1963 to 2000 here listed. This well-designed book, its essays lovingly prepared and edited, was supported by the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.