London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories 9780226670218

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London Voices, 1820–1840

London Voices, 1820–­1840 vo cal Perfor m e r s, Pr actice s, Histo r i e s

Edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

The University of Chicago Press Chicago a nd Lond on

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, ex­cept in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­67018-­8  (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­67021-­8  (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago /9780226670218.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Parker, Roger, 1951– editor. | Rutherford, Susan, editor. Title: London voices, 1820–1840 : vocal performers, practices, histories / edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019016539 | ISBN 9780226670188 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226670218 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Music—England—London—19th century— History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML286.8.L5 L65 2019 | DDC 780.9421/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016539 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introdu ction

London Voices 1820–­1840: A “Luminous Guide”  *  1 Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford ch a p te r 1

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”  *  15 Oskar Cox Jensen ch a p te r 2

The Traffic in Voices: The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  *  33 Mary Ann Smart ch a p te r 3

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  *  51 Claudio Vellutini ch a p te r 4

The Castrato as Creator: Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-­Music Market  *  71 Sarah Fuchs

ch a p te r 5

“The Essence of Nine Trombones”: Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  *  93 Sarah Hibberd ch a p te r 6

Adelaide Kemble and the Voice as Means  *  121 Matildie Thom Wium

ch a p te r 7

On Tongues and Ears: Divine Voices in the Modern Metropolis  *  137 James Grande ch a p te r 8

From Dissent to Community: The Sacred Harmonic Society and Amateur Choral Singing in London  *  159 Wiebke Thormählen ch a p te r 9

Foreign Voices, Performing Frenchness: Jenny Colon and the “French Plays” in London  *  179 Kimberly White ch a p te r 10

“Singer for the Million”: Henry Russell, Popular Song, and the Solo Recital  *  201 Susan Rutherford ch a p te r 11

Vessels of Flame: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Improviser’s Voice  *  221 Melina Esse

ch a p te r 12

“Silver Fork” Novels and the Place of  Voice  *  235 Cormac Newark ch a p te r 13

Voice Boxes  *  261 Ellen Lockhart

Acknowledgements  *  281 Contributors  *  283 Index  *  287

• 

I n t r o d u ct i o n 

•

London Voices 1820–­1840 A “Luminous Guide” Ro ger Pa r ker a nd Sus a n Ru t he r for d

The “Luminous Guide” in our title comes from a publication whose frontispiece deserves, even demands, its own indented space: Leigh’s New Picture Of London; Or, A View Of The Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral State Of The British Metropolis; Presenting A Luminous Guide To The Stranger, On All Subjects Connected With General Information, Business, Or Amusement. To Which Are Subjoined A Description Of The Environs, And A Plan For Viewing London In Eight Days.1

Assembled and published by the bookseller Samuel Leigh in 1839, this volume was the latest (and last) in a series of travel guides to London first published in 1818. As the spectacularly loquacious title suggests, it set out to provide a painstakingly comprehensive introduction to the city for the tourist or other temporary resident: places to go, people to see, experiences to be savoured. Above all, the book promised its readers a way to make sense of the city—­literally to make newly legible a space that was becoming notoriously bewildering even for those who considered themselves natives. Leigh’s publication was, in other words, a practical way of counteracting the overwhelming sense that Thomas De Quincey had identified some years earlier in a famous essay. Encased in a coach flying towards the metropolis, De Quincey had figured London as some kind of monstrous planet, an “attracting body,” gathering to it “the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes”; he concluded that “the coming metropolis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense of his own utter insignificance . . . a poor shivering unit in the aggregate

2 

introduction

of human life.”2 The sense of a gathering storm, even of an approaching quasi-­biblical apocalypse, is palpable: small wonder that Leigh needed to proclaim, and loudly, the all-­inclusiveness of his “luminous” approach. In some respects, the present collection attempts a feat similar to Leigh’s, if with no claim to his compendiousness. But the first part of our title establishes a very different metaphorical ground. While Leigh’s ways of understanding the metropolis are, in common with old Enlightenment terms, resolutely concerned with the visual, we want instead to understand by means of sound, and particularly by means of “voice.” Such a concentration is in one sense obviously liberating, as would be any sense of clearing the metaphorical air; but such beckoning freedoms as always come with certain constraints. It is clear, for example, that our idea of “London voices” carries with it some ambiguity. Most obviously, it suggests “voice” as a noun, thus gesturing to the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues in the city during two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. These were years in which the city’s population expansion was at a height, and when, as a result, different classes were placed in dangerous but—­at least to later eyes—­culturally fruitful proximity; in which ideas of political and social Reform were constantly in the air, but barely managed to keep in check the forces of unrest that had periodically erupted in London’s great rival capital across the Channel; in which Londoners ignored or even stubbornly resisted the infrastructural changes (in local government, in sanitation, in transportation regulation) that were being proposed with increasing urgency and that would, a few decades later, mark the beginning of a more efficiently networked, more ruthlessly rationalized metropolis.3 To put this more simply, it would be vain to assume that those “London voices” could ever sing in mutually reinforcing harmony, let alone in a resounding unison. Equally important for us, though, is that the idea of “London voices” can also embrace a more active sense: the notion that envoicing a city might be an important step, following an increasing trend in the humanities, towards understanding through attention to sounding communication rather than our habitual visual metaphors. According to this usage, London during these two decades might be supposed, through its inhabitants, its visitors, and its institutions, to voice itself, to proclaim its cultural identity, its sonic apprehensions of existing traditions and the stirrings of modernity. We might, that is, perceive its reluctant but gradual embrace of sounding difference. Wordsworth’s famous sonnet of 1802, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” is interesting in this regard. The poet famously anthropomorphized the city:

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  3

This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

There are, of course, no voices here except the poet’s implied lyric “I”: necessarily for Wordsworth’s project in the sonnet, the metropolis is immersed in silence, subsumed metaphorically within the natural in order to become sublime.4 Three decades on, though, with Wordsworth’s Romantic project in steep decline,5 it is possible to argue that London was most authentically itself precisely through its noisiness, its unruly concatenation of voices. Attempts to reduce it to order were, for the present, vague and incoherent: its confusion of sounds resonated richly within its crowded streets. Above all, though, a concentration on “voice” means a concentration on human subjects, and thus the possibility of including within one’s purview people of many types and stations. This is certainly part of the reason that the notion of “voice” has taken such a prominent position in today’s humanities, perhaps particularly in musicology: because it allows (or, some would say, offers the illusion of) a seemingly closer alignment with something loosely called “politics.”6 In engaging with this movement, our essays thus aim to offer a challenging new delineation—­or, perhaps better, articulation—­of the vocal resonances of the epoch. As James Davies points out in a recent colloquy, voices always “belong,” and in the following essays they “belong” in a material sense to specific individuals (personalities and bodies), communities, social conditions, locations, geographies, historical zones, theories and practices, and systems of  belief. They manifest privilege and disempowerment; they articulate emotions and ideas with varying levels of coherence; and they were heard or ignored by diverse listeners. Their unifying feature is that they “belong” to London, demonstrating a sample of the multiplicity of voices that sounded in the city during the early decades of the nineteenth century.7 Like Leigh’s New Picture of London, our essays thus strive to touch on a good number of those “Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral” issues that occupied the city, and do so via a broad array of methodological approaches and topics, many of which would have made unusual bedfellows only a few years in musicology’s past. One aim of this introduction is thus to sketch some of the peripheries bounding our period and place. We can once again be aided by Leigh’s New Picture. The earliest version of his travel guide, published in 1818, had a slightly different title:

4 

introduction

Leigh’s New Picture of London; or, a View of the Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, and Moral State of The British Metropolis: presenting a Brief and Luminous Guide to the Stranger on all subjects connected with General Information, Business or Amusement. Embellished with upwards of One Hundred Elegant Engravings of Royal Palaces, and Public Buildings of all Descriptions in London and its Environs; also a correct plan of london.8

The original claim of brevity (“a Brief and Luminous Guide”) was later abandoned, as was the emphasis on “Royal Palaces,” perhaps underlining the fact that metropolitan attractions had by 1839 come to encompass a much wider and more socially inclusive range of enticements. Also abandoned was the initial intention of providing a “correct plan” of London, perhaps reflecting the fact that by the 1830s the city was changing at such a rate as to defy such aspirations in a volume of this kind. For our purposes, though, the most important difference between the two volumes concerns its treatment of music. In the 1818 version, music is largely confined to a description of the major theatres and, prominent within them, an extended list of the most well-­known British voices of the day: In the singing department, many of our native performers unite with fine and powerful voices no common portion of science. Mrs Bill­ ington, Mr Braham, Mrs Mountain, Mrs Bland, Mrs Dickons, Miss Kelly, Mrs Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss Matthews, Mr Incledon (lately embarked for America), Mr Philipps, Mr Bellamy, Mr Sinclair, and Mr Broadhurst, are justly admired and have acquired much professional fame.9

In several respects this is a curious inventory. Two of the singers could not have been heard by London visitors: Elizabeth Billington, although commonly regarded as the most accomplished soprano the nation had yet produced, and with some success in Italy to further enhance her reputation, had retired from the stage in 1811 (Leigh’s Guide was presumably published just before her death in August 1818 in Venice); Charles Incledon was indeed in the middle of a lucrative tour in the United States.10 The inclusion of Billington and Incledon here speaks to an important and oft-­ reported aspect of the British stage in the early nineteenth century: the comparative lack of British singers of high calibre.11 Intriguing too is the insistence—­in the reference to “no common portion of science”—­that the abilities of British singers combined vocal quality with technique: in-

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  5

triguing because they tended to have a less than flattering reputation with regard to the latter. Significantly, however, this puffery for the capital’s handful of singers is followed by an emphasis on London’s cosmopolitan provision of music. In particular, the opportunities for hearing excellent music sung by some of Europe’s finest (albeit unnamed) singers had supposedly never been better: The musical votary never had the means of gratifying his taste with a higher relish than at the present period. New compositions of considerable merit daily issue from the press. The list of vocal performers comprises the names of some of the first singers in Europe; and the instrumental performers are no less celebrated. The British bands, in general, exhibit specimens of the highest taste and manual skill.

And in case readers tempted by this array of musical wares were none­ theless hesitant about finding themselves in the notoriously rough en­ virons of London theatres, assurances were also forthcoming about a new moral probity among professional artists, as illustrated by the various marriages between aristocracy and stage performers. In short, the tone here is deliberately sanitizing, the equivalent, perhaps, of Rudolph Ackermann’s ever-­tidy, politely peopled vistas of the capital in his Microcosm of London series (three volumes, 1808–­10). The only seeming stumbling block was that the “magnificence and grandeur” of the two main theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden) was offset by their vast size, which compromised the “convenience of seeing and hearing”—­and made the provision of a suitably astonishing spectacle (and thus seat prices) very expensive. Nonetheless, this part of the guide finishes with a flourish of confidence in London’s musical cornucopia: “The talents of the vocal and instrumental performers at the opera and concerts are unrivalled; and probably no city in Europe possesses a place of public amusement more brilliant and magnificent than Vauxhall.” The sunny optimism of this first guide is somewhat clouded in later editions. True, the much-­expanded summary in the 1839 version begins promisingly, declaring that there had been “a decided improvement” in the “public taste” for music; but the account immediately then takes a turn for the worse with the statement that “the science and feeling of professors appear to have retrograded.” The first claim is substantiated by the “enormous patronage” music now received, demonstrating that while it was “true that we have by no means the same taste or feeling for the art as the Italians or Germans . . . to say that we are utterly destitute of either, is an insult to common sense and to nature.”12 Yet the increase in audiences

6 

introduction

or in the enjoyment of music more generally had not been matched by a concomitant development in composition and performance, both of which are said to have deteriorated: The quality of music, however, is but little considered: and it is viewed more as an innocent pastime than as a scientific attainment and an intellectual gratification. We seldom hear of a truly English original opera, although the last few seasons have been more prolific, but are harassed with cramped imitations of foreign works, produced with infinite labour, little skill, and less effect.13

Echoing innumerable publications of the time, particularly those specifically dedicated to music, the guide blames this state of affairs on an imperfect understanding of the finer points of the art, those gained through extensive training: British composers were “arrangers of pretty melodies rather than authors of elaborate and scientific works,” unable to compete effectively with “foreign talent, so decidedly superior to our own in this respect.”14 This, of course, was a reference to the pasticcio genre that had long dominated “English opera,” comprising a patchwork of music by different composers rather than a coherent, single-­authored composition. Finally, despite the earlier claim that public taste had progressed, that taste nevertheless remained untutored and exacerbated by even worse leadership: Much is attributed to the bad taste of the public: true it is that that taste is bad; but it is for the learned to lead the unlearned: true greatness never yet urged the plea of a mastery beyond it, nor ever required an apology for pusillanimous subserviency.15

Although exaggerated in some respects, this summary aptly captures the central issues of those two decades, familiar themes in England’s fraught and long-­running operatic history, during which various concerns about native performance and composition once again found only fitful resolution. Above all, there was an anxiety that somehow, despite the expansion of London’s venues and audiences, the city was being written out of accounts of musical prowess: that the metropolis, so plainly now the preeminent “world city,”16 exceeding all others in overall wealth and reach, had so far failed to make sufficient impact on the musical world. The city’s musical voice, in short, did not match its presumed metaphorical vocality in other matters, as is apparent from the concluding paragraph of Leigh’s Guide: “The destinies of the world seem to revolve on [London] as on an

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  7

axis; and from the heart of this mighty body the voice of liberty, humanity, and morality, is wafted to the distant shores of the globe.”17 Determined efforts were made by some individuals to address the situation. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the calls for an “English school of opera” and indeed an “English school of singing” had become increasingly audible. A prime mover was Richard Mackenzie Bacon, who would articulate his theories in the pages of the journal he founded and edited from 1818 to 1828, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review; his aim was to inculcate greater understanding of vocal techniques and bridge the divisions between Italian and English style. Vocal music would also receive special attention in the specialist music periodicals that followed: the Harmonicon from 1823 to 1833, and the Musical World from 1836 to 1891. The perceived lack of native vocal talent was approached by attempts to introduce institutionalized training through the establishment of the Royal Academy of Music in 1822,18 and by the plethora of singing manuals that were produced in growing numbers, aimed at the keen amateur or putative professional singer alike. The trickle of British singers seeking training abroad, which had begun in the late seventeenth century with John Abell, became slightly more persistent: examples include John Sinclair (1791–­1857), Henry Russell (ca. 1812–­1900), Elizabeth Feron (ca. 1797–­1853), Fanny Ayton (ca. 1806–­1833), Adelaide Kemble (1815–­1879), and Clara Novello (1818–­1908), although not all met with sustained success on their return to Britain. Ideas of opera, still modelled at the beginning of the period on Italian works and English ballad opera, each with their largely separate audiences, were also given new impetus from different cultural directions. The seven adaptations of Weber’s Der Freischütz hosted by London’s elite and minor theatres in 1824, for example, demonstrated opera’s capacity to create remarkable, even terrifying theatrical and musical effect in new ways, as well as its ability to attract a socially diverse spectatorship. Impresarios attempted to capitalize on such success by introducing other German and French operas.19 Although the Italian repertory, now enriched by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, retained its primacy, by 1840 London opera house audiences were more familiar than previously with a wider range of European compositional and performance styles; in the meantime, the efforts of British composers such as John Barnett, Edward Loder, George Alexander Macfarren, and Michael William Balfe to produce a convincing national style in opera found renewed energy.20 The sections from the various Leigh’s New Guide editions cited above underline the preeminent place that elite musical/theatrical enter­tain­ ment—­opera in particular—­was assumed to have in public perception,

8 

introduction

illustrative as it was of the comforting coexistence of high artistic achievement and political and social patronage. What also, more tentatively, emerges in the guides is a larger sense of “voice” in London, of the sheer multiplicity of auralities, uses, and identities which lingered on from earlier practices or which were emerging in the rapidly changing city. From the elite theatres and concert halls, and the salons of their audiences, to more lowly theatrical cousins showing melodrama and farce, often now south of the river; to a host of singing raised to the glory of God, as the established Church began—­sometimes in the face of great resistance—­to encourage its congregation to express itself aloud; to singing in newly formed associations of the middling and lower classes, not to mention the continuation of such activity in taverns and other places of entertainment; and so on down to the lowliest ballad singers in the streets of the metropolis, peddling their songs as a meagre means of subsistence. In other words, voices sounded across and within a vast spectrum of musical and extramusical activities in a diverse range of accents and inflections. What is more, the connections between “high” and “low” usages were becoming inexorably more polarized and significant. It is fundamentally this variety and these levels of interconnection that the essays in this book set out to explore. In this context, it seemed important to start our collection with a pair of essays that powerfully articulate both our breadth of purview and some of the cross-­currents newly exposed within the teeming city. Oskar Cox Jensen’s discussion of that most vilified vocalist of the period, the ballad singer, tackles head on the fact that so much of this negative discourse comes from what he calls “social superiors.” Cox Jensen also underlines how the newly “scientific” idea that, as the Harmonicon so succinctly put it, “voice is the index of the mind, denoting moral qualities,” could easily be used as a way of bringing aesthetic judgements into line with (a priori) vilification of the poor and unfortunate.21 His closing point, that loud voices from the streets in the 1830s and 1840s, after the Reform upheavals and with the rising tide of Chartism, were becoming newly threatening, chimes productively with Mary Ann Smart’s essay. Smart also deals with street performers, the so-­called organ boys who flooded London streets during this period, but locates them as something like commodities in high radical politics: taken up as part of exiled Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini’s educational programme for his less fortunate countrymen. The fact that a staple of the repertoire purveyed by the “organ boys” was recent hit tunes from Italian opera makes richly ironic the fact that Mazzini’s fund-­raising concerts typically featured professional sing-

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  9

ers of the calibre of Grisi, Mario, and Tamburini, who in their turn purveyed identical musical gems to genteel benefactors, again reminding us (as does the “street music” debate more generally) of music’s dangerous boundary-­crossing potential. Our next pair of essays engage with a phenomenon that might seem a strange, even uncanny revenant from the ancien régime: the persistence of Italian vocal pedagogy as the gold standard of London elite music-­ making, and the national anxiety this hegemony continued to generate in a city that considered itself so internationally progressive. Claudio Vellutini’s essay offers yet another angle on the idea of vocal “science”: this time via the extraordinarily successful singing treatise of Gesualdo Lanza and its troubled cohabitation with more home-­grown traditions when, at the inauguration of the Royal Academy of Music in 1823, famed Italians such as the castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti taught side by side with doughty choirmasters such as William Hawes and William Knyvett. Velluti himself comes to the fore in Sarah Fuchs’s essay. Of course for some at the time, famously, the continuing presence of Velluti on London’s stages was the stuff of nightmares: Mendelssohn, catching sight of him in London in 1829, wrote that “his voice so excited my loathing that it pursued me into my dreams that night.”22 But perhaps, Fuchs implies, this “Sarrasine”-­inflected view of the castrato has been overstressed by modern commentators. Just as Vellutini revealed that singing pedagogy had become a formidable commodity in London’s developing cultural marketplace, Fuchs exposes the commodification of the castrato that came with sheet-­music “editions” of ornamented arias—­revealing en route the surprising manner in which amateur consumers succeeded in finding creative ways of making their own voices emerge from within vehicles that seemed on the surface to celebrate unconditionally the foreign professional. The essays of Sarah Hibberd and Matildie Thom Wium explore further facets of the cult of celebrity that surrounded elite artists, this time by engaging with issues of gender, vocality, and the body. Hibberd’s account of the celebrated bass Luigi Lablache, one of the most prominent singers on the London stage in the 1830s and singing tutor to the young Princess Victoria, reveals how his robust embodiment of masculinity was countered by a simultaneous projection of sympathy and even tenderness. In Hibberd’s words, Lablache might even be thought an avatar of “the sound and vision of modern masculinity”: perhaps another illustration of the Harmonicon’s idea, quoted earlier, of the voice as “index of the mind.” Thom Wium’s consideration of the soprano Adelaide Kemble examines the tensions arising from the conflict between a rewarding professional

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introduction

career and longings for domesticity: the picture that emerges is one in which the singer was not only actively engaged in the “managing” of her public persona but also making mature, independent decisions about renouncing that persona (or aspects of it) in favour of marriage and private life. In the cases of both Lablache and Kemble, lived experience and vocal identity challenged the increasingly narrow definitions of gender spheres that were emerging during this period. Our next pair of essays, by James Grande and Wiebke Thormählen, bring to the fore provocative new layers to the idea of “voice.” Grande’s point of departure—­an intense reading of Charles Lamb’s famous “Chapter on Ears”23—­demonstrates that the notion of “voice,” poetic voice in particular, but also the singing voice of elite music, was thoroughly embedded in the emerging print culture of the period (notably in the serial publications in which Lamb plied his trade). But, as a famous passage from the “Chapter” reminds us, such notions could be violently juxtaposed with the noise of the London streets. From there it is a short step to the radical religious orator Edward Irving (like Lamb, from dissenting stock), who promulgated an idea of “voice” very distant from our now-­ conventional notions of how that collection of ideas might manifest itself in song or Romantic poetry. Thormählen continues the theme of dissenting religion, this time examining its manifestation in the renowned Sacred Harmonic Society concerts of the late 1830s. Again, as in other essays, we have a powerful sense of “voice” as something that could be closely tied to moral character: here, though, within a gathering of the middling classes that was if anything antithetical to the “rise of music” elsewhere so often acclaimed as a key part of the spirit of the age. Indeed, as Kimberly White and Susan Rutherford demonstrate, the secular world was witnessing novel manifestations in singing of the idea of the “popular,” a key new term gradually emerging in these years, and one that would become increasingly associated with different vocal styles, performers, and listeners. This pair of essays juxtaposes an avowedly “foreign” example of sung entertainment in the city—­the French soprano Jenny Colon’s appearances in vaudevilles imported directly from Parisian boulevard theatres and performed in their original language—­with one of the most autochthonous: the solo recitals of Henry Russell. In the first instance, French popular theatre becomes London’s elite entertainment, opening British ears to exotic resonances from abroad and contributing to the growing body of operatic and theatrical adaptations of French works on the British stage. Those French accents contrast around a decade later with the singer-­songwriter Henry Russell’s indigenous “London voice.” Russell fashioned his popularity from his early beginnings in

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  11

elite music by stripping out elaborate vocalism and focussing instead on the simple communication and performance skills that would earn him a reputation for vocal “authenticity” and a certain currency within political activism during the growth of Chartism. Melina Esse and Cormac Newark, our last pair, both focus primarily on representations of voice, but also on the multiplicity of voices that could emerge during this period. Esse’s meditation on Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and her lengthy narrative poem on the so-­called Improvisatrice sees the work as at base a celebration of polyvocality: of the myriad ways in which the idea of improvisation can encourage assumption of other voices, becoming, in Esse’s words “a vessel for other personalities.” In this sense, the essay has many resonances with Grande, in that it pushes back on the too prominent idea of the poetic “voice” as most authentic when most personal and interior, instead encouraging us to look outwards, to performance, as a means of reconfiguring the vocal within our newly material urban context. This last thought might also set a suitably equivocal scene for Newark’s discussion of another female author, Mrs (Catherine) Gore’s so-­called silver fork three-­decker novel The Opera (1832), which once more takes us to the gender politics of the period as they intersect with notions of “voice.” Again, there can be no easy equations of “the diva” with liberation or triumphant self-­expression: rather, we gain a further sense that the period’s obsession with Reform generated multiple levels of equivocation about the power of vocal expression. We have placed Ellen Lockhart’s essay at the end because it returns us in many ways to our central priorities in assembling this collection, so much so as to form a fitting conclusion. For one thing, its detailed critical examination of the bewildering proliferation of modern musicological treatments of “voice” is salutary, making clear that the term carries risks in spite of its evident attractions and benefits. Just as important, however, she locates the beginnings of this proliferation precisely during our chosen period: one in which the word became (in Lockhart’s words) “a profitably manifold locution.” What is more, and drawing in part on James Davies’s work concerning the changes of vocal imaginings in the 1830s,24 she persuasively argues that the sheer variety of contexts and meanings for “voice” our contributors have unearthed may, in some small way, offer a revealing “index” of the historical actors at work: of the range of cultural initiatives unleashed or further enabled by the idea of “voice” in London during these turbulent decades. Our closely defined period, with its tidy beginning and ending, is by no means strictly adhered to in what follows, and just as well. We have

12 

introduction

nevertheless become convinced that, as Lockhart argues explicitly, these years did, for a variety of social, political, economic, technological, and cultural reasons, prove decisive for the development of notions of “voice.” Within this period were set in motion initiatives and strategies that arguably only found complete fruition in the years after our end point. In the most clichéd of cultural-­historical terms, the coronation in 1837 of Victoria launched an epoch that, in its sheer length and durability, profoundly shaped cultural life in the capital and the country at large. It also coincided with or possibly even enabled other events more directly linked with our topic. To name but a few: the emergence of the sight-­ singing movement around 1840, with its huge impact in developing all kinds of amateur music-­making, from choral societies to working-­men’s choirs; the establishment and regulation of state education and the inclusion of music within that educational system; the reform of church choral singing, the steady rise of hymn-­singing congregations and the inclusion of singing within ministry training; the expansion of the musical press, particularly the arrival of the Musical World in 1836 and the Musical Times in 1842, which endowed music criticism with a more professional slant, and a “scientific” interest in music history; the Theatres Act of 1843, which changed the licensing laws so that the old divisions between “patent” and “minor” theatres vanished, creating opportunities for a greater spread of music-­based theatre as well as facilitating the development of the music halls (the first, the Canterbury, opened in 1852); the première of Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl in 1843, marking the most successful headway for some time in English opera composition;25 the founding of a new Royal Italian Opera company at Covent Garden in 1847, and thus of a theatrical space that in many respects became the site of a “national” opera house; Manuel Garcìa II’s invention of the laryngoscope in 1855 and the subsequent emphasis on a “scientific” approach to vocal tuition;26 and, eventually, the gradual disappearance from London’s streets of the professional ballad singer, who migrated indoors to make way for a new, more acoustically aggressive kind of “street music,” which in turn fuelled ever more strident debates about the need for legislation to curb those making such unseemly urban noise. Some things, of course, didn’t change. Despite an increase in their numbers, British singers still struggled to build a career within the international opera repertory in London, to the end of the century and beyond. Yet more broadly, singing was still often held in contempt by some factions—­perhaps even more so now that it had become so widely practised in public by different social classes—­in comparison to instrumental playing. Witness a tirade in the Musical World in 1844, which claimed:

London Voices 1820–1840: A “Luminous Guide”  13

All vocalists are overpaid—­if they be at all popular—­in comparison with their fellow-­artists in the instrumental line, whose labour and acquirements are necessarily as ten to one—­and whose pay is as one to a hundred. . . . Nothing in the world is easier than to sing indifferently—­ say, par exemple, as nine vocalists out ten—­if you are gifted with a voice; no vocation needs so small a share of intellect, and so small share of labour, as that of the ordinary vocalist.27

Although nominally an attack on Italian opera (a routine object of scorn in this periodical, and in much of the burgeoning journalistic discourse), the attitudes in this article, in particular its contention that singing was somehow unworthy because it could—­it was assumed—­be achieved without labour, were more widespread, and remained especially prevalent among certain religious groups. And yet such views, evident since the commercialization of singing began with the arrival of opera in early eighteenth-­ century London, rarely exerted sufficient leverage on the broader public or indeed the marketplace in order to limit the thirst for vocal performance as both a listening experience and participatory practice. In short, from around 1840 the vocal vista began to change, finding more support (or, at times, solidification) in the establishment of various systems and organizations, and gradually shedding some of the exciting unpredictability it had displayed in the post-­Napoleonic period. If this book succeeds in charting some of that excitement, it will have fulfilled part of its task. If, in the process, it manages to suggest that a musicological purview which takes “voice” as a primary building block will be part of an expanded and richer discipline, then that will be a still more important gain.

Notes 1. Samuel Leigh, Leigh’s New Picture (London: Leigh, 1839). This edition is more or less identical to earlier printings in the 1830s. 2. Thomas De Quincey, “The Nation of London,” in his Autobiographic Sketches (London, 1853), 204–­8. 3. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-­Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), in particular pp. 14–­26; see also Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–­1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 4. For a fascinating discussion of this poem, and for much else that is germane to our project here, see the Editors’ Introduction to James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205), 1–­41. 5. On the legacy of Wordsworth in Victorian Britain, see in particular Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artefacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

14 

introduction

6. A good example is the colloquy “Why Voice Now?”, with short essays by Martha Feldman, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, and James Q. Davies, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 3 (2015): 653–­85; whether an engagement with “politics” is real or illusory is one point on which the contributors noticeably differ. An important starting point for this interest is, of course, Carolyn Abbate’s intense meditation on the values at stake when we change our category from “music” to “voice”; see her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 7. James Q. Davies, “Voice Belongs,” in “Why Voice Now?” 677–­81, here 681. 8. And apparently a different editor, the mysterious “S.C.”; see Leigh, Leigh’s New Picture (London: Leigh, 1818). 9. Leigh’s New Picture, 358–­59. 10. Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–­1860 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 2–­3. 11. See, for example, the claim that “With regard to the strength of talent available for operatic performance in England, we have half a dozen first rate singers, with scarcely as many tolerable second rates; and our choruses are almost beneath contempt.” London Literary Gazette, 18 December 1824, 803–­4. 12. Leigh’s New Picture (1839), 400. 13. Leigh’s New Picture (1839), 400. 14. Leigh’s New Picture (1839), 400–­401. 15. Leigh’s New Picture (1839), 401. 16. The epithet is extensively explored in, and furnishes the title for, London—­World City 1800–­1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 17. Leigh’s New Picture (1839), 403. 18. William Wahab Cazalet, The History of the Royal Academy of Music (London: T. Bosworth, 1854). 19. For a fuller consideration of the role of operatic adaptations on the London stage during this period, see Christina Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouse: From Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 20. Eric Walter White, A History of English Opera (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 260–­65. 21. “On Vocal Music,” Harmonicon 9 (August 1831): 188–­9, here 188; reprinted from the New York-­based periodical Euterpeiad 2, no. 1 (1 May 1831): 4–­5; and no. 2 (15 May 1831): 16–­17. 22. Quoted in James Q. Davies, “ ‘Velluti in speculum’: The Twilight of the Castrato,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 271–­301, here 276. 23. First published in London Magazine 3, no. 15 (March 1821): 263–­66. 24. James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 25. White, The History of English Opera, 279–­83. 26. James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 230. 27. “The Italian Opera,” Musical World, 24 August 1844, 277–­78, here 278.

• 

Ch a p t er 1  

•

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice” Oska r Cox Jensen

It came from the mouth of an old, unshaven ballad-­chanter, who looked as if he had made a hair’s-­breadth escape from one of his Majesty’s houses of correction . . . his voice was a real woice,—­all that vulgarity, hoarseness and tobacco, could produce; and his prononnsation was of the same cast,—­for Ome, sweet Ome, was so thundered in the tympanum, that it was enough to drive the hearer from his home, be it what it might, and to ruin forever all domestic harmony. —­E xchange Herald, 31 August 1826

Although their names were rarely recorded, the ballad singers of the nineteenth-­century London street—­itinerant, disreputable, impoverished fixtures of the urban environment since Elizabethan times—­nonetheless received a great number of “notices” from their social superiors. Admittedly, the vocalist described above is less favoured by the critic for his rendition of Henry Bishop’s “Home! Sweet Home!” than was Mary Ann Paton, whose performance of the same song a few months earlier at Covent Garden “was executed in the purest strain, and is still ringing in our ears, and wringing our hearts.”1 Yet the judgement of the street singer compares more equably with the verdict passed on Miss Foote’s Drury Lane delivery earlier in 1825: “when she sung [sic] ‘Home, sweet home, there’s no place like home,’ the audience seemed to feel the truth of what she was singing, and evidently wished she would go there.”2 And even the much-­ praised Paton had a rival, in the female ballad singer encountered by one J. M. Lacey in December 1823, whose “execution was in such a superior style, and . . . in a manner very much above many of our second-­rate theat­ rical singers; . . . she went on to ‘Home! sweet Home!’ and finished it in a really beautiful style; it actually went to my heart.”3

16  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

The unnamed singer Lacey describes was, as the account acknowledges, exceptional: “unlike the usual run of street-­ballad singing,” her performance revealed that she had “been taught music.” There was in truth no such thing as a “usual” ballad singer: the practice was not, contrary to certain continental traditions, a recognized vocation, but something a beggar might aspire to, or that a ruined actor, tradesman, or “fallen woman” might resort to and take up for a time. Their ranks thus included both those who had been singing on the streets all their lives and those who were new to the trade, and whose experience might range from the professional stage to being wholly unused to singing. Lacey’s example is of a talented singer (whether in public or private life is unclear) who had come down in the world. She was technically what we would now call a busker rather than a true ballad singer. The latter’s practice was not to perform for money but to retail single-­sheet copies of lyrics for a halfpenny per song, so that their vocal renditions served to attract attention, and to communicate the tune by ear to prospective purchasers; it was therefore more functional than recreational in purpose. I scarcely need to add that the numerous descriptions of ballad singers’ voices that appeared in periodicals, travel writing, political treatises, moral tracts, comic sketches, fiction, and other texts, were never intended as serious musical criticism or “notices” and should not be read as such. Even Lacey’s account of the street busker, which takes note of several items in the singer’s repertoire, belongs more properly to a set of generic, moralizing descriptions of “poor but honest,” pitiable young female singers, wherein their pure, warbling, often trained voices stand in synecdochal relationship to their characters.4 In any consideration of these sources, then, our first supposition must be that when nineteenth-­century writers made value judgements about ballad singers’ voices, their point was more likely to be moral or sociopolitical than musical—­and that, unlike Lacey, most of these judgements were in denigration of street singers rather than in their praise. The rationale linking character to voice was not altogether without a theoretical basis, so that condemnations of ballad singers could be couched in specifically musical language. In August 1831, an anonymous article, set in London, from the May issues of the Euterpeiad, a short-­lived New York musical periodical, was reprinted in the Harmonicon of London, the leading musical publication of its day.5 This piece was entitled “On Vocal Music,” and its thrust was that English singers should, like their continental peers, pay more attention to science. In the process, it made space for a rather spurious piece of reasoning based in a contemporary understanding of natural philosophy:

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   17

The influence of the temper upon tone deserves much considera­ tion. . . . In the voice there is no deception; it is to many the index of the mind, denoting moral qualities; and it may be remarked, that the low, soft tones of gentle and amiable beings, whatever their musical endowments may be, seldom fail to please; besides which, the singing of ladies indicates the cultivation of their taste generally, and the embellishment of the mind. For an instant compare the vulgarity of a ballad-­ singer, her repulsive tone of voice and hideous graces, to the manner of an equally uncultivated singer in good society; or watch the treatment of a pretty melody from the concert-­room, at the west end of London, until it reaches the ears from under the parlour window, and observe how it gains something new of vulgarity with every fresh degradation.6

The passage implies a causal correlation between character and vocal tone, the former—­constructed as innate rather than learned—­informing and being conveyed by the latter, and it is inserted into the discussion as a concession to the argument that some voices are naturally more talented than others. As this idea is applied to street balladeers rather than concert singers, we may observe a quasi-­racialized prejudice against lower-­class performers in both accounts of the street renditions of “Home! Sweet Home!” mentioned above.7 Lacey’s “delicate female”8 has a correspondingly “delicate” voice, while it is no coincidence that the hoarse, vulgar singer is suspected of convicted felony: his voice, as well as his situation, suggests that he belongs to the criminal classes of society. Just as critics of the Italian street musicians, discussed in Mary Ann Smart’s chapter later in this volume, saw only tanned skin and rags in these denigrated “for­ eigners,” so they heard in indigenous ballad singers only deplorable accents and intonation. In both Lacey and the Harmonicon article, and in a hundred other commentaries, it is not melody—­which travels unchanged through social and physical space—­that denotes breeding, manners, char­ acter; it is, rather, voice in its “treatment” of the melody that is the marker of difference. This supposedly scientific reasoning, dating from the early 1830s, clearly postdates its application: just as the same article also draws on Shakespeare to make a similar point, so were the 1820s’ verdicts on singers’ voices (with which this chapter begins) representative of a discourse that stems from the late sixteenth century. The journalist was writing for an educated middle-­and upper-­class audience happy to pay three shillings for an elite periodical that, not coincidentally, also provided sheet-­music editions of songs for domestic performance. This is in stark contrast to the

18  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

halfpenny lyric sheets sold by ballad singers and is effectively extrapolating a principle from preconceived prejudices.9 To generalize only a lit­­tle: respectable writers did not deem ballad singers disreputable because their voices were bad; they characterized voices as bad because they deemed the singers disreputable. The longer explanation of this axiom will involve, in musicologist Robert Walser’s phrase, “accounting for taste,” although the process is more nearly an inversion of his proposition that the “understanding of cultural pleasures is an unavoidable precondition to understanding social relations, identities, structures, and forces.”10 In short, my title is “How the Ballad Singer Lost Her ‘Woice,’ ” but I also hope also to achieve something more: to find it again.

Detecting Distinction As already suggested, ballad singers were a fixture of the streets of London from the mid-­sixteenth to the mid-­nineteenth centuries, selling printed songs to an eager and evidently appreciative audience. Yet accounts of their singing were consistently negative. In the nineteenth century, these accounts ranged from the condescending—­“it was his harsh, cracked, blatant voice that growled, squeaked, shouted forth the glorious truth”—­to the proverbial: “bawling for fair play, with a voice that might deafen a ballad singer.”11 It is hard to swallow so many accounts of discordant, broken, reedy—­in a phrase, unfit for purpose—­voices, when in order to make a living, singers had not only to attract customers but to communicate a variety of tunes accurately enough to be remembered and repeated. The most obvious explanation for this disjunction is an insuperable barrier of class and, therefore, expectation: Lacey, for example, supposed it “pretty evident, that such execution and even pathos, could only have been acquired by a musical education.”12 By this reading, middling-­and upper-­ class auditors were simply incapable of engaging with a musical tradition that, however valid, long-­standing, and sufficient on its own terms, was nevertheless incompatible with that of those more elite auditors. For convenience, we might label this putative division as one between a “vernacular” and a “trained” voice, where “trained” refers to a formal, literate, and generally expensive musical education in the Western classical tra­ dition. Even in its own terms, this division is problematic: to clarify, it does not map to a professional/amateur divide, not only because street singers were remunerated (albeit indirectly) for their vocal efforts and depended on such efforts for their living, but also because even the most mediocre of genteel amateur singers, satirized by Austen or Dickens, must be classed among the “trained,” if only in terms of what they conceived

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   19

the art of singing to signify. Moreover, to label a voice “vernacular” by no means precludes the possibility that it might be highly skilled and indeed taught; it merely acknowledges that any such education would not be recognized as such by the readers of the Harmonicon. To take a (slightly) more modern parallel: Dietrich Fischer-­Dieskau was “trained,” whereas Bob Dylan would be described as a vernacular singer. Yet even if we accept this division, the posited explanation remains insufficient on at least two counts. First, almost all new melodies to which printed ballads were set originated on the respectable stage, composed by everyone from Weber to von Neukomm to Braham—­not to forget Henry Bishop, of “Home! Sweet Home!” fame—­and there was therefore a substantial overlap of repertoire between stage and street.13 As Smart discusses later in this volume, even the arias of the Italian opera, the “pinnacle of the aesthetic hierarchy,” were pressed into service on the street.14 Just as in the Euterpeiad/Harmonicon example, the songs might easily remain the same, in terms of melody and lyrics, irrespective of location. Second, even the wealthy, the learned, and the fashionable were known to have bought street ballads.15 The economic capacity to purchase songs as sheet music or in high-­quality songbooks did not preclude those of superior financial and cultural capital from, on occasion, spending a halfpenny, and therefore recognizing these street productions as valid songs. Ballad singers’ performances must have been legible as such to these purchasers. If issues of class were at stake, as they certainly were, then something subtler than an irreconcilable gulf of expectation and understanding was at play. There is a strong indication here that many commentators were, consciously or not, engaged in what Pierre Bourdieu theorized as “distinction,” parading their own refined sensibility, disparaging the rude noises of the street with which they must perforce come into contact as citizens of London, making clear the divide between their own cultivated taste and that of the vulgar, represented by the ballad singer, whose very voice—­ innate, undeniable—­signalled lower status. As Bourdieu notes, “the song, as a cultural property which . . . is almost universally accessible and genuinely common (since hardly anyone is not exposed at one moment or another to the ‘successes’ of the day), calls for particular vigilance from those who intend to mark their difference.”16 The ultimate manifestation of this may be seen in my title and opening quotation: the words “his voice was a real woice” indicate a transparent rhetorical strategy on the writer’s part. “Woice” was a typical Cockneyism, a key component of the “flash” dialect attributed to lower-­class Londoners in works such as Pierce Egan’s Life in London series of 1821.17 To state that “his voice was a real woice” was a knowing act of condescension, flattering the writer

20  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

and his audience with a discernment and grasp of proper En­glish that the ballad singer implicitly lacked, and as a technique for marking distinction it was curiously self-­fulfilling, its logic proceeding thus: people like them speak like that, which I know to be common because I have read it in books; and if they in fact do not, I would not know, because I have not met them. Works employing these strategies, along with books such as Egan’s, or George Parker’s A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life of 1791, were most commonly the work of journalists. These were often hack writers, themselves occupying a liminal position in the public sphere but not securely within polite society, self-­consciously bidding for inclusion in a classic case of social aspiration, a phenomenon Mark Philp has demonstrated with regard to the pamphlet literature of the 1790s.18 It cannot be coincidental that these are the pens keenest to cut down the street singer. Rhetoric of this type is awkwardly apparent in a letter from W. J. Barrett published in Henry Mayhew’s “Answers to Correspondents” in 1851: Seeing in your periodical an account of street Ballad-­singing, I have ventured to pen a few remarks relative thereto. I have often stood to listen to the rude music of those ditties, and it struck me they were not disagreeable, and, being a student of music, I committed to memory the tunes and wrote them on paper; if your correspondents, therefore, should feel desirous of obtaining the music (of any street ballad) they can by communicating with me.19

Barrett was writing to a publication primarily aimed at the working classes, from 2 Scott Street, just off North Street on the Whitechapel Road, close to the Brady Street Jewish Cemetery: it is therefore highly likely that he was of that class, loading the words “rude music” and “not disagreeable” with the pressure of self-­distinction. Yet the letter transcends this rhetoric to be invaluable as a near-­unique written instance of working-­class appreciation of ballad singers’ performances in London, in which the legible musicality of the singers referred to is irrefutable. It is this intimation of legible musicality that I wish to pursue in attempting to rediscover the ballad singer’s “woice”: an attempt in which even the most negative of accounts may prove useful.

Making a Racket We should not simply dismiss the raft of elite indictments of ballad singers’ voices. When the presumably disinterested Oliver Goldsmith writes

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   21

“bawling for fair play, with a voice that might deafen a ballad singer,” we may reason that, situated in a noisy streetscape, singers would naturally have sung extremely loudly to make themselves heard.20 Recently, the singer-­songwriter Billy Bragg gave interviewer Laura Barton this advice on “the voice” in busking: “you’re competing with the noise of the street, the traffic, and you’re trying to get the attention of people who are in a hurry. My test is—­could a passing lorry driver hear me? If they can, then the people walking past can too.”21 This advice was clearly applicable to and anticipated by nineteenth-­century singers. In a famous text of 1861, George Augustus Sala invites us to accompany him at five o’clock in the morning from Billingsgate market to the offices of the Times, counselling us, as we walk west towards Blackfriars and Fleet Street: Never mind the noises of dogs barking, of children that are smacked by their parents or guardians for crying, and then, of course, roar louder; of boys yelling the insufferable “Old Dog Tray,” the abominable “Keemo Kimo,” the hideous “Hoomtoomdoodendo,” and rattling those abhorrent instruments of discord, the “bones;” of women scolding, quarrelling, or shrieking . . . of men growling, and wagon-­wheels rumbling, and from distant forges the yell of the indignant anvil.22

Amongst Sala’s pandemonium of human and industrial noise, however, three songs may still be heard. According to William Gardiner, who in 1832 published a remarkable five-­hundred-­page book entitled The Music of Nature, this was the very reason that commercial “cries” of London were first set to music: because “musical sounds are heard at a greater distance than others more noisy. As such it is the object with him who cries to choose a word upon which he can pour out the whole force of his voice.”23 The ballad singer, too, employed music in a crowded, contested soundscape, as an aid to the sale of physical wares, albeit wares that represented that same performance. Other street criers were their competitors for both coin and auditory attention; more so even than modern buskers, ballad singers had to work to make themselves heard. Similarly, other accounts more indicative of tone than volume—­full of screeching, rasping voices either thin and reedy or hoarse and coarse—­ should lead us to accept that many singers may have possessed very poor vocal tone, but also to return with a degree of sympathy to our initial supposition and attribute a part of this perception of unmusicality to the difference between a trained and a vernacular voice. A rough, rasping voice could even have a thrill of its own (sophisticated musical traditions in other countries, such as Portuguese fado singing, can be most compelling

22  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

when singers push their voices to the edge of a scream), and the fact that descriptions do not acknowledge these positive interpretations does not preclude the possibility that audiences were drawn to these more abrasive attributes.24 There is, of course, an awkwardness in what the historian Christopher Marsh calls “reading such evidence against the grain,” that is, seeking clues to musical performance in descriptions that strive to deny that very status.25 In Marsh’s exhaustive survey of the early modern period, he turns up only a single positive first-­hand reception account of a singer’s voice. Yet it is a good one: that of Roger North, a Restoration-­ era lawyer and writer whose “dominant passion” was music, and whose many writings on that subject were, according to musicologist Jamie C. Kassler, highly innovative.26 North includes ballad singers in his discussions On Music, writing of “a loudness that downs all other noise, and yet firme and steddy. Now what a sound would that be in a theater, cultivated and practised to harmony!”27 This is perhaps the single most convincing description of a ballad singer’s voice that we have, albeit from the seventeenth century: loud but untrained, and sufficient to its purpose, which was to render audibly and accurately the primarily modal street melodies, and thereby the ballad texts, of North’s time.

The Professional Parallel It is worth pausing on this putative dichotomy of the trained (theatrical/parlour) voice and the untrained (street). We know that a high proportion of ballad tunes and complete songs were theatrical in origin. We know that singers from the theatre or even the opera could sink to, or supplement their salaries with, street ballad singing.28 Nor was the reverse trajectory out of the question. One child ballad singer known as “Master Demar” was taken on at Sadler’s Wells and had a successful season, being “generally encored,” before running away with the house silver: Charles Dibdin the Younger writes of his “very sweet, strong, and flexible voice.”29 Two years later, in 1816, the Morning Post ran two articles about “A Mr. J. King, who is said to have been a working goldsmith, and who, from the pressure of the times, was compelled to take up the humble profession of a street ballad-­singer.” He was heard by the managers of Covent Garden, and appeared that December in the part of “Blind Beggar,” the Post reporting, “His voice has great clearness and variety, and some of his tones are remarkably fine. He was rapturously encored,” and “His voice embraces three entire octaves, and is so full, rich, and harmonious, that it astonished all the musical Professors.”30 These considerations should guard us against my initially crude binary of unrelated vocal traditions.

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   23

Were ballad singers not, after all, materially rewarded for their renderings of what were explicitly (because materially) classified as musical works, performed from sheets in front of them; and was this not a practice closer to the emerging bourgeois tradition of concert music than to busking or what is now called “folk” music? Instead of drawing a hard line between stage and street, we might instead posit a more nuanced world in which ballad singers, although largely “untrained,” may often have possessed the musicality necessary to perform relatively complex theatrical melodies, yet may also have operated within a vernacular musical idiom based on vocal conventions different from those of the stage or the concert hall. Here again, even the negative accounts afford insights. An 1852 article by William Allingham in Household Words mocks an Irish ballad singer of around thirty-­five thus: His vocal excellence consists in that he twirls every word several times around his tongue, wrapt in the notes of a soft, husky, tremulous voice. In this style of gracing—­which is considered highly artistic, and for which, I believe, “humouring” is the country phrase—­the words are delivered somewhat as follows: This pay-­air discoo-­ooeyoor-­cèrced with sich foo-­oocy-­oorce o’ ray-­ayizin, Ther may-­aynin they ay-­apee-­ayx-­esprayss’d so-­hoo-­o-­o clearrrr, That fau-­hor to lae-­ssen too-­oo ther caw-­aw-­he-­on-­vairsay-­ ay-­ashin, My ehe-­ee-­in-­clinay-­aheeay-­ashin was for too-­oo-­hoo-­hoo draw-­aw-­haw-­ee-­aw-­a-­neerrrrr.31

We find similarly absurd phonetic renderings in descriptions of concert singers. Gardiner, writing of  the proper manner of  “attacking” syllables, continues: The following slovenly expressions from a bass singer of eminence will be in the recollection of many. Doo-­ark-­ness shall cover the earth. The Gen-­te-­oyles shall come to thy le-­oyt, The she-­had-­dow of death. The wings oo-­hof the woo-­inde. A soprano of eminence, Bid me dis-­ke-­orse, de-­ance and play.32

24  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

The comparison leads us to take more seriously Allingham’s preamble and to draw an analogy between vernacular “gracing” and the syllabic extensions of the respectable stage. This relativism continues: a few pages later, Gardiner’s description of the famous operatic star Catalani’s singing as “offensively loud to those who were placed near her” becomes a reminder of how ballad singers were criticized for their own loudness, whereas of course both Catalani and the balladeer must have painstakingly cultivated their delivery so as to be heard across a busy street or from the back of a crowded auditorium. As Gardiner himself puts it, “volume and force of voice are essentially necessary in a public singer”—­wherever that public might be located.33 To cap it all, even the stock caricature of the ballad singer in satirical prints as a wide-­mouthed, chin-­tilted bawler, face agape beyond the bounds of decency, corresponds exactly with Gardiner’s recommendation for amateur singers, that they might develop a better vocal technique: The first and most important operation is to open the mouth so completely, that the voice may meet with no obstruction in its course. To do this, the head must be thrown a little back, while standing in an erect posture, opening the mouth so as to admit three fingers set edgewise between the teeth.34

In these terms, the slack-­jawed balladeer of a Gillray street scene was simply demonstrating an awareness of the first essential principle of good singing.

Techniques of the Trade This is not to say that there were not bad ballad singers, but that it was an art with the potential to be performed well or badly. One singer interviewed in Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor is quoted as follows: “It would puzzle any man, even the most exactest, to tell what they could make by ballad-­singing in the street. Some nights it would be wet, and I should be hoarse, and then I’d take nothing.”35 That penultimate clause is crucial, introducing an aesthetic variable: this singer would not “take nothing” simply because the night was wet and there was less passing trade, but rather because this rain made him “hoarse” (note that it did not cause him to cough or be quiet; it affected the quality rather than the volume of his voice) and therefore less pleasant to listen to. Not only could one singer be good or bad, and aware of the fact, but in admitting that poor singing did not pay, the singer implies that successful performers sang well and were rewarded for it. John James Bezer, a working-­class

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   25

writer and sometime Chartist who had a brief spell as a street singer in 1838, certainly thought as much: “Whether it was my singing loudly—­ for I had a good strong voice at that time,—­or my peculiar earnest manner, I know not, but, when I counted up my gains at about six o’clock, they amounted to six shillings, and, I think, fourpence.”36 Bezer, whose longer account is cripplingly modest, will not admit to skill—­indeed, as a devout hymn-­singing Christian he considered it shameful to sing in a consciously worldly manner—­but he will entertain the possibility that his takings were high because his voice was good. All of which is of course to speak of “good” or “bad” as understood in terms of subjective judgements on the part of passers-­by, who cannot all have been as harsh as those who denigrated singers in print. In particular, given that most ballad singers were unaccompanied and therefore had merely to keep in tune with themselves, it is hard to believe that the average auditor in an era before the standardization of pitch condemned them out of hand as out of tune. Conversely, this same lack of accompaniment may help contextualize elite accusations of singers’ “wildness,” as coming from writers habitually accustomed to the taming, regulating effect of a keyboard accompaniment on the human voice—­a restraint not commonly heard by the greater part of London’s working-­class inhabitants, whose access to keyboard instruments before the latter part of the nineteenth century was necessarily much restricted.37 Having resolved to rescue the ballad singer’s voice from its critical exile as “noise,” the challenge becomes whether we can say something meaningful about their vocal performances. Frustratingly, most scholarship on the subject suffers from inadequate referencing—­Leslie Shepard, for in­­ stance, makes unsubstantiated claims for the “uncanny power” of certain vocal inflections—­yet contemporary evidence can indeed be found to bear out this and similar assertions.38 Allingham’s comic account, encountered above, underpins more recent discussion of Irish ballad singers that stresses the high regard of street audiences for “supplementary syllables” and extensive gracing, which was apparently much praised.39 Indeed, Irish singers have benefitted from that nation’s long-­standing scholarly interest in its vernacular performers, a significant proportion of whom, in the nineteenth century, influenced the vocal makeup of the London street. Earlier in his narrative, Allingham also gives the following description: A ballad-­singer, a young woman in old plaid cloak and very old straw bonnet, strikes up, with a sweet Connaught lisp, and slightly nasal twang, “The Sorrowful Lamentation of Patrick Donohoe”—­with the

26  O s k a r C o x J e n s e n

words “Come all you tender Christians!”—­and soon summons around her a ring of listeners. She will sing da capo as long as the ballad appears to draw attention and custom.40

Besides seeming to give us evidence of the “vernacular” voice—­note the lisp and “slightly nasal twang”—­the woman’s exhortation of “Come all you tender Christians!” is highly reminiscent of the following interview conducted by Alan Lomax in the mid-­twentieth century: When I asked a bluff old lumberjack . . . what made a good bunkhouse singer, he was equally emphatic. “Why, a feller that has a loud, clear voice so you can hear him—­a man that can speak his words out plain so you can understand what he’s singing about—­and a fellow that remembers all the words.” Such is a folk definition of the underpinnings of the come-­all-­ye style that has dominated ballad-­making in Britain and America for the last three centuries.41

This gives us other performance frames for the voice: loudness for the sake of inclusivity; and clarity for the better communication of text, which was, after all, the singer’s primary function in order to sell wares. There is, in these accounts, an approximation of Lawrence Kramer’s ideal of “songfulness”: a vocal delivery neither too technically proficient nor too virtuosic, informed by the (in this case entirely mercenary) consideration that “the addition of voice to a melody activates a set of human relationships that an instrumental performance can only signify.”42 Kramer’s concept is admittedly problematic—­in his own words, “being so Protean, songfulness seems not only to elude but also to resist critical or analytical understanding”—­yet there is certainly a suggestion that the successful performances of Allingham’s Connaught lisper, Mayhew’s informant, Bezer, and the lumberjack’s ideal singer, might all be classed as “songful.”43 The songful ideal, professedly devoid of artifice, is clearly at odds with the apparent praise of gracing mentioned above, and further contrasts with a series of assertions found in Edward Lee’s Music of the People, in which Lee states, “The tone of the street-­singer appears to have been much broader, with a heaviness of technique well suited to the sentimentality which we have already noticed in much of the nineteenth-­century urban song.” Lee quotes the late-­Victorian folklorist Cecil Sharp’s observation that balladeers “like to sing in as high a pitch as possible, and will often apologize for not being able, on account of age, to sing their songs

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   27

high enough,” placing this in conjunction with Albert Lloyd’s dictum that “the street singers commonly pitched their songs about a fifth higher than their voice would really take, and they used voice breaks, slides, and high rasping wails, and in that way lines which look on paper merely sad and tearful become as thrilling as an Indian war whoop.”44 Though unsubstan­ tiated, this claim accords with repeated contemporary observations of the shrillness or high pitch of singers, and in particular with the journalist and dramatist Douglas Jerrold’s memory of the first ballad singer he ever heard, around the beginning of the nineteenth century: Billy had a rich falsetto . . . he would murmur, preludise a few low notes, then rush into it, and, once there, he knew too well his own strength to quit it on small occasion. Billy’s falsetto was his fastness, where he capered and revelled in exulting security. We hear it now; yes, we listen to his “love” whooping through wintry darkness—­proudly crowing above the din of the street—­shouting triumphantly above the blast—­a loud-­voiced Cupid “horsing the wind.”  .  .  . We have known a worse falsetto than his ten thousand times better paid.45

Between Lloyd’s enthusiastic valorization—­“thrilling as an Indian war whoop”—­and Jerrold’s ironic sketch, we may detect traces of plausible sound: high, keening—­even, to borrow the ubiquitous idiom of the period, electrifying. There is clear consonance here with both current “folk” traditions, especially in eastern Europe, and (as Jerrold hints in his final line) the high registers of contemporary trained singers; writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the musicologist Francis Cunningham Woods declared himself astonished at both the extensive gracing and the staggeringly high pitch of songs that were “popular” on the stage a century earlier.46 Yet within Jerrold’s parenthetic asides we also find style married to pragmatism: “crowing above the din of the street—­shouting triumphantly above the blast.” We are returned to the essential noisiness of the street: a difficulty which singers appear to have met, not only by singing loudly, but by singing high, pitching their voices to the treble register of their auditors’ ears so as to be distinguished from the lower sounds of traffic, conversation, and other street vendors. Considered in their totality, singers’ vocal performances appear to have exhibited a range of evolved responses to the challenges of the street, within which different musical styles may be distinguished. Each of these techniques was at once cultivated to aid the sale of their songs, and each may be read in negative—­from volume, to pitch, to gracing—­in the accounts

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of their detractors. Yet time and again, it appears these vocal techniques were condemned, if only subconsciously, not for running in opposition to those of trained stage and concert vocalists but for running in parallel. The successful ballad singer was manifestly musical.

Coda: Voice and the Vox Populi Considered in isolation, it seems faintly implausible that concerns of taste making and one’s own class consciousness could precipitate quite so many damning accounts of ballad singers’ voices. Yet it must be remembered that the nineteenth was a century in which the greater part of the populace was finding a voice of quite another kind. The urban ballad singer performed against a backdrop of agitation, awakening, and clamour for reform, from the radicalism of the early 1790s, to the Reformist movement of the post-­Waterloo period, to the Reform Bill of 1832, to the Chartist heyday of the midcentury. Or, to give things a more accurate, active construction, singers themselves were central in articulating an emergent discourse of working-­class politics.47 Some singers were active in radical politics; many more gave voice to Reformist or Chartist song; their very presence on the public street as unlegislated, unruly, mobile representatives of an underclass who all too audibly possessed a voice was itself seen as intolerable by much of the establishment—­a subject too broad to tackle in this chapter.48 In this context, any performance by such a subaltern figure, taking place visibly within public space, might assume political significance irrespective of the content of the song being voiced, so that the mere act of a musically competent ballad singer performing in the street a song appropriated (which is to say, pirated) from the respectable stage might itself be taken as an affront to the established but imperilled order of things. Respectable discourse might have strived to deny the ballad singer’s voice, not as a reflection of its inadequacy but as a function of a precisely opposite phenomenon, in recurrent attempts to mitigate the effects of a voice that was manifestly all too articulate, audible, and even accomplished. It is because the London ballad singer’s voice was, in both a literal and a political sense, in rude health, that in the historical record it has been not so much lost as actively suppressed.

Notes 1. “Theatricals,” The Age 31 (11 December 1825): 245. 2. “Theatres,” The Age 7 (16 June 1825): 54. 3.  J. M. Lacey, “Misery at Christmas,” Ladies’ Monthly Museum (1 February 1824): 64.

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   29

4. See, for example, Isabella Kelly, Joscelina, 2 vols. (2nd ed., London: T. N. Longman, 1798), 1:195; Maria Edgeworth, The Ballad Singer, 4 vols. (London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1814), 4:64; The Surprising History of a Ballad Singer (Falkirk: T. John­­ ston, 1818); Felicia Hemans, “To a Wandering Female Singer” (1829); Douglas Jerrold, “The Ballad Singer,” in Heads of the People: Being Portraits of the English, 2 vols. (London: Robert Tyas, 1840), 2:295; “Beggars,” English Gentleman 34 (13 December 1845); “The Italian Boy,” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance, 1 September 1846, 158–­59. 5. “Vocal Music,” Euterpeiad 2, no. 1 (1 May 1831): 4–­5, and Euterpeiad 2, no. 2 (15 May 1831): 16–­17. 6. “On Vocal Music,” Harmonicon 9 (August 1831): 188–­89. This reprint was itself swiftly replicated in the English provincial press, which credited the Harmonicon rather than the original, for example as “Musical Test of the Female Voice,” Lancaster Gazette 1576 (27 August 1831). 7. For a recent account of the racialized construction of the London street, see Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 8. Lacey, “Misery,” 65. 9. This characterization applies equally to the Euterpeiad and the Harmonicon. For further discussion of the latter publication and its market, see Leanne Langley, “The Life and Death of ‘The Harmonicon’: An Analysis,” Royal Musical Association Research Chron­ icle 22, no. 1 (1989): 137–­63, and Erin Johnson-­Hill (now Johnson-­Williams), “Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–­1833),” Nineteenth-­Century Music Review 9, no. 2 (2012): 255–­93. 10. Robert Walser, “Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances,” in Analysing Popular Music, ed. Allan F. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16–­38, here 22. 11. Jerrold, “The Ballad Singer,” 289; Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, J. Scatchard, G. Wilkie, 1800), 56. 12. Lacey, “Misery,” 64. 13. See Oskar Cox Jensen, The London Ballad-­Singer: Outcast at the World’s Centre, 1792–­1864 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 14. See Mary Ann Smart, “The Traffic in Voices: The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London” in the present volume. 15. As evidenced in, e.g,. George Gregory, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1806), 1:197, and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (here­­ after POB), viewable at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org, cases t18040704–­14, t18041024–­43, and t18151206–­160. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­­ versity Press, 1984), 60; see also Bourdieu, Distinction, 56. 17. Pierce Egan, Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and Corinthian Tom (London: Sherwood, Jones, 1823). 18. Mark Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism, 1792/3,” in Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–­1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 40–­70, esp. 51–­56. 19. “Answers to Correspondents,” 23 (17 May 1851), cited in Bertrand Taithe, The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 157.

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20. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, 56. 21. Billy Bragg, “How to Busk,” Guardian, 21 March 2014, http://theguardian.com /lifeandstyle/2014/mar/21/billy-­bragg-­how-­to-­busk?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487, accessed 28 July, 2016. 22. George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or The Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Houlston and Wright, 1861), 25. 23. William Gardiner, The Music of Nature (London, 1832; new ed., Boston: J. H. Wil­­ kins & R. B. Carter, 1841), 306–­7. 24. I would like to thank Susan Rutherford and Katherine Hambridge for raising these considerations. 25. Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 239–­40. 26. Mary Chan, “North, Roger (1651–­1734),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biog­­ raphy, http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/20314, accessed 3  June 2016; Jamie C. Kassler. “North, Roger,” Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630 .article.20085. 27. John Wilson, ed., Roger North on Music (London: Novello, 1959), 215; cited in Marsh, Music and Society, 245. 28. These include George Demery Archer of Drury Lane and the Opera House (POB t17950520–­47), and “two women . . . that formerly sung at Sadler’s Wells” (POB t17770910–­21). 29. George Speaight, ed., Professional and Literary Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1956), 109. 30. “Drury-­Lane Theatre,” Morning Post 14326 (20 December 1816) and 14332 (27 De­­ cember 1816). Let us hope that Mr J. King’s first name was not Joe. 31. William Allingham, “Irish Ballad Singers and Irish Street Ballads,” Household Words 94 (10 January 1852), repr. in Ceol 3, no. 1 (1967): 2–­16, here 4. 32. Gardiner, Music of Nature, 72. 33. Gardiner, Music of Nature, 76. 34. Gardiner, Music of Nature, 28. 35. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), 3:196. See Mary Ann Smart’s chapter in this volume for further discussion of Mayhew’s purported interviews, especially note 32. 36. The Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848, repr. in Testaments of Rad­­ icalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790–­1885, ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1977), 180. 37. I am indebted to Sarah Hibberd for prompting this reflection. 38. Leslie Shepard, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origin and Meaning (London: H. Jenkins, 1962), 38. One notable and excellent exception is Breandán Ó Madagáin, “Functions of Irish Song in the Nineteenth Century,” Béaloideas 53 (1985): 130–­216, yet the focus here is explicitly on singing in Ireland, in Irish, so that its findings cannot in all conscience be applied to Irish ballad singers in London. 39. Colin Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads: Performers and Performances,” Folk Music Journal 6, no. 2 (1991): 209–­22, here 219–­20. 40. Allingham, “Irish Ballad Singers,” 3. 41. Alan Lomax, “The Good and the Beautiful in Folksong,” Journal of American Folklore 80, no. 137 (1967): 213–­35, here 214.

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”   31

42. Lawrence Kramer, “Beyond Words and Music: An Essay on Songfulness,” in Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field, ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf (London: International Association for Word and Music Studies, 1999), 303–­19, here 306. 43. Kramer, “Beyond Words and Music,” 307. 44. All from Edward Lee, Music of the People: A Study of Popular Music in Great Britain (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), 120. 45. Jerrold, The Ballad Singer, 296. Jerrold employs the term “falsetto” as it is commonly understood today. 46. Francis Cunningham Woods, “A Consideration of the Various Types of Songs Popular in England during the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 23rd Session (1896–­97), 37–­55, here 40. 47. For the place of ballads in constructing this political discourse in the mid-­nineteenth century, see Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–­1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230–­55, and—­for an account that also considers their singers—­Phil Eva, “Home Sweet Home? The ‘Culture of Exile’ in Mid-­Victorian Popular Song,” Popular Music 16, no. 2 (1997): 131–­50, esp. 148. 48. See Oskar Cox Jensen, “The Travels of John Magee: Tracing the Geographies of Britain’s Itinerant Print-­Sellers, 1789–­1815,” Cultural and Social History 11, no. 2 (2014): 195–­216, here 211–­12; Cox Jensen, The London Ballad-­Singer, chap. 2.

• 

Ch a p t er 2  

•

The Traffic in Voices The Exchange Value of  Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London Ma ry A nn Sma rt

I watched the others fall till all were dead, Between the fifth day and the sixth. And I, Already going blind, groped over my brood—­ Calling to them, though I had watched them die, For two long days. And then the hunger had more Power than even sorrow had over me. When he had finished, with a sideways stare He gripped the skull again in his teeth, which ground Strong as a dog’s against the bone he tore.1

These macabre lines from Dante’s Inferno were almost a refrain among supporters and friends of London’s sizeable community of Italian exiles and immigrants in the mid-­nineteenth century. One could have heard the verses intoned by the exiled Italian actor Gustavo Modena, costumed as Dante, in the Concert Room of Her Majesty’s Theatre in June of 1839, part of a benefit concert that also included excerpts from Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux sung by several of that theatre’s star singers.2 The same year those in attendance at Filippo Pistrucci’s lecture on the history of the Italian language would have heard the illustrious but now greying poet-­ improviser recite the canto with instrumental accompaniment, a tour de force that Pistrucci had been trotting out for London audiences since his arrival in the city in the 1820s.3 By the summer of 1842, Dante’s verses had been fitted to the music of Rossini’s Stabat mater and performed at the Hanover Square Rooms by the London Choral Society.4 And in June 1844, attendees at a benefit concert to support Giuseppe Mazzini’s

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“Gratuitous School” for Italian immigrants—­probably among them Lady Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, and John Stuart Mill—­lis­ tened to the verses (again, in untranslated Italian) recited by a ten-­year-­ old boy whose everyday occupation was begging behind a barrel organ.5 The prestige of such events was underwritten by Dante’s canonical status, as well as by the affinities between his situation as an exile and that of the political exiles recently arrived in London—­Gustavo Modena and Giuseppe Mazzini among them—­who had been compelled to leave Italy because of their work on behalf of a free and united Italy.6 The grim episode of Ugolino’s imprisonment had long enjoyed a somewhat baffling popularity among English readers, surpassing even the story of Paolo and Francesca as the most translated section of the Divine Comedy. In the Inferno, Dante comes upon Count Ugolino in hell, gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggiero of Sienna, the prelate who had imprisoned him with his children in a tower. Ugolino describes watching his sons slowly starve to death, recalls their dying plea that he should save himself by eating them, and hints at his eventual acquiescence (“hunger had more / Power than even sorrow had over me”). By the 1840s the character of Ugolino had been converted in the British imagination into a symbol of the virtuous everyman struggling against cruel absolute power. This hardly seems the stuff of a typical Victorian entertainment. While Dante’s original text showed two equally unscrupulous men, Ugolino and the Archbishop, scheming against each other while grappling for power, English translations from Thomas Gray’s in 1737 to William Gladstone’s a century later nudged the canto towards political (and anti-­Catholic) commentary, depicting Ugolino as the innocent victim of a powerful bishop. The culminating act of cannibalism was redeemed, made into a metaphor for the savagery to which an unjust society can drive its citizens.7 By the time Byron adapted the story in The Prisoner of Chillon and Blake painted Ugolino and his sons (in 1816 and 1826 respectively), Ugolino’s plight and his infernal revenge had come to stand for defiant liberty, both political and artistic. In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle played on these resonances to indict government trade policies, comparing a starving couple who murdered their children in order to buy food for themselves with the burial fees to Ugolino, driven to unthinkable acts by an inhuman situation.8 As much as any messages about power and reform these verses may have carried, their attraction rested also in the simple fact that this was Italian poetry—­usually performed untranslated and thus understood partially or not at all by London audiences. Language was circumvented, the words turned into an expressive flow of immediate gesture and mu-

The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  35

sical inflection, perhaps not so different from hearing a performance of an aria from an Italian opera. As one spectator who heard Gustavo Modena recite for an English audience noted: “There is such expression in his face as he measures up his subject, such passion in his voice, such ability to modulate from cries of despair to impassioned pleas . . . that without even understanding what he is saying people are profoundly moved.”9 The musicality of these spoken verses, as well as the savagery of their content, would also have worked to confirm and extend stereotypes and assumptions about Italian art and Italian character as excessive and spontaneous, issues of increasing relevance as more and more Italians, most of them abjectly poor, migrated to London. Musical and dramatic performances like the Ugolino recitations, or concerts of opera highlights by the Italian singers under contract at Her Majesty’s Theatre, brought Italian voices to English ears in an atmosphere of relative détente, amid a heated debate about immigration and forms of aid and reform that might be implemented for the immigrants. While the attraction of these performances undoubtedly lay partly in the opportunities they afforded for a safely aestheticized encounter with the imagined savagery of the southern temper and the rich sonorities of Italianate voices, this essay attempts to look past the surface pleasures of these performances, to consider the ways in which Italian voices, Italian music, and narratives of Italian experience could be transmuted into various currencies, whether measured in terms of public opinion, political power, or financial return. Italians had been migrating to London in large numbers since the economic and agricultural collapse that had followed the defeat of Napoleon, and the upper echelons of English society had been making the reverse journey, experiencing the sights and sounds of Italy through the Grand Tour and its literature, for much longer than that.10 The relative familiarity enabled by tourism and immigration seems to have bred the proverbial contempt, at least on the English side: Italy and Italians appeared in the British imagination mainly as sites of Romantic fantasy or objects of a morally superior gaze that dismissed them as lazy and feckless, trafficking in the pejorative stereotypes commonly projected onto southern peoples.11 Diplomatic crises such as the “Queen Caroline Affair” in 1820–­ 21 were flashpoints in a relationship otherwise characterized by casual acceptance of centuries-­old stereotypes.12 By the late 1830s Italian immigrants were an inescapable reality on the streets of London, and “the Italian question” posed a thorny diplomatic challenge to the government. After the uprisings against Austrian rule in

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northern Italy were suppressed in 1831, the illiterate Italian musicians and vendors who already populated the streets of London were joined by an influx of educated and influential political exiles and expatriates, including revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini. At this point the dominant attitude towards the immigrants and their cause was still one of condescension. In June 1831, the Morning Herald wrote of Italians as “slaves of a foreign dominion, [who crawl] amid the magnificent ruins of the glory of their land” and acknowledged: “It is a pity that blood has been shed; but the recreant cause of these ‘patriots’ commands but little respect and less sympathy from Europe.”13 When Mazzini settled in London in 1838, after stints in Marseilles and Switzerland, he became a focal point for the Italian community, his success in the English capital a story of charisma yoked to the power of print. He was remarkably integrated into London society—­he attended the literary breakfasts hosted by Samuel Rogers, the Saturday literary soirées of Joseph Toynbee, suppers at the Milner Gibsons (the husband was a conservative MP and president of the Board of Trade), and he was appointed vice president of the Wellington Club. He exerted a special magnetism for intelligent and powerful women, earning the devoted friendship of Jane Welsh Carlyle and, later, of Emilie Ashurst Venturi and Jessie White Mario, both of whom devoted themselves to translating his works and disseminating his ideas.14 It was not until the mid-­1840s that public sympathy and official support began to shift in favour of Italy. The cause enjoyed a sudden jump in public support when it was revealed in 1844 that the secretary of state had allowed Mazzini’s correspondence to be read by spies, who shared information with Austria, leading to the arrest and execution of some prominent rebels.15 But at least as important were Mazzini’s ongoing efforts to build support through alliances with working-­class groups and through his writings, which granted a central role to the arts and, as his­ torian Maura O’Connor argues, “made it impossible to separate out culture from politics and romance from public opinion.”16 In essays such as “Philosophy of Music” and “Byron and Goethe,” Mazzini argued that art­ works promoting collective responsibility over the egotistical values of Romanticism could usher in a progressive concept of humanity and eventually bring about political change.17 For Mazzini, opera was both a luxury and a cogent expressive medium that had the power to model for Italians a form of responsible, egalitarian engagement with the world. A passionate opera lover since his student days in Genoa, he revelled in the ready availability of opera in London, after several years in Switzerland when he had been able to experience

The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  37

music only through the guitar transcriptions that he occasionally asked friends and relatives to mail him.18 Soon after his arrival in London he attended a performance of Rossini’s La gazza ladra, during which he noted the dress and customs of the English operagoing public with the bafflement and delight of an amateur ethnographer.19 Although his income rarely stretched to buying opera tickets, by 1847 Mazzini’s friendship with singers Giulia Grisi and her companion Mario de Candia earned him a pass to attend the opera whenever he wanted at no cost, a privilege that pleased him greatly—­even though (as he wrote to his mother) his austere lifestyle meant that he would use it very rarely.20 It was also in 1847 that Mazzini met Verdi, in London for the première of I masnadieri; the encounter seems not to have made a strong impression, judging again by a letter to his mother, which notes starkly: “Ho veduto Verdi il compositore” (“I have seen Verdi the composer”).21 It was during the interval of exile in small-­town Switzerland, far removed from the opera house, that Mazzini penned his essay on operatic reform. Long passages of “Filosofia della musica” proceed on an abstract and idealistic plane, arguing for the high purpose of music as an art form, its bonds with religious exaltation, and the necessity for composers to recognize and rise to this divine calling. It can be difficult to discern the essay’s aesthetic and political substance, the more so because many of its recommendations have come to seem magically prescient, anticipating many of the developments of Verdi’s style in the later 1840s and 1850s—­ even though Verdi could not have read the essay until much later, and may not even have known of its existence.22 The essay’s vigorous cultural politics can disappear behind its clouds of verbiage and occasionally preachy tone; but its logic emerges more clearly when it is read alongside Mazzini’s other writings of the period, especially “The Duties of Man.”23 Without that context Mazzini can sound like a proto-­Wagnerian (or post-­ Gluckian?) reformer, calling on composers to decrease the emphasis on melody and vocal ornament that had reigned supreme since Rossini, to write fewer arias, and to devise more vivid and more accurate musical means for depicting specific geographical and historical settings. These desiderata were motivated not by a desire to render Italian opera more realistic or more modern (although they would have that effect), but by Mazzini’s hatred for Romantic individualism and the obsession with individual rights and freedoms that he believed had plagued European thought and culture since the French Revolution. Instead of artworks and political systems grounded in the rights of the individual, Mazzini sought to promote responsibility towards others and the principle of “association” (to use the Saint-­Simonian term for collective action that he

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preferred). The greater development of the chorus, individuation of characters through motivic contrast, and local colour that he hoped would unseat Rossinian melody and the hegemony of the star singer were, essentially, a series of musical correlates for his political vision of collective responsibility and associationism. As in his writings on literature, his ultimate hope was that what was depicted on stage—­and how it was depicted—­would change behaviours off the stage and beyond the theatre, so that, for example, the effective depiction of local colour would encourage listeners to imagine distant places and times and to stimulate vivid encounters with peoples different from themselves. Mazzini has long been criticized for his infatuation with “political theology,” as well as for the extremism and impracticality of his programme for independence, which was eventually marginalized by the more pragmatic approach to building the Italian nation espoused by Camillo Cavour.24 It is in the London phase of his career, perhaps, that Mazzini came closest to integrating idealistic vision and practical social undertakings. A key component of that integration was the school he established in 1841 to ameliorate the circumstances of young Italian immigrants, many of whom worked as street musicians or “organ boys.” Parish records show that close to half the Italians living in the Holborn neighbourhood, where most of the immigrants had settled, earned their living as street musicians, while another 25% sold small art objects in the streets. Most of the musicians had come to London as young boys who had been entrusted—­or sold—­to human traffickers by their impoverished families in Italy.25 Mazzini’s main objective in establishing the school was to help these young people become literate so that they might gain better employment. Lessons were offered each evening in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and drafting, with a special lecture on Sunday evenings, usually devoted to Italian history or religion. Instruction was not overtly politicized; but in addition to the history and literature of their homeland Mazzini aimed to teach the students that immigrants from different regions and economic positions shared a common cause—­that (as one of the school’s champions put it in a letter to the Morning Chronicle) the organ grinder from Parma was not a stranger to the vendor of statuettes from Como.26 The school’s bills were paid in large part with funds raised in an annual benefit concert featuring singers from the Italian opera and other prominent Italian (and non-­Italian) performers. Music thus worked as a sort of economic lever to connect high and low, English and Italian. As English popular opinion and official government policy gradually warmed to the Italian cause, undertakings like the Italian Gratuitous School were impor-

The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  39

tant sites where London’s wealthy and powerful could brush up against “the romance of Italy” while contributing to a worthy cause. Simply put, Mazzini put music to work: raising funds to better the prospects of immigrant musicians. The Italian organ boys were popular subjects in journalistic reportage and sentimental fiction, as well as in stories that straddled fact and fiction, edification and guilty pleasure. The narratives spun about the organ boys usually struck a paternalistic tone, while nakedly promoting the values of Victorian moralism or Risorgimento meliorism, depending on the author and the intended readership. The London journalists who wrote about the organ boys tended to emphasize the value of music and its ability to improve the moral condition of listeners and performers. Writing in the 1870s, the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith praised London’s street musicians for bringing “the warm melodies of Italian opera” to the “uncouth English labourer” and for nurturing “in our courts and alleys echoes of a purer music than could otherwise have reached these dismal abodes.”27 For Smith, opera sat at the pinnacle of the aesthetic hierarchy: above dances and folk tunes, which in turn ranked above music-­ hall songs, regarded as the lowest of the low. The Italian exile Antonio Gallenga (writing under his literary alias, Luigi Mariotti) chronicled the life of one particular organ boy, “Morello,” in an exemplary tale designed to highlight the qualities of character necessary to build a unified and autonomous Italy, while condemning traits that would make both the citizen and the nation weak and vulnerable. Gallenga, a member of Mazzini’s “Giovine Italia” movement, was an occasional teacher at the Gratuitous School who would go on to write fiction as well as nonfictional tracts, all of which aimed to instil in Italians the strength, valour, and work ethic required to change the situation of their homeland.28 His “Morello, or the Organ Boy’s Progress” belongs to that popular Victorian genre midway between fiction and journalism, its fictional outlines larded with factual details about the lives of the immigrant musicians. Gallenga advertises the story’s documentary ambitions in the texture with which he chronicles a day in the life of the organ boy (eating polenta for breakfast, being subject to a beating unless he brings home at least eighteen pence) and in the blankness of the chapter titles (“The Life of an Italian Boy in London”). In a bid for historicity and thus for the tale’s value as more than mere entertainment, Gallenga claims that his tale derives from a historical document: “Lest it be supposed that I avail myself of the privileges of a writer of fictions to exaggerate the evils

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of those miserable Italian mendicants, here are a few authentic records from well-­informed testimonies.”29 Although it tells the tale of a single street musician, Gallenga’s story could almost be an allegory of Italian character and the obstacles Italians faced in achieving autonomy. Its title character, Morello, is depicted first as a helpless victim, sold by his impoverished family to a human trafficker, who brings him to London to beg and play the organ. In service to the trafficker, Morello’s moral and physical state deteriorates: his dress is more squalid every time the author encounters him, and his health is gradually but steadily undermined. Yet not cranking an organ on the streets turns out to be even worse than the degrading life of indenture. Eager to better himself, Morello sneaks out to attend Mazzini’s school (which is described in accurate detail) and is caught and beaten by his master. When he runs away, he is taken in by a countess, Lady Muscavado, who adds him to her collection of luxury items: She had four footmen, all as tall as church steeples, a French maid, a Piedmontese cook, a Dutch nurse, and an Icelandic chasseur. She was now in want of a Lapland dwarf. In the meantime she put up with the services of an Italian page, and her choice fell upon poor Morello.30

When the slave trader locates Morello, he convinces Lady Muscavado to let him go by offering her a bullfinch in exchange. Once back in the service of the trafficker, the boy is forced back onto the streets with his organ; but Gallenga leaves the reader in no doubt that this outcome is in every way an improvement compared to the indolence of life in an aristocratic home. The notion of Morello—­or any other Italian immigrant—­as equivalent to a bullfinch or a Lapland dwarf, part of a cabinet of picturesque figures from various nations, is precisely the perception that Italians needed to correct and transcend. Even abject work and the seedy lodging houses in which the immigrants resided was morally preferable to the luxury and indolence of existence as a countess’s pet. In “Morello” Gallenga’s focus falls so completely on the sentimental and moralizing aspects of the tale that the reader learns nothing about the music Morello played or how listeners reacted, beyond the affection his songs inspired in the countess. Some such details are retailed by Henry Mayhew, whose remarkable London Labour and the London Poor contains seven interviews with Italian immigrants, three of them street musicians.31 And while the exaggerated dialect and poignant personal details in the conversations Mayhew transcribes betray a kinship with the fic-

The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  41

tional “Morello,” Mayhew’s book is drawn from solid ethnography, albeit transcribed with a free hand and an ear for the vivid detail.32 Mayhew’s accounts are typical of writings about Italian musicians and street vendors in their preoccupation with the economic condition of the workers they depict, and his sketches often discuss monetary transactions. Even more than Gallenga, he dwells on the minutiae of life in the Italian-­run boarding houses of Saffron Hill (Holborn), where boarders paid separately for each meal and service. From earnings of perhaps ten shillings a week, the musicians might pay four pence for a loaf of bread for breakfast, a halfpenny for a cup of tea or coffee, tuppence nightly for the bed itself, and a shilling and sixpence for a laundered shirt for Sunday.33 Music was on a par with the sale of fruit and vegetables: the skills required to turn a barrel organ are almost identical to those needed to sell anything else on the streets: the ability to call up a mental map of the city, with rich and poor quarters clearly noted, and a sharp memory for the addresses where sales have been made before and where certain “products” are in demand. Just as Gallenga emphasizes that Morello was neither musically inclined nor musically trained when he was brought to London, Mayhew’s musicians disavow musical expertise. His most obliging informant, the “Organ Man with Flute Harmonicon Organ,” says mildly, “I don’t know music at all. I am middling fond of it.”34 Yet the Organ Man is an authority on the mechanical aspects of his instrument and on the science of squeezing the greatest possible profit from listeners by matching his musical selections to location, class, and taste. Gallenga writes searingly about the “shrewd” tricks and manipulations the organ boy, Morello, devises to make money, his progress through the city guided by “the map in his brain . . . dotted with golden marks.”35 Taking a less judgemental tone, Mayhew relays in exhaustive detail how Organ Man’s earnings fluctuate with the weather, how the physical strain of cranking the organ makes his wrist sore, and how he tunes his instrument (“it is the trumpet part that get out of tune sooner”) and updates it with new tunes—­something he does only once a year because of the prohibitive expense. He even gives the name and address of the technician who adds the new tunes and explains that he also sells sheet music for the tunes he plays, at four shillings each. Whereas a costermonger (Mayhew points out) might boil his oranges to enhance their size and colour or adulterate his coffee with chicory, musicians lack the capacity to cheat their customers. The same point is made by Filippo Pistrucci, the improviser we encountered earlier reciting

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the lines from Dante’s Ugolino, who from 1841 served as director of the Mazzini’s Gratuitous School.36 In a polemical essay on the situation of the organ boys, Pistrucci calls them the most innocent of all street vendors: unlike the Italians who sell plaster casts and other art objects in the streets, the musicians do not sell something for ten pence that is worth only five. In fact, Pistrucci argues, street musicians offer a rare bargain by evoking the memory of a song that the listener might once have paid a half-­guinea to hear at the theatre and can now enjoy again for a pittance, or even for nothing.37 In contrast to Adolphe Smith’s rigid stratification of high and low genres in relation to value, Mayhew’s Organ Man is refreshingly pragmatic. The economic imperative that guides his existence leads him to value eclecticism and variety above all, although he seems in no doubt that the stratification of musical genres corresponds reliably to the stratification of class: It won’t do to have all opera music in my organ. You must have some opera tunes for the gentlemen, and some for the poor people, and they like the dancing tune. Dere is some for the gentlemens, and some for the poor peoples.38

Along with the Liverpool hornpipe “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter,” a polka, a waltz, and a Scottische, his organ plays a tune from Verdi’s I Lombardi (an opera that he recalls once having seen in Italy) and one from Il trovatore.39 About the excerpt from I Lombardi, he muses “All organs play that piece. I have sold that music to gentlemens.”40 In Antonio Gallenga’s sentimental story, Morello’s fall from indolent luxury back to vagrancy comes when Lady Muscavado is invited to attend the prize ceremony and supper at the Italian Gratuitous School. Eager to see his old school and neighbourhood again, Morello sneaks onto her carriage and once at the school joins his companions on the platform, revealing himself to his former master. This episode gives neat narrative form to the uneasy fit between wealth and indigence that marked the biennial events at which rich and prominent patrons were invited to mingle with (or gawk at) the students of the School. Each year on 10 November, the school’s patrons were invited into the building for the annual prize ceremony, which was followed by a festive meal at a nearby tavern. In early summer many of the same patrons would gather for a concert to benefit the school, featuring an array of musicians who donated their services for the evening.

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Jane Welsh Carlyle attended the first prize ceremony in 1842 and later wrote an account to her cousin that retells many of the standard Italian stereotypes, while lionizing her close friend Mazzini as restrained and self-­effacing, proof against the excess that surrounded him. Carlyle worries that the “forty-­five gallons of beer, fifty pounds of macaroni, and roast beef of unascertained quality” amassed to feed the 250 dinner guests would completely wipe out the £13 of receipts taken at the door: “the moral satisfaction was complete; the financial  rather disappointing.”41 After the feast, Pistrucci teamed up with Gabriele Rossetti (father of Dante Gabriel and professor of Italian at King’s College London) to deliver “in horrible recitative a dramatized poem written for the occasion,” a performance that she imagines must have prompted “a good deal of inward laughter” among the small number of “well-­wishing English” in attendance.42 Far more successful were the benefit concerts. Held initially at the Princess’s Rooms, and from 1845 at the Hanover Square Rooms, these featured a long list of performers, by no means all of them Italian.43 Michele Finelli has shown that proceeds from the annual concerts covered almost the entire operating budget for the school.44 A few, but certainly a minority, of the performers were outright supporters of Mazzini’s political cause. The tenor Mario and his companion Giulia Grisi were affiliated with Giovine Italia, as was the baritone Antonio Tamburini; the brotherhood’s secret correspondence also notes that bass Luigi Lablache’s cook was a supporter, without specifying the sympathies of the great man himself.45 Prominent singers could enhance their reputations through public beneficence, and press reports on the concerts not infrequently included an observation about the performers’ generosity, or, occasionally, lack thereof.46 Reporting on the 1845 concert, the Musical World prefaced a list of performers with this a gesture of recognition: “All honour is due . . . to the following eminent artists who liberally afforded their gratuitous assistance.”47 The year before, though, the Polytechnic Review had tempered its report on the performance of comic singer John Orlando Parry, who had apparently not waived his fee: “John Parry sang his Whittington, and Fair Rosamond, of course with applause, but we heard that he accepted some more substantial proofs of the value of his services.”48 Detailed accounts of the concerts are rare, beyond the requisite list of artists participating that appeared in the papers each year. But an 1845 report in the Musical World that claims to list just the evening’s “encores” indicates a typical mix of operatic highlights, instrumental fantasies on opera tunes, and more popular fare.49 Although not all the operatic excerpts on the programme are named, the list perhaps tilts towards the

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soulful and serious: Elvira’s aria from the act 2 mad scene of I puritani (“Qui la voce”), sung by Sabilla Novello; an unspecified duet by Verdi and a cavatina by Donizetti; Rossini represented only by a duet (“Dove vai”) from Guillaume Tell.50 The concert also featured renditions of Beethoven’s “Adelaide,” and two German lieder, along with an equal amount of instrumental music: fantasies on L’elisir d’amore and Lucia di Lammermoor composed and performed by Leopold de Meyer; and solo turns by Ernesto Cavallini (clarinet), Henri Vieuxtemps (violin), Félix Godefroid (harp), and Giulio Regondi, probably playing the concertina recently patented by Charles Wheatstone.51 Beginning in 1847 the wattage of the performing forces was boosted exponentially when the management of the Italian Opera gave permission for its singers to perform at the benefit.52 That year’s concert featured performances by Giulia Grisi, Sabilla Novello, Marietta Alboni, Fanny Persiani, Giorgio Ronconi, Mario de Candia, Antonio Tamburini, and Filippo Galli. While political conviction and social conscience would have played some role in securing ticket sales for the school’s annual benefits, their success was surely due mainly to spectators’ desire to see and hear these singers up close, and perhaps especially to see them outside the fictional frames and costumes of the performance of a complete opera.53 There are no reports that Mazzini’s benefit concerts featured performances of Verdi’s “La mia letizia infondere” or any of the other operatic melodies made popular by the organ boys, but it is likely that the repertoire of street and stage did overlap on these occasions. The whole enterprise of the street musician was based on the migration of tunes from stage to street, and that this movement operated in reverse at the concerts in aid of the Gratuitous School is almost a certainty. The same tunes that were cranked out as advertisements for sheet music on the streets of London were purveyed as perquisites for donations to Mazzini’s school. The juxtaposition reminds us that all musical activity can be accounted for in terms of speculation and exchange value, and that the activity of historians is often to strip away sound and feeling in order to get at those core economic transactions. Mazzini’s efforts to leverage the arts, and above all operatic music, to transform the political and economic realities of his compatriots were similarly malleable and contingent. Widely read essays such as “Filosofia della musica” and “Duties of Man” pivoted on the idealistic conviction that the right kinds of culture could change the ways people thought and acted. In planning the benefit concerts, however, pragmatism reigned su-

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preme. Decisions about personnel and programming were governed by popular taste, rather than by any deference to Mazzini’s lofty programme for operatic reform. Star turns, memorable melodies, and virtuoso showpieces dominated. The most popular tunes, in performances by star performers, became currency that could be traded for gifts from the aristocracy and the successful merchant classes in support of the school. The goal was to educate the organ boys and other residents of Saffron Hill to the point where they could earn a living, and, if successful, the process would almost always result in the boys casting aside the barrel organ and any association with music. Its idealistic premise notwithstanding, the “Filosofia” itself was on some level a piece of marketing, although aimed at a very different audience and mode of consumption from those of the benefit concerts. But where Mazzini’s writings assume a binary logic in which some works and styles are good, progressive, and communitarian, while others are egotistical and reactionary, the logic of the street musicians and of the benefit concerts is based in a notion of infinite substitution and exchange. Under this system, almost any product or experience, whether aesthetic or material, can be traded for financial returns that can support needy individuals, institutions, or ideas. As Jane Carlyle intuited, though, opera arias sung by celebrity singers were worth far more on this market than forty-­five pounds of macaroni or close encounters with the charity cases themselves.

Notes 1. Dante, The Inferno of Dante, Canto 33 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), trans. Robert Pinsky, 357. 2. Performers included Fanny Persiani, Luigi Lablache, and Antonio Tamburini. This was a morning concert on 17 May 1839; discussed in Michael Caesar and Nick Havely, “Politics and Performances: Gustavo Modena’s dantate,” in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Aida Audeh and Nick Havely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 111–37, here, 116–­24. Modena’s style was not one of vivid dramatic impersonation; rather he aimed to recapture a sense of  Dante at his desk, forming and correcting the lines for the first time (see letter from Modena 1859, cited in Caesar and Havely, 125). 3. London Dispatch, 21 April 1839. 4. Il Conte Ugolino, adapted by Manfredo Maggioni (poetry) and William Callcott Hutchins (music), performed by the London Choral Society on 29 June 1842; advertised in the Musical World on 23 June 1842. Score and parts were for sale from Cramer, Addison, and Beale and advertised in the same issue of the Musical World. 5. Morning Post, 21 June 1844. The most prominent supporters of the school are named in an article published in the Examiner (6 December 1845), which in addition to

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Carlyle, Martineau, Mill, and Lady Byron names Mrs Milner Gibson, Sir James Clarke, and Joseph Toynbee (author of The Diseases of the Ear and grandfather of Arnold). 6. On Dante’s status as “spiritual father” of the Risorgimento exiles, see Maurizio Isabella, “Exile and Nationalism: The Case of the Risorgimento,” European History Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2006): 493–­520. 7. The historical Count Ugolino was less of a wronged innocent, having joined forces with Ruggiero and then betrayed him in order to gain (brief) control of Sienna for himself; see Frances Yates, “The Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14, nos. 1–­2 (1951): 92–­117. 8. “Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things happen; best-­loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his father’s knees!—­The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he were out of misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?—­W hat a committee of ways and means!” Thomas Carlyle, “Midas,” in Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 6–­7. 9. From a letter by Agostino Ruffini to his mother; quoted in Caesar and Havely, “Politics and Performances: Gustavo Modena’s dantate,” 115. 10. The economically disadvantaged population that made up the majority of Italian immigrants was supplemented by a smaller contingent of political exiles and self-­exiles, including author Ugo Foscolo, who left Italy in 1813 and settled in London in 1816. On the post-­Napoleonic generation of emigrés to both England and Spain, see Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigrés and the Liberal Imagination in the Post-­ Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. See Roberto Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 12. See Thomas Laqueur, “The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,” Journal of Modern History 54, no. 3 (1982): 417–­66. 13. Morning Herald (16 and 10 June 1831); both cited in C. P. Brand, Italy and the En­ glish Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-­Century England (1957; Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211. 14. Wilkie Collins caricatured Mazzini’s personal magnetism in the mesmeric powers of the double agent Fosco in The Woman in White (1861). 15. Marjorie Stone, “On the Post Office Espionage Scandal, 1844,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-­Century History, Dino Felluga, ed., http://www .branchcollective.org/; extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, accessed 30 May 2017. 16. Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 64; see also Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014); Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile. 17. “Filosofia della musica” was first published in the Parisian exile journal L’italiano in October 1836; “Byron and Goethe” appeared in the Monthly Chronicle in 1839. 18. Stefano Ragni, “Giuseppe Mazzini e Giulia Grisi,” Bollettino della Domus Mazzi­ niana, 1 (1989), 29–­49; see also Ragni’s “Giuseppe Mazzini e la chitarra,” Bollettino della Domus Mazziniana (1991–­92), 173–­93.

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19. The men wore suits rather than tails, he noted, and women never wore hats in the stalls; moreover, spectators would line up for half an hour to gain entry to the hall and then storm in all at once; letter to Maria Drago, 8 August 1838, S.E.N. XV, 121–­24; in Ragni, “Giuseppe Mazzini e Giulia Grisi,” 33. 20. Letter to Maria Drago, 7 June 1847; in Ragni, “Giuseppe Mazzini e Giulia Grisi,” 46. 21. Letter to Maria Drago, 22 June 1847; in Ragni, “Giuseppe Mazzini e Giulia Grisi,” 46. 22. After its initial publication in L’italiano, which had a very small circulation, the “Filosofia” appeared in a Swiss edition in Scritti letterari d’un italiano vivente, vol. 2 (Lugano: Tipografia della Svizzera italiana, 1847) and in Scritti editi e inediti, vol. 4 (Milan: Daelli, 1862). 23. The Duties of Man was published in 1860, but much of it was sketched (and published) in 1841–­42 in the newspaper Mazzini established for the London immigrant community, L’Apostolato popolare. Similarly, the essay “Fede e avenire,” which lays out some of the same ideas about rights, responsibilities, and individualism, was written and published in French in 1835, but was immediately banned by the government of Louis-­Philippe. The essay was more widely disseminated only after its publication in Italian in 1850. 24. See especially Simon Levis-­Sullam, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 25. Drawing on the enumerators’ books for the parish, Lucio Sponza shows that there were 472 Italians in Holborn in 1841, of whom 216 were street musicians; 99 makers of figures, artificial flowers, or wire bird cages; and 60 makers of precision instruments such as barometers, or of looking glasses. Twenty years later the total number was 609, with the distribution of occupations roughly the same. Sponza also shows that the occupations of the immigrants correlated with their regional origins, with most of the organ grinders coming from Emilia, the statuette makers from Tuscany, and the makers of precision instruments from Lombardy. Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1998), 31–­33 and 328. See also John Zucchi, Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-­Century Paris, London, and New York (Montreal: McGill-­Queens Press, 1992), 76–­110. 26. Michele Finelli, ‘Il prezioso elemento’: Giuseppe Mazzini e gli emigrati italiani nell’esperienza della Scuola Italiana a Londra (Verucchio, Italy: Pazzini, 1999), 55. Finelli here draws on a letter from an anonymous supporter of the school that appeared in the Morning Chronicle in 1842. 27. John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877), 87–­88. 28. New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 75 (1845), 193–­206; also included in Mariotti’s The Blackgown Papers (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). In 1833 Gallenga was commissioned by Mazzini’s revolutionary society, Giovine Italia, to assassinate King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont, but he failed through a lack of opportunity and lack of conviction. Gallenga later engaged Mazzini in a vigorous debate about the necessity of regicide in revolution, and although the two men eventually parted ways, Gallenga’s nonfiction writings of the 1840s cleave to a Mazzinian worldview. For Gallenga’s official role at the school, see Finelli, ‘Il prezioso elemento.’ On Gallenga and for transcriptions of his letters to Panizzi on the subject of regicide, see Margaret C. W. Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816–­1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937). Silvana

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Patriarca discusses Gallenga/Mariotti’s nonfictional writings on Italian character and their intersections with Mazzini’s programme for a regeneration of culture and character, focusing especially on Gallenga’s Italy: Past and Present (1848); see Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44–­45. 29. Mariotti, “Morello,” 201. In a footnote (202n), Gallenga does in fact quote from the “Address and Rules of the Society for the Protection and Education of the Poor Italian Boys,” established in 1844. 30. Mariotti, “Morello,” 203. 31. Mayhew’s reports originated as articles for the Morning Chronicle in 1849 and 1850 and were first published in book form in 1851. However, some passages in the 1863 edition must postdate the book’s first edition, since the “Organ Man” mentions playing a tune from Verdi’s Il trovatore, an opera premièred in 1853. 32. While many have taken Mayhew’s portraits more or less at face value, others have questioned their sociological and ethnographic bona fides. Jonathan Raban argues that the testimony of the rat catcher (for example) is “simply too well-­structured to be that of a rat catcher and is instead Mayhew’s own creation” (“The Invisible Mayhew,” En­ counter [August 1973], 69). Drawing on Mayhew’s own accounts of his working meth­ ods, Paul Thomas Murphy shows that the author drew his sketches from actual inter­ views, mostly one-­on-­one, but reworked them in the form of monologues that minimized both the writer’s agency and the frequent friction between interviewer and subject (Murphy, “The Voices of the Poor? Dialogue in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Nineteenth-­Century Prose 25, no. 2 [1998], 24–­44). See also Eileen Yeo, “Mayhew as Social Investigator,” in The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, ed. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 51–­95; and Catherine Gallagher, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 83–­106. 33. From the account of the Italian Pipers and Clarionet Players, in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: Cyclopaedia of Conditions and Earnings, vol. 3 (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1863), 179. The detail about laundry comes from the account of the “Organ Man with Flute Harmonicon Organ,” vol. 3, 177. 34. The origin story told by the Organ Man in “Organ Man with Flute Harmonicon Organ” is typical both in the tale it tells about where the immigrants came from and how they arrived in London, and in its caricature-­like effort to capture the Italian accent and syntax: “I belong to Parma,—­to the small village in the duchy. My father keep a farm, but I had three year old, I think, when he died. There was ten of us altogether; but one of us he was died, and one he drown in the water. I was very poor, and I was go out begging there; and my uncle said I should go to Paris to get my living.” Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 174. 35. Mariotti, “Morello,” 201. And also: “The base cunning of the consummate beggar lurked beneath every fold of his dimpling cheek. He had already acquired a powerful relish for that kind of gypsy-­like vagabondism which unfitted him for all useful and honorable pursuits in after life” (201–­2). 36. Pistrucci (1782–­1859) had left Italy in 1821 to avoid arrest for his activities with the Carbonari. He worked briefly as house poet for the King’s Theatre under Laporte and wrote words for a number of salon music compositions, including the song “Tu

The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London  49

che un augel” (1830), which figured in Malibran’s repertoire. Pistrucci was also active as a painter, exhibiting five canvasses at the Brera academy of 1815 and painting a portrait of Rossini that was exhibited in London in 1824 and reproduced as a lithograph. While in London Pistrucci converted to Protestantism, which exacerbated the conflict between the Italian Gratuitous School and Father Angelo Maria Baldacconi, pastor of the local church, who agitated tirelessly against the school’s influence on his parishion­ ers. See Rossella Bonfatti, “Filippo Pistrucci: Un esule ai confini dei generi,” in Voci dell’Ottocento, ed. I. Pozzoni (Milan: Limina Mentis, 2011), 81–­127; and her article on Pistrucci in the Dizionario biografico italiano, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia /filippo-­pistrucci_(Dizionario-­Biografico)/, accessed 24 June 2017. For a negative assessment of the Rossini portrait, see “Michael Angelo and Rossini,” Somerset House Gazette and Literary Museum (1824), XXII. 37. Pistrucci, “Sui Suonatori d’organetto a Londra, chiamati Italian Boys,” in Letture di Filippo Pistrucci, alcune recitate in pubblico in differenti occasioni, altra non ancora udite (London: Presso l’autore, 1842), 145–­48. The essays collected in this vanity publication are not individually dated, and their original function is usually not indicated. 38. Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 176. 39. Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 176. The excerpt from Il trovatore could be almost any melody from that opera, so popular were its tunes with organ grinders. An 1863 article on Verdi jokes that Il trovatore was subject to “canonization by organ-­murder” and “worn threadbare . . . upon vile and debasing street organs”; P. F. E., “Verdi and his Music,” London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, vol. 3 (1863), 91 and 95. 40. The inclusion of a tune from I Lombardi, never among Verdi’s most successful operas, suggests a rhythm of repertoire and canonization on the London streets radically different from that of the opera house. In a scene in The Martian that is set in the 1850s, George du Maurier mentions a tune from Lombardi—­Oronte’s “La mia letizia infondere”—­as popular with organ grinders (The Martian [New York: Harpers, 1896], 158). An 1874 overview of Verdi’s output noted that “In England . . . the tenor aria ‘La mia letizia’ has long been ground upon the barrel organ; but otherwise the music [of I Lombardi] failed to please here”; “Giuseppe Verdi,” Every Saturday, 22 August 1874, 204. 41. Letter to Jeannie Welsh (16 November 1842); Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters to Her Family, 1839–1863, ed. Leonard Huxley (London: John Murray, 1924), 51. 42. Reviews of other recitations by Pistrucci give some insight into the reasons for Carlyle’s reaction. Several mention the strangeness of his use of musical accompaniment and one suggests that “he would obviate a feeling of the ludicrous (to which English audiences especially incline), from the inharmonious quality of his voice”; see Musical World, 1 July 1836, 42. 43. The 1844 benefit, for example, featured soprano Sabilla Novello, singer Giacinto Marras, cellist Alfredo Piatti, bass Josef Staudigl, actor-­singer John Orlando Parry, and sixteen other performers—­not counting Pistrucci, who, as always, offered an improvisation “to complete the evening’s entertainment”; Morning Post, 21 June 1844. 44. Finelli, ‘Il prezioso elemento,’ 85–­92. 45. The connections with Lablache, Mario, and Grisi are documented beginning in about 1841. For the connection with Lablache’s cook, see the correspondence compiled in Mazzini, Scritti editi e inediti (Mazzini Edizione Nazionale, or M.E.N.), vol. 1 (Imola: Galeati, 1910–­), letter of 11 September 1841. On the politics of the latter two singers, see

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Elizabeth Forbes, Mario and Grisi: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985); Ragni, “Giuseppe Mazzini e Giulia Grisi.” 46. On singers’ attempts to represent themselves as philanthropic, see Hilary Poriss, “Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 42–­60; Mary Ann Smart, “Voiceless Songs: Maria Malibran as Composer,” in Authorship—­Genius—­Gender, ed. Kordula Knaus and Susanne Kogler (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013), 137–­58. 47. “Concert for the Italian Gratuitous School,” Musical World, 26 June 1845, 307. 48. “Princess’s Concert Room, Castle Street, Oxford Street,” Polytechnic Review and Magazine of Science, Literature, and the Fine Arts, July–­December 1844, 75–­76. 49. “Concert for the Italian Gratuitous School,” 307. 50. The duet for Arnold and Guglielmo, “Dove vai,” was immensely popular on London concert programmes from the 1830s through the 1850s. In 1830, a report on the concerts of the Philharmonic Society in The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres (6 March 1830) wryly noted about the duet that “we should not have recognized [it] to be Rossini’s, in consequence of its being mostly free—­advantageously so—­from those redundant triplet passages with which most of his operas are stamped” (160). 51. On the early history of the concertina and Regondi’s performance on the instruments, see James Q. Davies, “Instruments of Empire,” in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1781–­1851, ed. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 161–­65. 52. This change of policy was announced in the Illustrated London News (3 July 1847); the concert took place on 9 July. 53. On this desire and the many ways it could be satisfied, see Nell Cloutier, “Ways to Possess a Singer in Nineteenth-Century London,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 2 (2017): 189–214.

• 

Ch a p t er 3  

•

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere) Cl audio Vel lu tini

Performances of Italian singers were an established feature of the nineteenth-­century London musical landscape. Despite the financial va­ garies of the local operatic market, Italian virtuosi had been flocking to Britain since the early eighteenth century, prompting responses that reshaped, reimagined, and at times fictionalized singers’ personae, their per­ formances on stage, as well as their voices.1 Myths and preconceptions further proliferated with the development of music criticism and became particularly conducive to displacing insecurities and anxieties about local operatic culture.2 This phenomenon, to be sure, was far from confined to Britain. With the dissemination of the idea of nation in the late eighteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Italian opera companies across Europe became a contentious matter. Reactions to them differed widely, but rhetorical strategies often relied on conceptual binaries that could be boiled down to the familiar “Us” versus “the Other” dichotomy. In the early nineteenth century, stereotypes by transalpine commentators were enmeshed in what Joseph Luzzi has described as “Italy’s tran­ sition from Europe’s ‘museum’ to its ‘mausoleum’ ”—­the perception that the cultural vestiges of a glorious past interfered with, and left no room for, vigorous impulses towards cultural innovation.3 Accused (among other traits) of indolence, passivity, effeminacy, and backwardness, Italy and the Italians were not only exoticized but also considered incapable of gaining access to the realm of cultural (not to mention social and political) modernity.4 In 1817, for instance, an anonymous Viennese critic wrote: “The time has passed when Italian singers, like Court Turks and Court dwarfs, were an indispensable part of proper splendour.”5 This scathing remark relies on a double displacement of Italian singers, one both chronological and geographical. The singers are presented as extravagant

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oddities belonging to a distant part of the world as well as to a bygone era. Yet, far from being a mere manifestation of cultural superiority, this passage also reveals a profound concern with the alluring power that Italian singers still emanated. This danger was particularly palpable in post-­ Napoleonic Europe, at a time when the political and administrative resolutions of the Congress of Vienna were viewed on the whole as a return to the ancien régime: a betrayal of the patriotic impulse that had sustained the campaigns against Napoleon. But the same year as the Viennese review, the exotic fascination with Italian singing also found a formulation bearing remarkably different political underpinnings. In one of his Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra (Letters Written from England), the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo claimed: “Foreigners know us as an eminently musical people and beg us to sing; yet they don’t consider how they always make us weep.”6 This passage exposes what Foscolo perceived as a central misunderstanding about Italian singing. Foreign observers fail to notice that Italian songs are bathed in tears. Given his political inclinations, Foscolo’s emphasis on indifference towards the pain and suffering of the Italians gestures towards the situation imposed on them by the post-­Napoleonic regime: their invisible tears are those of a population under the yoke of foreign domination. Such invisibility is not only the by-­product of cultural distance but also of the unwillingness of foreign powers to release the Italians from enslavement and suffering. From this perspective, the exoticization of Italian singing is inseparable from Italy’s oppression by foreign forces; in fact, it is all of a piece with turning Italy into a special kind of colony. Written during the poet’s exile in England, Foscolo’s letters were intended to disclose the extent to which stereotypes negatively affected the cause of Italian political freedom, and to seek a more nuanced understanding of English and Italian cultures, one that would, in the words of Luzzi, ultimately “grasp the essential kinship between England and Italy.”7 Even though this attempt remained largely unsuccessful (the project was never completed), it suggests that constructions of national categories in Britain relied less than elsewhere on clear-­cut oppositions. Italian singing, in particular, emerged as a discursive space that complicated the antithesis underpinning conceptual polarities, inducing British observers not only to measure their inherited assumptions about Italy as a locus classicus of British cultural imagination, but also to establish productive connections between Italian vocal practices and the construction of a national operatic “voice.” Italian singing, in other words, became a floating signifier, revealing a fundamental tension between a past that is simultaneously

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  53

idealized and ideologically problematic, and a present that discloses strident dissonances between cultural and political power relations. One of the ways in which this discursive space developed was through the growing attention that British commentators placed on Italian vocal pedagogy. In this essay I will trace some of the paths through which, in early nineteenth-­century London, national and colonial ideologies coalesced in the interpretation and assimilation of Italian singing as a set of pedagogical and professional practices. At a time when vocal production was increasingly considered from a scientific viewpoint, the issues I will be addressing tended to remain distant from a deep engagement with the physical functioning of the singer’s body. Here I will discuss physical phenomena (vocal production, formation of vowels, articulation of consonants) less as embodied events than as signs of cultural codes contributing to the definition of collective identities. As James Davies reminds us, these dimensions—­the physical and the ideal, the individual and the collective—­were not mutually exclusive but rather stratified in a nuanced set of discourses.8 In the following I will first provide a broader discussion of the effects of the Napoleonic Wars on changing attitudes towards Italian singers and vocal pedagogy in London as well as other European capitals. I will then examine the work of an Italian vocal pedagogue, Gesualdo Lanza, seeing it as a systematic attempt to integrate Italian and En­ glish training. Finally, I will discuss the debates on the pursuit of a similar form of coexistence in the voice programmes of the newly founded Royal Academy of Music.

The Return of the Italians For about a century, the presence of Italian opera in London had been intermittent, reaching one of its lowest ebbs during Napoleon’s Continental Blockade (1806–­14). With only a few exceptions (notably Angelica Catalani), most Italian artists were prevented from reaching England; meanwhile local singers such as Elizabeth Billington and John Braham, who at the turn of the century had gained considerable professional experience in Italy, filled the void left by their Italian colleagues.9 But the termination of the Blockade exposed England to a new wave of foreign singers and revealed that musical life on the Continent was undergoing major changes. The discourse on Italian singing was pitched to this new situation. In 1814 a local commentator, Allatson Burgh, built on a widely disseminated view (après Rousseau) to justify the presence of Italian singers in England: that nature and language contributed to the simplicity of

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Italian vocal music. According to his argument, the best way to appreciate this repertoire was through Italy’s “own natives, who give both the language and music their true accent and expression; consequently there is as much reason for wishing to hear Italian music performed in this genuine manner.”10 He also observed, however, that contemporary Italian music was showing the first signs of incipient decline and lamented that German influences were leading the Italians “to discover that the human voice may also be made an instrument.”11 English singers, on the contrary, had preserved the natural simplicity of Italian singing before it had become contaminated by the “false extravagance” of German instrumental music. The “natural voice of Mrs. Billington,” in particular, “ought ever to be held up as a model of imitation to the student.”12 He concludes with a note of satisfaction: there would be “little reason to apprehend that the patronage of the great will ever again be exclusively confined to foreign adventurers.”13 Burgh provides here a paradigmatic example of how the changing political events of those years induced observers to reimagine ideas and assumptions about singing. Burgh legitimizes Italian singing as an aesthetic ideal now confined to the realm of a mythologized (if not so remote) past and betrayed by the new operatic wave from the Continent. The recent developments of London operatic life instead suggested that the time was ripe for British singers to take hold of the Italians’ aesthetic legacy, especially if a new generation of performers proved capable of following in the footsteps of their predecessors. The question then became: how to create the conditions for British singers to compete on par with their Italian colleagues? By and large, the answers fell into two categories: first, the institutionalization of the education of professional musicians, including singers; second, the creation of an elite “English” operatic genre. While the latter solution bore only short-­lived results during subsequent decades, the former gained considerable ground. Yet the creation of professional music schools also set in place the conditions in which Italian singing could be legitimized as part of the necessary training of a singer. When the Blockade was revoked in 1814, musical life on the Continent was witnessing a gradual dissemination of institutions dedicated to the education of professional musicians, institutions that were modelled on the conservatories of  Naples and Venice. Unlike their Italian counterparts, however, these new institutions responded to the ideas of centralization and autarchy typical of the modern state. According to an anonymous document attached to an official report sent by the Austrian Minister of Finance, Count Johann Philipp von Stadion, to Emperor Franz I as late as 1820, the function of state-­funded conservatories, drama schools, and

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  55

dance academies was to train artistic personnel to be employed in the main theatres of the Empire, and thus to reduce the employment of and expenditure on foreign artists.14 This logic underpinned the opening of the Vienna Conservatory in 1819, as well as the foundation of the conservatories in Prague and Milan, which had been in place for some years. The latter, to be sure, opened under the auspices of the French regime in 1808—­although the Austrians had proposed such an institution before retreating from northern Italy—­on the model of what was to become the prototype of such institutions, the Paris Conservatoire.15 Within this autarchic framework, however, Italian vocal pedagogy was widely accepted as the foundation of singers’ training. The development of vocal pedagogical methods rooted in the Italian tradition had already gained momentum in France, especially in the aftermath of the several querelles that had marked Paris operatic life in the second half of the eighteenth century. As the lack of systematic training for opera singers emerged as one major gap in French music education, Italian vocal pedagogy was widely adopted and fostered the dissemination of solfeggi, wordless exercises aimed at the gradual development of the correct vocal production and the full technical arsenal of a virtuoso, particularly the mastery of ornamentation.16 So sweeping and unchallenged was their influence that many French publishers issued several sets of solfeggi. Eventually even the official singing method of the Paris conservatory, the Méthode du chant du Conservatoire (1802, later adopted in Milan), included a large number of them.17 To be sure, the Méthode itself resulted from the transnational encounter between the pragmatism of the Italian pedagogical tradition and the penchant for theorization and (pseudo)scientific aspirations of the French one. Yet it also paved the way for a profusion of other pedagogical publications that, like the Méthode, capitalized on the inclusion of solfeggi.18 Much more so than in Paris, Italian vocal music had been at home in Vienna since the late seventeenth century; there, however, a radical patriotic turn during the Napoleonic campaigns gave free rein to the idea of a German singing aesthetic at odds with Italianate virtuosity.19 Yet not even these circumstances produced any significant alternatives to Italian vo­­ cal pedagogy. The local conservatory was affiliated with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde—­an expression of Viennese milieu ideologically orientated towards German cultural nationalism—­and its vocal programme was entrusted to Antonio Salieri. Although championed as a follower of Gluck and therefore assimilated into the German camp, Salieri wrote a didactic treatise for his class that reaffirmed the importance of Italian language for proper vocal training and of florid singing—­a feature that set

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him apart from the supporters of the German vocal aesthetic.20 In line with these principles, Salieri duly penned a number of solfeggi for his students.21 The situation in London in the mid-­1810s is even more fragmented. Illustrious but discontinuous, the local tradition of Italian opera suffered less from competition with a native elite operatic genre than from the laws of the free market, a continuous perception of the exoticism of Italian singers, and an attachment to a vocal aesthetic that stemmed from choral and sacred music. As Susan Rutherford has discussed, British rhetoric forged during the Napoleonic wars also exacerbated the resentment against Italian singers and their vocal style (along with almost anything else that would interfere with the development of genuine patriotic feeling). In contrast to the tonal homogeneity of Italian vocal technique and its distinctive practices, an “English style” in singing struggled to find its own identity; by and large, as Rutherford says, it came to be defined predominantly by a much looser set of characteristics including “the nationality of the singer, a personal demeanour that accorded with national stereotypes, adherence to the conventions of specific repertories ascribed to national traditions, and singing in the English language.”22 Simplicity and a restrained approach to improvised ornamentation became the most widely recognized markers of a style that sought to be differentiated from the overtly exuberant and passionate Italians.23 Despite this perceived gulf, vocal pedagogy associated with Italian virtuosi was not considered at odds with the English tradition but very much integral to it—­the result of a long process of assimilation that stretched back to the seventeenth century.24 An inventory of vocal treatises published in London in the early decades of the nineteenth century reveals a prosperous market for Italian singing teachers, one characterized by less polarized tendencies than those emerging from contemporary criticism.25 Not only do we find Italians promoting their own singing style and non-­Italians appropriating and disseminating the practice of solfeggi; there is also the striking case of an Italian pedagogue, Gesualdo Lanza, who ventured beyond his native tradition. A closer look at his treatise will allow us to measure the degree of compatibility and interaction between Italian and English vocal cultures.

Singing in Italian and in English: Gesualdo Lanza’s Vocal Treatise The son of the Neapolitan composer and singer Giuseppe Lanza (since 1812 a voice teacher at the Naples Conservatory), Gesualdo Lanza followed his father to London, becoming a sought-­after voice pedagogue in

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  57

his own right.26 The younger Lanza’s 1813 treatise includes many exercises, solfeggi, and arias belonging to both the Italian and English repertory, in addition to bilingual pieces probably of his own composition. Texted music, however, appears only halfway through his method. Not until stu­ dents had mastered vocalises and tested their skills with a number of  ex­ ercises and solfeggi were they to essay music with text. And in their prep­ aration they should “train the voice on the vowels a, e, and o as they sound in Italian, in order to render it flexible and ready to perform easily and exactly all the passaggi that might occur in an aria.”27 The corollary is clear: regardless of the national style of a given piece of music, the Italian language and its training regimes provide a pedagogical lingua franca for voice students. Another pedagogue active some years later in London, Domenico Crivelli, was adamant about this point: I may here notice a common prejudice, namely—­that of cultivating a voice for any particular style of singing [quello di coltivar la voce per degli stili particolari di canto]. My principles contain all that is essential for the general development of the vocal organ, and when the voice, by practice in the principles of the art, is made capable of sustaining sounds, and has acquired flexibility and an equal quality throughout its extent, the artist has it in his power to enter into the spirit of a composition.28

And a few pages later: The system then that has been adopted of cultivating a voice for a particular style, whether German, English, or Italian, is absurd;—­for the language of music is always the same, whatever be the language of the words; the voice being able only to sing to the greatest advantage in that style for which it is organized, whether for sostenuto, or brilliancy and execution [sic]; and the music of every nation will resolve itself into one or other of these styles.29

Good singing, then, transcends national traditions; yet this is not to say that differences did not exist or matter. Both Lanza and Crivelli discuss the challenges that each language, in affecting the modes of sound production, poses to the development of students’ technique.30 And it is here that the Italian language takes pride of place. Rich in vowels and with consonants usually providing smooth points of articulation, Italian proves essential when introducing foreign students to the challenges of performing texted music.

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Lanza, who was addressing non-­Italian singers, dedicates an unusual amount of space to illustrating this process step by step. He starts by focussing on vowels, and recommends (1) forming the correct shape of the mouth for each vowel; (2) adapting the text in such way that fioriture are only performed on syllables containing a, e, and o—­the same vowels he suggested for the solfeggi; (3) practicing the shift from one vowel to another following specific exercises to ensure evenness of sound between different vowels; and (4) distinctly articulating vowels forming diphthongs and synaloephas.31 Lanza then moves to consonants. He describes them as “imperfect” articulations of the vocal apparatus that need to be handled carefully so as not to compromise proper vocal production. As a rule of thumb, their sound should be “brief, clear, and sweet” and should be smoothly integrated in the vocal line, except for those at the beginning and end of words (unless they are followed by punctuation).32 Finally, double consonants and consonant clusters should receive particular attention, since students tend to insert vowels between them to prevent interruptions in the vocal flow. Again, a number of practical exercises accompany Lanza’s discussion. The inclusion of bilingual pieces in Lanza’s treatise is an extension of this pedagogical method. Languages are here brought together not to train the student in the expressive nuances of the relationship between words and music in performance, but for the different technical challenges they pose to vocal production. In a footnote functioning as an excusatio non petita, Lanza credits one signor Caravita for the Italian “translations” of the English text, claiming that “if the music were not to express the meaning of the Italian words, I should be not to blame, for I couldn’t give expression to both languages at the same time.”33 In fact, in some cases Caravita’s verses are hardly a translation of the English poem. Consider, for instance, the opening of the first of these pieces, the canzonetta “Sweet weeping willow / Dolce speranza” (see ex. 3.1). The two texts not only require adjustments in the rhythmic profile of the vocal line; they are anything but close in meaning. The English addresses a willow as a companion to the lyric self ’s grieving, while the Italian invokes hope as the faithful partner of a happy lover. In other words, a clichéd expression of English sentimentality and melancholy is turned into a most stereotypical Italian love song (one whose patching together of the most hackneyed expressions and images is so unskilful that one wonders whether its verses have any meaning at all). Yet if we keep in mind students’ gradual training in the performance of texted pieces, the clumsy and trivial Italian lines start making more sense. On the one hand, Caravita’s text places emphasis on vowels that facilitate control over the correct vocal production,

E x . 3.1  “Canzonetta Prima” from Gesualdo Lanza, Elements of Singing in the Italian & English Styles (1813), vol. 3: 74–­78.

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E x . 3.1 (continued)

favouring a, e, and o rather than the long /i:/ sounds of words such as “sweet,” “weep,” and “breeze.” On the other, it features a far more modest number of consonant clusters, thus smoothing the unfolding of the vocal line. In sum, in the context of this treatise the introduction of the Italian version acquires an added value not despite its differences from the En­ glish but because of them, providing a stepping-­stone towards the greater challenges that the English version poses. By reducing language to its purely sonic components, the resetting of songs to texts that have little semantic common ground postulates a fundamental separation between vocal production and language as a field of signification. Lanza’s treatise, in other words, undermined the ideological premises of the mainstream orientation of the critical discourse on Italian

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  61

singers. The notion that good singing can be achieved by purging language of its semantic content invalidates competing claims that grounded national vocal styles in language. Of course, resisting “national” claims was, for Italian teachers working in London, also a matter of professional survival, something at which they turned out to be remarkably successful. In 1822, for instance, the Norwich-­based Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review published an article in which the anonymous author (probably the editor, Richard Mackenzie Bacon) both laments the indiscriminate mingling of Italian and English vocal styles and also concedes that maintaining some common ground between the two would prove beneficial for the local tradition.34 A genuine admirer of  Italian opera, Bacon was also a fervent patriot and staunch advocate of a distinct English style of singing.35 In his article, he deploys a rich inventory of stock-­in-­trade clichés, including national “temperament,” “character,” “manners,” “habits,” and “vernacular modes of expression.” These basic natural and cultural differences, according to the author, make Italian singing intrinsically dramatic and passionate to the point of excess, unlike “sound and chaste” English singing. Italians, therefore, dedicate themselves to opera while for the English, the “highest species of art is sacred [music].”36 Turning his attention to the technicalities of vocal training, the author laments that “the English singer . . . accepts the Italian theory without any attempt to modify it,” even though it is conceived for a language that sounds different from English and that aims at diverse expressive goals.37 Yet, towards the end the author acknowledges that “the English are certainly indebted to Italy for their technical rudiments of singing” (something that previously he had praised as “the only certain method . . . of training the voice to its point of perfection”).38 And while he would rather maintain a more marked distinction between the vocal styles of Italian and English singers, he is ready to accept that the English “appropriate what is best in Italian art”—­that is, the fundamentals of vocal pedagogy—­deprived of its expressive intensity.39

The Institutionalization: The Royal Academy of Music Around the time of the anonymous Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review article, the first steps were taken to create a public institution devoted to the education of professional musicians: the Royal Academy of Music. The initiator of the project—­John Fane, Earl of Westmorland (also known as Lord Burghersh), a diplomat and accomplished amateur musician and composer—­was very familiar with Italian music and music pedagogy, which he had nourished during his service as an envoy in

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Florence in the late 1810s and in Naples during the campaign against the Carbonari revolt of 1820–­21.40 Since the opening of the Royal Academy in 1823, the voice programme has aimed at providing institutional recognition to both Italian and En­ glish vocal traditions, with instructors of both nationalities. The first two Italian voice instructors were Domenico Crivelli (quoted in the previous section) and Giovanni Liverati; Vincenzo Gabussi and Nicola Vaccai joined the institution in 1829 and 1832; and even the famed castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti made a fleeting appearance in the faculty roster in 1825.41 While these names confirm the orientation of the Italian classes towards opera, the British instructors seem to come from the local choral tradition.42 The Academy’s board reached out to cathedrals in order “to admit as students a certain number of singing boys from each after their voice cracks,”43 and they entrusted the teaching of English singing to choirmasters and singers such as William Hawes and William Knyvett—­ both of whom had long-­standing associations with the Chapel Royal and the choir of Westminster Abbey—­and to sought-­after oratorio conductor George Smart.44 And yet, whatever path voice students decided to take, they were all required to study Italian for four hours a week. Later, students had to complete a regular course of solfeggio before they could move to more advanced voice studies.45 Thus, the basic pedagogical principles expounded in the treatises by Lanza and Crivelli found a practical application in the voice programme of the Royal Academy of Music. The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review article expresses both pragmatic acceptance and frustration about this state of affairs. It praises the Academy for placing “the elementary parts of instruction and practice . . . upon solid foundations”; yet it laments the fact that the professional side of student training was excessively exposed to “the practice of foreign music.”46 Starting in 1829 the Academy staged a series of opera performances under the tutelage of another Italian singer active in London, Giuseppe de Begnis.47 The benefit of these productions for students’ careers became immediately evident: de Begnis himself negotiated the engagement of one student for professional performances in Bath, while another took part in Rossini’s La donna del lago at the King’s Theatre.48 There were also impresarios ready to exploit the inexpensive labour of Academy students. Nicolas Bochsa, for one, compromised his professional relationship with the institution after attempting to engage three voice students for productions of L’inganno felice, Il matrimonio segreto, Don Giovanni, and Le nozze di Figaro in Brighton on the condition that they would leave the institution to join his company.49

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  63

These repertory choices confirm that, as far as opera was concerned, the Royal Academy betrayed a strong Italian inclination. Given the operatic landscape of the time, even the contributor to the Quarterly Musical Magazine admits that this was inevitable in order to launch students’ professional careers on stage; yet he also remarks that “till the English can boast of an English lyric drama, there will be no fine dramatic singers. The supremacy of the foreign artist . . . will still remain in this the most popular, not to say the most captivating and lucrative portion of the profession.”50 Not all commentators, however, shared his hostile attitude. The author of an anonymous pamphlet also established a connection between the thriving of Italian opera in London and the inconsistency with which attempts at creating a national operatic genre were carried out, but the terms of his discussion were much less negative: The want of a national grand Opera renders perfection on the Italian stage of this metropolis doubly necessary. In time, a perfect system of representations in the Italian language must create a desire for a well organised national Opera (entirely in music, with full accompanied rec­ itatives, for nothing less will do). . . . It is the existence of a Theatre for Italian performances that will have raised England to eminence as a musical nation, and that eminence so acquired, must be maintained with perseverance.51

According to this author, the creation of a repertory of English works, as well as the cultivation of a taste for English operas, is inseparable from the development of a “system”: “Until an English composer of talent undertakes the composition of a grand Opera . . . the taste ought to be anti-­ national. The musical Drama is one which requires in this country the external pressure of constant open competition, of decided free trade.”52 Accordingly, Italian opera fulfils several functions in London: it fills a perceived void in the local demand for lofty “musical drama”; it stimulates and sets the standards for the creation of a native operatic tradition; and it provides a viable model for developing a market. Institutions for the training of professional musicians, such as the Ro­yal Academy, played a strategic role within this system. They responded to the specific needs of the operatic market, and particularly to transnational calls for “nationalizing” future generations of singers. But, as is well known, such national impulses were inseparable from confrontation with a foreign (in this case, Italian) “other.” Examining the workings of these institutions shows not only that such confrontation was inevitable—­all

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the plausible institutional models existing outside Italy were in one way or another indebted to their earlier Italian counterparts—­but also that it was richly varied, branching out into pedagogical methods and professional outlets. This is not to say that the relationship here between national and nonnational was exclusive to London. The tendency towards incorporating Italian singing within local traditions, for instance, was a transnational one and, as in Britain, was often justified in nationalistic terms: as a necessary step towards the training of local professional singers. Neither should we imagine that this fluid discourse on the permeability between local and foreign cultures marked unconditional surrender to Italian music in London. Rather, bringing together some of the London voices that were interpreting the cultural role of Italian singing reveals a picture not far removed from Terry Eagleton’s provocative claims that “diversity is perfectly compatible with hierarchy” and that we should not “overlook its role in consumerist ideology.”53 That the commodification of Italian musical goods (operas, singing treatises, pedagogical methods, even singers) at this time was consistent with the consolidation of the logic of capitalism emerged as a trope on both sides of the Channel. Yet nowhere did it acquire such boastful overtones as in England. The abovementioned quotation from a 1839 pamphlet is not an isolated case. A quarter of a century earlier, Allatson Burgh had reminded his readers that opera is “a manufacture of Italy, which . . . is no more disgraceful to a mercantile nation to import, than wine, tea, or any other production of remote parts of the world, which is not the natural growth of our soil.”54 This commodification reveals the hierarchical implications of much contemporary British discourse on Italian opera and, more generally, on vocal culture. An exotic luxury good, it testifies to the riches of London’s cultural landscape as well as to Britain’s sprawling influence over “remote parts of the world” and thus reassesses not so much the Italian hold over British culture but rather British imperial power.55 This perspective reinforces one of the points made earlier: Italian opera and Italian singing are justified only as long as they assist the “growth” of English opera and singers. Clearly there is a conspicuous teleological bias in this path towards English opera—­one made of the same cloth as the mythologizing of Italy’s past glories at the expense of its present. As in the case of Burgh’s discussion, the trope marks a shift in the way that British commentators envisaged the power relations between these two cultures: the Italian, withdrawing into its past, yields to the English, projecting instead towards a luminous future. Nevertheless, whenever the present did not

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  65

measure up to these expectations, whenever it was clear that Italian singers were not yet receding from their dominating position in the British operatic market (or that colonizing foreign markets was not going to be an easy task for British singers), critics blamed the system rather than questioning the ideological implications behind their teleology.56 The discourse on Italian singing in early nineteenth-­century London thus reveals how tensions of different kinds—­between competing operatic markets; between assimilation of foreign cultural practices and liberation of local creative energies; between perception of political and economic superiority and a lingering complex of inferiority in musical matters; and between different languages and singing traditions—­were addressed and negotiated. Many questions remain open to further investigation, such as the extent to which the reception of individual Italian singers intersected with, and further contributed to, broader notions of Italian singing, and how they changed vis-­à-­vis other national operatic traditions, most notably German and French. Yet gesturing towards these questions reminds us not only of the ongoing interaction between these different traditions, but also of their contribution to the plurality of London voices.

Notes I am grateful to the London Voices conference participants for their feedback, particularly Oskar Cox Jensen, James Q. Davies, Ellen Lockhart, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, Mary Ann Smart, and Benjamin Walton. Many thanks also to Kirby Haugland, Elizabeth Elmi, Jillian Rogers, Taylor Hall, Elizabeth Parker, and Ilse Woloszko (Royal Academy of Music Library) for their help at various stages. Finally, I wish to acknowledge financial and institutional support from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the University of British Columbia. 1. See Suzanne Aspden, The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2. On the development of music criticism in England in relation to opera, see Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–­1830 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 3–­61. 3. Joseph Luzzi, “Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth,” Mod­ ern Language Notes 117, no. 1 (2002): 48–­83, here 50. See also the introduction to Imagining Italy: Victorian Travelers and Writers, ed. Catherine Waters, Michael Hollington, and John Jordan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 1–­11; Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (London: I. B Tauris, 2005), 171–­85. 4. Luzzi, “Italy without Italians,” 51. 5. “Die Zeit ist vorüber, in welcher italienische Sänger, wie Hoftürken und Hofzwerge unnachläßlich zum anständigen Glanze gehörten”: Wiener Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, 29 March 1817, 152.

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6. “I forestieri che ci conoscono per popolo unicamente musico ci pregano di cantare; né pensano com’ei ci fan piangere sempre”: Ugo Foscolo, Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra (Gazzettino del bel mondo), ed. Edoardo Sanguineti (Milan: Mursia, 1978), 113. 7. Luzzi, “Italy without Italians,” 77. 8. James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 7. 9. See Fenner, Opera in London, 518–­28 (on Braham) and 542–­43 (on Billington). 10. Allatson Burgh, Anecdotes of Music, Historical and Biographical; In a Series of Letters from a Gentleman to His Daughter, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurs, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 2:509–­10. 11. Burgh, Anecdotes of Music, 3:441; emphasis in the original. 12. Burgh, Anecdotes of Music, 3:442; emphasis in the original. 13. Burgh, Anecdotes of Music, 3:456. 14. Vienna, Haus-­Hof-­und Staatsarchiv, General Intendanz der Hofoper, Box 10 (1819–­1820), 1820, ad 350, Beil. 6 (olim: ad 1934/M 820). The content of this document is also discussed in Teresa Reichenberger, “Italienische Opernstagioni im Wiener Vormärz,” in Österreich-­Italien: Auf der Suche nach der gemeinsamen Vergangenheit / Italia-­ Austria: Alla ricerca del passato comune, ed. Paolo Chiarini and Herbert Zeman (Rome: Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, 2002), 213–­24; here, 214–­15. On Stadion’s reform of the Vienna Court opera house, see Claudio Vellutini, “Cultural Engineering: Italian Opera in Vienna, 1816–­1848” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015), 75–­81. 15. See Theophil Antonicek, “Biedermeier und Vormärz,” in Musikgeschichte Österreichs, ed. Rudolf Flotzinger and Gernot Gruber, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), 279–­351; here, 289; J. Bužga, Adrienne Simpson, and Jitka Slavíková, “Prague. 2. 1620–­1830,” in Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630. article.40791, accessed 21 August 2016; Davide Daolmi, “Uncovering the Origins of the Milan Conservatory: The French Model as a Pretext and the Fortunes of Italian Opera,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770–­1914): Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, ed. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-­Verlag, 2005), 103–­24. 16. See Sylvie Mamy, “L’importation des solfèges italiens en France à la fin du XVIII siècle,” in L’opera tra Venezia e Parigi, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 70–­71. 17. Méthode de Chant du Conservatoire de Musique contenant les Principes de Chant, des Exercises pour la Voix; des Solfèges tirés des meilleurs Ouvrages Anciens et Modernes; et des Airs dans tous les mouvemens et les Différens Caractères (Paris: Imprimerie du Conservatoire de Musique, 1802). The Italian version was published as Metodo di canto del Conservatorio di Parigi, adottato dall’I.R. Conservatorio di Milano (Milan: Carulli, 1825.) A partial list of Italian and Italianate solfeggi published in France between the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century is provided in Mamy, “L’importation des solfèges,” 80–­89. 18. See Marco Beghelli, “I trattati di canto: Una novità del primo Ottocento,” in Umbruchzeiten in der italienischen Musikgeschichte, ed. Roland Pfeiffer and Christoph Flamm, Analecta Musicologica 50 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013), 121–­32, here 125–­26. Significantly, Beghelli points out that the custom of including solfeggi and similar exercises gradually created a gulf between pedagogical and professional performance practices, with the former more and more entrenched into the past and no longer current with vo-

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)  67

cal styles and techniques. By perpetuating and idealizing the tradition of solfeggi, these treatises ended up turning it into an “other” in comparison to the life on stage. 19. An influential discussion of the aesthetics of German opera and singing is Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Versuch einer Aesthetik des dramatischen Tonatzes (Vienna: Strauss, 1813). This does not touch on questions of vocal pedagogy, but Mosel oversaw the project of the Vienna Conservatory together with Salieri and later celebrated the composer by writing his first biography: see Theophil Antonicek, “ ‘Vergangenheit muss unsre Zukunft bilden’: Die patriotische Musikbewegung in Wien und ihr Vorkämpfer Ignaz von Mosel,” Revue Belge de Musicologie 26/27 (1972): 38–­49; Hartmut Krones, “Der schönste und wichtigste Zweck von alles . . . : Das Conservatorium der ‘Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des östererreichischen Kaiserstaates,’ ” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 43, nos. 2–­3 (1988): 66–­83; Lynne Heller, “Das Konservatorium für Musik in Wien zwischen bürgerlich-­adeligem Mäzenatentum und staatlicher Förderung,” in Musical Education in Europe, ed. Fend and Noiray, 205–­28. On Mosel’s biography of Salieri, originally published in 1827, see Rudolph Angermüller’s introduction to the facsimile edition: Ignaz Franz von Mosel, Über das Leben und die Werke des Anton Salieri, ed. Rudolph Angermüller (Bad Honnef, Germany: K. H. Bock, 1999), i–­vii. 20. Salieri’s singing manual was first published in Rudolph Angermüller, “Antonio Salieri und seine ‘Scuola di canto,’ ” in Beethoven-­Studien. Festgabe der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zum 200. Geburtstag von Ludwig van Beethoven (Vienna: Böhlau, 1970), 37–­50. 21. See Rudolph Angermüller, Antonio Salieri: Sein Leben und seine weltlichen Werke unter besonderer Berücksichtigungen seiner ‘grossen’ Opern, vol. 1, Werk-­und Quellenverzeichnis (Munich: Katzbichler, 1971), 273. 22. Susan Rutherford, “ ‘Bel Canto’ and Cultural Exchange: Italian Vocal Techniques in London, 1790–­1825,” in Umbruchzeiten, ed. Pfeiffer and Flamm, 133–­46, here 141. 23. Rutherford, “ ‘Bel Canto’ and Cultural Exchange,” 141. 24. See Livio Marcaletti, “Manieren e trattati di canto: Didattica dei mezzi espressivi vocali tra esempi musicali ed espedienti linguistici (1600–­1900)” (PhD diss., Universität Bern, 2015), 23–­24. 25. A substantial list is provided in Robert Toft, Bel Canto: A Performer’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 253–­57. 26. For biographical details on the two Lanzas, see Francesco Esposito, “Lanza,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 63 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2004), 648. 27. Gesualdo Lanza, Elements of Singing in the Italian & English Styles, Familiarly and Thoroughly Exemplified for Pupils of Every Age to Acquire the Science of Vocal Music with Greater Facility, 4 vols. (London: Chappell, 1813), 3:13. The publication date for this vol­ ume is given wrongly in Grove Music as 1809. 28. Domenico Crivelli, L’arte del canto, ossia corso completo sulla coltivazione della voce (London: by the author, 1841), 5. Crivelli’s bilingual treatise features the Italian and English texts on the same page. Here, I quote from the English version. 29. Crivelli, L’arte del canto, 20–­21. 30. See Crivelli, L’arte del canto, 17, on the relationship between correct pronunciation and the proper position of the vocal apparatus; see also Lanza, Elements of Singing, 3:49. 31. According to Lanza, when diphthongs and synaloephas correspond to a single note, its value should be subdivided to accommodate each vowel; in more elaborate

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embellishments, the last note(s) should correspond to the concluding vowel(s). The same suggestions appear in Crivelli’s treatise: see Marcaletti, “Manieren e trattati di canto,” 84–­85, a passage that also discusses how, compared to today’s performance practice, some of Crivelli’s suggestions might appear stylistically idiosyncratic. 32. Lanza, Elements of Singing, 3:55. 33. Lanza, Elements of Singing, 3:43. 34. “On the Differences between Italian and English Manner in Singing,” Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 4 (1822): 401–­8, also published in full in London Opera Observed, 1711–­1844, vol. 5: 1821–­1844, ed. Michael Burden (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 10–­16. Subsequent quotations from the article come from this volume. 35. See Rutherford, “ ‘Bel Canto’ and Cultural Exchange,” 139. 36. “On the Differences,” in Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:11. 37. “On the Differences,” in Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:11. 38. “On the Differences,” in Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:15. 39. See also Rutherford, “ ‘Bel Canto’ and Cultural Exchange,” 144. 40. A biographical essay on Lord Burghersh opens W. W. Cazalet’s The History of the Royal Academy of Music, Compiled from Authentic Sources (London: Bosworth, 1854). 41. Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 11 August 1825 (Velluti), 8 May 1828 (Gabussi), and 16 February 1832 (Vaccai). Crivelli and Liverati are listed as faculty in the public announcement of the opening of the Academy published in the Morning Post on 22 August 1822 (reproduced in Cazalet, The History, 26). 42. The planned appointment of John Braham seemingly came to nothing. His name appears in a list of prospective professors published in Cazalet, The History, 23, but is then missing in the announcement in the Morning Post. 43. Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 7 January 1823. 44. Hawes was selected as Professor of English Singing in Braham’s stead, and his name appears in the Morning Post announcement. Like Braham’s, Knyvett’s name was also included in the 1822 plan but was then missing in the printed announcement. Knyvett is mentioned in such a capacity in the Academy’s records only as late as 1835, while Sir George Smart was appointed Professor of English Singing on 18 December 1834. 45. Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 26 August 1822 and 24 October 1834. 46. “On the Causes of the Superiority of Italian Singing,” Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 10 (1828): 442; the full article is also in Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:57–­62. 47. The first two productions, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and L’inganno felice, were authorized in December 1828 for the Academy’s own benefit; see Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 4 and 28 December 1828. 48. See Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 8 January and 19 February 1829. 49. Gb-­Lam, Special Collections, Minute Books, 8 and 29 October 1829. 50. “On the Causes,” 442. 51. Hints on the Italian Opera in Italy, France, Germany and England (London: W. Seguin’s Subscription Library, 1839); also in Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:215–­45, here 236. 52. Burden, London Opera Observed, 5:236. 53. Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 30–­31. 54. Burgh, Anecdotes, 2:509. 55. Of course, Britain did not exert direct authority over the Italian states after the Congress of Vienna, but the British navy’s ample control over the Mediterranean

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therefore conditioned maritime trade and, to some extent, the economic policies in the Peninsula: see Stuart J. Wolfe, “La storia politica e sociale,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), 241–­47. 56. See, for instance, Rutherford’s discussion of the Italian perception of British and other foreign singers in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in her “ ‘Bel Canto’ and Cultural Exchange,” 144–­45.

• 

Ch a p t er 4  

•

The Castrato as Creator Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-­Music Market S a r a h Fuchs

On 30 June 1825, Giovanni Battista Velluti made his debut at the King’s Theatre in London, performing as Armando in Il crociato in Egitto, an opera Giacomo Meyerbeer had recently written—­and then rewritten—­as a vehicle for the soprano castrato. In 1824, Velluti had premiered the opera at La Fenice in Venice (in March) and again at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence (in May). For the second of these performances, Meyerbeer had adapted the plot of the opera and revised the parts of all of the principal singers in order to provide the castrato with a more prominent entrance scene: the newly composed “Popolo d’Egitto . . . Cara mano dell’amore.”1 Velluti chose the Florence version of Il crociato in Egitto for his debut in London, thus making his first appearance there with an entrance aria designed to draw special attention not only to his role but also to his singular voice.2 With his rendition of “Popolo d’Egitto  .  .  . Cara mano dell’amore,” Velluti further asserted his authority as a singer. Indeed, if C. M. Sola’s piano-­vocal arrangement, which purported to reproduce the scene as “sung with unbounded applause by Signor Velluti,” may be taken as evidence, the castrato introduced a burst of florid embellishments into the final stanza of the aria, replacing Meyerbeer’s original melody with an embroidered line of his own design.3 Throughout the late 1820s, Velluti’s artistic agency—­especially his pen­ chant for ornamentation—­captivated London audiences, and British sheet-­music publishers capitalized on this fascination by issuing nearly thirty piano-­vocal arrangements that claimed to bear traces of the castrato’s performance practice. Several piano-­vocal scores advertised themselves as souvenirs of Velluti’s performances, drawing on a variety of textual and musical means to suggest that the printed page reflected what had occurred in real time. The bulk of the publications associated with

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Velluti did not purport to capture an actual performance, however, but instead featured extensive passages of alternative embellishments printed on separate ossia lines, which the castrato may have been commissioned to write.4 In this essay, I argue that the sheet music published in late 1820s London emphasized Velluti’s creative agency, whether as a virtuoso performer or as a kind of composer. As might be imagined, critics and consumers responded to such publications in different ways, several of which I consider. Even before Velluti set foot on the stage of the King’s Theatre, his infamous encounter with the young Gioachino Rossini (as related by Stendhal) had become a trope among English critics, whose concerns over singers’ incursions into the domain of the composer steadily heightened during the 1820s.5 The claims made by souvenir scores troubled critics, so much so that they occasionally went to great lengths to outline the ways in which the castrato’s performance departed from the composer’s original melody—­or, indeed, from the souvenir score itself. None but the most credulous consumer could have believed that souvenir scores faithfully represented Velluti’s onstage performances; rather, as I suggest below, amateur musicians and aspiring professional singers envisioned souvenir scores and specially emended scores not as records of performance but as a means of acquiring the castrato’s performance practice. For several performers, Velluti’s additions served as starting points for their own embellishments, faint remnants of which survive as pencilled-­in revisions in archival documents. Ultimately, examining English critics’ and consumers’ reactions to these piano-­vocal scores sheds new light on Velluti’s reception in late 1820s London and, more broadly, on the significance of singers’ creativity in the early to mid-­nineteenth century.

Souvenir Scores and the Authority of Performance Sheet-­music publishers drew on a set of established practices to align certain piano-­vocal arrangements with actual events, deploying singers’ names, geographical locations, and vocal embellishments to frame scores as replicas of specific performances. In such arrangements, the singer’s name often featured prominently on the front cover or the first page. More often than not, Velluti’s name appeared before that of the composer, occasionally in a larger or more striking font. For example, G. Longman printed “signor velluti” using uppercase letters and a distinctive font on the title page of Sola’s arrangement of “Cara mano dell’amore,” while Meyerbeer’s name appears in an unremarkable script used multiple times on the page (see fig. 4.1). Amanda Eubanks Winkler argues (in her ex-

Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-Music Market  73

Fig. 4.1 Title page for C. M. Sola’s arrangement of “Cara mano dell[’]amore” (London: G. Longman, n.d.). Source: M1508.M61 C7 1833, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

amination of piano-­vocal arrangements associated with the seventeenth-­ century singer Anne Bracegirdle) that, by thus drawing attention to the singer’s name, “the printer invited the consumer to remember or imagine the performance of the composer’s song by that specific person.”6 In order to frame further the piano-­vocal score as a memento of an actual performance, publishers relied on two additional tactics, both of which

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Chappell and Company used on the first page of “Notte tremenda . . . caro suono lusinghier” (see fig. 4.2). The publisher indicated that the consumer was purchasing not simply an excerpt from Morlacchi’s Teobaldo ed Isolina but, rather, an arrangement “as sung by the celebrated Signor Velluti at Verona and Florence.” The designation of specific geographical locations suggested that the piano-­vocal score reflected the singer’s actual performances, and the phrase “as sung by” hinted that the arrangement reproduced Velluti’s vocal practices, including his embellishments of the composer’s melody. Souvenir scores purposely blurred the boundaries between what the composer wrote and what the singer performed, only occasionally—­and unreliably—­distinguishing between the original vocal line and the performer’s additions and alterations. For example, the final page of Sola’s arrangement of “Cara mano dell’amore” uses small noteheads to differentiate Velluti’s ornamentation from what we might presume to be Meyerbeer’s vocal line (see fig. 4.3). However, in this case, the full-­size vocal line also includes smaller-­scale embellishments (e.g., the sixteenth-­note figurations in the second and third measures of the second system of fig. 4.3 [mm. 111–­12]). These added notes only become apparent on close comparison of Sola’s arrangement with other versions of the same scene, such as Birchall and Company’s relatively unadorned “Popolo d’Egitto ecco ritorno a voi . . . Cara mano dell’amore,” which was published in the weeks prior to Velluti’s debut and was thus unlikely to reflect the castrato’s performance practice.7 Similarly, in the Chappell arrangement of “Notte tremenda  .  .  . caro suono lusinghier,” Velluti’s cadenza (on the word “senza”) is set in relief through the use of smaller noteheads; once again, however, the full-­size vocal line comprises a combination of Morlacchi’s original melody and a variety of small embellishments, indistinguishable from each other except to those with knowledge of the full score.8 Given the dearth of full operatic scores and piano-­vocal reductions published in early nineteenth-­century England, few members of the public would have been able to distinguish between Velluti’s ornaments and the composer’s original (if, indeed, they had any interest in doing so).9 For British sheet-­music consumers, the souvenir score probably functioned less as a means of separating the contributions of castrato and composer than as an aide-­memoire prompting recollections of operatic events (or even as a kind of “aide-­imagination” allowing the many un­ able to attend the opera to imagine themselves among the audience).10 Indeed, early nineteenth-­century audience members and consumers under­ stood opera to be a highly collaborative endeavour, involving the creative efforts of both composers and performers and taking account of their

Fig. 4.2 First page of “Notte tremenda” / “Caro suono lusinghier” (London: Chappell and Company, n.d. [1826]). Source: Add. Mus. 833, National Library of Ireland; reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Fig. 4.3 C. M. Sola’s arrangement of “Cara mano dell[’]amore,” mm. 107–­27. Source: M1508.M61 C7 1833, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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own predilections.11 As Melina Esse has argued, moreover, scholarly efforts to draw “distinctions between rebellious singer and controlling text imply too clear a division between work and performance, a division that perhaps speaks more to twentieth-­and twenty-­first century concerns than to nineteenth-­century ones.”12 The souvenir score, in other words, seemed to reflect the actual conditions by which opera commonly came into existence in the early decades of the nineteenth century: in print as in performance, the creativity of the singer overlapped with that of the composer, their voices—­literal and metaphorical—­sounding in unison.13

Unsettling Authority The souvenir score concretized in print a set of practices that were widely accepted by opera audiences, performers, and even composers, but which increasingly came to disquiet English critics. During the 1810s and 1820s, critics’ complaints about singers’ alterations of and additions to composers’ scores steadily escalated, as Rachel Cowgill, Jennifer Hall-­Witt, and Robert Toft have observed.14 According to Cowgill and Hall-­Witt, such objections—­which initially revolved around the reception of productions of Mozart’s operas at the King’s Theatre but later expanded to encompass performances of works by still-­living composers—­point to the emergence of the so-­called work-­concept in London operatic culture. English critics did indeed become uncomfortable with unsanctioned cuts, insertion arias, and especially extravagant ornamentation, but the evidence I have uncovered suggests that such concerns centred less on the autonomy of the operatic work and more on the authority of the composer. In the year and a half before he made his London debut, Velluti served as a symbol of vocal excess among English writers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Velluti finally arrived in London, certain critics found the castrato’s creativity—­ especially as captured in the Chappell and Company souvenir arrangement of “Notte tremenda . . . caro suono lusinghier”—­unnerving. Other critics, however, sought to undercut Velluti’s reputation for inventiveness by complaining that the singer had begun to repeat his embellishments. These sometimes contradictory responses offer glimpses into the nature of the authority ascribed to Velluti—­not only unsettling, as I have been explaining, but also, in a sense, unsettled—­even as they demonstrate the lengths to which English critics were willing to go in order to undermine star singers’ power. As mentioned earlier, within days of T. Hookham’s release of The Memoirs of Rossini in January 1824, critics began to cite Stendhal’s colourful (and probably apocryphal) tale of the young Rossini’s encounter with

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Velluti, in which the castrato supposedly embellished a cavatina from Aureliano in Palmira to the point of unrecognizability, prompting the composer’s turn to his “second manner.”15 That same month, for example, an anonymous letter to Richard Mackenzie Bacon, the editor of the Quar­ terly  Musical Magazine and Review (hereafter, QMMR), quoted Sten­ dhal’s anecdote in order to critique the contemporary trend towards busily ornamented vocal lines, whether invented by singers or composers.16 “I am not, Sir, a thorough-­bred downright bigotted old-­school man,” the correspondent assured Bacon, continuing thus: “I can admit that ornamental passages may be beautiful—­I can admire facility of execution—­ nay, I can even go so far as to allow that certain figurate parts do actually exalt the expression of peculiar sentiments.”17 After admitting as much, however, the writer launches an argument against the practice of substituting a musical phraseology which is entirely and wholly florid, for the flow of simple melody . . . as Rossini does in the majority of instances* . . . [because] it induces the singer to consider that he must rack his imagination, and strain his voice to make alterations and additions, without which he must pass for a creature devoid of fancy.18

The asterisk in this passage directs the reader to an extensive quotation from Stendhal’s Memoirs, which the anonymous author cites as a means of explaining why Rossini turned to his “second manner.” As the writer makes clear, though, Rossini’s efforts to curtail singers’ liberties had largely failed: instead, the singer “sets himself to work, and out-­Rossini’s [sic] Rossini at the expence [sic] of time, true tone, taste, and execution.”19 Several months later, in another extensive letter to the editor of QMMR, a correspondent identified as “G. S.” returned to Stendhal’s anecdote, this time to criticize Giuditta Pasta’s recent interpretation of “Di tanti palpiti” in Rossini’s Tancredi. “A true artist,” G. S. argued, “should not invade the province of the composer,” because “a singer is not a composer . . . they study two different though connected branches of science, and consequently . . . the singer is no more competent to amend the composer’s work than the composer is able to vie with the singer.”20 In his final remarks, the author makes an impassioned plea against singers’ habitual pursuit of invention (and audiences’ support of such practices): I know it is considered by many—­nay, I know it to be inculcated by great Italian masters—­that a singer ought never to sing the same passage twice alike. If this be true, the singer must become a composer—­

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he must descant upon the ground of the melody. If this be true, what li­mits are we to place upon his invention? And if we cannot (as I contend we cannot) place any boundary line, what becomes of the composer? How Rossini has felt this power, in its capricious exercise, we know from the anecdote of Velluti,* and the adoption of his second manner. But even Rossini cannot satiate the winged fancy of the modern vocalist, or of a public trained to novelty in every phrase of a song. His second manner, in which he has exhausted the resources of his mind to fill his scores with notes, avails him nothing. And why? Because every singer can alter a passage, and though they cannot add they can vary, which answers the same end—­the production of what they esteem new effects.21

Here, the asterisk points the reader to the letter to the editor printed in QMMR a few months earlier (discussed above). Taken together, these passages illustrate the mounting concerns of English critics over the contentious issue of operatic invention. At the same time, the repeated citations of Stendhal’s anecdote serve to position Velluti as a central figure in the fray between singers and composers long before the castrato arrived in London.

Souvenir, Score, Stage For those critics already anxious about singers’ incursions into the ambit of the composer, the souvenir scores that followed closely on the heels of  Velluti’s debut at the King’s Theatre proved particularly troubling. Midway through the 1826 season, an anonymous author drew on his knowledge of Morlacchi’s Teobaldo ed Isolina and his memory of Velluti’s recent performance as Teobaldo to review Chappell and Company’s piano-­vocal arrangement of “Notte tremenda,” a souvenir score that, as discussed above, seamlessly integrated the castrato’s embellishments into the vocal line. Throughout his analysis, the writer makes a point of contrasting Morlacchi’s original melody with the embellished vocal line printed in the Chappell arrangement, occasionally reproducing measures from both the original and the arrangement in order to demonstrate that “the original score contains little more than the harmonies upon which the singer has founded his illustrations.”22 Though the critic initially seems positive about Velluti’s role as an interpreter of Morlacchi, even describing the composer’s score as “the bones and the muscles of the figure” and the singer’s realization as “the nerves and cellular substance,” his tone gradually becomes more perturbed.23 “Upon comparing Morlacchi’s score with

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the published song, and with our recollections of Velluti’s alterations, which are not always exactly given in the printed copy,” he writes, “we can but be surprized at the latitude indulged, for there is scarcely a passage from the beginning to the end that is not altered. . . . The question then arises how far such emendations (admitting them to be such) are allowable?”24 Protesting against what he describes as singers’ “usurpation” of composers’ authority, the critic argues that more composers should follow Rossini in “making it impossible for [the singer] to preserve the character of good taste if he substitutes passages of his own.”25 In his final lines, the critic somewhat abruptly acknowledges that Morlacchi’s aria is an exception to this rule: inexpertly composed as the author believes “Notte tremenda” to be, it imposes on the singer “not only the task common to all songs, of giving it due expressiveness,” but also that of “heightening that expressiveness by a more than ordinary adaptation of diversified passages.”26 The critic deems Velluti’s additions and alterations to be permissible only because of Morlacchi’s failings, thus making clear that such inventiveness fell outside the lines English critics sought to draw over the course of the 1820s. Responses to Velluti’s performances as Teobaldo at the King’s Theatre proved contradictory: although some critics found the castrato’s “Notte tremenda . . . caro suono lusinghier” to be highly—­indeed, excessively—­ original, others complained that the singer’s style of ornamentation was not as inventive as one would expect. “A number of the graces and embellishments which charmed us in [Velluti’s] Armando were equally conspicuous in Teobaldo,” the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal observed, further remarking that “altogether there was a greater sameness of style and manner, than we remember to have witnessed in the performance of two characters by the same individual.”27 The Examiner expressed similar sentiments: What taste indeed can be expected from a man who sings so miserably out of tune, that it is difficult for the band to accompany him,—­who defies all time,—­hurrying or relaxing without ever regarding the effect intended, and dwelling upon a set of tegious [tedious] flourishes with a sameness perfectly wearisome?28

“When he draws up his round shoulders, grins with his thin face, and stretches out his bony arms,” The Examiner concluded, “we know precisely the division of notes he is going to execute.”29 Critics’ complaints about Velluti’s lack of originality may well have been supported not only

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by the castrato’s appearances at the King’s Theatre but also by comparison with the embellishments found in souvenir scores associated with his performances as Armando and Teobaldo, which reveal similar figurations (if not identical ornaments).30 These conflicting reactions to Velluti’s performance as Teobaldo served a similar purpose: whether critics judged the castrato’s embellishments to be unoriginal to the point of predictabil­ ity or so original as to trespass into the domain of the composer, their rhet­ oric worked to undermine Velluti’s creative authority alongside his tuning, timing, acting, and appearance.

Emended Scores and the Castrato as Composer-­Pedagogue With its intermingling of composer’s invention and performer’s intervention, the souvenir score suggested a performance-­orientated aesthetic of collaborative authorship. Significantly, of the nearly thirty piano-­vocal scores concerning Velluti published in London in the late 1820s, the vast majority illustrated the co-­creative efforts of composer and castrato in a distinctly different fashion. As mentioned earlier, instead of integrating the singer’s embellishments into a single vocal line, these publications located Velluti’s elaborate embellishments on additional staves, thus drawing attention to the singer’s revision of the composer’s original melody. The marketing of such publications made no effort to draw connections between the arrangement and an actual event (whether through allusion to a geographical location or by printing some variation of the clause “as sung by Signor Velluti with unbounded applause”). Instead, the front matter usually stated the title of the operatic excerpt or art song and the name of the composer, followed by the words “to which are added ornaments and graces by Signor Velluti”; in addition, publishers occasionally positioned such emended scores as instructional aids, intended to assist amateur and aspiring professional singers to grasp Velluti’s style of ornamentation. Emended scores thus acknowledged that Velluti’s authority extended beyond the stage to encompass pedagogical and compositional activities. The title pages of two pieces of sheet music—­T. Boosey and Company’s arrangement of the duet “Mille sospiri e lagrime” from Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira and the art song “L’amor timido” by John Fane (better known by his title, Lord Burghersh), published by both Grua, Ricordi and Company and T. Welsh—­suggest that Velluti had a direct hand in creating at least some of the emended scores released in late 1820s London.31 The title page for “Mille sospiri” notes that the excerpt was a “duet from the opera Aureliano in Palmira by M.o Rossini,” and further indicates

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that the excerpt was “expressly published with the manner of Signor G. B. Velluti, in order to be of use in the instruction in his Academy in London.”32 The “Academy” to which this publication refers may have been Velluti’s private studio, where he gave lessons from at least mid-­1826 through 1829 (and which the London press described as an “academy” or a “singing academy”).33 Between 1825 and 1829, Velluti also worked as an instructor at the Royal Academy of Music, which had only recently been founded by the aforementioned Lord Burghersh, a staunch supporter of the castrato.34 Boosey’s reference to Velluti’s “Academy” may simply have been intended to alert consumers to the pedagogical potential of this piece of sheet music, but such language, unusual as it is, also suggests that Velluti may have composed the alternative embellishments found in this publication as a means of illustrating his methods for his students. The title page of “L’amor timido” makes a more explicit claim about Velluti’s participation in the preparation of the publication: as it indicates, Lord Burghersh had set a cantata by Metastasio, which he had then presented to Velluti “with whose Vocal Embellishments it is now published, for the instruction of those Amateurs desirous of acquiring his style of Singing.”35 Velluti’s relationship with the composer extended back to the early 1820s, when Lord Burghersh—­who served as the British Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany between 1814 and 1830—­engaged the castrato to perform the role of Ippolito in the 1822 premiere of his opera La Fedra.36 After this performance, Velluti and Lord Burghersh collaborated on a small number of publications, including two excerpts from La Fedra and three art songs, “L’amor timido,” “Gentil usignolo,” and “Placido zeffiretto”; for each, Velluti provided extensive alternative embellishments of Lord Burghersh’s vocal lines.37 The Florentine publisher Giuseppe Lorenzi released the excerpts from La Fedra. The art songs, on the other hand, were published by the London branch of Grua, Ricordi and Company, probably between 1824 and 1828, and again by T. Welsh (of the Royal Harmonic Institution), probably between 1828 and 1830, suggesting that Velluti may have facilitated the publication of these compositions during his time in London. Support for this idea emerges in the fine print found near the bottom of the title pages of both Grua, Ricordi and Company’s “L’amor timido” and T. Welsh’s: “Property of Signor Velluti” appears on the left-­hand side of the page, with an advertisement for “a series of the best Authors [sic] Compositions arranged by Sigr Velluti” gracing the bottom centre.38 Such phrases hint that Velluti maintained both authorial and financial control over at least a handful of the publications bearing his embellishments.

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F ig. 4.4 “L’amor timido,” cantata by Metastasio and Lord Burghersh (London: T. Welsh, n.d. [1828–­30]), mm. 27–­29. Source: H.2830.a.(1.), British Library.

Burghersh and Velluti ostensibly intended “L’amor timido” to help aspiring singers acquire the castrato’s distinctive style of ornamentation, and—­as the handwritten simplifications of Velluti’s embellishments found in archival copies of “L’amor timido” and other emended scores hint—­ singers did use such publications as a means of extending their abilities.39 As Aubrey Garlington notes, the British Library’s copy of “L’amor timido” demonstrates multiple attempts to make Velluti’s ornamentation slightly more accessible: in measures 28–­29, for example, the handwritten passage in the upper staff of the piano part follows the overarching line of Velluti’s embellishment, but does so with simpler, slower rhythms and without stretching up to the high F (see fig. 4.4). In measures 33–­34, the presence of two handwritten passages suggests that the castrato’s embellishment posed some difficulties, which the amateur editor attempted to mitigate by omitting the flourish between the initial D and C, reducing the number of skips and leaps, and narrowing the overall range, the stretch up to a high G in the bottom of the two handwritten passages notwithstanding (see fig. 4.5).40 A prior owner similarly intervened in a copy of Grua, Ricordi and Company’s arrangement of “La tua diletta im­­ m[a]gine” (from Stefano Pavesi’s 1815 opera Celanira) held at the Universitätbibliothek at the Universität Basel.41 Throughout the score, this amateur editor used pencilled-­in horizontal lines to indicate when to switch from Pavesi’s vocal line to Velluti’s ossia; in addition, the editor occasionally altered whatever vocal line a singer was intended to perform in order to simplify a difficult passage by Velluti or smooth the transition between the two. In measure 9, for example, an editor recomposed the ascending

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Fig. 4.5 “L’amor timido,” mm. 33–­35. Source: H.2830.a.(1.), British Library.

Fig. 4.6 “La tua diletta imm[a]gine,” cavatina “coi modi del Sigr Velluti” (London: Grua, Ricordi, and Company, n.d. [1824-­28]), mm. 8–­10. Source: Kr VI 336:9, Universitätbibliothek, Universität Basel.

notes setting the word “nel” in order to make a transition to Velluti’s embellishment in measure 10 (see fig. 4.6). Once reaching the ossia line, however, the editor adjusted Velluti’s line in an effort to avoid the high F (as well as to eliminate the leap of a fifth from D to G). As these and other archival documents make clear, sheet-­music consumers did not simply adapt Velluti’s embellishments to their own abilities; rather, many also added ornaments to portions of the composer’s original melody that the castrato had left bare. The owner of the copy of “La tua diletta,” for example, added a mordent between the repeated middle Cs of Pavesi’s vocal line in measure 9 (see fig. 4.6). The same amateur editor who sought to simplify Velluti’s embellishments of Lord

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Fig. 4.7 “L’amor timido,” mm. 45–­46. Source: H.2830.a.(1.), British Library.

Burghersh’s “L’amor timido” similarly inserted a simple division into the composer’s vocal line in measure 46 (see fig. 4.7). In other scores, including the copies of J. B. Cramer, Addison, and Beale’s publications of Nicola Vaccai’s canzoncina “Api erranti” and Giuseppe Nicolini’s arietta “Or che l’indissolubile” held at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, handwritten alterations reflect the same impulse to enhance unornamented melodic passages in the style of  Velluti, thus suggesting that the castrato’s creativity inspired early nineteenth-­century consumers to exercise their own authority as performers, teachers, and composers.42

Conclusion The scores that I have examined point to the continued significance of co-­ creation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, despite critics’ efforts to wrest agency, inventiveness, and originality away from the singer and assign such attributes instead to the composer. The rapid expansion of the sheet-­music industry throughout these same years may well have prompted English music critics’ anxieties over collaborative creativity: according to historian of print culture Douglas Brooks, for example, a “preoccupation with individualized authorial agency” emerged in sixteenth-­century

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England alongside the publication of plays, which consumers had up until that point experienced only in the context of ephemeral performances.43 The sheet music associated with Velluti in late-­1820s London persistently complicated any notion of sole authorship: souvenir scores put forward a collaborative view of performance by integrating the singer’s ornaments into the composer’s vocal line, while emended scores emphasized the authority of composer and castrato alike—­and opened up space for other authoritative voices, beyond those of the castrato or the composer. Indeed, as the many handwritten revisions strewn throughout archival copies of these scores reveal, consumers-­turned-­editors engaged in co-­creative acts of their own, whether by adjusting Velluti’s embellishments to work for their voices or by adding ornaments to the original vocal line in keeping with his style. These pencilled-­in annotations reflect consumers’ efforts to embody an authorial role, both through invention and, we may imagine, through inventive performance. Ultimately, such multifaceted responses to scores bearing Velluti’s name serve to illuminate the complex nature of creative authority—­whether exercised by castrato, composer, or consumer—­in late-­1820s London.

Notes 1. As Philip Gossett notes in the introduction to the facsimile of a manuscript of the Venice version of Il crociato in Egitto, this work “poses more textual problems than practically any other opera of the early nineteenth century, problems which are only partly resolved.” As Naomi André has described, Meyerbeer revised Il crociato in Egitto multiple times, each time altering elements of plot in order to highlight different characters (and singers). James Q. Davies argues that, for his debut in London, “probably on Meyerbeer’s instruction, Velluti ditched ‘Cara mano dell’amore,’ the aria he preferred in Florence, and exchanged it for a transposed version of ‘Popolo dell’Egitto,’ ” the entrance aria Meyerbeer created to highlight the role of Adriano (for the third version of Il crociato in Egitto, premiered in Trieste). Davies bases this assertion on a review published in the August 1825 issue of the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, which stated that Velluti’s first words were “ ‘Popol’ d’Egitto,’ uttered in a feeble, shrill, and discordant voice.” However, publishers printed numerous sheet-­music arrangements of “Cara mano” in late-­1820s London, at least one of which included the opening recitative “Popolo d’Egitto,” thus offering concrete evidence that Velluti sang the entrance aria Meyerbeer wrote for him for the Florence production of this opera (possibly with a newly revised recitative). The detailed synopsis and English translation of selected excerpts from the libretto printed in the July 1825 edition of the Harmonicon further affirm that Velluti sang “Cara mano” in London. Philip Gossett, ed., Il crociato in Egitto: A Facsimile Edition of a Manuscript of the Original Version Edited with an Introduction by Philip Gossett (New York: Garland, 1972); André, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-­Nineteenth-­Century Italian Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University

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of California Press, 2014), 188, note 3; New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 15, no. 56 (1 August 1825): 344; “Il Crociato in Egitto, an Heroic Opera in Two Acts, Written by Rossi, composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer,” Harmonicon 3, no. 31 ( July 1825): 119–­26. 2. Hilary Poriss draws attention to the significance of the entrance aria in early nineteenth-­century opera, writing that “throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the entrance aria served a dual function: not only did it introduce characters into the context of the opera, but it also provided them with a solo opportunity with which they could showcase their glorious voices”; Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38. 3. C. M. Sola, “Recitative and air, ‘Cara mano dell[’]amore,’ sung with unbounded applause by Signor Velluti, in Meyerbeer’s celebrated opera Il crociato in Egitto, arranged with piano forte accompaniment and dedicated to Miss Emma Doveton, by C. M. Sola” (London: G. Longman, n.d.), M1508.M61 C7 1833, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 4. Martha Feldman distinguishes between arrangements that functioned as “auditory ‘souvenirs,’ strewn with little trinkets, mementos, and novelties of the singers they celebrate” and those that attempted to record a singer’s embellishments on an ossia line. I distinguish between arrangements in a slightly different fashion: I use the term “souvenir score” to describe arrangements that professed to record accurately singers’ performances (and integrated ornaments into the printed vocal line by way of evidence), and I employ the term “emended score” to refer to arrangements that claimed to represent idealized performances (and thus represented singers’ embellishments on ossia lines). Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 240. 5. Stendhal, Memoirs of Rossini, by the Author of the Lives of Haydn and Mozart (London: T. Hookham, 1824). 6. Amanda Eubanks Winkler, “ ‘Our Friend Venus Performed to a Miracle’: Anne Bracegirdle, John Eccles and Creativity,” in Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-­Century England, ed. Rebecca Herissone and Alan Howard (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013), 265. 7. Full-­score versions of Il crociato in Egitto published in the early to mid-­nineteenth century do not include Velluti’s entrance aria “Popolo d’Egitto . . . Cara mano”; however, distinct versions of this aria—­with more or less ornamentation—­circulated in London during these same years. In addition to C. M. Sola’s arrangement (cited in note 3 of this chapter), see the following arrangements: “ ‘Popolo d’Egitto ecco ritorno a voi,’ recit[ati]vo e coro e ‘Cara mano dell’amore,’ cavatina, in the opera of Il crociato in Egitto, composed by Signor Giacomo Meyerbeer” (London: Birchall and Company, n.d. [ June 1825], G.811.n.24.), Music Collections, British Library; “ ‘This dear hand,’ the celebrated cavatina ‘Cara mano’ as sung by Sigr Velluti, with the chorus, ‘Youthful Hero’ or ‘Fortunato Vincitore’ in the opera of Il crociato in Egitto composed by Sigr Meyerbeer” (London: J. Willis and Company, n.d. [1825–­26]), M127 .G58 op. 146b, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Holland/Terrell Libraries, Washington State University. Precise dating of the Birchall publication is possible owing to an announcement found in the Quarterly Magazine and Review 7, no. 26 ( June 1825): 255. The approximate date of the Willis arrangement, in keeping with all other dates of publication suggested in this essay, takes into account the publisher’s address during specific periods, as well as possible dates associated with plate numbers, based on the information compiled in Charles Humphries and William C. Smith’s Music Publishing in the British Isles (London:

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Cassell, 1954) and O. W. Neighbor and Alan Tyson’s English Music Publishers’ Plate Numbers in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). 8. “ ‘Notte tremenda,’ recit[ati]vo e ‘Caro suono lusinghier,’ romanza, as sung by the celebrated Signor Velluti at Verona and Florence, in the opera of Teobaldo ed Isolina, composed by Signor Morlacchi” (London: Chappell and Company, n.d. [1826]), Add. Mus. 833, National Library of Ireland. 9. In his discussion of the relationship between operatic arrangements and the development of the operatic canon, Thomas Christensen distinguishes between piano-­vocal scores of full operas—­which, he argues, both clarified the boundaries of the operatic work and compelled at-­home performers to attend to sound rather than spectacle—­and arrangements of audience favourites. According to Christensen, piano-­vocal arrangements of single arias, duets, and other numbers reflected “the resilient habit of viewing the opera as a compilation of detachable elements,” thus extending an event-­orientated mode of operatic consumption. According to James Parakilas, few full operatic scores circulated in England in the early nineteenth century. Christensen, “Public Music in Private Spaces: Piano-­Vocal Scores and the Domestication of Opera,” in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate van Orden (London and New York: Garland, 2000), 67–­93, here 82; Parakilas, “The Operatic Canon,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 862–­80. 10. Several of the souvenir scores published in London in the late 1820s reproduced excerpts from operas that Velluti sang elsewhere but never performed at the King’s Theatre, such as Giuseppe Nicolini’s Balduino, from which Birchall and Company culled the trio “Dolce fiamma in sen”; “ ‘Dolce fiamma in sen,’ terzettino in the opera of Balduino, composed by Signor Nicolini, as sung by Madame Caradori Allan, Signor Velluti, and Signor Curioni, with the embellishments of Signor Velluti” (London: Birchall and Company, n.d. [1828]), H.2830.g.(22.), British Library; MUSICA FV st 021 and MUSICA FV st 022, Belluno Biblioteca Civica. In her article on English sheet-­music adaptations of Italian operatic excerpts published during the Victorian era, Roberta Montemorra Marvin notes that for some, “sheet music did not complement an opera house experience but rather proffered the only exposure to operatic works.” Roberta Montemorra Marvin, “Verdian Opera in the Victorian Parlor,” in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-­Century Italian Opera, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53–­75. 11. Melina Esse, Karen Henson, and Robert Toft have recently addressed the issue of collaboration between composers and singers: Melina Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatrice in Italian Opera,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 709–­70; Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Robert Toft, Heart to Heart: Expressive Singing in England 1780–­1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 12. Esse, “Encountering the improvvisatrice,” 749. 13. Cindy Kim makes a similar argument regarding sheet-­music arrangements of Velluti’s operatic excerpts, suggesting that “when ornamentation enters into the publishing market, the performer’s role as an executor is no longer visible; thus, the singer’s contribution completely overlaps with the composer’s”; Cindy Kim, “Changing Meanings of Ornamentation in Nineteenth-­Century Italian Opera” (PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 2011), 91. 14. Rachel Cowgill, “ ‘Wise Men from the East’: Mozart’s Operas and Their Advocates in Early Nineteenth-­Century London,” in Music and British Culture, 1785–­1914:

Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-Music Market  89

Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–­64; Cowgill, “Mozart Productions and the Emergence of Werktreue at London’s Italian Opera House, 1780–­1830,” in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 145–­86; Jennifer Hall-­Witt, “Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London,” in Music and British Culture, ed. Bashford and Langley, 121–­44; Jennifer Hall-­Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–­1880 (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 48–­49; Toft, Heart to Heart, esp. xii, 12–­13, and 85–­89. 15. T. Hookham released Memoirs of Rossini in January 1824, some months before Stendhal published the expanded French version, Vie de Rossini. As Stendhal’s story goes in this early English adaptation, Rossini was “struck with admiration” at hearing Velluti sing his cavatina in the first rehearsal of Aureliano in Palmira; when, during the second rehearsal, Velluti began “to show his powers in gracing ( fiorire),” Rossini “found the effect produced, just and admirable, and highly applauded the performance.” On the occasion of the third rehearsal, however, “the simplicity of the cantilena was entirely lost, amidst the luxuriancy of the ornaments,” and, when the premiere finally arrived, “scarcely did Rossini know what Velluti was singing—­it was no longer the music he had composed.” In Vie de Rossini, Stendhal would add considerable nuance to his description of  Velluti, even going so far as to describe the castrato’s embellishments as an important means of expressing the true meaning of an operatic aria. Stendhal, Memoirs of Rossini, 197–­200. Gossett states that Stendhal’s tale of the Rossini-­Velluti encounter is “totally without substance”; Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 297. 16. As Theodore Fenner has observed, each issue of the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review contained “a goodly number of articles submitted by unpaid correspondents,” many of whose identities remain unknown. Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–­1830 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 37. 17. “On the Present State of Vocal Art in England,” Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 6, no. 21 ( January 1824): 5. 18. “On the Present State of Vocal Art in England,” 5–­6. 19. “On the Present State of Vocal Art in England,” 6. 20. G. S., “To the editor,” Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 6, no. 23 ( July 1824): 300. The English conductor, composer, and pedagogue George Smart was a close friend of Bacon. As John Carnelley acknowledges, “the majority of articles in the QMMR are anonymous [and thus] it is impossible to know what Smart might have contributed to the journal”; in this case, I would suggest that the presence of the initials “G. S.” point to the possibility that Smart may have authored this letter to the editor, as do the opinions expressed therein. John Carnelley, George Smart and Nineteenth-­Century London Concert Life (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2015), 63. 21. G. S., “To the editor,” 301. 22. Review of “ ‘Notte tremenda,’ Recit. e Caro suono lusinghier, Romanza, as sung by the celebrated Signor Velluti, at Verona and Florence, in his Opera of Tebaldo e Isolina, composed by Signor Morlacchi” (London: Chappell and Company, n.d. [1826]), Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 8, no. 30 (April 1826): 204–­5. 23. Review of “Notte tremenda,” 204–­5. 24. Review of “Notte tremenda,” 204–­5.

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25. Review of “Notte tremenda,” 206–­7. 26. Review of “Notte tremenda,” 207. 27. “Music,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, April 1826, 151. Fenner dubs this anonymous author “critic Z,” further observing that he “was the only critic to do justice to the castrato Velluti.” Fenner, Opera in London, 40. 28. X, “Theatrical Examiner,” Examiner, 5 March 1826, 148; italics in the original. Critic X reviewed performances at the King’s Theatre for the Examiner between 1822 and 1828. For further description of X’s critical style, see Fenner, Opera in London, 34–­35. 29. X, “Theatrical Examiner,” 148. 30. Will Crutchfield’s recent analysis of sheet-­music and manuscript scores bearing traces of Velluti’s performance practice outlines several characteristic embellishments to which the castrato returned. Crutchfield, “G.B. Velluti e lo sviluppo della melodia romantica,” Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi 54 (2014): 9–­83. 31. “ ‘Mille sospiri e lagrime,’ duetto, nell’opera Aureliano in Palmira, del M.o Rossini, Espressamente publicato coi Modi del Sig G.B. Velluti. Onde servire d’istruzione nella sua Accademia, in Londra” (London: T. Boosey and Company, n.d. [1826–­29]), Store HQ01800, Special Collections, Glasgow University Library, and M1508.2R677 A8, Special Collections, Music and Performing Arts Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign; “ ‘L’amor timido,’ Cantata by Metastasio, the Music Composed by Lord Burghersh and Presented by him to Signor Velluti with whose Vocal Embellishments it is now published, for the instruction of those Amateurs desirous of acquiring his style of Singing” (London: Grua, Ricordi, and Company, n.d. [1824–­28], and London: T. Welsh, n.d. [1828–­30]). The Grua, Ricordi, and Company version is held at the British Library (H.2830.a.[1.], British Library), and the T. Welsh version is held at Glasgow University (Sp. Coll. N.b. 19, Special Collections, Glasgow University Library). In many of the emended scores I have located, the authorship of the embellishments remains am­ biguous; although publishers attributed the emendations to Velluti, verifying his partici­ pation—­whether in the form of composition, proofreading, or approval—­has proved impossible. The title pages for these two pieces, however, indicate Velluti’s possible involvement much more clearly than the few other surviving title pages. 32. “Espressamente publicato coi Modi del Sig G.B. Velluti. Onde servire d’istruzione nella sua Accademia, in Londra,” “ ‘Mille sospiri e lagrime.’ ” 33. “Kings Theatre,” Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 369 (10 June 1826): 368; “Covent Garden Theatre,” Theatrical Observer, 24 January 1829, [1]. 34. For a mid-­nineteenth-­century account of the establishment of this institution, see William Wahab Cazalet, The History of the Royal Academy of Music (London: T. Bosworth, 1854). Velluti’s position at the Royal Academy was hotly contested among certain members of English press; see “Legal Records,” Examiner 977 (22 October 1826), 674–­76. 35. “L’amor timido”; capitalization as on original title page. 36. Aubrey Garlington, Society, Culture and Opera in Florence, 1814–­1830: Dilettantes in an “Earthly Paradise” (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 37. “ ‘Gentil usignolo,’ canzonetta composed by Lord Burghersh, with the vocal embellishments of Sigr Velluti” (London: Grua, Ricordi, and Company, n.d. [1824–­28], and London: T. Welsh, n.d. [1828–­30]). The Grua, Ricordi, and Company version is held at Harvard University (MUS 505.56, Isham Memorial Library, Harvard University), and the T. Welsh version is held at the Glasgow University Library (Sp. Coll. N.b. 19, Special Collections, Glasgow University Library). “ ‘Placido zeffiretto,’ arietta composed

Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-Music Market  91

by Lord Burghersh, with the vocal embellishments of Sigr Velluti” (London: Grua, Ricordi and Company, n.d. [1824–­28]), MUS 505.56, Isham Memorial Library, Harvard University. 38. “L’amor timido”; capitalization as on original title page. 39. Although the editors’ identities remain unverified, certain orthographic features—­such as the placement of the stems—­hint that their annotations date to the first half of the nineteenth century. 40. In both handwritten embellishments, the editor pencilled in sixteenth notes; however, given the number of notes indicated, it seems likely that they intended to per­ form thirty-­second notes. 41. “ ‘La tua diletta imm[a]gine,’ cavatina, introdotta nella Celanira, coi modi del Sigr Velluti. Anno 2o fas[cico]lo 6o della Lira d’Italia” (London: Grua, Ricordi, and Company, n.d. [1824–­28], kr VI 336:9, Universitätbibliothek, Universität Basel. 42. “ ‘Api erranti,’ canzoncina, composed by Nicola Vaccai, to which are added ornaments and graces by Signor Velluti” (London: J. B. Cramer, Addison, and Beale, n.d. [1827]), H.2831.c.(67.), British Library; “ ‘Or che l’indissolubile,’ arietta, with an accompaniment for the piano forte, composed by G. Nicolini, to which are added ornaments and graces by Signor Velluti” (London: J. B. Cramer, Addison, and Beale, n.d. [1824]), 2010TW-­28 (138b) [Box 9, no. 138b.], Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 43. Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xiv.

• 

Ch a p t er 5  

•

“The Essence of Nine Trombones” Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London S a r a h Hibber d

Imagine, good reader, and without alarm, a great man standing full six feet high, weighing some sixteen stone, and measuring about six and sixty inches around the chest, his form fair and fatly proportioned, and his features handsome, intelligent, and very goodnatured.1 If one of the giants at Guildhall were to astonish a city dinner someday by taking a part in a glee, he would sound like lablache. Or as a lady next to whom we had the pleasure of sitting observed, an elephant might sing like him.2

The Neapolitan bass Luigi Lablache (1794–­1858) arrived in London in May 1830. Following a career of nearly twenty years on the Italian peninsula, he was to become indispensable to the performance of Italian opera in London and Paris for the next twenty.3 Although particularly successful in comic operas, he was also acclaimed in serious roles: in short, he was the most charismatic and versatile bass of the age.4 As my epigraphs suggest, the starting point for most reviews was his size: for critics his physique was inseparable from the indescribable power and volume of his voice on the one hand, and from his sensitive personality and perceptive characterizations on the other, a combination captured in an 1836 lithograph depicting Lablache with soprano Giulia Grisi in their duet from Bellini’s I puritani (see fig. 5.1). For Londoners, the combustive power of his lungs seems to have been at the core of this double facility. There have been a number of calls to think about voices in the past not simply in the abstract, but rather—­as Susan Rutherford has recommended—­as “shapes and movements drawn in space by the performing body,” whose “presence” impacted the mind and body of the spectator.5

Fig. 5.1   Giulia Grisi as Elvira and Luigi Lablache as Giorgio in Bellini’s I puri­ tani (1835) by Richard James Lane, after Alfred Edward Chalon; coloured lithograph, published January 1, 1836. Print originally bound in the volume Recollections of the Italian Opera (1836) . Source: National Portrait Gallery.

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Rutherford is interested in how individual voices articulate a unique identity, and in the effect corporeality has on vocal timbre and delivery. Lablache’s unmissable “performing body” offers a particularly good subject for such an approach. It shifts focus away from the castratos, sopranos, tenors, and—­more recently—­baritones whose exhibitionist and heroic activities have tended to attract the attention of scholars, towards the subtler contributions of the bass, in less prominent dramatic roles.6 In so doing, it further invites us to think about how voice participated in early nineteenth-­century constructions of masculinity in Britain. Scholars have argued that by the end of the eighteenth century, manliness was understood as combining new values of sensibility and feeling with traditional qualities such as fortitude and courage. For Claire Brock, in her study of Rousseau’s influence on English elites, “the man of feeling” was intertwined with “the man of virtuous action,” thereby presenting “a new sort of hero, a figure to be admired and emulated.”7 But ideals of masculinity continued to evolve in the new century. The idealized figure of the “independent man” that emerged in the Georgian period became the epitome of manliness and national character.8 This proud independence manifested itself in bodily and behavioural terms: in “an unmistakable sturdiness and directness of demeanour,” emphasizing “sincerity and straightforwardness.”9 Although the political and social definitions of independence were contested, Matthew McCormack has identified the Reform Act of 1832 as a pivotal moment that helps bridge the gap between what has been viewed as the high-­political eighteenth century and the social nineteenth.10 When the reforming Whigs came to power, the idealized notion of the citizen-­voter prevailed as the model of electoral independence; an understated, sincere masculinity was associated with political legitimacy, and with speaking on behalf of the nation.11 Overt displays of emotion were increasingly viewed as artificial and insincere, and male emotional self-­control was expected and valued. Political speechmaking offered an important opportunity to demonstrate one’s in­ dependence and, as McCormack has demonstrated, records were often accompanied by accounts of how a speech was performed. Thus, at the 1830 Norwich election, we are told that Gurney was “stout, manly and bold,” while his opponent Grant was comparably imposing: “[his] stature is lofty, and his deportment grave and commanding . . . his voice and manner are alike dignified.”12 Nevertheless, sensitivity—­when deeply felt and modestly presented—­could still enhance traditional masculine roles; Joanne Bailey has argued that many men were actively seeking to reconcile authority and tenderness within their own identities during this period, most obviously in their styles of fatherhood.13

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Despite the strong current of antitheatricality (and hostility to feigned emotions) running through Georgian society, there was, as McCormack has noted, a fluid relationship between political speechmaking and the gestural language of actors: both aimed to make manifest an inner truth of feeling.14 Such sincerity of expression seems to have been a particularly British preoccupation at the time, and in both spheres.15 For at least a generation of performers, Edmund Kean had been the model for tragedians against whom all were judged, but by the 1820s there were increasing criticisms of his exaggerated “naturalness.”16 When William Charles Macready drew on his own experiences of fatherhood and filial devotion in his interpretation of the title role in James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius, the Daily News reported that “[his] love of sudden transitions was controlled within the bounds of propriety, and his rich manly voice . . . was subdued and mellowed down to a tone of exquisite touchingness.”17 Furthermore, when Knowles himself took the role in 1832, the Spectator reported approvingly that in the scene between Virginius and his young daughter, he was “at home with his child . . . his manner, look and tone were kind, earnest and genial, like those of a father.”18 In quotations such as this, theatrical journalism offers a window onto the preferred qualities of masculinity, and onto the nation’s self-­fashioning during these years of political transition. This chapter will examine Lablache’s reception in London between his 1830 debut and 1835, when he created new roles in operas by Bellini and Donizetti written for the so-­called Puritani Quartet (comprising Giu­ lia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, and Lablache). Whereas contemporary reviewers in Paris were most interested in  de­ scribing the powerful effect his singing had on audiences (and co-­ performers), London critics were more intent on conveying something of the sound itself, produced by what they viewed as the combustive quality of his lungs. Moreover, Lablache’s corpulence was understood as correlating not only with this force of production but also with personality traits such as empathy and sensitivity, which were in turn associated with his superior talents as an actor. In what follows I thus situate Lablache’s London reception in the context of voice and body image as they were understood at the time. Drawing on examples from roles written for Lablache—­Giorgio in I puritani and the title role of Donizetti’s Marino Faliero—­I argue that the particular combination of power and sensitivity that was seen as defining his performances related closely to new British models of masculinity being contested in the role of fatherhood.

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Machine-­Age Voice: Lablache as Instrument The first decades of the nineteenth century saw an expansion in the way the singing voice and its mechanism was understood. As cultural historian Georges Vigarello has charted, the discovery of oxygen in the 1770s had ushered in a new appreciation of the act of breathing: it was no longer seen simply as helping the heart contract or refreshing blood, but rather as maintaining animal heat and life through a sort of invisible furnace (fed by food and oxygen).19 Antoine Lavoisier was the first to state clearly the role of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in respiration, building on the work of previous investigators such as Joseph Priestley; but he erroneously proposed that combustion took place in the lungs, thereby assigning new importance to the chest.20 Authors of English singing treatises showed particular interest in the vocal implications of this new understanding of breathing, often employing a quasi-­industrial language that evoked the thermodynamic processes of the steam engine and the harnessing of power.21 For example, Isaac Nathan’s 1823 Essay on the History and Theory of Music describes the acts of inspiration and expiration, emphasizing how the lungs “like an organ” depended on a continuous cur­ rent of air for the production of sound.22 He explained: “although these processes are continually going on with great rapidity in the living system, it is still in our power to repress or protract either of them at pleasure to a considerable extent, and thereby to render them subservient to the rules of music.”23 “The singer,” he suggested, should “first make an inspiration, as if to sigh, taking care to keep the breath so much under command, that one note may be continued at pleasure; gradually increasing or diminishing the sound without labour.”24 After claiming that “the chest, as containing the great natural organs of respiration, is the most important of all the requisites for a singer,” he went on to devote a full section to breathing, noting that “power or softness, volubility, or sweetness, depend greatly on prudent management of the breath. By a proper inflation of the lungs at the beginning of a note, the singer is enabled to give that gradual swell and diminution of voice, which forms one of the most exquisite beauties of the science.”25 The following year, in his Elements of Vocal Science (1824), Richard Mackenzie Bacon considered the relationship between breathing and mu­ sical phrasing: The principal rules are, to fill the chest just before beginning a strain (phrase)—­to take breath on the weak or unaccented part of the

98  Sarah Hibberd

measure, and never at the beginning of the bar, or in the middle of a word—­to sing a single strain, or musical phrase, if possible in the same breath, to prepare, by a deep inspiration, for a long passage or division—­to take the opportunities short rests or pauses afford for inhaling and giving out the breath as slowly as possible.  .  .  . All other rules . . . must be acquired by experience.26

An approving review observed that “singing has hitherto been treated too much like an art and too little as a science” and thanked Bacon for correcting the “error.”27 It is clear from both writers that the power associated with the lungs—­ the body’s combustion engine—­was recognized from an early stage to be the source of delicate effects as well as forceful sounds, and that some skill was required from the singer to disguise process. There were numerous anecdotes in circulation that recounted Lablache’s ability to emit a stream of sound, seemingly without effort: at dinner one day he reportedly sang a long note (from piano to forte), drank a glass of wine, sang a chromatic scale up the octave in trills, and blew out a candle with his mouth open—­all without appearing to breathe at all.28 This ability finds confirmation of sorts in his own singing treatise, published in 1840, which emphasized the importance of “long and free respiration” and offered an exercise by which “lungs of small power may in the end be made to produce a well sustained sound, which will last from eighteen to twenty seconds.”29 London critics seeking to convey the power of Lablache’s voice likened it to a musical instrument. But rather than the mysterious inner workings of the vocal tract (traditionally compared to the violin or flute) it was the force of the originating breath and its resonating capacity that were emphasized through a range of more extravagant metaphors and similes. The critic of the Tatler, for example, claimed “The power of this singer seems to come out of a body lined with brass . . . exhaling the mighty music, the essence of nine trombones.”30 Some sought alternative resonant compa­ risons: “That stupendous voice, clear, deep, and sonorous as a bell—­the Great Tom of the musical stage”;31 “It rings like a bell by the force of its vibrations.”32 Others turned to the explosive sounds of war and nature as even more extreme comparators: “Impossible to describe the effect of his magnificent organ . . . as a cannon amid a rolling fire of musketry; as thunder amid the tempest.”33 Another category of comments takes the comparisons with musical instruments in a different direction, illuminating the challenge for critics when the singer was not a virtuosic soprano or tenor, shining in solo

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  99

arias, but a bass whose primary role was to underpin ensembles. Their approach was to align Lablache with the workaday instruments of the orchestra and praise his modest but essential contribution. A regularly retold anecdote seems to confirm his abilities in such a role: Maria Malibran, in order to get rid of an annoying hurdy-­gurdy player outside the window who was disturbing her party, instructed Lablache to sing a sustained low F and their friend John Orlando Parry a B♭, both men pinching their noses to form a drone while she imitated a skirling chanter over the top. They eventually sank their voices together as though their human bagpipe was running out of air, and the hurdy-­gurdy player fled.34 At the premiere of I puritani in Paris in January 1835, the reviewer of Le Temps had suggested that Lablache (in the role of Giorgio) was employed “to accompany, rather like an instrument, and to count bars like a string bass,” and a London critic noted a few months later when the opera came across the Channel that Lablache simply “fill[ed] in the bass in the concerted pieces.”35 In the quartet “A te, o cara,” another bass (Theodore Giubilei, who in London played the role of Giorgio’s brother Lord Walton) and Lablache sang in thirds to provide an undulating ground for the voices of Rubini and Grisi following the former’s opening statement. They then punctuated the rest of the number, in unison with the chorus and instrumental bass, thus melting into the accompaniment. Two of the most popular numbers from I puritani offer further examples of the ways in which critics understood Lablache as an orchestral instrument, appreciated above all as part of the ensemble. In the act 1 polacca, in which Elvira shows off her wedding dress (“Son vergine vezzosa”), Grisi’s thrilling acrobatics soared over a three-­part accompaniment provided by Elizabeth Seguin (Enrichetta), Rubini (Arturo), and Lablache (Giorgio). The effect made a feature of the rather me­ chanical writing that characterized Lablache’s role in the opera. As the Morning Post critic explained: Grisi sings the burden with a grace and elegance without parallel, first luxuriating in roulades of exquisite finish and precision. . . . The other three singers aided and abetted in this attack upon the sense of hearing, until every listener almost imagined he was in fairyland, and the sounds were of no mortal origin. This polacca will become an established favourite.

We might imagine a larger-­than-­life human bagpipe, along the lines of that assembled by Malibran in Naples: typically, open fifths were maintained by Lablache and Rubini, with a seventh added by Seguin; they

100  Sarah Hibberd

alternated between the tonic and dominant. All three parts consisted of mesmerically repeated notes, which for Lablache included occasional octave leaps. More suggestively, the pianississimo repeated “sì, sì, sì” on a dominant pedal before the return of the theme suggests the effect of bellows emptying and then filling; Lablache clings to his repeated A while the inner voices shift chromatically, before they land together on the tonic chord (see ex. 5.1). The critics did not make explicit comparisons with the great double bass player Domenico Dragonetti, based in London during the same period, but there are strong similarities in the ways in which their performances were described.36 As Fiona Palmer has explained, Dragonetti was admired for a prodigiously strong left hand, coupled with flexibility and speed. After a brief period as a virtuoso soloist, he was mainly employed as an orchestral and chamber musician, in which role he demonstrated the power of the double bass as a reliable orchestral anchor and as an effective colleague to others in small ensemble work. He was reportedly most effective when accompanying recitative (he played in countless operas at the King’s Theatre) and his expression was strongly influenced by leading bass singers of the period—­including, after 1830, Lablache. (Indeed, Dragonetti and the cellist Robert Lindley seemed to occupy a similar place in the affections of London audiences as Lablache and Tamburini were to do.) Claims such as this from 1828 anticipate the praise for Lablache’s importance in ensemble singing in Puritani: “Dragonetti’s thundering double bass, marked time with such precision, as led us to the conviction that he was the foundation stone, on which this stupendous structure of harmony was erected.”37 Although Lablache’s reliability in an accompanying role was noted repeatedly by critics, it was as the star of the opera’s most popular number, the duet for two basses in act 2, “Il rival salvar tu dei,” that he was most acclaimed. In the cabaletta “Suoni la tromba,” in which Giorgio and Riccardo swear to take up arms and face death together, Lablache and Tamburini in turn imitate the opening obbligato trumpet. The final statement of the tune (which would more usually have been in sixths or tenths, according to the Rossinian model) is sung in unison: the voices apparently vibrated thrillingly together, almost indistinguishable from the trumpet, and causing the cabaletta to be immediately encored.38 This unusual duet builds up a richly sonorous effect that once again seems to transform the combined voices of the singers into an outsize instrument. In the solo statements, the first violins shade the final word of each of the first two lines (a repeated high C with D♭ auxiliary; then the C with a fall to A♭). The voice is joined in the third line by the trumpet, which together with

Elvira

Enriche�a

Arturo

Giorgio

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gen-

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Tempo 1.mo

Lento

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(Elvira places the veil on Enriche�a's head.)

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Œ Œ ‰ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ J J J J J J

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E x . 5.1 Bellini, I puritani, act 1 Polacca, “Son vergine vezzosa.”

‰ œœœ œ œ œœ œœ œœ pp œ . . . . œ ‰ Œ J

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102  Sarah Hibberd

? bb b œ b

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E x . 5.2 Bellini, I puritani, act 2 duet, cabaletta: “Suoni la tromba.”

clarinets and flutes supplies an arpeggiated figure and momentum up through C to the climactic high E♭ in the final line. In the unison reprise, violins, cellos, and trumpet double the first two lines, joined by clarinets and flutes in the third and piccolo for the final “gridando libertà!” (see ex. 5.2). This subtly building timbral texture fills out the melodic line and in­ tensifies the dramatic climax. Put slightly differently, the clarion sound of the voices in their rallying cry is amplified by individual instruments of the orchestra to become the sound of a richly sonorous, fortississimo, larger-­ than-­life “trumpet.” The concluding lines “Sia voce di terror / Patria! Vittoria! Onor,” which are repeated, are sung in thirds (Tamburini concluding above Lablache on a high F), with the entire melody doubled by high woodwind and violins—­the brass and lower strings and woodwind maintaining the rhythmic energy. In this further amplification of the timbre, the voices are subsumed into the orchestral texture.

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  103

The London critics’ admiration of the number’s expressive simplicity is telling. While reviewers in the Parisian press were most concerned with capturing the “electric” effect the combined voices had on the audience (and, a few months later, noted the number’s deleterious effect on Tamburini, who was unable to match Lablache’s strength39), London critics were more interested in the drama being conveyed and more admiring of Lablache’s physical characterization: “The various emotions are correctly described; and the gradual preparation for the unison of the two voices chanting the paramount duties of patriotism reflects the highest credit on Bellini for his happy conception”; “This celebrated singer, and, we may add, actor, has made quite a picture of the Puritan soldier. His gait and bearing are also very characteristic”;40 “[Lablache’s] walk, action and gestures were all equally adapted to his part”;41 “[A] matchless display of vocal power.”42 In other words, for London critics the vocal “spectacle” offered by Lablache in I puritani was rooted, on the one hand, in his reliable but unobtrusive support of his colleagues, blending into the background like an orchestral instrument; and, on the other, in his thrilling combination of direct dramatic expression and power in the duet. Sympathy and authority: these facets of his performance at one level resided in the character of Giorgio, a compassionate uncle, foil to Elvira’s less sympathetic father, Lord Walton. He negotiates between patriarchal demands (Elvira must marry suitably—­the Puritan colonel Riccardo) and human needs (she is in love with a lowly Stuart sympathizer), persuading first Lord Walton and then Riccardo to consider her emotional state and alter their behaviour. But at another level these characteristics map onto the models of masculinity outlined above: as we shall see, a productive tension between sympathy and authority was at the heart of Lablache’s attraction and was seen to be rooted in his larger-­than-­life physical presence.

Embodied Voice: Lablache as Actor Historically, corpulence has been a sign of wealth and health.43 However, as Vigarello has demonstrated, the technological advances of the eighteenth century in more affluent parts of Europe increased the availability of food and concomitantly the prevalence of obesity, so much so that a newly complicated picture of fatness emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century.44 The vibrancy of nerves, muscle, and nerve tensions, and the causes that might lead to a softening or relaxation of fibres, were popular subjects of enquiry. While older views and moral classifications retained a hold—­a healthy body was not “fat” but rather possessed

104  Sarah Hibberd

“radical moisture”45—­size came to be understood as correlating with individual attitudes, personality traits, and ways of thinking: a shift towards psychological rather than physiological understandings of the body.46 But the associations were contradictory. In the wake of the French Revolution, fatness was often conflated with corruption, egoism, and weakness, an identification personified in the body of Louis XVI—­and, closer to home, that of the Prince of Wales, who by the time he ascended the throne as George IV in 1820 was suffering from a range of diseases caused by his obesity.47 The lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-­Savarin was clearly unhappy about succumbing to this inevitable—­specifically male—­condition: There is a type of obesity that is confined to the belly. I have never seen it in women. . . . I call this type of fatness Gastrophoria and its victims Gastrophores. I myself am in their company; but although I carry around with me a fairly prominent stomach, I still have well-­formed lower legs, and calves as sinewy as the muscles of an Arabian steed. Nevertheless I have always looked on my paunch as a redoubtable enemy; I have conquered it and limited its outlines to the purely majestic.48

Nevertheless, in 1811 the physician Thomas Jameson suggested that a moderate degree of obesity was desirable, as a layer of fat around the nerves “diminished the irritability of the system” and led to “good humour and sociability.”49 Twenty years later, Edward Jukes explained that “fat, when moderately diffused over the body, indicates a sound state of health, and an easy disposition . . . [and] contributes to the beauty of the countenance.”50 Vigarello has concluded that the scientific discoveries at the end of the eighteenth century and their implications for understandings of the voice alluded to above (the identification of oxygen in the 1770s, the emphasis on the chest and its expansion) also contributed to this new image of corpulence. The role accorded to breathing gradually displaced morphology, and “the sober authority of the belly” was understood in terms of dynamism as well as bulk—­a conception that became popular in the literature of the period.51 Thus, Vigarello assures us, figures such as the travelling salesman in Balzac’s L’Illustre Gaudissart (1832) are “fleshy but not obese, bloated but not collapsed. His heavy ease becomes a form of sociability.” Nevertheless, such figures captured an ambivalence that allowed them to be “both seductive and repulsive.”52 A similar ambivalence is evident in English literature of the period. For example, Juliet McMaster has argued that Charles Dickens presented

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  105

two types of corpulence: fat-­cheery and fat-­bloated.53 At some basic level, she suggests, Dickens associated the curve with what is organic, natural, humane, and loving, and associated the line with what is artificial, mechanical, and unfeeling—­while also maintaining negative associations with fatness: oily and oozing, egotistical, obstinate, slow-­witted. She contrasts Mr Pickwick—­a plump man “charged with energy, solar or otherwise. He bursts, he beams, he bulges. . . . His fatness . . . is scarcely even heavy”—­with Joe (Mr Wardle’s fat boy), whose fat seems to have “its customary association with inertia.”54 Such connections were rooted in the phrenological work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johannes Spurzheim, and—­ more directly—­in Johann Kaspar Lavater’s philosophy. The latter had introduced the idea that physiognomy related not just to general types but also to the character traits of individuals.55 McMaster argues that Lavater’s popularity helped to create a readership receptive to Dickens’s detailed descriptions of physical appearance—­and of course this correlation of physical and psychological characteristics had a much broader fascination and acceptance. Writing about a later period, Karen Henson has linked the interest in physiognomy on the operatic stage to changes in lighting—­in her case the introduction of electricity in the 1880s, when bodies and faces became more discernible—­but it could equally be applied to the 1820s and the introduction of gas lighting, which seemed to have had an equally revolutionary impact on what audiences could see and how physical attributes were interpreted by reviewers.56 Lablache seems to have played characters across the range from “fat-­ bloated” to “fat-­cheery.” His imposing size surely added authority and realism to his portrayal of a repellent Henry VIII in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and rendered Falstaff ’s amorous ambitions ever more ridiculous in Balfe’s 1838 opera. Conversely, he used his size to enhance the comic potential of Leporello (on one occasion he tucked Masetto—­played by Giubilei—­under his arm and walked offstage).57 Crucially, he himself was full of energy—­“good” fat—­and admired for his lightning-­quick ability to switch between modes, provoking sympathy for his character at one moment and mockery or repulsion the next. However, it is the connection between fatness and sociability, which Jameson and Jukes had observed, that finds the clearest realization in Lablache’s performances. As we have seen, critics repeatedly observed his ability to blend into the sound-­world created by his fellow singers—­ despite his ability to swamp them if he chose.58 And such sympathy to musical balance was regularly understood in other contexts as a sort of sociability.59 But even more striking is the critics’ determination to detail

106  Sarah Hibberd

Lablache’s acting skills in both comic and serious roles (including facial expression, gesture, and stance) and his use of naturalistic recitative. His generous body, it seems, was inseparable from his sensitive powers of com­munication—­with audiences as well as co-­performers. George Taylor has explained how actors on the Georgian stage wanted to convey not just affective states of mind but all mental activities, including sensation, perception, and recognition. Audiences were reportedly thrilled by the immediacy of Kean perceiving something that overwhelmed him with feeling.60 Singers, too, were urged to imagine themselves as the person they were representing, and to capture the proper emotion “by endeavouring to recall any similar situation in which we ourselves may have been placed.”61 But as noted above, the 1820s saw a shift away from Kean’s melodramatic exaggeration towards a more restrained mode of expression. Isaac Nathan emphasizes that “suavity of manner and a modest deference, without the mixture of a shadow of servility, are both to the singer and to the actor the best passports to the lasting favour of the public, when joined to a moderate reliance on their own powers.”62 He continues, “To act well, the performer should, in a certain degree, divest himself of the idea that he is acting, or he will ever fail of being natural.  .  .  . Attitudes and gestures should arise from the feeling inspired by the part performed.”63 Lablache was frequently compared with the recently deceased French actor Talma, who had been a regular visitor to London (and whom many critics had seen in Paris). The two performers seemed to share a rare sensitivity and restraint. Talma had explained in his essay on the dramatic arts: The actor must appear to think before speaking; he must, by means of pauses, seem to take time to consider what he is going to say, but he must also by his facial expression eke out those silences and, by his bearing and the play of his features, indicate that during such pauses his mind is deeply preoccupied. . . . The feelings which sway him before his own voice can express them suddenly slip out in dumb show. Gesture, bearing, facial expression, must of necessity forestall words as the lightning flash precedes the thunder clap. This method heightens expression to a remarkable degree in that it lays bare a mind already deeply affected and impatient to declare itself by the most immediate means available.64

Comparisons were also made with T. P. (Thomas Potter) Cooke, who specialized in mute characters and whose sensitive expression was regu-

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  107

larly admired.65 Something of the nature of Lablache’s performances is captured by the following comments: His performance is chaste . . . his Comedy never verged on caricature, nor went beyond the display necessary to exhibit the singularities of the deaf . . . old merchant. He makes you weep, laugh, or shudder at pleasure, and frequently by a mere look or gesture or a simple movement of his body. . . . Look not at him on every occasion for rapid execution, a profusion of graces, chromatic ascents and descents. He aims not at effect by such trivialities. He attains it by dramatic truth, by accents of real melody, by the intensity of his feelings.66

Such effective but modest expression was commonly observed even when Lablache was at rest: “when silent his by-­play is an index to the passing action.”67 Many critics gave extensive, blow-­by-­blow descriptions of his physical movements and their effect on the audience, trying to capture the essence of his acting.68 For the young Clara Novello, Lablache’s face alone encapsulated everything: Once, to keep me awake whilst waiting in the green-­room, he enacted a tempest; sitting down, he placed two lighted candles on each side of his glorious face, and accompanying the play of the face with a few rare words, he let his face grow dark. “Now a flash of lightning”—­his eyes positively emitting one—­his face grew more and more sombre, till, the storm at its height, his face was absolutely terrific; then gradually the storm abated, the clouds dispersed, and sunshine returned. So magnificent a piece of face-­acting I never witnessed and shall never forget.69

Of course, Lablache’s physical bearing was only one facet of his qualities as an actor; his command of vocal expression was at least as important. English writers generally considered oratory the twin sister of music, and in both art forms, Nathan maintained, expression held the same inalienable sway. For Bacon, “the effects of reading or declamation are produced by the quality of tone, by inflexion, by emphasis, and by total cessations or pauses. Singing seems only to heighten these effects by using in a bolder manner the same agents. The principles of both are the same.”70 These are of a piece with Lablache’s later detailed instructions on recitative, pronunciation, and articulation in his singing method (1840):

108  Sarah Hibberd

the best recitative leaves “to the intelligence of the singer” how long one should “dwell” on each note: “Reflection is necessary for the good execution of the recitative. The singer ought to be thoroughly impressed with the dramatic situation, with the character of the person, with the nature of the idea, and with the value of the words which express it.”71 In addition to this immersion in the drama, attention should be paid to the performing space: “The degree of force of articulation ought to be subordinate to the sense of the words, to the dramatic situation, to the character of the person who is speaking, and, above all to the size of the room where one is singing, and to the number of hearers.”72 The success of his approach was born out by comments on his performances such as this: [His] intonation is remarkably clear and correct, and his articulation so distinct that each of his words is understood in every part of the house. . . . Almost everything he utters is productive of effect; and his recitative is given in a talking way, which is highly amusing, without ever being at variance with the instrumental modulations that fol­ low him.73

In short, Lablache’s restrained and natural style of acting seems to have resonated for London critics with the approach of leading figures on the spoken stage, and was in turn inseparable from the personality traits associated with his corpulence. The harmonious relationship between sensitivity and authority that he embodied so successfully invites us to return to the father figure and tensions at the heart of manliness in the early 1830s.

New Models of Masculinity: Lablache as Father Figure As mentioned earlier, during the first decades of the nineteenth century an understated, sincere masculinity came to be associated with political legitimacy, particularly with the Reform Act of 1832, which extended franchise rights.74 Joanne Bailey has developed this idea, pointing to nuances in the way that fatherhood was understood according to social rank: gentry and middling men were cautioned against prioritizing what were suitable activities for their class over tender fatherhood.75 For the middling man in particular this brought aspects of provision and tenderness into conflict: while socially dominant manhood drew on traditional values of authority and autonomy, it also involved qualities of care and feeling. Studies to date, Bailey claims, have tended to focus on the au-

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  109

thority of fathers at the expense of the emotional nature of fatherhood; this aspect of male identity can be profitably explored through theatrical representation, which highlights preoccupations of the period. Indeed, for London critics, some of the best examples of Lablache’s qualities as a singer-­actor were in the fatherly roles written for him in the mid-­1830s. We have already touched on the appeal of Giorgio in I puritani: the character manages to reconcile appreciation of his brother’s duty to marry his daughter to an appropriate suitor with sensitivity to Elvira’s plight. Likewise in the climactic scene of Donizetti’s Marino Faliero, the eponymous Doge’s political obligations are brought starkly into conflict with his tender fatherly instincts. The opera was premiered in Paris a few months before I puritani (although it arrived in London before Bellini’s opera). Here is what the critic for the Morning Post thought of Lablache’s performance in the title role (15 May 1835): [Fernando] is led forward to die at the feet of his uncle Faliero. This dying scene is worthy of every praise, for the composer has treated it like a man of genius. The attitude of Lablache, who is for a few seconds stupefied, and then at once the whole power of his tremendous voice is used, to describe his thirst for revenge upon the patricians. It was a noble piece of acting, as well as of surprising vocal effort, and when the sound of his voice towered over a strong chorus, with the orchestra playing forte, the applause was absolutely rapturous. The music of this finale of the second act displays resources of a high order of excellence. It is essentially dramatic, and, for a specimen of fine and vigorous writing, we would call attention to the change, when the chorus chant, in solemn strain, ‘Mort’, and, wound up by the words of Faliero, ‘Notte atroce, notte orrenda’.

Following Fernando’s dying words “Vendica tua consorte . . . / io moro,” which collapse through an octave from an eerie, chilling high A, Faliero gra­dually emerges from a trance of disbelief: “Ove son, chi piange qui? . . . / Mio nipote ov’è? morì? / Voi chi siete?—­che piangete? ma Fernando! ov’è? . . .” (see ex. 5.3). The ambiguous relationship between the two men embodies a terrible irony that reinforces the dramatic impact of the scene: Fernando is like a son to Faliero but is secretly in love with Faliero’s wife Elena; he has been fatally wounded defending her honour (and is planning to leave the city in order to preserve the dignity of Faliero as well as Elena). Furthermore, Faliero’s rage is all the more terrible for the way in which it builds with dignity through the cabaletta from this heart-­breaking scene

110  Sarah Hibberd

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E x . 5.3 Donizetti, Marino Faliero, act 2, Fernando’s death.

of tenderness and incomprehension, an emotional conflict captured in an 1836 lithograph (see fig. 5.2). The sheer power of Lablache’s voice here seems to have activated a release of emotion in his audience, one initiated in the death scene. First supported and amplified by the chorus as he asserts his power, Faliero soars repeatedly up to a high D (the note that “thunders out with so wonderful a power”),76 holding his own against a swirling, tempestuous orchestra and thunderous chorus in a collective declaration of vengeance (see ex. 5.4). This combination of strength and sensitivity seems to have been a distinctive quality, noted a few years earlier at Lablache’s London debut, in Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto. The Dramatic Magazine attempted to de­scribe his voice: “In its upper notes, soft and flexible almost as a tenor, it possesses, as it descends, a strength the most astonishing, positively overtopping, nay drowning the whole chorus and orchestra in their fortissimo passages, and yet preserving the most exquisite truth of tone, and not a symptom of straining.”77 In Mercadante’s I briganti the following year, the “transcendent talents” of Lablache and Rubini in the duet

Fig. 5.2   Luigi Lablache as the Doge in Donizetti’s Marino Faliero (1835) by Richard James Lane, printed by Graf & Soret, published by John Mitchell, published by Rittner & Goupil, after Alfred Edward Chalon; lithograph, published January 1, 1836. Source: National Portrait Gallery.

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E x . 5.4 Donizetti, Marino Faliero, act 2, climax of “Notte attroce, notte orrenda.”

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  113

“Deh! Risparmia ch’io racconti” provoked similar admiration: “The acting of Lablache is above all praise, his recognition and blessing of his son, the stern honour of the ancient Noble, and the emphatic declaration to restore Ernano to the rights wrested from him by Corrado, were all in turn equally grand and impressive.”78 Again, the relationship between the two men is complex: the Count is caught in the rivalry between his two sons—­the opera concludes with the beloved younger son Ernano freeing his father from imprisonment by the older brother Corrado, although in so doing he precipitates the suicide of the latter. In this duet, Lablache’s voice occupies the upper part of his range, frequently reaching up to an E♭, the audible effort surely contributing to the sympathetic effect of a father desperately striving to protect his son. Donizetti’s writing for Lablache in the title role of  Marino Faliero has been understood by at least one modern scholar as reflecting the singer’s declining powers: rather than high-­energy Rossinian acrobatics and impossible-­ to-­sustain legato, the role features broken, short-­breathed vocal lines and expressive declamation.79 It was an approach that seems to mirror his writing for a declining Filippo Galli as Enrico in Anna Bolena—­another role played successfully by Lablache in London. But this dismissal ignores the fact that Lablache was still singing an earlier repertory—­including flashy Rossinian roles—­during the 1830s. In fact, the early part of the decade was an important moment in his career: a number of serious roles were written for him, and the balance shifted from comic to serious parts around 1836, in Norma, Otello, Mosè in Egitto, Anna Bolena, and Le Siège de Corinthe (in Italian), together with I puritani, Marino Faliero, and I briganti. In these operas he mostly (though not exclusively) played sympathetic, aristocratic father figures, whose powerful effect on the audience derived from a combination of the (literal) weight of authority and a compelling sensitivity and sympathy. Heft was implicated in characterizations of complex, often tragic, individuals. It is perhaps not coincidental that Lablache seems to have begun putting on weight during the early 1830s. Portraits from the 1820s depict him as tall but relatively slender, but as he turned forty he became more substantial, with reviewers articulating the connections between size, power, and sensitivity outlined above (see also figs. 5.1 and 5.2). By the early 1840s, his proud belly was very much to the fore in all images.80 The lingering association of corpulence with wealth and class in such characters as Henry VIII and Falstaff was surely reinforced by Lablache’s own social interactions with the nobility in London, not least Princess Victoria, to whom he gave weekly singing lessons. But this association was

114  Sarah Hibberd

also contested in new ways in the opera house: mass in an operatic context was, after all, productive, shaping timbre and sensory impact as well as character. And in the newly created roles of Giorgio and Faliero, his corpulence seems to have been more readily understood in relation to sensitivity and sympathy rather than as a sign of corruption or misuse of aristocratic power. Although the popularity of Lablache’s comic interpretations never waned, this later series of characterizations seems to have given a stamp of authority to the serious bass role, and perhaps stimulated the transition to the tortured Verdian bass.81 In London, Lablache’s performances in such conflicted roles (and their reception) confirm some of the ways in which masculinity was being (re)negotiated as a fusion of authority and sensitivity, particularly for the middling classes. Material traces of the encounters between singers, composers, and audiences allow us to appreciate the effect of such unrecoverable voices. Images, scores, and above all reviews invite us to engage our creative imaginations: “voice” embodied the singer’s mentality, corporeality, and charisma as well as his sonic qualities. Francesco Florimo was channelling a common observation about Lablache’s “sublime” talents when he declared “Those not fortunate enough to see and hear him cannot imagine at all the perfection and ability of this singer.”82 But as the London critics demonstrated, effective and evocative writing that deployed metaphors and similes rather than description conjures up the impression made by the singer very vividly. Lablache’s larger-­than-­life physical and aural presence clearly created a thrilling effect at a visceral level, informed his sensitivity as an actor, and was inseparable from his personality. Moreover, such qualities of his “performing body” spoke to the modest model of masculinity that was emerging in cultural, political, and domestic spheres. Lablache’s “voice” presented the sound and vision of modern masculinity.

Notes I would like to thank, in addition to participants in the London Voices symposium, Céline Frigau Manning, and Laura Protano-­Biggs for stimulating discussions about Lablache. 1. Dramatic Magazine 2 (1 June 1830): 146. 2. Tatler, 6 June 1831. 3. Lablache’s London debut was as Geronimo in Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto at the King’s Theatre, on 13 May 1830; during the same season he also sang in Semiramide, Don Giovanni, Il turco in Italia, and L’inganno felice. His repertoire rapidly expanded, and in the following season he sang in the London premieres of L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (March 1831) and Anna Bolena ( July 1831). For a full list of his opera appearances, see

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  115

Clarissa Lablache Cheer, The Great Lablache: Nineteenth-­Century Superstar: His Life and His Times (London: Xlibris, 2009), Chronology A, 583–­616 (covering his entire career, 1812–­56). 4. In Britain, he also sang at a number of music festivals and concerts; Queen Victoria had regular singing lessons with him during his London sojourns from 1836 to 1854; see http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/. 5. Susan Rutherford, “ ‘La cantante delle passioni’: Giuditta Pasta and the Idea of Operatic Performance,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 107–­38, here 109. 6. Some key studies on individual voices include Mary Ann Smart, “The Lost Voice of Rosine Stoltz,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6, no. 1 (1994): 31–­50; Katherine Bergeron, “The Castrato as History,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 2 (1996): 167–­84 (on Farinelli); Gregory Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-­Louis Duprez,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 11–­31; Karen Henson, “Verdi, Victor Maurel and fin­de-­siècle Operatic Performance,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 59–­84. 7. Claire Brock, “Rousseauvian Remains,” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003), 136–­ 53, here, 149. 8. Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1. 9. McCormack, The Independent Man, 2. 10. McCormack, The Independent Man, 6. 11. David Kuchta, “The Making of the Self-­Made Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 1688–­1832,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54–­78. 12. McCormack, The Independent Man, 40. Caricatures by James Gillray of notable figures performing speeches similarly tell us much about the physicality of “independent” behaviour and manliness. 13. Joanne Bailey, “Masculinity and Fatherhood in England c.1760–­1830,” in What Is Masculinity?: Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 167–­88. She is in part responding to John Tosh’s proposition that fatherhood styles had shifted by Queen Victoria’s accession; he suggests that William Cobbett’s advocacy of physically demonstrative fathering in 1830 was defensive in tone because it was being rejected as effeminate. John Tosh, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity: Reflections on Nineteenth-­ Century Britain,” History Workshop 38 (1994), 179–­202. 14. McCormack, The Independent Man, 39. He shows how Henry Siddons’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1822) captured the conventions of the po­lit­ ical as well as the theatrical stage. 15. Laura Protano-­Biggs has examined the importance of sincerity in the London reception of Meyerbeer and the character of Fidès in the late 1840s (which can be understood as a continuation and intensification of the more socio-­politically charged sincerity of the early 1830s); “An Earnest Meyerbeer: Le Prophète at London’s Royal Italian Opera, 1849,” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 55–­73. 16. George Taylor, Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 40–­45. 17. Taylor, Players and Performances, 45. The performance (which took place at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on 17 May 1820) has been recognized as confirming the supremacy of a new style based on “domesticity” and “humanity”; see Harry M. Ritchie,

116  Sarah Hibberd

“Kean versus Macready: Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius,” Theatre Survey 17, no. 1 (1976): 28–­37. 18. Spectator, 15 December 1832. 19. Oxygen was discovered independently by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Uppsala and Joseph Priestley in Wiltshire ca. 1773/74, although the latter was first to publish; Lavoisier coined the name “oxygen” in 1777. Georges Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013; orig. publ. in French, 2010). 20. John B. West, Essays on the History of Respiratory Physiology (New York: Springer, 2015), 143–­46. 21. Continental writers initially remained focused on questions of the voice’s equivalence to wind and string instruments and the workings of the vocal tract. See James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-­Louis Duprez.” 22. Isaac Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis: An Essay on the History and Theory of Music, and on the Qualities, Capabilities, and Management of the Human Voice, 2nd ed. (London: Fentum, 1836), 121. (orig. publ. as An Essay on the History and Theory of Music, and on the Qualities, Capabilities, and Management of the Human Voice [London: Whittaker, 1823]). Nathan was an English composer and singing teacher. 23. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 118. 24. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 121. 25. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 121. 26. Richard Mackenzie Bacon, The Elements of Vocal Science: Being a Philosophical Enquiry into Some Principles of Singing (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1824); cited in Brent Jeffrey Monahan, The Art of Singing, A Compendium of Thoughts on Singing Pub­ lished between 1777 and 1927 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 46. 27. London Magazine 10 (August 1824): 148. 28. Cited in William Shakespeare, The Art of Singing (London: Metzler, 1899), 114. 29. Louis [sic] Lablache, A Complete Method of Singing: An Analysis of the Principles by Which Study Should Be Regulated in Forming and Developing the Voice, etc. (London: Chappell, [1840]), 3. 30. Tatler, 6 June 1831. 31. Morning Chronicle, 5 November 1832. 32. Examiner, 6 May 1832; Great Tom was the name given to the bell at St Paul’s that struck the hour and was used to announce deaths; also to the bell that preceded Big Ben at Westminster. 33. Musical World, December 1839; trans. from France musicale, 1830; cited in Cheer, The Great Lablache, 117. 34. This episode reputedly took place in Naples, and was described, for example, in the Dublin Observer (11 January 1834) and the South Eastern Gazette (14 January 1834) as a citation from a letter from Parry. It was reported in the London Post as having taken place in summer 1833; cited in Cheer, The Great Lablache, 155 (no date given). 35. Le Temps, 10 January 1835; Morning Chronicle, 22 May 1835. 36. Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 5 (1823): 266; cited in Fiona Palmer, Domenico Dragonetti in England (1794–­1846): The Career of a Double Bass Virtuoso (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 63. 37. At the York Festival in 1828; cited in Palmer, Domenic Dragonetti in England, 219. 38. See Mark Everist, “ ‘Tutti i francesi erano diventati matti’: Bellini and the Duet for Two Basses,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-­Century Paris

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  117

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 281–­307. For more on French interest in understanding the mechanism of the vocal tract (rather than the power of the lungs), see Sarah Hibberd, “Dissecting Lablache,” Laboratoire italien, 21: Musique italienne et sciences médicales au XIXe siècle, ed. Céline Frigau Manning, 20/2 (2017). 39. Henri Blaze de Bury (under the pseudonym H. W. [Hans Werner]), “Revue musicale,” Revue des deux mondes 4 (October 1835): 486–­97, here 490. 40. Morning Post, 27 May 1835. 41. Morning Post, 22 May 1835. 42. Morning Post, 27 May 1835. 43. Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat. 44. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word “obese” was rarely used before the nineteenth century; its first use in French dates from 1825, although it is found in Thomas Beddoes’s Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge (Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1799) and very occasionally in mid-­seventeenth-­century English sources. 45. Sander L. Gilman, Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 84. 46. The Dutch physician Malcolm Flemyng had been one of the first to argue for a physiological rather than moral definition of obesity: see his presentation to the Royal Society of Physicians in London, published as A Discourse on the Nature, Causes, and Cures of Corpulency (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1757); cited in Sander L. Gilman, “Enlightenment Dietetics,” in Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2008), 83–­85, here 84. 47. See, for example, E. A. Smith, George IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 48. Jean Anthelme Brillat-­Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy [1825], trans. M. F. K. Fisher (Washington: Counterpoint, 1999), 237; cited in Gilman, Fat Boys, 108. 49. Thomas Jameson, Essays on the Changes of the Human Body, at its Different Ages (London: Longman, 1811), 91; cited in Gilman, Fat Boys, 62. 50. Edward Jukes, On Indigestion and Costiveness: A Series of Hints to Both Sexe (London: John Churchill, 1833), 287; cited in Gilman, Fat Boys, 144. 51. Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat, 123. 52. Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat, 119 53. Juliet McMaster, Dickens the Designer (London: Macmillan, 1987) 23, 25. Pickwick Papers (1836) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) are central to her discussion. 54. McMaster, Dickens the Designer, 88. 55. See, for example, John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, ill. Thomas Holcroft, trans. (from French) Henry Hunter (London: J. Stockdale, 1810). 56. Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For an alternative study of perceptions of physiological-­psychological correlations in the 1820s and ’30s, see Céline Frigau Manning, “Phrenologizing Opera Singers: The Scientific Proofs of Musical Genius,” 19th-­Century Music 39, no. 2 (2015): 125–­41. 57. Presumably this was at the moment when Don Giovanni sets about seducing Zerlina in the first act. Frances Hullah, ed., Life of John Hullah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 13. 58. For example, following his London debut in Il matrimonio segreto, the critic of the Morning Post noted that although he “out-­topped” the tenor Donzelli at the conclusion

118  Sarah Hibberd

of the quartet “Tu mi dici che del Conte,” his voice was more usually characterized by “fulness and equability, combined with appropriate modulation” (14 May 1830). 59. See, for example, Elizabeth Morgan, “The Accompanied Sonata and the Domestic Novel in Britain at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” 19th-­Century Music 36, no. 2 (2012): 88–­100 at 94. 60. Taylor, Players and Performances, 30–­31. 61. Richard Mackenzie Bacon, Elements of Vocal Science: Being a Philosophical En­ quiry into Some of the Principles of Singing, ed. Edward Foreman (Champaign, Ill.: Pro Musica Press, 1966), 74–­75; cited in Robert Toft, Heart to Heart: Expressive Singing in England, 1780–­1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. 62. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 249. 63. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 252. 64. Talma, Quelques Réflexions sur Lekain et sur l’art théâtral, 1825; cited in Herbert Collins, Talma: A Biography of an Actor (London: Faber, 1964), 353–­54. 65. Lablache was compared to both Kean and Cooke in a review of La gazza ladra in the Morning Post (10 April 1835). 66. The first example comes from the Morning Post (17 May 1830), for his performance in Il matrimonio segreto; the second was published in the Musical World (14 No­ vember 1839; trans. from orig. in France musicale in 1830) and refers more generally to his approach across a range of roles. 67. Review in the Morning Post (10 April 1835) of a performance of La gazza ladra. 68. See, for example, the reviews of Falstaff ( July 1838). 69. Clara Novello’s Reminiscences, compiled by her daughter Contessa Valeria Gigliucci (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 48–­49. 70. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 223–­24; Bacon, Elements of Vocal Science, 73; both cited in Toft, Heart to Heart, x, 156. 71. Lablache, A Complete Method of Singing, 83. 72. Lablache, A Complete Method of Singing, 86. 73. Review of Il matrimonio segreto, in the Times (14 May 1830); cited in Cheer, The Great Lablache, 113. 74. McCormack, The Independent Man, 105. See also Philip Carter, Men and the Emer­ gence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–­1800 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000); Karen Harvey, “The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–­1800,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 296–­311. 75. Bailey, “Masculinity and Fatherhood in England.” 76. Morning Post (May 1830; in his debut in Il matrimonio segreto); cited in Cheer, The Great Lablache, 112. 77. “Theatrical Journal: King’s Theatre,” Dramatic Magazine 2 (1 June 1830): 146 (reporting on performance of 12 [13] May 1830). 78. Morning Post, 1 July 1836. 79. Rodolfo Celletti, “La vocalità di Donizetti,” 1o convegno internazionale di studi donizettiani (Bergamo: Azienda autonoma di turismo, 1983), 107–­47, here 142–­44. 80. For example, compare the early lithograph by Achille Devéria (from the 1820s) with the engraving by John Henry Robinson published by Ernest Gambart & Co., after Thomas Heathfield Carrick, on 15 October 1846 (both held at the National Portrait Gallery in London). Two images from the mid-­to late 1830s show him with a developing paunch: a sketch made by Queen Victoria in 1837 (now in the Royal Collection, RCIN980007.d) and a lithograph of Lablache and Mario in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at

Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London  119

the Théâtre Italien in Paris in 1839, by Alexandre de Valentini, after C. Voct (held at the Wellcome Library, ICV No 16462). He was immortalized as a rotund Figaro in Dantan’s 1858 caricature (at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris). 81. See Karen Henson, “Introduction: Divo Worship,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 1–­9, here 7. 82. Francesco Florimo, Cenno storico sulla scuola musicale di Napoli (Naples: Lorenzo Rocco, 1869), 2079; cited in Cheer, The Great Lablache, 65.

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Ch a p t er 6  

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Adelaide Kemble and the Voice as Means Matil die Thom Wium

In the last quarter of 1837, the English soprano Adelaide Kemble (1815–­ 79) was travelling central Europe (Carlsbad, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Brussels) with her father, actor Charles Kemble, performing ad hoc, meeting established musicians (notably Mendelssohn and De Bériot), and trying to predict her chances of success as an opera singer. The prospects looked good. In the next year, 1838, she would return to the Continent to begin a career that held much promise but ended after a mere four years: from 1838 to 1840 she sang in Venice, Trieste, Milan, Padua, Mantua, Bologna, and Naples; in 1841 and 1842 she was engaged at Covent Garden, but she retired at the end of 1842 when her marriage to Edward Sartoris coincided with the failure of her father’s management of the theatre. Despite the brevity of Kemble’s career, she is an intriguing and rewarding figure to study. As a member of England’s foremost theatrical family of the period, her insights into life on stage (especially those of women) are of at least as much interest as those of her better-­known sister Fanny, and more so for opera scholars.1 While Fanny published her journals and correspondence in later life, few of Adelaide’s writings have been accessible to scholars until the recent bequest (in 2012) of a sizeable collection of correspondence by her great-­grandson to the Garrick Club in London.2 This correspondence has been the object of study once before, when it served as the basis for Ann Blainey’s 2001 book Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters, but it has not received sustained scholarly attention.3 Besides a number of songs that appeared in the 1860s and 1870s, Adelaide Kemble’s publications comprised an 1867 novella entitled A Week in a French Country-­House (a fictionalized memoir: part roman à clef, part Austenesque romance) and a collection of short stories and memoir essays, Past Hours, including a short

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reminiscence of Kemble’s lessons with Giuditta Pasta. All these works, however, pale beside the spontaneity and poignancy of the letters.4 Passages in which the young Kemble describes her performances and reflects on her career are a particularly strong point of the collection, especially in the copious letters to the family of Count Franz von Thun-­Hohenstein, whom Adelaide and her father befriended during their 1837 tour.5 One of Kemble’s letters to the Thuns—­an example especially illustrative of her self-­conception and her self-­presentation towards them—­was written from Leipzig on 8 November 1837: Dessauer6 said I was like Corinne, which made me rather angry, as I do not particularly care to be reckoned like the heroine of a French romance, yet one thing that she says when dying, always touched me very much—­“oh mes amis, rappelez vous quelquefois mes vers, mon âme y est empreinte!”7 If you did but know how I who undervalue singing as an act in general, now prize my voice as a means of recalling me occasionally to your memory: but you will not quite forget me!

In this rich paragraph, we can observe Kemble defining her role as a singer and a woman. Crucially, she both claims and distances herself from different facets of the mythology of the prima donna—­the complex set of ideas that came to inform the adoration and abuse of female opera singers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss’s formulation, such ideas included “vanity, self-­dramatization, capriciousness, irritability, and glamour,” while Susan Rutherford has shown how the image of the “siren” combined notions of, on the one hand, supernatural, transcendent musical power invested in the voice, and, on the other, sexual availability and agency, demanding singers negotiate the “fault lines between ‘diva’ and ‘whore’.”8 Importantly for my purposes here, the discourses around prima donnas, while celebrating their talent, often reviled female opera singers for the way in which they supposedly used their remarkable voices as the means to acquire money and power. Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), a foundational text for fictional portrayals of opera singers, identified the singer with the siren myth and made her a tragic heroine—­one whose death might be understood as a renunciation of a world in which her artistry and agency were incompatible with romantic love.9 For Phyllis Weliver, the legacy of Corinne to the nineteenth-­century idea of the prima donna, especially in England, was to underscore that “the prima donna may be a familiar, adulated figure on stage and page, but she was still different, exotic, and foreign as compared with then ideal, quietly controlled

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English femininity.”10 No wonder that later nineteenth-­century novels (mainly those written by men) featuring singers would sometimes construct, as Rutherford observed, “an idealized, passive version of the female singer” as a “counter-­image to the siren.”11 What Kemble may be trying to accomplish—­either consciously or unconsciously—­in her letter, then, could be summarized as follows: to resist the melodramatic, superficial, and narcissistic components of prima donna mythology through her disavowal of the perceived association with Corinne and the genre of the “French romance,” emphasizing that she herself “undervalue[s] singing as an act in general”; to lay claim nonetheless to Corinne’s status as a serious creative artist in Romantic terms (evident from her identification with de Staël’s notion that the artist’s creativity expresses her soul); and to cast her voice as a means of evoking a gentle memory of domestic music-­making for her friends, commensurate with accepted contemporary ideas of appropriate musicianship for women. In short, if the “ideal woman” was no less a myth than the “diva” in the nineteenth century, the one could yet be drawn on to mitigate the other. If Kemble’s singing voice was a means to specific ends, and if she negotiated conceptual space for herself with respect to others who might regard her voice as a means to different ends, the idea of Kemble’s voice as “means” may be a productive lens through which to consider the entanglements of the nineteenth-­century prima donna myths. Such entanglements have been discussed in other recent contributions to the field of prima donna studies. Poriss has pointed out how singers’ self-­writing tried to neutralize the negative aspects of prima donna mythology, something we can observe in Kemble’s letter above (although Poriss’s examples concerned writing intended for publication).12 Poriss draws on the work of both John Rosselli and Rutherford to point out how, in fiction and in journalism about singers across historical eras, the “normal, hardworking musician” functions as “a construction that helps to counteract the myth of the divine monster.”13 If, in this essay, I take another look at such myth interactions in writings about Kemble’s voice as means, in one sense I am offering a response to Roger Parker’s question, posed in his review of the Oxford Handbook of Opera: “Is it possible to deal critically with the idea of the diva without simultaneously perpetuating it?”14 It is tempting to regard prima donna myths as belonging in the first place to journalism, and consequently to hope that private sources may furnish us with the materials to offer a corrective; but, as we have seen, Kemble felt no less compelled to fashion her identity with reference to such myths (whether by playing along with them or resisting them) in personal correspondence. Perhaps the scholarly approach most respectful of both

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historical and present-­day singers is to listen attentively for dissonance within and between private and public documents: for the clash of prima donna myths with other myths In my opening example from Kemble’s correspondence, we saw her conception of her voice as a means of recalling her presence to the Thun family via their memories of her singing in a domestic setting. Shortly afterwards she continued along the same lines, writing that she too was reminded of them when she sang. Again, she seems to underscore her social integration with the aristocratic hostess of the soirée she describes, as well as with one of the Thun sons who was present (either Fritz or Leo): I dined with Dessauer & your son at the Princesse Clary’s yesterday & I sang a good deal in the evening—­I did not sing one thing that did not bring with it a regretful & most affectionate remembrance of  Tetschen—­ with “I tuoi frequenti palpiti” came a dear thought of you—­with “se il padre m’abbandona” one of your husband—­with the air from the Puritani one for Franz & the Spanish & Neapolitan songs were each of them thoughts for Anna & Yuza.15

The familial mould in which she presents her relationship with the Thuns is perhaps not surprising: she was in the midst of a romantic relationship with the eldest son, Francis (or Franz), begun when Adelaide and her father visited the Thuns at their castle at Tetschen (present-­day Děčín in the Czech Republic) early in the 1837 tour. Although this relationship did not lead to marriage, it was serious enough for her to write to Franz individually as part of her letters to the family, first obliquely (“I send my warmest love to all your house—­by no means excepting Franz—­if he will not be shocked at a young lady’s so far transgressing the bounds of propriety as it is at present understood”),16 and later overtly, again emphasizing the memory of her singing in their castle: For Franz—­I confess I was a little surprised at hearing from you but more pleased—­thank you for your note—­Is it possible that some memory of my voice has travelled with you to Peruty? The most I could have hoped or expected was that a few stray sounds might hang for a little while in the corners of the dining room at Tetschen.17

The notion that the ephemeral voice can be sublimated in memory, as Rutherford reminds us, has often accompanied the idea of the “lost voice” in its many manifestations as a trope in operatic history.”18 Kemble’s own

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version of this idea, especially in its connection to romantic love, may have taken some inspiration from the very opera she seems to associate with Franz Thun. Remembered voices are an important element of the love story between Elvira and Arturo in Bellini’s I Puritani: when Elvira believes that Arturo has abandoned her, she loses her reason, and her mad scene, “Qui la voce sua soave . . . Vien diletto”—­which we know to be the very “air from the Puritani” that Kemble mentions in her letter—­refers specifically to the memory of his voice.19 What is more, their reconciliation in act 3 is preceded and facilitated by a moment when the lovers hear each other sing in a moment of shared recognition. Kemble’s extension of this idea from opera to real life—­casting herself as a benign siren whose voice follows her beloved on his travels in the hope of bringing him back to her—­strikes a precarious balance between the “public singer” and “private woman” components of her identity. On the one hand, conceptualizing her voice as a gateway to memory in the contexts of friendship and romantic love might have been motivated by the desire to emphasize domestic over public performance, especially in her relationship with an aristocratic family she was hoping to marry into, who were opposed to her pursuit of a career in opera.20 On the other, Kemble achieves this very conceptualization by means of an operatic trope: a coloratura aria she performed herself, an emphatic affirmation of her prima donna persona. There is, however, another possible reason why the notion of voice-­as-­ reminder might have appealed to Kemble, and why she reached for this imagery in her letters to the Thuns at this time. The idea of the voice as a stimulus to memory and personal affection may also function as a mask for what her voice was much more obviously a means to, namely, money. There are other signs of her preempting associations with the “avaricious prima donna” stereotype, even before her debut: she refers to the money she hopes to earn in her operatic career as “that golden trash which supplies one with the best substitutes for happiness—­pictures & statues,” and makes much of her indignation at being given a bracelet in payment for a performance at an aristocratic soirée (“I had sung out of good will, & was wounded at being paid for it. Besides she has no right to pay me as I am not a concert singer”).21 Payment for singing in aristocratic homes remained a sore point, especially in England, where she probably felt that accepting such payment would underscore the differences in social status between her and her hosts, whereas she hoped to be accepted in such circles. In 1842, her sister Fanny explained to her friend Harriet St Leger: She does not intend to be paid for singing in society at all. . . . Of course, her declining such engagements will greatly diminish her income,

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popular singers making nearly half their earnings by such means; but I am sure that, situated as we all are, she is right, and will avoid a good many annoyances by this determination, though her pocket will suffer for it.22

This explanation comments on an episode when the Duke of  Wellington invited Adelaide to sing in his residence at Apsley House; she sang, but refused payment.23 Interestingly, in this instance, when the Duke brought a bracelet to her house the following week, Fanny commented that Ade­ laide “value[d] [it] highly, as she ought to do.”24 If her voice as a means of making money was an aspect of her career and image that Kemble felt she had to manage carefully, that aspect also presented challenges for others. During her career in Italy, her letters suggest that her father protected her against exploitative theatre managers (“I found it so odious to have to contend with the cabals of the Manager at Milan that we paid him a considerable sum to release me from my engagement, & should have considered ourselves happy on regaining our freedom at any price”);25 but when Kemble returned to England, she had no such protection against her father himself. When she gave her first performances at Covent Garden in 1841, the theatre was still managed by Lucia Vestris;26 Fanny described Adelaide’s engagement there as “extremely agreeable and advantageous,” adding that she was offered “a very handsome salary.”27 However, the theatre evidently had financial problems: although Fanny observed that Adelaide’s popularity had revived “the fortunes of the unfortunate theatre,”28 that upturn proved unsustainable. Matters went from bad to worse under Charles Kemble’s management in the next year. As early as January 1842, Fanny wrote to Harriet St Leger, reflecting with some exasperation on Covent Garden as a destructive legacy for the Kembles: My father, I am sorry to say, gets no rent from the theatre. The nights on which my sister does not sing the house is literally empty. Alas! It is the old story over again: that whole ruinous concern is propped only by her. That property is like some fate to which our whole family are subject, by which we are every one of us destined to be borne down by turn, after vainly dedicating ourselves to its rescue.29

By October, the situation was even more desperate: “My father has a violent lumbago; so, I am sorry to say, has the theatre, which, in spite of my sister’s exertions, can hardly keep upon its legs.”30 The Athenaeum commended Adelaide’s magnanimity in forgoing her fee throughout Decem-

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ber to keep the theatre afloat, but the situation was clearly untenable.31 Having accepted the marriage proposal of Edward Sartoris (a wealthy landowner and later politician) in April 1842, Kemble married him in a quiet ceremony during her tour of Scotland in July. Given the theatre’s perilous state of affairs, the couple agreed that she would sing professionally until the end of the year, delaying the announcement of their marriage until then.32 When Fanny saw Adelaide perform Norma for the last time, she was prompted to reflect on her sister’s decision to marry: a reflection that adds to the complexities of the voice/love/money nexus. In my interpretation of Kemble’s letters to the Thuns, I have suggested that Adelaide drew on the idea of the voice as means to stimulate affectionate memory in order to deflect the idea of the voice as means to accumulate money. Now, however, Fanny despaired of Adelaide giving up her career, and thus an independent income and social status, in favour of financial dependence on her husband: I was surprised to find how terrible it was to me to see my sister, that woman most dear to me, deliberately leave a path where the sure har­ vest of her labor is independent fortune, and a not unhonorable distinction, and a powerful hold upon the sympathy, admiration, and even kindly regard of her fellow-­creatures, while she thus not unworthily ministers to their delight, for a life where, if she does not find happi­ ness, what will atone to her for all this that she will have left?33

Fanny’s line of argument here asserts the respectability of using one’s voice as a means to money (pace her earlier exasperation at her father’s exploitation of Adelaide), and to view marriage as an alternative that, by contrast, represented a personal risk. These remarks were probably inspired by Fanny’s own unhappy marriage, which would end in divorce in 1849, with severe financial and emotional consequences. But Fanny’s double-­negative formulations are revealingly tentative: to call fame a “not unhonorable distinction” or to describe the prima donna as “not unworthily minister[ing] to [her audience’s] delight” shows that she was as tensely aware as Adelaide of the prevailing conceptions of their day. There is some sense of futility in such arguments about which element of the “love/money” or “public/private” binaries map onto the “respectable/not-­respectable” binary. Clearly, marriage concerned money as much as it did love, and for some nineteenth-­century opera singers an upper-­class spouse provided an advantageous ending to a career in opera.34 It would probably be fair to include Adelaide Kemble in this

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group; although she felt the loss of personal independence after marriage, she also regarded her new state as a fortunate escape from notably difficult working conditions. What is more, she evidently derived profound meaning from her relationships with her husband and (especially) her children. The voice, then, could turn out to be a means to love and money—­but while they sang professionally, singers had to negotiate the risks associated with the myth of the greedy-­seductress prima donna with utmost caution. Soon after Kemble’s retirement, her friend Anna Jameson published a long essay to accompany a series of portraits of her by John Hayter, commissioned by the Marquis of Titchfield (who was infatuated with Kemble).35 Jameson takes pains to distinguish between “une artiste, in the French sense,” and “what we and the Germans designate as an artist.” The former’s “beauty, her grace, her art, her genius itself, are means only to an end, and that end the most vulgar, and altogether unsanctified—­the acquisition of money for merely selfish purposes.” In contrast: An artist, properly so called, is a woman who is not ashamed to gain a livelihood by the public exercise of her talent—­rather feels a just pride in possessing and asserting the means of independence—­but who does not consider her talent merely as so much merchandise to be carried to the best market, but as a gift from on High, for the use or abuse of which she will be held responsible before the God who bestowed it.36

The difference lies both in a performer’s attitude to the money she can earn (greed vs. responsible independence) and in the divine vocation that Jameson regards as the artist’s main purpose in a career (again, in contrast to making money as a primary objective). In this way, the myth of the divinely inspired artist, focused on the transcendent rather than the mundane, could function as another counterbalance to negative prima donna myths. It is no coincidence that Jameson’s “artist” is defined in the negative, by not being focused on making money—­as Jerome McGann pointed out as early as 1983, “one of the basic illusions of Romantic ideology is that only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by ‘the world’ of politics and money.”37 Of course, the singer as channel of the supernatural was already a central part of prima donna mythology, and there are many examples of its application to Kemble (one poem about her ends “Supercelestial seems the heavenly tone, / for, in thy notes, the angels find their own”).38 But Jameson claims for Kemble

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a version of the artist myth that implies a different kind of agency and responsibility with respect to aesthetic creativity. Rather than associations with the siren, angel, or goddess, we have something more akin to the normative myth of the male Romantic artist. Bound up with Christian doctrine as it often was, this allows Jameson to adjust the supernatural components of prima donna myth so as to portray Kemble as a creative artist in her own right: a genius in control of, and accountable to God for, her own gift. Rather than being a passive vehicle for the divine, Jameson’s artist takes an active part in the aesthetic process, an observation that allows us to draw a connection with Poriss’s hardworking musician figure, since art as vocation implies the imperative of work as sacred duty. For Jameson, the “work” here concerns not only the rehearsals and performances that constitute an opera singer’s professional life, but also the idea that musical and vocal aptitude must be honed through consistent, conscientious study: this is how the artist-­singer proves herself a worthy recipient of her God-­given talent. In some journalistic writing about Kemble, this strategy is even extended to imply that she had an unexceptional voice, one that she had then perfected through years of training. In one piece, she is expressly contrasted in this respect with earlier nineteenth-­ century female singers such as Angelica Catalani, who was “led astray” by “too great a facility and richness of organ.”39 The trope also appears in Henry Chorley’s assessment of her career: “Such was Miss Adelaide Kemble: a musical artist in right of resolution, rather than liberal nature. Her voice, originally limited, had been moulded, rendered flexible, and extended in compass, by study and incessant practice, till it became capable of every inflexion, of every possible brilliancy.”40 Fanny’s impression of Adelaide’s vocal study is perhaps the most cynical; although she admired Adelaide’s tenaciousness, she felt that the “artificial” extension of her range in order to sing high soprano parts was not ultimately successful: “Adelaide’s real voice is a high mezzo-­soprano, and in stretching it to a higher pitch—­that of the soprano-­assoluto—­which she has done with infinite pains and practice, in order to sing the music of the parts she plays, I think she has impaired the quality, the perfect intonation, of the notes that form the joint, the hinge, as it were, between the upper and middle voice; and these notes are sometimes not quite true—­at any rate, weak and uncertain.”41 (One must wonder, with the siblings’ biographer Ann Blainey, if such a judgement was coloured by filial jealousy.)42 Jameson was not alone in claiming artist status for a professional female singer in order to legitimize her independent income through performing in the public sphere. As David Kennerley notes, some of the arguments that would be used to justify women’s work outside the home

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during the women’s movement of the 1850s had precursors in the periodical press as early as the 1820s and drew on discourses of professionalism as well as ideals of the Romantic artist.43 The impetus to apply the male Romantic genius myth to female artists is also evident from contemporary fiction: Linda M. Lewis has argued that de Staël and George Sand “created the female myth that was to become the counterpart of Romanticism’s Prometheus/Icarus myth of artistic manhood” in Corinne (1807) and Consuelo (1842), and that this myth inspired English authors such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mrs Humphry (Mary) Ward to conceive of their own literary artistry along similar lines.44 Moreover, the character of Consuelo (most often said to be based on Pauline Viardot, but probably derived in some respects from Kemble)45 shows significant evolution from that of Corinne with regard to the heroine as Romantic artist. As Kari E. Lokke argues: [In Consuelo] Sand displaces the conflict between domesticity and public performance, so prominent in Corinne, and the cornerstone of the ideology of separate spheres, onto the psyche of her heroine and significantly transforms it into a conflict between love and independence, thus, in a sense, refusing to legitimate the public/private, professional/domestic conflict so central to Corinne.46

If  Jameson recast the “supernatural” component of prima donna mythology by shifting the artist-­singer away from the figure of the siren and towards the figure of the Romantic genius, Fanny mitigated the myth of the evil enchantress by drawing on Romantic ideology in a different way. More than once she commends Adelaide’s capacity to move her audiences emotionally, including Fanny herself (“My sister’s singing excites me to such a degree that I am obliged, after crying my bosom full of tears, to run out of the room”).47 When Chorley related to Fanny that, in Italy, the audience cheered Adelaide in Norma before the royalty did, thereby breaking etiquette, Fanny interpreted their reaction as “proof of [Ade­ laide’s] power over her fellow-­creatures, and of the irresistible human sympathies which are occasionally . . . stronger than social conventionalities.”48 If “power over her fellow-­creatures” was precisely what made the siren a threatening figure, Fanny refashions this power as “irresistible human sympathy,” a reaction she deems so deep-­seated as to overrule the acquired behaviours of propriety. The idea that the effect of music on human emotions can be understood as an instance of “sympathetic resonance” (which derives from the spiritual interconnectedness of the universe) has a legacy that reaches back to antiquity and the Renaissance,

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but as Giuseppe Gerbino points out, it continued to support explanations of the emotional appeal of music “for centuries . . . after its philosophical underpinnings had waned,”49 including, I would add, the Romantic notion that music was a universal medium for the expression of emotion, of the ineffable, of the transcendent. Here in Fanny’s letter, the conception of music’s emotional power as sympathetic resonance helps displace the idea of the prima donna’s voice as a means of manipulation, replacing it with the idea of her voice as a means of shared spiritual experience leading to edification and catharsis. Female singers were frequent foci for the propagation of notions of national identity in England in this period, with such views often accompanied by specifically anti-­Italian prejudice.50 It should ths come as no surprise that Kemble’s performances, as a singer from a prominent En­ glish theatrical family who had also attained success in Italy, provoked reactions with a nationalist slant. Although she excited patriotic pride in some commentators (the Illustrated London News called her and Mary Shaw “two distinguished ornaments to English song”),51 numerous critics used her success as a stimulus to grumble about the paucity of English operas: “Norma” is to be produced on Tuesday next, and Rossini’s “Gazza Ladra,” and other Italian operas, are to be brought forward for Miss Adelaide Kemble. What are Messrs. Bishop, Barnett, E. J. Loder, Macfarren, W. S. Bennett, and Rooke, to do with their untried and shamefully neglected scores? Madame Vestris usually caters substantially—­a dish of maccaroni [sic] might occasionally be palatable, but a succession of Italian sugar-­plums is a sad deterioration of her ordinary bill of fare.52

Another critic hoped “that her great success is only the foundation of an English Opera, which shall raise us above our helpless dependency on foreign art, and enable us at last to say we have a national school of our own.”53 For her part, Anna Jameson developed the popular nationalist perspective into an anecdote asserting that Kemble had expressed just such a wish to her friends before embarking on her career: When Adelaide Kemble prepared to make her debut on the English stage, it was with the acknowledged determination to attain, by every possible exertion, distinction and independence: but it was also with some larger and less selfish views than are usually entertained by a

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young aspirant for public applause. . . . She wished to naturalise the Italian lyrical drama, with all its beautiful capabilities, on the English stage, to cultivate a taste for a higher and better school of dramatic music.54

Such a motivation is not quite borne out by Kemble’s correspondence with her family and friends, even if she did join her father around 1839 in congratulating Alfred Bunn on his “success in the establishment of a real English Opera” at Drury Lane.55 The phrase “to naturalise the Italian lyrical drama . . . on the English stage” may be understood as a reference to the English translations of Italian operas Kemble performed at Covent Garden.56 In this line of reasoning, even if the ultimate objective is the founding of an English school of opera, the first aim should be a well-­established tradition of English-­language performances of Italian opera, so that audiences might grow accustomed to the (aesthetically superior) Italian style, and English composers might emulate it. Jameson’s attribution of patriotic intentions to Kemble are unremarkable as hagiography, and the exhortation that English opera should embrace Italian opera as its model was not a novel one in the 1840s—­but what makes her claim particularly pertinent to my present purposes is how it is constructed, once more, as a mitigation of prima donna mythology. The heroic Kemble, committed to serving a national ideal larger than herself, is contrasted with the vain, self-­serving norm for opera singers (“aspirants for public applause”). In this way using the voice to realize national goals, to serve a greater good, downplays and ennobles the money and fame gained in the process. The conceptions of Adelaide Kemble’s voice as means to a wide spectrum of ends reveal different ways in which the singer herself, as well as others who wrote about her, negotiated prima donna myths and their application. In the texts explored in this essay, the money-­grubbing prima donna stood out as the stereotype Kemble and her proponents seemed most careful to avoid.57 While Fanny Kemble and Anna Jameson explicitly defended the respectability of professional singing as a source of income for women, a more common strategy for countering this aspect of prima donna mythology was to emphasize other purposes Kemble’s voice could be construed to serve. In so doing, the writings refashioned prima donna mythology by recuperating its positive aspects (exceptional vocal and musical talent and skills, the ability to communicate aesthetic and emotional content through singing) with recourse to other myths. These include the ideal of domestic femininity, which Kemble invoked

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by portraying her voice as a means of memory sustaining private relationships of friendship and love; the figure of the Romantic genius, used by Anna Jameson and others to characterize Kemble’s artistry as a divine vocation demanding conscientious work; the idea that music’s power to move others emotionally constitutes a sympathetic resonance, a way to understand the voice as a means of transcendence and catharsis; and, finally, nationalism, which allowed an altruistic construction of Kemble’s intentions as an opera singer.

Notes 1. At this time, two of her father’s siblings had recently retired from very successful careers: Sarah Siddons appeared on stage for the last time in 1819, and John Phillip Kemble retired in 1817. Like Adelaide’s father, Charles, her uncle John Phillip had managed Covent Garden Theatre for some years before his retirement with mixed success; perhaps the definitive event of the latter’s management was the “Old Price” riots of 1809, when “much ill-­feeling was excited against all bearers of the name of Kemble”; see John Joseph Knight, “Kemble, John Phillip,” in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 30 (London: Smith, Elder, 1892), 372–­78, here 376. By the time of Adelaide’s 1837 European tour, her sister Fanny had already retired from her early career at Covent Garden (1829–­1834) to be married to Pierce Butler; she would, however, resume her career after the marriage broke down in 1845. 2. For Fanny’s memoirs, journals, and correspondence, see Frances Ann Kemble, Records of a Girlhood (London: Richard Bentley, 1878), Records of Later Life (New York: H. Holt, 1882), and Further Records, 1848–­1883: A Series of Letters (London: Richard Bentley, 1890). Kemble’s collected letters were donated to the Garrick Club by Eric Lubbock (1928–­2016), then Lord Avebury; they now form part of the Kemble Papers. All references to Adelaide Kemble’s letters in this essay are to items in this collection. 3. See Ann Blainey, Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001). Blainey was friendly with Kemble’s granddaughter Adelaide Lubbock and had the correspondence on loan for the purpose of writing the monograph. 4. See Adelaide Sartoris, A Week in a French Country-­House (London: Smith, Elder, 1867) and Adelaide Sartoris, Past Hours, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1880). The heroine of the former book is a would-­be opera singer who inherits a fortune and is dissuaded by her relations from a career on the stage. During the eponymous “week,” she receives a marriage proposal from a wealthy man who falls in love with her, but she rejects him because of his dismissive view of the profession and the general milieu of opera. 5. See Matildie Thom Wium, “Adelaide Kemble and Opera Arias in Concert and Drawing Rooms,” in Opera Outside the Box, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Routledge, forthcoming), which focuses on Kemble’s descriptions in her letters of opera arias she had performed in concert and domestic settings. 6. The Viennese composer Josef Dessauer was a close friend of Kemble’s and had visited the Thuns at Tetschen with her and her father. 7. “Remember my verses sometimes, for my soul is stamped on them”; see Germaine de Staël, Corinne, Or Italy, ed. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 402.

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8. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, “Introduction,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxvii–­xlvi, here xxvii; Susan Rutherford, “Sirens and Songbirds,” in The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–­1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27–­57, here 32. 9. See Toril Moi, “A Woman’s Desire to Be Known: Expressivity and Silence in Corinne,” in Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Ghislaine McDayter (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 143–­75. 10. Phyllis Weliver, “George Eliot and the Prima Donna’s ‘Script,’ ” The Yearbook of English Studies 40, nos. 1–­2 (2010): 103–­20, here 108. 11. Rutherford, “Sirens and Songbirds,” 45. 12. Hilary Poriss, “Divas and Divos,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 373–­94. 13. Poriss, “Divas and Divos,” 379. James Q. Davies’s remarks on the futility of trying to recast the diva as “working artist” may be read as directed at this same binary; see James Q. Davies, “Gautier’s ‘Diva’: The First French Uses of the Word,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, 123–­46, here 127–­28. 14. Roger Parker, “Hugging the Bank: Opera Studies in Brobdingnag,” in Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 107–­16, here 112. 15. Adelaide Kemble to Countess Thun, November 1837, Dresden. 16. Adelaide Kemble to Countess Thun, 24 July 1838, Carlsbad. 17. Adelaide Kemble to the Thun family, 1 August 1838, Carlsbad. 18. Susan Rutherford, “Voices and Singers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 117–­38, here 118. Rutherford cites the composer Reynaldo Hahn as having held this conviction, and returns via Hahn to the idea of the “transcendence [of the voice] in the infinite realm of the imaginary” in her conclusion (134). 19. The first line translates as “Here his gentle voice called me . . . and then disappeared.” That this aria was the one Kemble meant is confirmed by her letter to her sister Fanny dated 21 December 1837. 20. See a letter from Adelaide Kemble to the Thun family, 1 February 1838. 21. Adelaide Kemble to Countess Thun, 31 January 1838; Adelaide Kemble to Countess Thun, 21 September 1838, Milan. 22. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 5 February 1842, in Frances Anne Kemble, Records of Later Life (London: Richard Bentley, 1882), 2:179–­80. 23. Fanny acerbically observed that Adelaide “did sing for them, though, poor thing! not very well. There was no particular reason for her not taking money at that concert”; Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 5 February 1842, in Kemble, Records, 2:179–­80. 24. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 11 February 1842, in Kemble, Records, 2:182. 25. Adelaide Kemble to Countess Thun, 25 July 1839, Padua. 26. Vestris managed Covent Garden in 1839–­42. 27. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 28 July 1841, in Kemble, Records, 2:105. 28. Kemble, Records, 2:137. 29. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 13 January 1842, in Kemble, Records, 2:173. 30. Fanny Kemble to Barbarina Brand (Lady Dacre), 8 October 1842, in Kemble, Records, 2:270. 31. Athenaeum, 3 December 1842.

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32. Ann Blainey, Fanny and Adelaide: The Lives of the Remarkable Kemble Sisters (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 184. 33. Fanny Kemble to Barbarina Brand (Lady Dacre), 30 September 1842, in Kemble, Records, 2:265. 34. Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 151. 35. See Blainey, Fanny and Adelaide, 181–­82. 36. Anna Jameson, “Adelaide Kemble and the Lyrical Drama in 1841,” in Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), 54. 37. Jerome J. McGann, Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 13. 38. Lumley Skeffington, “Lines on Miss Adelaide Kemble, in the character of ‘Norma,’” Morning Post, 13 December 1841. 39. “Miss Adelaide Kemble,” in Omnibus, Cruickshank’s British Minstrel, and Musical and Literary Miscellany, January 1844. 40. Henry F. Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), 1:213. 41. Fanny Kemble to Barbarina Brand (Lady Dacre), 29 April 1843, in Kemble, Records, 2:293. 42. See Blainey, Fanny and Adelaide, 176–­79. 43. David Kennerley, “Debating Female Professionalism and Artistry in the British Press, c. 1820–­1850,” in The Historical Journal 58, no. 4 (2015): 987–­1008. 44. Linda M. Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 3. 45. In a letter to her sister Arabella, Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggests reading Consuelo: “A thing to know is, that in the first part of the book (the scenes laid in Italy) Mad.me Viardot was the type in the author’s mind, while afterwards in the German part, she took hold of Adelaide Kemble, character & life, & fused her into ‘Consuelo’ ”; http://www.browningscorrespondence.com/correspondence/3843/?rsId=48941 &returnPage=11, accessed 2 March 2017. 46. Kari E. Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (London: Routledge, 2009), 121–­22. 47. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 21 May 1841, in Kemble, Records, 2:75; see also Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism, 96, 101. 48. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St Leger, 2 April 1841, in Kemble, Records, 2:69. 49. Giuseppe Gerbino, “Reflection: Music and Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106. 50. See, for example, Gunilla Budde, “Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Female Opera Singers in Britain and Germany in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, ed. Olivier Janz and Daniel Schönpflug (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 184–­99; and Deborah Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–­1850: A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109. 51. “Miss Adelaide Kemble and Mrs Alfred Shaw,” Illustrated London News, 24 December 1842. 52. “Miscellaneous,” Musical World, 28 October 1841. 53. “Adelaide Kemble, as Norma,” The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 18 December 1841.

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54. Jameson, “Adelaide Kemble and the Lyrical Drama,” 56. 55. Cited in George Biddlecombe, English Opera from 1834 to 1864 with Particular Reference to the Works of Michael Balfe (New York: Garland, 1994), 8. 56. These included Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Bellini’s La sonnambula, Rossini’s Semiramide, Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto, and Mercadante’s Elena da Feltre; about the last work, Chorley observed that Kemble’s family background of English theatre “enabled her here to carry Signor Mercadante’s opera triumphantly through in its English version; while, on our Italian stage, it died out, without disapproval—­there to be heard of no more.” Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 1:214. 57. This may have been a consequence of the continuing reverberations of Angelica Catalani and the “Old Price” riots in London. See Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 210–­13.

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Ch a p t er 7  

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On Tongues and Ears Divine Voices in the Modern Metropolis Ja me s Gr a nde

In accounts of voice and vocality in early nineteenth-­century London, two dominant narratives emerge. If one concerns political representation—­of having, or finding, a voice, in an age of petitions, protests, and parliamentary reform, orchestrated by figures such as the radical leader Henry “Orator” Hunt—­the other revolves around a new set of aesthetic claims that were being made for the idealized voices of high art. These ranged from the effusions of lyric poetry, symbolized by the “full-­throated ease,” “high requiem,” and “plaintive anthem” of Keats’s nightingale, singing unseen in the “melodious plot” of a suburban garden, to the celebrated actors and singers of the London stage: Angelica Catalani, Giuditta Pasta, John Braham, Edmund Kean, and others. Both paradigms were enabled by the rapid proliferation of print culture in the decades after 1800, as a vast array of publications puffed, interrogated, disseminated, and sometimes tried to silence these new vocal regimes. These twin narratives alone do not, however, tell the whole story. This essay takes up some alternative accounts of listening and speaking in London during the 1820s and 1830s, accounts that disrupt the stories we tell of Romanticism and reform. Moreover, they challenge the larger framework of secularization that underpins our sense of  London’s nineteenth-­century modernity. The heterodox accounts examined here, of tongues and ears, frustrated listening, charismatic oratory, and inspired speech, suggest the persistence of some older regimes of voice, which now seem strangely proleptic of our own religious present.

“I Have No Ear” In March 1821, Charles Lamb’s essay “A Chapter on Ears” appeared in the pages of the London Magazine. Through the voice of Lamb’s essayistic

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pseudonym Elia, a voice that channels the conversational idioms of the eighteenth-­century familiar essay through a more disruptive, upstart “Cockney” style, “A Chapter on Ears” challenges a new set of attitudes towards music.1 The title plays on the chapters on noses, whiskers, and other body parts in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–­67), and the essay begins by riffing on this imagined physical absence (“those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments . . . those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—­ those indispensable side-­intelligencers”) before developing into a meditation on not knowing what music means: “When . . . I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean—­for music.”2 This is at once comically absurd, a playful resistance to shared identities—­“I have been practicing ‘God save the King’ all my life,” Lamb writes, “whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it”—­and a terrifying, alienating form of privation: It is hard to stand alone—­in an age like this . . . to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. . . . I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!3

The image of rushing out of the opera and “into the noisiest places of the crowded streets” recycles a scene that Lamb first worked out in a letter to William Wordsworth two decades earlier. “Separate from the pleasure of your company,” Lamb tells his friend, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.—­I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you Mountaineers can have done with dead na­ ture. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street . . . all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden . . . life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud . . . coffee-­houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade, all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-­walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life—.4

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Lamb returned repeatedly to this construction of the urban character through a cluster of sensory experiences, of night walks, noise, and crowded streets, which rival the “local attachments” of Wordsworthian pastoral and transform the city into a vast theatre (“London itself a pantomime and a masquerade”).5 Its first appearance in print is in “The Londoner,” a short epistolary essay based on the letter to Wordsworth and published in the Morning Post in 1802. Here, Lamb expands on the metropolitan identity forged among the sights, sounds, and sublime sympathies of the city: The man must have a rare  recipe  for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet-­street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humor, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skillful Pantomime.  .  .  . Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke—­what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?6

Reading these earlier texts alongside “A Chapter on Ears” suggests the ways in which Lamb’s sensible urban character exists in opposition to the silent, attentive listener variously produced by instrumental music, Italian opera, “dead nature” and Wordsworthian lyricism. Lily Gurton-­Wachter has recently posited a “poetics of attention” in the writing of this period, one that responds to the “militarization of attention.”7 The first written appearance of “Attention!” as a military command was in 1792; more pervasively, a state of vigilance was exhorted throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Lamb’s unfocused, pleasurably distracted urban character might be read as a challenge to this state of “paranoid watchfulness,” which had become a disciplinary force in civilian as well as military life and continued long after the wars had ended.8 At the same time, however, his anguished account of “the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention” speaks to a familiar topic in the history of listening. In a 2010 article, “Listening, An­ cient and Modern,” William Fitzgerald takes Lamb’s essay as an early protest against the “rise of instrumental music” and a shift in ideas of musical response, “away from the rhetorical model” of affective power and “towards an emphasis on listening, seen as a form of devotion.”9 Here, Fitzgerald follows James Johnson’s seminal study of audience behaviour

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in Paris between 1750 and 1850, which describes how first concert and then opera audiences gradually stopped talking and began to listen in reverential silence.10 This (contentious) account of changing ways of listening rehearses a well-­worn narrative of music history, one that ascribes the late eighteenth-­century elevation of elite music, and elite instrumental music in particular, to its lack of semantic coding and absence of any clear mimetic function.11 Within this transition, the antimimetic qualities of instrumental music—­Lamb’s “mere sounds . . . empty frames”—­ came to occupy a privileged aesthetic position for newly silent audiences. For writers such as Lamb, however, silent listening only brings home the problem of not knowing what it is you are listening to. In “A Chapter on Ears,” rushing out into the noisy, crowded, night-­ time streets and losing oneself in the din of the Strand represents a source of solace that exceeds the vaunted effects of music on the passions. Inverting the scene from Hogarth’s “The Enraged Musician” (1741), Lamb takes “refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-­life sounds;—­and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise.”12 Here, Hogarth’s street scene is elevated through Lamb’s religious language, which contrasts the ordeal of the opera house with the paradisiacal din of the streets. The essay’s coda, however, is much stranger and harder to gloss, reframing the mock confession within a schematic religious politics, as Lamb shifts the scene to “the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend, Nov[ello]; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-­room into a chapel.” At the commencement of “one of those solemn anthems,” Lamb writes, “a holy calm pervadeth me.” But “fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean,” presided over by the sea gods Haydn, Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, become an oppressive, interminable ordeal: I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits’ end;—­clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me—­priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me—­the genius of his religion hath me in her toils . . . he is Pope. . . . I am converted, and yet a Protestant . . . till the coming in of the friendly supper-­tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith.13

The concerts held at the Oxford Street home of Vincent Novello, music publisher and organist and choirmaster of the Catholic chapel of the Portuguese embassy in South Audley Street, are described as an overpower-

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ing and bewildering sensual experience, leading to a temporary loss of identity.14 This identity is explicitly Protestant, doggedly rational, gregariously sociable, but also inward-­looking and depressive: “like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches.” Through its figuring of musical response in religious terms, Lamb’s essay points towards the often occluded religious politics of music, listening, and voice in early nineteenth-­century London. Lamb was a Unitarian, or Rational Dissenter, and, for all its bathos and bravura irony, “A Chapter on Ears” expresses a characteristic dissenting suspicion towards metropolitan music culture. Throughout the eighteenth century, dissenters such as Lamb were excluded from holding civil and military office, sitting in Parliament, or taking degrees at the English universities by the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 and Corporation Act of 1661, legislation that was only repealed in 1828. As Tessa Whitehouse writes, “the terms of the seventeenth-­century legislation made them effectively second-­class citizens, and dissenters felt their exclusion sharply.”15 This sense of exclusion can be traced across many areas of social and cultural life, including musical life. Dissenting writers frequently express anxieties about the irrationality and sensuality of music, sometimes inflected with anti-­Catholic prejudice (not always ironic).16 In a period in which a hegemonic British identity was predicated on francophobia and anti-­Catholicism, we might take these accounts as signalling attitudes that were much more widely held in British culture, if not always expressed with the same intensity.17 Dissenting writers worried about the special power of music over the emotions and its associations with the rituals of state power: what William Blake described as the “mind-­forg’d manacles” of “State Religion.”18 In response to these state-­sanctioned forms of music, dissenters developed a musical culture of their own, centred above all on congregational hymn-­singing: a form of popular, devotional song that was viewed with suspicion by conservative Anglicans, tainted with radical enthusiasm, and only sanctioned by the Church of England in 1820, when a controversy over the singing of hymns at a Sheffield church was settled in a lawsuit.19 Congregational singing is present in Lamb’s essay through an allusion to Isaac Watts, an Independent minister and among the most celebrated eighteenth-­century hymn writers. Novello’s concerts are simultaneously aligned and contrasted with congregational worship through Lamb’s footnoted quotation from Watts: “I have been there, and still would go / ’Tis like a little heaven below.” Song 28, “For the Lord’s Day Evening,” from Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), celebrates the experience of  “whole assembly worship,” but it was this kind of collective experience

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from which the essayist is excluded in the opera house, oratorio concert (“that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse”) or the devout atmosphere of Novello’s chamber concerts.20 By casting his experience in religious terms, Lamb invokes a set of con­ temporary stereotypes, simultaneously deploying them for comic ef­fect and subjecting them to critique.21 Implicit here is the role of the London Magazine and the voice of periodical essayists such as Lamb in the construction of a compensatory—­or perhaps competing—­form of community, one characterized not by its confessional identity (Robert Southey scathingly complained in the Quarterly Review that Lamb’s Elia essays “wanted a sounder religious feeling”) but by its urbanity and sophistication.22 David Russell has recently argued that, for all his apparent modesty, Lamb “reconceived the essay genre to democratic ends,” “telling stories of London encounters that illustrate a tactful sociability.”23 If “A Chapter on Ears” appears to offer a case study in amusia, it also provides a meditation on the dialectical relationship between music and magazines, and between the kinds of listeners and readers they create, from the open, conversable voice of the familiar essayist to the alienations of musical listening.

“Over His Own Sweet Voice” Lamb’s essay suggests the way in which a residual religious politics could underwrite responses to new regimes of listening, and be articulated with sly irony in the intimate voice of the periodical essayist, a register able to broach and perhaps even defuse religious tensions.24 I want to turn now from this apparently slight 1821 essay to a controversy that began in London the following year and ran for over a decade, occupying thousands of columns of newsprint, pamphlets, and entire volumes, and that was pursued by its protagonists without a trace of irony. These two—­apparently dissimilar, but not unrelated—­case studies show not only the persistence of religious ideas of voice in 1820s and 1830s London but also how these older ideas would be transformed by print culture, celebrity culture, and the febrile political context of the early 1830s. My second case study concerns the career of the Scottish preacher Edward Irving, who arrived in London from Glasgow in July 1822 to take up a position as minister of the Caledonian Chapel, Hatton Garden. Born in Annan, Dumfriesshire, in 1792, the son of a tanner, Irving grew up one of nine children, studied divinity part-­time at Edinburgh University, and worked as a teacher and assistant minister in Kirkcaldy. His engagement to Isabella Martin, the daughter of the minister in Kirkcaldy, forced him

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to break off a relationship with his former pupil Jane Welsh, who he subsequently introduced to her future husband, Thomas Carlyle. Before moving to London, Irving served as a sometimes reluctant assistant to the experiments in urban reform and poor relief then being carried out in Glasgow by the theologian, social reformer, and celebrated preacher Thomas Chalmers. The Caledonian Chapel in Hatton Garden seemed an inauspicious opening, with a congregation of just fifty, but within a few months Irving had achieved an extraordinary degree of celebrity, lionized by fashionable London society even as he preached—­for up to three hours at a time—­in the uncompromising, millenarian style of a seventeenth-­century divine. For a few years, Irving was without doubt one of the most talked-­about, listened-­to, captivating voices in London: as one observer wrote, “His chapel is at once a drawing room, a college, a court of justice, and a house of parliament; for there are the ornaments and representatives of each.” Admission had to be ticketed, and according to one well-­circulated story, the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, resorted to climbing in “through one of the windows, and from thence let himself down into the interior of the chapel.”25 Since Hatton Garden could only accommodate 600 worshippers, the foundation stone was laid on 1 July 1824 for a magnificent neo-­Gothic “National Scotch Church” in Regent Square, the west front modelled on York Minster, which would be able to accommodate up to 2,000. This would serve as a spiritual centre for Scots in London: Irving declared that it was intended “for a sign to our nation, and for the gathering together of the scattered people of our nation.”26 To other observers, it was the sign of an encroaching pathology; one anonymous periodical writer reported, “A Scotch Presbyterian Preacher has succeeded in propagating a mania which threatens . . . to make dreadful inroads on the sanity of the British Metropolis.”27 Irving’s spectacular success presented an apparent anachronism: how could a preacher who seemed to be peddling a deeply recidivist form of religion, a gloomy Calvinist Presbyterianism redolent of seventeenth-­ century Scotland, become a quasi-­Byronic celebrity in the rapidly modernizing metropolis of 1820s London? In 1825, William Hazlitt took up this question in The Spirit of the Age, a collection of portraits of figures who had defined their era.28 Here, Irving appears alongside luminaries such as Bentham, Godwin, Wilberforce, Malthus, and Scott—­albeit as one who “has opposed the spirit of the age.”29 For Hazlitt, Irving stood out for his sheer defiance of any progressive or improving spirit: “Our Caledonian divine is equally an anomaly in religion, in literature, in personal appearance, and in public speaking.”30 His success was achieved

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through resistance to established categories; “with an unlimited and daring licence,” Irving “mixed the sacred and the profane together, the carnal and the spiritual man . . . the theatrical and theological, the modern and the obsolete.” His theatrical qualities were, unsurprisingly, a source of suspicion—­“the more serious part of his congregation indeed complain, though not bitterly, that their pastor has converted their meeting-­house into a play-­house”—­and Hazlitt describes “a lady of quality, introducing herself and her three daughters to the preacher” and telling Irving “that they have been to all the most fashionable places of resort, the opera, the theatre, assemblies, Miss Macauley’s readings, and Exeter-­Change, and have been equally entertained no where else.”31 Within the crowded marketplace of metropolitan entertainments, Irving’s style of preaching was uniquely compelling. Another periodical portrait opened by observing that “Have you heard Mr. Irving?” is a question in the circles of fashion, which has now quite supplanted that formerly trite one, “Were you at the Opera last night?” While the name of the reverend preacher has become as familiar to the ears of the fair and the great, as that of Vestris or Mercandotti.32

In fashionable life, Irving’s voice had begun to supplant even the singers and dancers of the London stage. Fascinated by Irving’s success, Hazlitt attempted to explain his power in both The Spirit of the Age and a long piece for the final number of the Liberal ( July 1823), the journal set up by Leigh Hunt, Shelley, and Byron. In the latter essay, “Pulpit Oratory,” Hazlitt contrasted Irving with Thomas Chalmers, Irving’s former mentor in Glasgow, whose popularity Irving now threatened to eclipse: “Who has not heard of him? Who does not go to hear him? You can scarcely move along for the coronet-­coaches that besiege the entrance to the Caledonian chapel in Hatton-­garden.”33 Hazlitt’s comparison between the two celebrity preachers hinged on a distinction between their argument and mode of delivery: Chalmers is “in earnest, and eager in pursuit of his argument, and arrests the eye and ear of his congregation by this alone,” but appears “bloodless, passionless . . . uninspired. His voice is broken, harsh, and creaking, while Mr. Irving’s is flowing and silvery.”34 For Hazlitt, Irving’s handsome features and impressive stature “inclines one to suspect fashionable or popular religion of a little anthropomorphitism.”35 Other observers described him mounting the pulpit “with a measured and dignified pace, as if to some solemn music heard by his ear alone”; when he stood up, “it seemed as

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if he would never finish rising, he was so tall.”36 But it was his voice that was especially striking. Irving’s sermons were always written out, and subsequently printed, but their effect seems to have depended on the experience of liveness and the alchemy of voice. “There is something . . . soothing in the tones of his voice,”37 Hazlitt wrote, and the lack of a strong Scottish accent attuned him to the “ear polite.”38 But Irving was also capable of the electric effects of the actor Edmund Kean: Hazlitt’s most vivid descriptions of the preacher at work, “with his cast-­iron features and sledge-­hammer blows, puffing like a grim Vulcan,” combine the mythical and the machinelike.39 Even the “fondest of his admirers,” Hazlitt claims, would “rather see and hear Mr. Irving than read him”: his profusion of books and pamphlets were all but unreadable; his popularity rested solely on the collective experience of his charismatic oratory.40 Among Irving’s most fervent admirers was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who by the 1820s was living in Highgate under the care of the surgeon James Gillman. In a letter dated 7 July 1823 Coleridge records being “driven in and back by Mr. Gillman to hear the present Idol of the World of Fashion, the Revd. Mr. Irving, the super-­Ciceronian, ultra-­Demosthenic Pulpeteer of the Scotch Chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden.”41 They quickly became close friends, and Coleridge would pay extravagant tribute to Irving in On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830): “edward irving possesses more of the spirit and purpose of the first Reformers, that he has more of the Head and Heart, the Life, the Unction, and the genial power of martin luther, than any man now alive: yea, than any man of this and the last century.”42 Coleridge is often described as Irving’s theological mentor, and their relationship has been read by historians of religion as a case study in the infusion of Romanticism and German idealism into Evangelical religion in Britain.43 Beyond their overlapping theological interests, Irving and Coleridge both exercised a mesmerizing effect on their listeners. In the mid-­1790s, Coleridge had considered a career as a Unitarian minister, but by the 1820s his talk was confined to more intimate venues. Descriptions of Coleridge in full flow often resemble accounts of Irving preaching, and both seemed to demand the same type of enraptured listening. The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson gives a richly ambivalent account of the two men together: I think I never heard Coleridge so very eloquent as to-­day, and yet it was painful to find myself unable to recall any part of what had so delighted me,—­i.e. anything that seemed worthy to be noted down. So that I could not but suspect some illusion arising out of the impressive

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tone and the mystical language of the orator. He talked on for several hours without intermission. His subject the ever-­recurring one of religion, but so blended with mythology, metaphysics, and psychology, that it required great attention sometimes to find the religious element. I observed that, when Coleridge quoted Scripture or used well-­known religious phrases, Irving was constant in his exclamations of delight, but that he was silent at other times.44

Confronted with Coleridge’s monologues, Lamb assumed the same character of stunned and satirical listener that he took up in “A Chapter on Ears.” Asked by Coleridge, “Have you ever heard me preach, Charles?” Lamb is said to have replied, “N-­n-­never heard you d-­d-­do anything else, C-­c-­coleridge.”45 Such descriptions point towards Coleridge’s submerged presence in “A Chapter on Ears,” suggestively aligning new forms of musical listening with the experience of pulpit oratory, Wordsworthian lyricism, and Coleridgean conversation or sermonizing. Lamb and Coleridge had worshipped together at the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel in the 1790s; Felicity James emphasizes the importance of Unitarianism to their early friendship and mutual influence.46 By the 1820s, however, Coleridge had rejected Unitarianism for high Anglicanism and Lamb’s essay registers a mistrust of his friend’s bewitching influence. This anxiety was expressed more directly by Hazlitt, who places Coleridge immediately before Irving in The Spirit of the Age and constructs his critique of Coleridge’s literary career and political apostasy around his beguiling voice: “All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.”47 In Hazlitt’s description, living on the sound of one’s own voice is an image of extreme solipsism, of ascetic dedication, but also of narcissism and charlatanry. Coleridge’s voice was the subject of Hazlitt’s peroration to his final lecture in a series on the English Poets, “On the Living Poets,” delivered at the Surrey Institution on 3 March 1818: He is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt any thing. . . . His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought . . . And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I!. . . . That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of  long-­past years, and rings in my ears with never-­ dying sound.48

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As Hazlitt moves from nostalgic reverie to a critique of Coleridge’s present politics, the latter’s voice becomes an object of both suspicion and desire, moving from the “music of thought” to a siren song and heady profusion of sound over sense. Moreover, as Peter Manning has reminded us, the force of this passage relies on Hazlitt’s own use of theatrical effect, playing on the fact that Coleridge was lecturing that same evening, on European literature, a short distance away at the London Philosophical Society. Coleridge’s voice was thus pitched in direct competition with Hazlitt’s acerbic commentary.49 One member of Hazlitt’s audience, Mary Russell Mitford, wrote to a friend that “Mr. Hazlitt is really the most delightful lecturer I ever heard—­his last, on modern poetry was amusing past all description to everybody but the parties concerned.” When his lecture appeared in print that autumn, Mitford found it “so much civiller than my recollections that I at first thought he had softened and sweetened it from a well-­grounded fear of pistol or poison,” but she was finally “convinced that it is unaltered and that it owed its superior effect to Mr. Hazlitt’s voice—­to certain slight inflections in his very calm and gentlemanly voice.”50 If we can, then, identify Coleridge’s voice as a concealed presence in “A Chapter on Ears,” it is also the primary focus of one of Hazlitt’s most celebrated essays, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” published in the Liberal in April 1823, a few months before “Pulpit Oratory.” Here, Hazlitt describes, with an almost overpowering sense of loss, his first encounter with Coleridge in 1798, when he walked ten miles on a freezing January morning to hear Coleridge give a probationary sermon for the role of ministerial assistant at the Unitarian High Street Chapel, Shrewsbury.51 As soon as he stepped off the coach, Coleridge began to talk: He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there . . . and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of “High-­born Hoel’s harp or soft Llewellyn’s lay!”

Listening to Coleridge preach—­on war and peace, slavery and abolition, the separation of church and state—­was remembered, even a quarter of a century later, as a captivating experience: “A sound was in my ears as of a Siren’s song.”52 In retrospect, however, this sound signals Coleridge’s eventual orthodoxy and conservatism: “There was a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the

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hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.”53 As Lucy Newlyn has suggested, “chaunt” here carries a range of associations, from bardic primitivism to the “oracular authority” of the Anglican Church, in polemical opposition to a dissenting ideal of plain speech.54 For Hazlitt, as for Lamb, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry and conversation had a spellbinding effect on the listener but could also be deceptive, and become the means of self-­deception. As David Duff has argued, an underrecognized aspect of the Romantic lyric “is its mimesis of the spoken voice.”55 However, the connection between these lyric speakers and an older discourse of divine inspiration is suggested by the opening stanza of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807): There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-­dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.56

The fifth line alludes to Milton’s image of the Holy Spirit in the opening of Paradise Lost, which “with mighty wings outspread / Dove-­like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss / And mad’st it pregnant.” Wordsworth’s appropriation of the image suggests that poetic inspiration is no longer a matter of invoking a divine muse but a more self-­reflexive process of a poet brooding over his own voice. In the preface to Poems (1815), the met­ aphor is glossed with the following note: The Stock-­Dove is said to coo, a sound well imitating the note of the bird; but, by the intervention of the metaphor broods, the affections are called in by the imagination to assist in marking the manner in which the Bird reiterates and prolongs her soft note, as if herself delighting to listen to it, and participating of a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the continuous process of incubation.57

As James Chandler writes, this note offers “a memorable instance of  Words­ worth listening to Wordsworth,” returning to a line that is in itself about listening back, brooding over the sound of his voice in “still and quiet satis-

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faction.”58 However, if Wordsworth’s lyric voice aimed to integrate Milton’s muse within its pastoral scene, Irving and his followers would soon exhibit an altogether noisier and more disruptive manifestation of divine inspiration within the urban environment.

The Gift of Tongues Hazlitt was unable to reconcile Irving’s religion “with sound reason or with history” but suggested that his sermons concealed a latent radicalism and would not continue to attract Tories, Whigs, and Radicals alike: “We suspect there is a radical ‘taint in him,’ and that Mr. Canning will be advised to withdraw himself from the congregation.”59 Sure enough, by the end of the decade, Irving had become a much more controversial figure, no longer the idol of the fashionable world. By the time the Regent Square church was finally opened in 1827, his congregation was already dwindling, while Irving himself was dogged by accusations of heresy. Irving’s most contentious claim was that Christ partook fully of human nature, and was only preserved from sin through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: in other words, that Christ Himself had to be divinely inspired. Somewhat surprisingly, Coleridge—­who had long since renounced Unitarianism for Anglican orthodoxy, “snapped my squeaking baby-­trumpet of sedition, and  .  .  . hung up its fragments in the chamber of Penitences”—­continued to defend Irving, centring his defence on the senses and somatic.60 Irving, he wrote in 1823, “certainly the greatest Orator, I ever heard (N.B. I make & mean the same distinction between Oratory & Eloquence as between the Mouth + Windpipe & the Brain + Heart), is, however, a man of great simplicity, of overflowing affections, and enthusiastically in earnest.”61 This somewhat double-­edged description casts Irving as pure voice, no more than a consummate orator, or the greatest “Mouth + Windpipe,” just as Hazlitt distinguished Irving’s compelling voice from Chalmers’s earnest argument. The critical force of this judgement is, however, significantly diminished by the list of personal qualities that follows. In 1830, when many of Irving’s followers had deserted him, Coleridge still declared, in full prophetic mode, I look forward with confident hope to a time, when his soul shall have perfected her victory over the dead letter of the senses and its apparitions in the sensuous understanding; when the Halycon ideas shall have alit on the surging sea of his conceptions, “Which then shall quite forget to rave, / While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.” milton.62

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The “dead letter of the senses” evokes Irving’s reliance on fallen communication, as well as his contentious case for Christ’s humanity, fleshiness, and temptation to sin. The final victory of soul over sense is imagined through a vision of divinely inspired peace, this time from Milton’s “Nativity Ode,” one that again incorporates the image of the brooding spirit-­bird. By this time, claims of divine inspiration were at the centre of the Irving controversy. In 1827 he had begun to make another, even more heterodox claim: that the spiritual gifts of Pentecost, including prophecy, spiritual healing, and speaking in tongues, had not been withdrawn from the Church but had merely disappeared through a lack of faith. In 1830, rumours reached London from a remote West Highland parish, under the charge of Irving’s acolyte John Macleod Campbell, that members of the congregation had begun to speak in unknown languages. Irving was initially sceptical, and Coleridge seems to have been instrumental in removing his doubts: John McVickar, a visiting Episcopalian clergyman from Columbia University, describes Irving reading aloud a letter that he had received from Scotland “containing the particulars of the first wonderful effusion of tongues.” “How is this to be regarded?” Irving asked Coleridge. Coleridge replied “with corresponding solemnity”: “I make no question but that it is the work of the Holy Spirit, and a foretaste of that spiritual power which is to be poured forth on the reviving Church of Scotland.”63 Irving sent a group from his church up to Scotland to investigate. By April 1831, members of his own London congregation had also begun to speak in unknown tongues. Irving at first tried to silence them, then decided to allow and defend such spiritual voices. He never displayed such gifts himself, describing himself as a mere “ear witness” and proclaiming “the tidings of the restoration of the gift of tongues” and “the great event of the Holy Spirit’s again making his voice to be heard.”64 For a second time, Irving’s church was the talk of  London. This outbreak of religious enthusiasm arrived at a moment of extreme political vol­­ atility, coinciding as it did with the Reform controversy, the July Revolution in France, the Captain Swing riots across the south of England, and the arrival of cholera in London.65 As Jürgen Osterhammel has reminded us, Britain’s “vulnerability to revolution peaked neither in the 1790s nor in 1848” but in 1830, when the country “participated in the European revolutionary movement.”66 As a premillennialist, Irving held that Christ’s second advent would precede the millennium, a position that tended towards a scorched-­earth attitude to earthly affairs: as Boyd Hilton writes, “Since pre-­millennialists hold that improvement can only take place after the Second Coming, which itself must be preceded by chaos and de-

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terioration, there is no incentive (and some disincentive) to set about repairs.”67 Irving had denounced the moves towards religious toleration represented by the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), “which, according to his view, destroyed the standing of this country as a Christian nation,” and welcomed the events of 1830–­32 with a grim fatalism, as divine punishment and portents of imminent apocalypse.68 The political context no doubt shaped responses to these inspired voices. In February 1832 the trustees of the Regent Square Church expelled Irving, effectively locking him out of his own church. Irving defiantly told the congregation, “If it be so, it will be simply because I have refused to allow the voice of the Spirit of God to be silenced in this church,” and held services in a room on Gray’s Inn Road belonging to an Owenite socialist society, and then in open air.69 Up to four thousand people came to listen to him in Britannia Fields, Islington, which was quickly renamed “The Field of the Tongues.” In March 1833 Irving returned to Scotland to stand trial for heresy and was formally ejected from the Church of Scotland by the Presbytery of Annan. A new church, the Catholic Apostolic church, was taking shape, inspired by Irving’s oratory and his gifted followers. By this point, however, Irving’s health had begun to decline, and on 7 December 1834, on a visit to Glasgow to open a new Catholic Apostolic Church, he collapsed and died. In an obituary for Fraser’s Magazine, Thomas Carlyle declared him “on the whole, the best man I have ever (after trial enough) found in this world,” and gave an impassioned, heavily partisan portrait of Irving as a Scottish martyr, consumed by the modern Babylon of London: Scotland sent him forth a Herculean man; our mad Babylon wore him and wasted him, with all her engines; and it took her twelve years: He sleeps with his fathers, in that loved birth-­land: Babylon with its deafening inanity rages on.70

More equivocally, Jane Welsh Carlyle surmised, “There would have been no tongues, had Irving married me.”71 How should the modern historian understand this strange episode? Leigh Eric Schmidt includes it in Hearing Things, his account of the audible visions of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century enthusiasts, which challenge the ocularcentric claims of the Enlightenment and the privileged place of visuality and the gaze within narratives of modernity. For Schmidt, focused as he is on the American context, the Irving controversy represents a foundational moment in the emergence of modern Pentecostalism:

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The “gift of tongues” is supremely important in highlighting the distance between the present religious reality and the past of the Enlightenment dream. . . . As Pentecostalism has ascended across the United States and around the globe into a massively popular form of Chris­ tianity, these episodes of the 1830s through the 1850s take on all the more symbolic importance as tiny harbingers of the undoing of modernity’s devocalized history.72

Here, the Irvingites become part of a much broader tradition of Swedenborgians, seekers, and spiritualists, united by their shared belief in “the materializing embodiment of the Spirit’s voice.”73 Such beliefs were vigorously contested: the Edinburgh Review denounced these “prophetical hieroglyphics” as a “wild waste of human breath,” “gross delusion,” and “shallow imposture.”74 Modern linguists, however, have shown that glossolalia, speaking in an unknown language, is “a baffling and awesome phenomenon precisely because it is not gibberish.” Instead, it draws on the sound units or phonemes of the speaker’s vernacular language but carries no semantic meaning. One theory is that it is caused by a physiological process of dissociation, in which “the higher speech control center in the cerebral cortex of the brain is cut off from the lower motor control center in the medulla. Aborted language results.”75 As the Irivingites knew, these voices, which challenged most available models of the self, from Lockean education of the senses to Romantic self-­expression, were both replete with meaning and resistant to semantic decoding. With this excess of sound over sense, we might seem to have come full circle, from tongues to ears, popular religion to elite music culture, and inspired voices to baffled listening. The Irving episode may be an originary moment in the birth of modern Pentecostalism and the eclipse of the Enlightenment dream, but placing it within such a longer history also risks obscuring its spatial and temporal specificities. The divine voices first of Irving’s pulpit oratory and then of his inspired congregation are ultimately inseparable from the contradictions of 1820s and 1830s London, with its celebrity culture, partisan periodicals, and political tensions. In these years, musical, literary, and religious ideas of voice are often at odds, but are not completely separate and should not be contemplated in isolation. Indeed, these episodes repeatedly show apparently distinct areas of urban life bleeding into each other, just as Lamb’s frustrated listener rushes out of the opera house and into the street, Novello’s Oxford Street drawing room becomes a chapel, and Irving is forced out of his church and into Britannia Fields. Urban spaces are transformed, even as an older set of devotional listening practices persist. If this period would

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see a gradual displacement of oratory, religious oratory in particular, by the voices of song, lyric poetry, and cheap print, it also witnessed a continued faith in divinely inspired voices and devotional listening. In short, these episodes complicate the twin narratives we began with, showing how the new voices of the 1820s and 1830s were not always those of enfranchisement, Romanticism, and reform, but were more disruptive and dissonant in their origins and claims.

Notes 1. On Lamb’s role within the “Cockney conversability” of literary culture in the 1810s and 1820s, see Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–­1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 6. Mee argues that a key part of the success of John and Leigh Hunt’s Examiner was its “ability to reproduce the idea of culture as a form of amiable exchange in which readers could easily join. . . . This relatively porous and easy-­going sociability infuriated many elite reviewers, who saw it as a debasement of what the republic of letters should represent” (248). The Examiner’s sense of friendly exchange was shared by other reformist periodicals including the Liberal and the London Magazine. 2. Charles Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears,” London Magazine 3, no. 15 (March 1821): 263–­66, here 263, 264. 3. Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears,” 264. 4. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1:267. 5. On the genealogy of this phrase, and Wordsworth’s role in the “eighteenth-­century transformation of aesthetic and moral attitudes” that privileged “the personal, emotional charge of particular places,” see Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21. For the “complex relation of landscape and cityscape” within “the new metropolitanism,” see James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., “Introduction: Engaging the Eidometropolis,” Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8. 6. “The Londoner,” Morning Post, 1 February 1802, 3. Gregory Dart has claimed this passage as “the nineteenth century’s first formulation of the writer as flâneur;” see Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–­1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 143. 7. Lily Gurton-­Wachter, Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 5. 8. Gurton-­Wachter, Watchwords, 8, 35. 9. William Fitzgerald, “Listening, Ancient and Modern,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 1 (2010): 25–­37, here 27. 10. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). On the privileged role accorded to Beethoven within this narrative, and the (Wordsworthian) “assumption that musical works themselves create the conditions of their reception,” see Mary Ann Smart’s review of  Johnson in 19th-­Century Music 20, no. 3 (1997): 291–­97, here 292. An alternative account of this transformation, one

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that dates the shift in audience behaviour much later in the century, is offered by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 11. One attempt to rethink this narrative is provided by William Weber, “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25, no. 4 (1997): 678–­91. Weber challenges Johnson’s strict distinction between “amusement” and “absorption,” which “regards as invalid any notion of listening that is not highly internalized and set in the language of individual genius” (680). 12. Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears,” 264. 13. Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears,” 265–­66. 14. Novello published numerous volumes of Roman Catholic sacred music, including masses by Haydn and Mozart. See Fiona M. Palmer, Vincent Novello (1781–­1861): Music for the Masses (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); Philip Olleson, “The London Roman Catholic Embassy Chapels and Their Music in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Music in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, ed. David Wyn  Jones (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 101–­18. Palmer and Olleson describe Novello as being, by the 1820s, “the most distinguished Roman Catholic church musician in England”; see Palmer and Olleson, “Publishing Music from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: The Work of Vincent Novello and Samuel Wesley in the 1820s,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 130, no. 1 (2005): 38–­73, here 44. 15. Tessa Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent, 1720–­1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10. 16. This suspicious attitude can be extended to other areas of the “fine arts” and traced back to the Puritan heritage of eighteenth-­century Dissent. As Jon Klancher observes in relation to William Hazlitt, an often critical inheritor of the dissenting tradition, “A key reason for Hazlitt taking issue with the rational Dissenters’ legacy was what he regarded as their Puritan legacy of ‘distaste for pictures, music, poetry, and the fine arts in general’ ”; Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 203. 17. The classic account of British identity in this period is Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–­1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 18. William Blake, “London” and “Annotations to an Apology for the Bible,” in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed., with a commentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 27 and 613, respectively. 19. On the rise of dissenting hymn-­singing, see Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, eds, Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 20. Lamb, “A Chapter on Ears,” 264–­65. 21. Lamb found the joke funny enough to return to it in his final year, in lines “To Clara N[ovello]:” “The Gods have made me most unmusical, / With feelings that re­ spond not to the call / Of stringèd harp or voice—­obtuse and mute / To hautboy, sack­ but, dulcimer, and flute; [ . . . ] Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars, / Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars; / I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float / Upon the captive air [ . . . ] I sit at oratorios like a fish, / Incapable of sound” (Athe­ naeum, July 1834). “Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers,” entered in Vincent Novello’s album, is in a similar vein. 22. Quoted in Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 189, n. 28.

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23. David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 12, 24. 24. See, for example, Felicity James’s reading of how another Elia essay, “Imperfect Sympathies,” “invites us first to reveal and then to confront our own prejudices”; Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 208. 25. James Fleming, The Life and Writings of the Rev. Edward Irving (London, 1823), 28–­29. 26. Edward Irving, Thirty Sermons . . . Preached during the First Three Years of His Residence in London (London, 1835), 124. 27. Edinburgh Magazine 13 (August 1823): 214. 28. For a compelling account of the range and dialectical method of this collection, see Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–­9. In dialogue with M. H. Abrams, Gilmartin suggests the ways in which Hazlitt’s “sprawling portrait gallery can prove as conducive to the sceptical and localizing impulses of the New Historicism as to high Romantic accounts of visionary transcendence” (9). 29. William Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–­34), 11:38–­47, here 44. 30. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 38. 31. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 39. 32. European Magazine 84 ( July 1823): 47. 33. William Hazlitt, “Pulpit Oratory—­Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Irving,” in Complete Works, ed. Howe, 20:113–­22, here 113. 34. Hazlitt, “Pulpit Oratory,” 115. 35. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 47. 36. Geroge Gilfillan, quoted in David Malcolm Bennett, Edward Irving Reconsidered (Eugene, OR: Wif and Stock, 2014), 56; John Stoughton, Recollections of a Long Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894), 29. 37. Hazlitt, “Pulpit Oratory,” 118. 38. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 40. 39. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 39. Compare the frequent descriptions of mechanized vocal performance in operatic criticism during this decade—­to take one example, in 1825, the London Magazine claimed that “the precision with which Velluti exactly the most difficult passages, can only be compared with that of a piece of machinery. . . . Some pieces of music he performs exactly as a steam-­engine would perform them, if a steam-­engine could be made to sing”; quoted in  James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 38. 40. Hazlitt, “Mr. Irving,” 45. 41. Coleridge to Charlotte Brent, 7 July 1823, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 280. 42. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State (London: Hurst, Chance, 1830), 168. 43. “It was Irving who, more than any other, transposed Evangelical doctrine into a Romantic key”; David Bebbington, “Evangelicalism and British Culture,” in Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century, ed. Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight, and John Morgan-­Guy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 109. For a detailed account of their relationship, see Suzanne E. Webster, Body and Soul in

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Coleridge’s Notebooks, 1827–­1834: “What is Life?” (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 44. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. (London, 1869), 2:297. 45. Quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), xxxv. 46. James shows how Lamb turned to Coleridge after his sister Mary Lamb stabbed their mother to death with a kitchen knife during a manic episode: “Write as religious a letter as possible.” Coleridge replied with a Unitarian emphasis on Christ’s human suffering, and  James reads this letter as the germ of “This Lime-­Tree Bower my Prison,” “Coleridge’s great consolatory poem of mid-­1797.” The poem transports “gentle-­hearted Charles . . . In the great City pent” to the Quantock hills and imagines him silenced through a sublime experience of a divinely energized world: “So my friend / Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, / Silent with swimming sense . . . No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.” Lamb vigorously contested the description of himself as “gentle-­hearted Charles.” See James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 85–­86. 47. Hazlitt, “Mr. Coleridge,” in Complete Works, ed. Howe, 21:30. 48. Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” in Complete Works, ed. Howe, 5:167. 49. Peter J. Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image: Hazlitt and Coleridge Lecturing,” in Romantic Metropolis, ed. Chandler and Gilmartin, 227–­45, here 232. 50. Quoted in Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image,” 231–­32. 51. Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137. 52. Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” in Complete Works, ed. Howe, 17:106–­22, here 107. Elsewhere, Hazlitt describes how on rural walks Coleridge “talked far above singing,” alluding to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (1620) (“I did hear you talk / Far above singing”); see “On Going a  Journey,” in Complete Works, ed. Howe, 8:181–­89, here 183. 53. Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” 118. 54. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 339. 55. David Duff, “The Retuning of the Sky: Romanticism and Lyric,” in The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135–­55, here 138. 56. In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 260. 57. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Poems (1815),” in William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Gill, 632. 58. James Chandler, “The ‘Power of Sound’ and the Great Scheme of Things: Words­ worth Listens to Wordsworth,” in “Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era, ed. Susan Wolfson, Romantic Circles Praxis (2008), https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/soundings, accessed 23 August 2017. 59. Hazlitt, “Pulpit Oratory,” 120, 122. 60. Coleridge to Charles Lloyd Sr., 15 October 1796, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:240. 61. Coleridge to Edward Coleridge, 23 July 1823, in Collected Letters, ed. Griggs, 5:286–­87. 62. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, 169.

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63. Quoted in John Beer, “Transatlantic and Scottish Connections: Uncollected Records,” in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London: Macmillan, 1990), 308–­43, here 321. 64. Edward Irving, “Facts Connected with Recent Manifestations of Spiritual Gifts,” Fraser’s Magazine ( January 1832), 754–­61, here 755, 760. 65. See James Grande, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–­1835 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 7, “ ‘Rural War’ and the July Revolution.” 66. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 541. 67. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–­1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 16. 68. Margaret Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, 2 vols. (London, 1862), 2:88. 69. Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, 2:245. 70. Fraser’s Magazine, January 1835, 103, 101. 71. James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols. (London, 1882), 1:162. The Carlyles’ most recent biographer is more skeptical: “It is equally likely that she would have had as little softening influence on Irving’s peculiarities as she had on Carlyle’s.” See Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), 113. 72. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 237. In similar terms, Phyllis Mack describes the Enlightenment as “the beginning of a transition from the culture of pre-­modern Europe, where God was assumed to exist even though He did not always appear, to our own modern Western world, where doubt of God’s existence and the desire to hear His voice survive with equal intensity”; Phyllis Mack, “The Senses in Religion: Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–­107, here 107. 73. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 236. 74. Quoted in Schmidt, Hearing Things, 230, 233. 75. Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 52.

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Ch a p t er 8  

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From Dissent to Community The Sacred Harmonic Society and Amateur Choral Singing in London Wiebke Thor mä hl e n

In October 1832 a new vocal society was founded in London. The event was little publicized but marked by the issue of a “Prospectus of the Sacred Harmonic Society, Gate Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.” Meetings about initiating the Society had been held since August 1832, but it would be six years before activities were first mentioned in the press, and a further six months before a report of a performance of Messiah, which had attracted “at least 2500 persons,” put it firmly onto London’s musical map.1 The press silence in its early years demonstrates that the Society’s ideals were not initially public-­facing: at the heart of its formation was not the performance of great sacred music, but the making of it. Against a professional music culture that rose in London in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Society sought to enshrine a sense of unity as much as a desire to bind together a social group through pan-­denominational class-consciousness. In amalgamating ideals of singing for religious worship, of making music, and of assembling for a larger purpose, the Society’s founding ideologies and their implementation in its early years represent an important moment in which a people’s metaphorical voice of choice and of self-­ determination was heard. This chapter investigates the Sacred Harmonic Society’s initial goals—­ set out in its founding documents and subsequent reports—­and brings them into dialogue with London’s musical landscape in the early 1830s as viewed through the eyes of the press, particularly the musical journal the Harmonicon. At that time, London lacked opportunities for organized communal singing among amateur musicians not of high social standing. Dissatisfaction was rife, with this issue as with aristocratic patronage and the preponderance of foreign vs English repertoire. What follows will show how the Society’s founders engaged with and reacted to these

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critiques by establishing a voice that was unified in its beliefs, desires, and practices. In so doing, I will claim that the Society’s activities as a large concert choir with iconic, public-­facing performances—­the activities for which it gained fame from the late 1830s onwards—­was not at the heart of its original establishment. This critical rethinking of the Society’s origins also offers a lens onto London’s musical debates about professionalism versus amateurism, national agendas, the role of different social groups in artistic patronage, and the secularization of sacred repertoire. In order to review these themes, I will draw comparisons between the Philharmonic Society and the Sacred Harmonic Society: both were hailed retrospectively as the harbingers of a new age of a professional class’s self-­determination in music.2 The idea of “voice” will then act as a medium to draw out the fundamental differences between the two societies. Finally, I will review the dissenting background with which the Sacred Harmonic Society has been associated in later literature. Its choice of music suggests that it combined a desire to sing sacred music outside organized worship, as a tool towards moral education, with the nondenominational model of sacred repertoire performance at provincial music festivals.3

Founding the Sacred Harmonic Society The Sacred Harmonic Society was formed in 1832 by a group of nine male, self-­styled “amateur practitioners of music” who laid out its intentions and rules in a printed prospectus.4 Its aims were encapsulated as “respectability of character, efficiency to its exertions, and permanency to its existence,” a curious mixture of professional and amateur ambition. It was to meet every Tuesday between eight o’clock and ten o’clock in the even­ ing at Gate Street Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the singers would rehearse in the galleries with a special dispensation to use the Chapel’s organ. In its conclusion, the prospectus called for amateur singers to contact one of its founding members with expressions of interest. The Society offered three tiers of association: full membership for those who sang every Tuesday; subscriber status for those who offered financial support yet attended only as visitors; and occasional visitors, who could “under proper regulations” and “on stated occasions” be brought along by members or subscribers. The subscription for full membership for three months was two shillings and sixpence if members brought their own music and four shillings if they used music provided by the Society. Subscribers paid three shillings. The fees were moderate considering that even cheaply printed music could cost anywhere between a few pence for

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a single sheet to the seven shillings charged by Novello for his Collection of Sacred Music as Performed at the Chapel of the King of Sardinia. As a com­ parison, tickets to a fund-­raising concert of sacred music performed by professional London musicians at Southwark, as advertised in the Morning Post of 21 June 1832, cost ten shillings and sixpence; and Messrs E. Seguin and J. Howells advertised their Musical Society meetings in the Concert Room at the Royal Academy of Music for a price of seven shillings each or a subscription to five concerts for a guinea.5 Membership in the Sacred Harmonic Society was thus not only affordable but appears to have been aimed at those of lesser means. It offered members the opportunity to listen to the music being performed and to sing themselves; also exposure to repertoire beyond the printed scores to which individual financial budgets might stretch. Anyone wishing to join had to be “recommended . . . in writing” by a current member or sub­ scriber, and attend meetings as a visitor until the next election (on the first Tuesday of each month).6 The founders were listed as Mr. John Harrison, Jun.; Mr. T. Brewer; Mr. Surman, who acted as the first and long-­standing conductor as well as librarian; Mr. Walker, the society organist; Mr. Hart; Mr. Bevan; Mr. Searle; Mr. Jeffreys; and Mr. Brewer.7 A committee of thirteen (with a quorum of five) was “empowered to decide what music shall be performed at each meeting and to make purchases.”8 After a series of delays—­occasioned in part by the death of the minister of Gate Street Chapel—­the Society began activities on 20 November 1832, “with the practice of part of Handel’s Oratorio ‘The Messiah’. ”9 From 1836 the Society performed in Exeter Hall; its subsequent history, in particular its fruitful period under the directorship of Michael Costa, is well documented.10 Discussion of the Society’s early years, however, and especially of its involvement in the 1834 Amateur Musical Festival at Exeter Hall, reveals some interesting variations. The festival was organized as a protest against the Royal Musical Festival, which had been auspiciously staged in June 1834 in Westminster Abbey to cele­ brate the seventy-­fifth anniversary of Handel’s death. The Royal Musical Festival chorus had been selected from provincial choral societies and Anglican churches in London.11 Feeling politically and denominationally side-­lined, a large group of amateur choral singers based in London came together to form the choir for the Amateur Musical Festival.12 Later scholars have suggested that the Sacred Harmonic Society grew out of this arrangement, while others have claimed that the Society was indeed the instigator of the rival choral festival. Neither version is entirely borne out by the Society’s minutes, which suggest that the Amateur Musical Festival was a project independent of the Sacred Harmonic Society; the

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festival availed itself of the Society’s members yet did not subscribe to its ideologies.13 The Society’s minutes give due credit to the fact that its committee showed stoical perseverance during its early years; it battled the lack of a permanent home, financial straits, and an influenza epidemic that obliged the hiring of paid musicians at great cost. Not addressed, though, are the ideals and intentions at the heart of the Society: the musical landscape into which it settled.

London Voices 1832: A View from the Press Various items in the Harmonicon during 1832 show that musical activities in the capital were burgeoning during the year of the Sacred Harmonic Society’s founding.14 The journal gave monthly updates or reviews on operas and concerts in the city, with commentary on events appearing in a regular column, “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante.” The weekly musical calendar might be as follows: during the spring season from February to June, the Italian Opera played on Tuesdays and Fridays, with the Ancient Concerts on Wednesdays and the Philharmonic Society on Mondays, interrupted only by a period in Lent given over to oratorio.15 Attendance at the Philharmonic Society’s concert, now held in the concert room of the King’s Theatre, was by subscription: rehearsals, which “took place, as usual, at twelve a clock on the Saturday morning . . . are to remain, as last year, quite private.”16 The February issue of the Harmonicon confirmed that subscribers were entitled to attend oratorios, concerts, or balls under the normal terms of their opera box subscription, which was nontransferable. While this kept the audience stable and exclusive, the manager also added a “professional price of admission.”17 Attendance was therefore held firmly in the hands of the upper and upper middle class, albeit with the caveat that an improvement of taste was to be guaranteed by allowing professional musicians to attend. In February, oratorios were resumed at Drury Lane under Henry Bishop, with John Braham among the soloists.18 In March, Braham also starred in oratorio performances at the Hanover Square Rooms, which a month later housed concerts by the students of the Royal Academy of Music with instrumental and vocal music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Corelli as well as parts of an opera by Lord Burghersh, who tightly controlled the choice of repertoire.19 In the same month, Burghersh took over direction of the Ancient Concerts, an occasion used by the Morning Post to remind its readers of the high social status of the series.20 In May the Albion Tavern played host to a special dinner and concert in honour of

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Haydn’s centenary, attended by a large number of professional musicians, native and foreign.21 Benefit concerts ran throughout the season at the King’s Theatre, the Hanover Square Rooms, the Concert Room, Coventry Street, Haymarket, the Albion on Aldersgate Street, Willis’s Rooms, and various private venues such as Lady Augusta Wentworth’s mansion on Connaught Place.22 In addition, a variety of clubs and societies continued to meet, among them the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club and the Madrigal Society, which celebrated its anniversary at the Freemason’s Tavern in January 1832.23 This snapshot of  London concert life raises the question of why there was a need to found a new society. A closer look at the press reports, however, reveals recurring criticisms that help contextualize the efforts to found the Sacred Harmonic Society. First, journalists alluded to the strong preference for foreign music in London, an attitude evinced by the high status of the Italian Opera at the King’s Theatre. Indeed, criticism of the neglect of home-­grown composition appeared in articles on a wide range of concerts. The Harmonicon’s review of the Ancient Concerts for May, for example, praised the rare inclusion of  “a very pretty glee of Dr. Callcott,” a welcome departure from “what has been repeated year after year, until it has become wearisome to listen to.” The latter remark referred to repeat performances of Handel’s music, of course, but also repeats of music by Graun, Paisiello, Martini, Mozart, and Pergolesi. What is more, the Philharmonic Society had long devoted itself to foreign music: in its First Prospectus the Society had declared a desire to promote “in the public mind that taste for excellence in instrumental music which so long remained in a latent state,”24 much of this music being of German origin.25 The Society’s 1832 season opened on 27 February in typical style with a mix of German instrumental music and arias and duets from Italian operas: Mozart, Rossini, Weber, Donizetti, and Beethoven in a neat alternation.26 In June 1832, the Harmonicon printed a letter to the editor that lamented this “anti-­Angloharmonic” state among the Philharmonic Society’s directors. While the editor—­William Ayrton, a founding member of the Philharmonic Society—­ostensibly refrained from taking a stand, he nevertheless printed the letter in full, which gave an account of the events that led to music by Attwood, Potter, and the author himself, John Barnett, being refused for performance.27 Whether or not the music was returned unopened—­as Barnett claimed—­Barnett may simply have been considered unsuitable for the Society’s presentation of the “highest class of music” (he was primarily known for incidental music for melodramas, farces, and burlesques).28 But the desire for “Angloharmony” spread across different sections of the journal. A note on the Madrigal Society,

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for instance, highlighted its laudable role in keeping “alive the taste of those masterly compositions, which adorned the age of Elizabeth, and which rank among the finest examples of English vocal writing.”29 Hand in hand with lamentations about foreign repertoire came an increasingly critical stance towards the fact that London’s musical life lay largely in the hands of aristocratic patrons. The Italian Opera’s forbidding prices kept it socially exclusive, the Ancient Concerts were patronized by the aristocracy, and the Oratorio Concerts were performed by professionals and supported financially by the “aristocracies of rank and wealth” who made up its audience.30 As for the subscribers and financial backers of the Philharmonic Society—­over 300 names—­every single one was furnished with a title.31 A range of private clubs and occasional soirées, of private concerts, and even private opera performances were also available to those of a high social standing. By the 1830s, however, the rising merchant classes in the city had made attempts to mount their own subscription series in response.32 But both the Harmonicon and the Spectator made the point that success was not easy to come by. The “Memoirs of the Metropolitan Concerts” printed across various issues of the Harmonicon in 1832 gave an account of the “Harmonic” at the City of London Tavern instigated by a German merchant and music collector residing in London, and of the “Amateur Concerts” that ran between 1818 and 1823. Whereas the former was apparently compromised by a ball at the end of the concert, which had a detrimental effect on both choice of repertoire and audience, the latter is portrayed as the result of rules about social standing among the merchant classes, which were too segregational.33 Neither the accelerated reporting of these endeavours, nor the mundane reasons given for their demise, was accidental in 1832. Indeed, the Harmonicon took an open antiaristocratic stance in discussing the “agitated state of the public mind” in June 1832. The “Diary of a Dilettante” recorded that the “taste for amusement is superseded by a stronger excitement,” referring undoubtedly to the seething tensions of the “Days of May,” the House of Lords’ blocking of the Third Reform Bill.34 The author made here a clear distinction between operagoers and those of lesser means, and in a double entendre that lamented the political atmosphere more than the empty boxes and benches at opera and concerts, he proclaimed “harmony (is) almost mute!”35 The Sacred Harmonic Society did not take an overt political stance but positioned itself clearly in terms of social class: its founders were marked by their lack of titles as members of a professional middle class. The location of their meeting place, Gate Street Chapel, straddled the West End and the City. The chapel was almost equidistant from the the-

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atres of the former and the banks and halls of the latter. Gate Street itself was a modest alley and the chapel stood contiguous to the public-­house called the Roebuck, a fact noted by the national press in April 1830: on exiting the chapel, church-­goers had to pass by the Roebuck and on one occasion had been assaulted by drunken ruffians emerging from the inn.36 Talk in the press of a near stampede indicates less the size of the chapel’s congregation than the narrowness of Gate Street. The chapel, then, was not an illustrious but affordable location. That the Society addressed a membership of lesser means was also made explicit in the choice of its regular meeting night: practice would take place every Tuesday evening, the same night as the opera at the King’s Theatre. A second way in which the Sacred Harmonic Society positioned itself was in its focus on amateur, communal music-­making. During its first year, the Society reported five concerts, of which one was conducted at Gate Street Chapel on 22 October 1833, two at the Scottish Chapel (6 May and 20 June), and two at Exeter Hall (7 August and 16 September). All were open to the public for a small ticket price.37 The Society at this point occupied only the “minor hall” at Exeter Hall, which—in combination with a special arrangement made for public performance—documents that its main objective was regular gatherings, not public performances.38 The accounts of the Society list relatively small expenses for “vocal and in­ strumental performers” hired to boost the numbers for later performances, thereby demonstrating that the concerts were executed largely by its own members. Three other features of the initial setup betray a specific ideology: the regularity of the rehearsals, which took precedence over any performances; the caveat that members sign up to a particular voice type and henceforth stay in this section; and the fact that subscribers’ attendance was only permitted if they were active members taking part in “public nights,” to which they and their personal guests were admitted. The promotion of amateur involvement in musical activities was another recurring theme across the pages of the Harmonicon and it was clear that frequent rehearsals were not the norm, even though they were desirable. In the “Memoirs of the Metropolitan Concerts,” the involvement of amateurs in the orchestra was hailed as one of the successful and laudable features of the Amateur Concerts.39 The Madrigal Society boasted a mixture of amateurs and professionals for its anniversary performance, by this means presenting a celebration of the repertoire that had never “been heard to greater advantage.”40 Musical activities in the provinces were regularly hailed as admirable and to be aspired to precisely because they involved amateurs, as reviews of various madrigal societies, glee clubs, and choral societies springing up in Devon, Manchester, Leeds,

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and Cheltenham confirmed.41 The middle class—­equated here with the intellectual class—­had begun to nurture its own talent. These reports from the provinces also served to highlight tensions in London’s musical life. The Philharmonic Society, seen as the harbinger of a newly independent concert culture run by professional musicians, also represented the silencing of the amateur, relegated to the role of educated and critical listener. The Philharmonic Society was set up by a group of professional musicians, as a type of limited company with members holding stakes; as Leanne Langley has shown, it functioned as an economic investment for professional musicians as much as a concert organization.42 Part and parcel of its new formulation was its strict separation of those qualified to perform music and those trained to listen. Indeed, the training of critical listening was central to its aesthetic ideology: giving particular significance to the “seriousness” of the music, the statutes describe the intended repertoire as “the highest class” of music; both founding documents and press reviews stress that the music demanded “exertion,” “nourishment,” and “support.”43 Subsequent reviews of the Philharmonic Society’s activities reveal an enduring focus on listening and on the education of taste: training the audience in active, analytical listening with attention to melody, harmony, timbre, and texture. The Philharmonic, then, promoted a new silence. By advocating a particular manner of hearing music, its members and subscribers were bound together by an ability to do so and to gain from it higher cultural status. This image was not only established in hindsight: the director, William Ayrton, stressed the “power and unity” of the band and the “simultaneity of sounds, that . . . seemed to proceed from one extra-­ordinary instrument.”44 Implicitly, this was then transferred to the subscribers, unified through their true knowledge, taste, and appreciation of the music. In prioritizing regular rehearsals and the duty of attendance over per­ formances, the Sacred Harmonic Society strove to achieve something markedly different. As mentioned, its programming suggested an indebtedness to provincial music festivals, which offered a ready model for amateur involvement.45 And the Society also evinced a new kind of en­ thusiasm for music, one displayed outside London: an enthusiasm that was at once emotional, noisy, and vocal.

Voices in London The Philharmonic Society’s “power and unity” was in no sense one of voice—­neither in its literal sense nor in terms of social empowerment. The audience was united in appreciation and reverence, yet the Philhar-

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monic effectively muted the audience into silent witnesses of a cultural canon. This stood in stark contrast to the increasing prominence given to individual voices, and to the idea of voice more generally, in the specialist music press, both in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review and the Harmonicon, since the Philharmonic Society’s founding. During its twelve-­year run, the Quarterly Musical Magazine, edited by its founder Richard Mackenzie Bacon, brought out near-­yearly “sketches” of the “state of music in London.”46 These frequently included discussions of vocal music that centred on opera and mostly focused on individual singers rather than on an individual work or its production. Singers’ voices were frequently conflated with presumed personal qualities: the 1821 “sketch,” for instance, described soprano Violante Camporese’s tone as “wanting, to our ears, that delicacy and richness which are essential to expression,” yet granted her “a chastity of manner and a native dignity which stamps upon the actress and the singer the superior manners of the well-­bred woman.”47 Fortunata Marinoni’s manner, by contrast, was “exuberantly florid,” her “powerful contralto voice” was “ill formed, and her intonation particularly defective,” while her gait was “rather lame.” Alberico Curioni, the first tenor, had a voice “well-­formed, rich, and sweet, but limited in compass,” sang “Italian in style—­flowery but not overloaded with graces,” while “his person is good, . . . and his manners on the stage are easy and gentlemanly.”48 The aural impression conjured by these descriptions enabled readers to develop a vivid mental image of actually hearing the singers on stage. Coupled with a value judgement, they reinforced in the reader’s mind particular voices and manners of singing as aspirational models, while other styles of singing became associated with weakness, incompetence, and unpleasant sensations. What is more, the conflation of voice and character made the idea of  “voice” central to both the music’s and the event’s meaning. Voice as meaning-­giving also appeared in the pages of the Harmonicon and the Spectator in 1832, in these cases with unmistakable political resonances. Here, however, the focus was on choral music, not on individual singing.49 Choral achievements were commonly picked out for their particular spirit, and not just in reviews of provincial music festivals but also at the King’s Theatre, where the new management had “remodeled and increased” the chorus, and at the Ancient Concerts. In April, the Harmonicon reported that Mr Knyvett dismissed certain choir members and engaged new ones so as to render “the most perfect performances in the king­ dom.”50 In addition, the author lamented that Knyvett added an accompa­ ni­ment to a glee, explaining that the “blending of the voices” is “far more pleasing to the ear than to have the chords struck upon an instrument.”51

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The idea of a powerful voice—­mapped onto a particular sense of “Englishness”—­was forcefully expressed as highly desirable yet missing from the capital. The Spectator, which had announced on 18 August 1832 that “a new vocal society is about to be established,” stressed the significance of recognizing the “fertile and unoccupied ground” of choral music in the metropolis.52 This vocal society was made up of a wide range of professional English singers with the express purpose of performing music by English and foreign composers of all types, sacred and secular, choral and ensemble, without the “absurd exclusions of music because it is new or old, because it is English or foreign.”53 If the new society thus broke down the barriers for public performance of recent English music, and brought together English voices, it was nevertheless a professional ensemble counting among its members Braham, Vaughan, Horncastle, Cooke, Phillips, Taylor, and many others well known from the operatic and concert stages. As such, it formed a companion to the Philharmonic Society’s instrumental excellence. The Sacred Harmonic Society, in contrast, tapped into the desire for a unified voice felt by a lower class of amateur musicians. It fed on a new desire to be heard that had been sparked by the rapid rise of provincial choral festivals, with their large-­scale oratorio performances.54 But while outside London there was clear evidence of amateur involvement in these festivals, in London the professional choristers of Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, and the Chapel Royal regularly appeared on concert announcements, thus limiting any need for amateur singers.55 Outside London, the situation had been rather different for a while. The desire for a unified vocal body achieved through regular and sustained rehearsal had brought the Birmingham Oratorio Choral Society into being in 1805 as a permanent music society.56 This society received professional regulations from the hands of the Hospital Festival Committee—­the recipient of the festival’s charity surplus. These rules in effect bound the singers contractually to attend rehearsals for the period of one year, thereby creating a standing ensemble of amateurs.57 Their performances’ striking effects appear to have sent waves rippling all the way to London’s musical scene.

Voices of  Unity/Voices of Dissent The final clue to the Sacred Harmonic Society’s particular individuality lay in its various homes. Gate Street Chapel was associated with dissenting culture, in particular with a strand of Calvinist Methodism perpetuated by Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who had founded the chapel, among some sixty-­four others, in the late eighteenth century to promote

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a particular group of dissenters, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.58 When in 1833 Gate Street Chapel suddenly revoked the privilege of rent-­free practice, the Society made application to a number of other nonconformist churches and chapels—­the German Lutheran Church in Savoy Street, Strand; the Adelphi Chapel; the Chapel in Orange Street, Leicester Square; and the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane Fleet Street—­ without success, before taking up residence at Exeter Hall in July 1834. What is more, at least two of the founding members were employees of dissenting churches: Mr Brewer was employed at the Protestant Dissenters’ School at Jewin Crescent, while Mr Walker, the Society’s organist, was organist at the Episcopal Chapel in Camberwell. Others, however, such as its leader, the violinist and composer George Frederick Perry, organist at the Quebec Chapel Marylebone, were regular members of the Church of England.59 In inviting applicants for membership, the rules of the Sacred Harmonic Society had one final caveat: “no persons (are) to be permitted to join the society but such as are of strictly moral character.”60 This formu­ lation was similar, yet in its implications very different, to the requirement of the Philharmonic Society twenty years earlier, namely that members had to be of “high musical standing.” The Sacred Harmonic Society’s requirement went hand in hand with the fact that the group was dedicated to singing exclusively sacred music: self-­improvement and moral education were to be guaranteed through exposure to and engagement with the sacred repertoire. Indeed, the rehearsals were given a spiritual hue not least through their regularity, which made these “practices” effectively resemble weekly services. Yet neither any particular denominational tone of the sacred repertoire nor of the moral character of the members were of great significance. The concert programmes of the Society brought together a mixture of sacred texts and subjects, on the whole avoiding full oratorios. The first programme, for 22 October 1833 contained extracts from Handel’s oratorios Saul and Messiah, a Reynolds anthem, a Callcott trio, Kent’s anthem “Hear My Prayer,” and a “Kyrie eleison,” “Rex tremendae,” and “Sanctus et Benedictus” by Mozart. The second programme was equally eclectic, adding Beethoven’s Hallelujah, an anthem by Atwood, and various pieces by Haydn beside compositions by the group’s leader, Perry. This was obviously a build-­up to the third concert, which unusually consisted of a full oratorio—­Perry’s The Fall of Jerusalem—­before the Society returned to its eclectic programming for its first Exeter Hall concert on 7 August 1834.61 The expected staple of Handel, then, framed a substantial dose of Catholic mass movements, the by-­then famous “Luther’s Hymn”—­popularized by Angelica Catalani and John Braham, who each

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sang the hymn at provincial music festivals—­and two Anglican anthems commonly performed at evensong in cathedrals. But the programmes gave pride of place to the choral numbers, interspersing them with solos yet showcasing communal singing. The Society itself kept no records of the principal singers, whether drawn from its own ranks or hired in. The focus remained with the communal voice as an activity, a sounding body, and an ideology. The idea of promoting moral self-­improvement through a community of singing was certainly inspired by dissenting practices and took a stand concerning ongoing debates about congregational involvement in Anglican parish churches. In the latter, the congregation was usually led by a small choir in metrical psalms or unison hymns, while anthems would be performed by the choir before a silent, contemplative congregation.62 Reverence was tied to a temperate engagement in music, with silent listening rather than enthusiastic, physically involved singing. Only the Evangelicals, the faction of Methodism under the umbrella of the established church, attempted to introduce congregational hymn-­singing as an essential part of worship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This placed them in tense opposition to standard cathedral practice, which relied on large-­scale music involving professional musicians and singers.63 The polemics about Anglican church music practices and particularly the controversy over congregational involvement, then, took on the mantle of current cultural and political debates as its central questions circled around themes of professionalism, amateurism, and the congregation’s voice. For the most part, congregational silence was promoted as enhancing the communication and countenance of piety, while the untrained singer’s voice was portrayed as crude, lacking in harmony, and offensive to the ear; decorous listening was hailed as the key to a flourishing and prosperous society.64 These debates were, however, as much secular as denominational, driven by anxiety over church musi­ cians’ social standing and pay, as well as by a nationalist agenda that promoted English church music from Tallis to the present. Outside the Church of England, congregational singing enjoyed greater popularity. Methodists and Evangelicals believed that worship ought to be spontaneous and expressive, an act of sincerity conducted both physically and mentally by each individual. Personal experience lay at its heart, and active engagement was key. Singing could replace the re­ collection of experience with a psychosomatic reality: it formed part of the activity of worship and took a primary position in Methodism’s doc­ trinal and theological positioning.65 Participating in communal activ­ ity was part of a Methodist’s spiritual journey of growth, far beyond the

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congregational meetings. The combination of words and music ensured a physically enthusiastic engagement with the word’s content and made the teachings delivered therein memorable. John Wesley produced a number of hymn collections that would serve these purposes.66 These Wesleyan ideologies of access to spirituality through active involvement in singing chimed with the Sacred Harmonic Society’s emphasis on regular membership, rehearsal, and active participation. Indeed, the Society’s Methodist sympathies were expressed in various other ways as well, not least through donations occasionally made to charitable institutions.67 If the ideology of active singing displayed the Society’s Methodist leaning, the presence of English anthems in its programmes suggests an affinity with the musical predilections of Calvinist Methodists. The tune book A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes . . . to be had at the Lock Hospital, had introduced hymns that followed a trend in late eighteenth-­ century Anglican hymn-­writing in copying a quasi-­galant musical style with two florid upper parts and a static bass.68 At both centres of Calvinist Methodist practice in London, the Lock Chapel and the Surrey Chapel, congregations appear to have joined in the singing of these hymns. The records of the Sacred Harmonic Society, on the other hand, remain silent on the matter of how many singers and who in particular sang the more complicated hymns and anthems. The initial exclusion of hired professional assistance, though, suggests that the members at least practised this repertoire themselves. The nature of the Sacred Harmonic Society’s religious dissent, then, remained uncertain. Perhaps it was precisely this eclectic nonconformity that eventually caused the Society to fall foul of the Gate Street Chapel ministry.69 Without prior warning, the resident vicar revoked the privilege of rent-­free weekly practice with immediate effect, this on the basis of alleged complaints from members of its worshipping community, who testified to having witnessed behaviour contrary to the beliefs and conduct of their church.70 The Society’s protest—­that its desire was to offer moral education—­fell on deaf ears.71 In a further communication, the Chapel accused the Society of reneging on the agreement that the gatherings were for the cultivation of sacred music in the spirit of furthering morality of the individual and not for the public performance of this music; the Society had apparently invited members of the public to its first “performance,” although in early days this was nothing more than a public rehearsal. A “leaflet” given out during the event had been perceived as a public concert announcement. The ministry was unconvinced by the Society’s rebuttals, and the correspondence implies that more deep-­rooted reasons, those of denominational disagreement, may

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have been at the heart of the dispute. At last, the Society surrendered and began to apply for new premises. On moving to Exeter Hall on 1 July 1834, the Sacred Harmonic Society’s leaders were conscious of the publicity: the affiliation is discussed in the records with a clear sense of new opportunity. The Exeter Hall premises had been built with the express purpose of housing and hosting a wide range of societies, especially those with a religious leaning that had fallen out of line with the established church. Some societies, such as the Protestant Association and the Reformation Society, occupied prominent offices on the ground floor of the building, while a large number of smaller societies found headquarters around the small hall on the upper floors. Speakers of all ranks—­members of the aristocracy, clerics, parliamentarians, naval and military personnel, various lay speakers—­would fill the large and small halls to discuss issues related to these societies. The Random Recollections of Exeter Hall of 1834–­37 features the Pastoral Aid Society, various Bible societies, the Reformation Society, the Temperance Society, and the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the  Jews.72 The variety and sheer number of speakers and societies is remarkable. Exeter Hall’s association with nonconformist communities gave the Sacred Harmonic Society a different level of public visibility, while also promoting its members’ interaction with the Hall’s affiliated societies. This interaction placed the Society in a wider web of associations, heralding a new sociopolitical voice: one in which individuals would come together under umbrella projects, often to serve charitable ends.73 As social historians have argued, both group association through religious affiliation (or lack thereof) and the establishment of behavioural patterns, or “habits,” to borrow Bourdieu’s term, are pillars in the formulation of a middle-­class consciousness in the early nineteenth century, indicating the separation of this social class from those on either side.74 Charitable societies in particular formed groups that were socially disparate: united by a common purpose rather than by their members’ birthrights. The Sacred Harmonic Society had just such a purpose: if its regular rehearsals and its lack of reliance on paid musicians distinguished it from other London-­based choral activities, its moral ideology effectively took religious practice out of the realm of denominational worship, transplanting it into the sphere of secular entertainment. Music was practised for the sake of the communal experience, accompanied by a liberal yet positivist belief in the presence of spirituality in any music written for the purpose of worship or to set a religious text, independent of precise denomination. The early years of the Sacred Harmonic Society were thus founded on an idea of music’s powerful potential in tying together a group through

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communal activity and religious sentiment. Singing and the belief that sacred music could inspire a “moral character” were at its heart, and its singularity was born of the manner in which it interacted with and reinterpreted singing practice in London in the early years of the new century. It emerged as a voice for the unnamed as they established themselves through practice and processes, not through a publicly visible product; it established a sense of community in a context in which the march of professional musical culture fractured musicians into isolated voices; and it celebrated a unique religious and political conviviality.

Notes 1. On 10 June 1836, the Musical World reported a performance of a Haydn mass and Spohr’s oratorio The Last Judgement. On 23 December, a report on the successful Messiah performance followed, but a full article was devoted to the Society only on 1 March 1838: see Musical World, 1 March 1836, 137–­40; 23 December 1836, 10; 10 June 1838, 210. The Society’s involvement with the Amateur Musical Festival in 1834 is discussed below. 2. Howard Smither claims that the Sacred Harmonic Society “became London’s foremost choral group”; Smither, A History of the Oratorio, vol. 4 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 282. 3. While the Society’s belief in moral education through active engagement was inspired by particular practices of dissenting communities, particularly Methodism and Calvinist Methodism, it did not conform to any one belief. 4. The one-­page flyleaf “Prospectus of the Sacred Harmonic Society, Gate Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” bears the date October 1832. It must have been printed before October 1833, when the report of the first annual general meeting was entered into the handwritten reports of the Society with a number of amendments to the rules. The printed prospectus, as well as a booklet of “rules” of the Society at Gate Street and a separate booklet “Rules of the Sacred Harmonic Society at Exeter Hall,” are bound into the handwritten Reports of the Sacred Harmonic Society, 1832–­1836, at the Royal College of  Music, GB-­RCM—­41832.a.4 (copy 1); copy 2 has no separate class mark and does not contain the printed items. After 1837, the Society’s reports appeared in print. Meetings to form the Society had been held since August 1832. 5. Morning Post, 16 June 1832, 19; and 16 January 1832, 19, 064. See also Table 5, “Expense Brackets of Concert Prices,” in William Weber, Music and the Middle Class (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 160. The table suggests that the lower bracket of concert tickets lay between one shilling and five shillings; the quarterly subscription to the Sacred Harmonic Society was thus firmly within this bracket. 6. Rules of the Sacred Harmonic Society at Gate Street Chapel (London, 1833), 7. At the first annual general meeting, rules were amended ensuring that applicants state the part they wished to sing and, on being elected, remain with that part. In addition, Rule 15 stipulated an increase of the joining fee after 24 June 1833—­a move intended to encourage interested parties to join early. 7. The Rules . . . at Gate Street also mention Mr Hilder and Mr Neville as committee members, and Mr Perry as leader; Rules . . . at Gate Street, 3. 8. Rules . . . at Gate Street, 11.

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9. “Appendix, Account of the Preliminary Proceedings Relating to the Formation of the Society, Alluded to in the Foregoing Report” in Reports, 48. The rule book must have been printed after 20 November as the amended list of committee members appears in the handwritten report but is missing from the prospectus. 10. Michael Costa led the Society after Joseph Surman stood down in 1848, a change that placed the group ever more firmly on the map of London’s large-­scale musical events: after performances of Mendelssohn’s Athalie (1849), Haydn’s Seasons (1851), Spohr’s Calvary (1852), Mozart’s Requiem (1853), and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (1854), Costa directed the Handel Festival at Crystal Palace in 1857. He continued in charge until the Society’s dissolution in 1882. While a history of the Society has not been written, its role in London’s musical life is discussed in, among others, Weber, Music and the Middle Class; John Carnelley, George Smart and Nineteenth-­Century Concert Life (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2015); Smither, Oratorio; and John Goulden, Michael Costa: England’s First Conductor. The Revolution in Musical Performance in England 1830–­ 80 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 11. Smither, Oratorio, 218; Weber, Music and the Middle Class, 102–­4; Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 12. For numbers involved in each festival, see Charles McGuire, Musical Festivals Database, http://musicalfestivals.org. 13. Smither erroneously equates the two (Smither, Oratorio, 281; Reports, 152). Weber, based on John E. Cox, suggests that several groups of city choirs came together to form the festival chorus, that they met repeatedly thereafter, and that they constituted themselves as the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1836, availing themselves merely of the name of one of its previous small choruses (Weber, Music and the Middle Class, 103–­4). Smither and Carnelley suggest that a small chorus was the instigator of the Amateur Musical Festival, based in part on an 1887 retrospective in the Musical Times (28 [1887]: 330) that lauds the festival as “the beginning of a mighty revolution” and “the death-­ knell of the professional concert-­chorister” (Smither, Oratorio, 281; Carnelley, George Smart, 198–­203). George Smart, conductor of the Royal Musical Festival, makes no mention of the rival festival in Leaves from the Journals of George Smart, ed. Hugh Bertram Cox and Clara L. W. Cox (London: Longmans, Green, 1907); see also John E. Cox, Musical Recollections of the Last Half Century (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872). 14. In 1832 the Harmonicon was the only specialist music journal published in En­ gland; the Spectator, devoted to the arts more generally, included many articles on music; the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review had ceased publication in 1830. See Leanne Langley, “The Musical Press in Nineteenth-­Century England,” Notes 46, no. 3 (March 1990): 583–­92. 15. Carnelley identifies four main types of concert activity, as categorized by Smart himself: “Professors,” “Charity,” “Private,” and “Oratorio;” see Carnelley, George Smart, 72. 16. “Philharmonic Society,” Harmonicon 10, no. 1 ( January 1832): 22. 17. This dispensed with the “free list” by which professional musicians had previously claimed free admission and which was deemed to have been made “upon the fickle terms of personal favour.” See “The New Management of the King’s Theatre,” Harmonicon 10, no. 2 (February 1832): 29–­31, here 31. 18. “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon 10, no. 2 (February 1832): 40–­44, here 41–­42. 19. “Royal Academy of Music,” Harmonicon 10, no. 4 (April 1832), 86. For Burghersh’s influence at the Royal Academy of Music, see Leanne Langley, “Sainsbury’s Dictio­

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nary, the Royal Academy of Music, and the Rhetoric of Patriotism,” in Music and British Culture, 1785–­1914, ed. Cyril Ehrlich and Christina Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 65–­98. 20. Morning Post, 17 and 18 February 1832, quoted in Harmonicon 10, no. 4 (April 1832): 90. 21. “The Centenary of the Birth of Haydn,” Harmonicon 10, no. 5 (May 1832): 113. 22. “Benefit Concerts of the Season,” Harmonicon 10, no. 7 ( July 1832): 153–­55. 23. Viscount Gladstone, Guy Boas, and Harald Christopherson, Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club: Three Essays towards Its History (London: Cypher Press, 1996); James Hobson, “Three Madrigal Societies in Nineteenth-­Century England,” in Music and Institutions in Nineteenth-­Century Britain, ed. Paul Rodmell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 33–­55; James Hobson, Musical Antiquarianism and the Madrigal Revival in England, 1726–­1851 (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2015). 24. First Prospectus of the Philharmonic Society, in Analytical Programmes of the Concerts, Seasons 1–­56, and Documents Relating to the Philharmonic Society (London, 1813–­68), GB-­Lbm K.6.d.3. 25. See Table 1.3 in Ian Taylor, Music in London and the Myth of Decline: From Haydn to the Philharmonic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Taylor debunks the notion that the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven was not heard in London between 1795 and 1813, revealing it as press propaganda. The suggestion that the Philharmonic Society was formed in opposition to the nobility’s long-­standing taste for Italian opera and the genre’s celebration of virtuosic display is also questionable. 26. “The Philharmonic Concerts,” Harmonicon 10, no. 4 (April 1832): 92–­93. 27. “Mr Barnett and the Philharmonic Society: A Letter to the Editor of the Har­ monicon,” Harmonicon 10, no. 6 ( June 1832): 129–­30. 28. John Francis Barnett, Musical Reminiscences and Impressions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906). 29. “Madrigal Society,” Harmonicon 10, no. 1 (1832): 267. 30. “Sketch of the State of Music in London, 1829,” Quarterly Musical Magazine & Review 10, no. 39 (1828): 275–­310, here 286; the season’s twelve concert programmes are reproduced at 281–­89. 31. Philharmonic Society Papers, GB-­Lbm. See also Thomas Irvine, “Das Bürgertum schafft sich ab: Zur Gründung der Philharmonic Society in London im Jahr 1813,” in Zwischen Tempel und Verein: Musik und Bürgertum im 19.Jahrhundert, ed. Laurenz Lütteken (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013), 154–­67. 32. William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Simon McVeigh, “The Benefit Concert in Nineteenth-­ Century London: From ‘Tax on the Nobility’ to ‘Monstrous Nuisance,’ ” in Nineteenth-­ Century British Music Studies, vol. 1, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 242–­66. 33. Harmonicon 10, no. 11 ( January 1833): 246–­48. In a separate issue, the demise of the more recent enterprise of the “City of London Amateur Concert” was lamented, and the persistence lauded of its sister subscription series “in the heart of the City,” the “Societa Harmonica”; Harmonicon 10, no. 8 (August 1832): 721–­73. 34. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England, 1783–­1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–­1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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35. “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon 10, no. 6 ( June 1832): 137–­ 38. The following month the dilettante distinguishes between the intellectual classes and those frequenting the opera, declaring that the high prices of subscription have led to a lack of taste and refinement as they stop the former from attending. “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon 10, no. 7 ( July 1832): 155–­57. 36. See Morning Post, 13 April 1830; a range of papers all over the country reprinted this report. 37. Each member received one free ticket but the bulk of tickets was available on the open market for two shillings and sixpence for a single and four shillings for a double, with members promoting their sale. The Society, crucially, did not usually perform for charitable purposes and any proceeds would benefit its running expenses; see Reports, 2 December 1834, 155–­58. 38. The Society’s agreement with Exeter Hall states explicitly that “said society or a branch thereof under the name of the ‘London Sacred Choral Society’ be allowed for the five public nights already appointed, the first of the said concerts taking place on the 25  June next”; see Reports, 167. 39. “Memoirs of the Metropolitan Concerts,” Harmonicon 10, no. 11 (1832): 246–­48, here 247. 40. “Anniversary of the Madrigal Society,” Harmonicon 10, no. 2 (1832): 33–­34, here 34. The anniversary was celebrated in the presence of H.R.H. the Duke of Cumberland and His Grace the Duke of Argyle. Harmonicon 10, no. 2 (February 1832): 34. For further mention of amateur involvement in the metropolis, see also “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon, 10, no. 5 (May 1832): 118. 41. On the Devon Madrigal Society, see Hobson, “Three Madrigal Societies,” 122–­32; see articles also across the Harmonicon in 1832; particular examples referenced here appear in “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon 10, no. 4 (April 1832): 87–­89; “An Amateur Music at Leeds,” Harmonicon 10, no. 6 ( June 1832): 130; “The Cheltenham Concerts,” Harmonicon 10, no. 2 (February 1832): 39–­40. 42. First Prospectus of the Philharmonic Society; see also Leanne Langley, “A Place for Music: John Nash, Regent Street and the Founding of the Royal Philharmonic Society,” eBLJ 2013, Article 12. 43. First Prospectus of the Philharmonic Society. 44. Robert Elkin, The Annals of the Royal Philharmonic Society (London: Rider, 1947), 16. 45. For choral festivals, amateur involvement, and the idea of a middle-­class cultural space, see Brian W. Pritchard, The Music Festival and the Choral Society in England (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 1968); Pippa Drummond, The Provincial Music Festival in England (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011); William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-­Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 46. “Sketches” appear on 1818, 1821, 1822, 1823, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1828, and 1829. 47. Sketch . . . 1821, 380. 48. Sketch . . . 1821, 381. 49. The Philharmonic Society concerts included multiple vocal numbers in every programme but very rarely choral pieces. 50. “Ancient Concerts,” Harmonicon 10, no. 4 (April 1832): 89–­92, here 90. 51. “Ancient Concerts,” 92. Compare also the criticisms in the Harmonicon 10, no. 5 (May 1832): 114–­16. 52. “English Vocal Union,” Spectator, 18 August 1832, 16; “Extracts from the Diary of a Dilettante,” Harmonicon 10, no. 9 (September 1832): 210–­12, here 211. “If the principal

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English singers have really been brought to understand the importance, to themselves and to the best interests of their art, of co-­operation, they have it in their power to bring into action a stronger phalanx of talent than the metropolis ever presented.” 53. Spectator, 25 August 1832. 54. Press reports cited in Pritchard, The Music Festival, 286. There is clear evidence of amateur involvement from 1818 onwards. 55. Pritchard, The Music Festival, 301. 56. Pritchard, The Music Festival, 288. 57. Rules to be Observed by the Oratorio Choral Society for the Triennial Festival 1811 (Birmingham, 1810): “The object of this society is to train a body of chorus singers for the next Triennial Music Festival for the benefit of the General Hospital.” Pritchard summarizes Rule 2: “Practice to be held once a fortnight. A system of 3d [threepence] and 6d [sixpence] fines was in operation for late or non-­attendance. Parents and guardians of trebles were also liable.” Pritchard, The Music Festival, 299. 58. The “Birth and Baptism Records of Lincolns Inn Fields, Gate Street Chapel” are held at the National Archives, Kew, RG 4/4193. For the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, see Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Hun­ tingdon and the Eighteenth-­Century Crisis of Faith and Society (Durham, UK: Durham Academic Press, 1997); Alan Harding, The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion: A Sect in Action in Eighteenth-­Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 59. G. F. Perry was organist at Quebec Chapel Marylebone and later at Trinity Church, Gray’s Inn Road. He was the Society’s leader from 1833 and temporarily acted as its conductor in 1848. 60. Reports of the Sacred Harmonic Society, GB-­RCM-­41832.a.4. 61. Note of a previous performance of Perry’s Fall of Jerusalem by a professional group appears in the Harmonicon in March 1832. 62. Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 151–­67 and 262–­66. See also the articles in the Harmon­ icon on how best to do this, for instance “On Chanting,” vol. 10, nos. 2 and 3. See also, among several others, “On the Music of Our Churches,” Quarterly Musical Magazine & Review 3, no. 11 (1821): 289–­92. 63. Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church; for changes to this practice around 1840, see also William J. Gatens, Victorian Cathedral Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 33–­44. 64. “On the Music of Our Churches,” 292; “To the Editor. On the Present State of Church Music in England,” Quarterly Musical Magazine & Review 6, no. 24 (1824): 457–­64, here 462. 65. Martin Clarke, “John Wesley’s ‘Directions for Singing’: Methodist Hymnody as an Expression of Methodist Beliefs in Thought and Practice,” Methodist History 47, no. 4 (2009): 196–­209. 66. Wesley’s hymn collections in order were A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music as They Are Commonly Sung at the Foundery (London, 1742); Select Hymns with Tunes Annext (London, 1761); 2nd ed., with tune suppl. separately, entitled Sacred Melody (1765); Sacred Harmony, or A Choice Collection of Psalms and Hymns (London, 1781/R). 67. The first such payment appeared on 7 August 1833, when the Society paid four pounds “for the benefit of Wesleyan Missionary Society;” see “The Accounts” in Reports, 161. The Society’s third concert on 7 August 1834—­and the first at the new premises of Exeter Hall—­concluded with a funeral anthem by Samuel Wesley “as a tribute

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of respect to the memory of the late Charles Wesley Esq. Organist of St Mary le bones Church, and nephew of the Rev. John Wesley the Founder of the Methodists.—­by desire of the Rev. J. Gaulter and other Ministers of the Connexion.” 68. Nicholas Temperley, “The Lock Hospital Chapel and Its Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 118, no. 1 (1993): 44–­72. 69. The Gate Street Chapel minister, the Reverend Thomas Stephenson, who had trained at Cheshunt College, died in 1833; the new minister may have had different ideas. 70. The debate is recorded in detail in the Reports. 71. “The committee regards the objects of the Sacred Harmonic Society as of great importance in encouraging a correct taste for sacred harmony, and also in sustaining an important relation to the cause of religion and morality, and that the character and influence which it has secured by the rectitude of its principles and the number and respectability of its members, impose upon the committee to whom the management of its affairs is entrusted the duty of bestowing the most vigilant attention to whatever may have a tendency to impair its usefulness or injure its reputation”; MS Reports, no page number; see note 4. 72. Random Recollections of Exeter Hall, 1834–­37, by One of the Protestant Party (London: n.p, 1838). The book was explicitly modeled on James Grant, Random Recollections of the House of Lords, from the Year 1830 to 1836, Including Personal Sketches of the Leading Members (London: Smith, Elder, 1836). 73. Such societies were forming rapidly in the 1820s and 1830s. See Robert  J. Morris, “Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–­1850: An Analysis,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (1983): 95–­118; Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–­1914 (Houndmills, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–­1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 74. Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-­Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–­1850 (London: Routledge, 2013); Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Ch a p t er 9  

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Foreign Voices, Performing Frenchness Jenny Colon and the “French Plays” in London Kimber ly White

In January 1829, Jenny Colon (1808–­42) arrived in London for the new season of “French Plays” at the English Opera House. One of the most beloved actresses on the Parisian boulevard stage, Colon capitalized on the popularity of French-­language theatre in the English capital to perform her repertoire of contemporary vaudeville. This new “imported ornament” was relished by the London elite, as much for her fine soprano voice, which enabled her to sing vaudeville songs with exquisite expression, as for her piquant yet simple acting style that exuded Frenchness.1 Jenny Colon was, according to English critics, “French sentiment personified.”2 Vaudeville was a popular, very Parisian theatrical genre that incorporated musical numbers, typically airs with new text on preexisting music, with rich wordplay and intertextual and intermusical references. In the early nineteenth century, the genre was imported into London by troupes of actors and singers from the Parisian stage and performed in the original language. For the fashionable classes attending the French Plays in London, their effortless comprehension of foreign voices allowed them to display their cultivation and language skills, often garnered during a “grand tour” of the Continent during their youth. For those who lacked such fluency, the vaudevilles offered an exceptional pedagogical opportunity to acquire and then practise their French voice. The English public were not the only ones cultivating their voices at the French Plays. So, too, was Jenny Colon. Between her first tour to London in 1829 and her second in 1834, Colon earnestly began vocal training to render her voice flexible and capable of more complex fioritura, introducing vocalisms that were largely foreign to the vaudeville genre.

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The roles she performed during her second tour revealed her new voice, which eventually took her away from vaudeville and opened new avenues for an operatic career in Paris and abroad. In this essay, I examine different dimensions of the French voice manifested through the performance and reception of French vaudeville in London, using Jenny Colon’s visits in 1829 and 1834 as touchstone moments. Her tours provide revealing snapshots, five years apart, of the repertoire and the press reception of the performers and the works, and help to situate the “French Plays” within the shifting theatrical landscape of the city. Vaudeville contributed in important ways to theatrical life in London by circulating music from the stage and shaping the English public’s perception of their neighbours to the south.

The French Plays [4 January 1827] . . . then went to the French Theatre, the most agreeable place of amusement now in London. . . . —­H enry Crabb Robinson 3

French culture was ubiquitous in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 English dramatists frequently borrowed from (or blatantly plagiarized) French drama, elite society dressed according to the latest French fashions and sent their children to France for their education, and the Prince of Wales (later George IV) hired French interior de­ signers, embroideresses, and painters to decorate his home at Carlton House.5 Despite periods of war and political tension throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, the two countries had a profound relationship maintained by intimate connections between aristocratic families, travel and tourism, and the importation of French theatre and literary culture. France was a particularly fertile ground for imports on account of its geographical proximity and thriving theatre life, as well as the absence of international copyright legislation on foreign adaptations.6 By the early nineteenth century, a trip between Paris and London was as short as thirty hours, and passenger traffic rose steadily with the development of transportation technologies, from 12,000 travellers per year around 1815 to 30,000 in 1830.7 Among those travelling across the Channel to the English capital were French actors and singers importing theatre and music.8 French-­language theatre had been performed intermittently in London from the seventeenth century. Charles II supported French troupes in the 1660s and 1670s, and, although royal patronage waned during a prolonged period

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of war between the countries (1689–­1713), French theatre reappeared on the London stage regularly from 1718 to 1735. The genres performed varied widely during this last period, from classic comedies and tragedies to tightrope walking and acrobatics.9 As Erica Levenson observes, most of the entertainment involved music: French or Italian operatic excerpts, dance music, popular songs, or vaudevilles. The performance of opéras-­ comiques en vaudevilles, a new genre developed at the Théâtre de la Foire in Paris in 1712 and imported to London from 1718, Vanessa Rogers has argued, notably served as an important model for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728).10 Gay also used four French vaudeville airs in Polly (1729), which he had probably heard in French productions of comédies en vaudevilles in London. His contemporaries Henry Fielding and James Ralph were similarly influenced by the opéras-­comiques en vaudevilles.11 After the Battle of Waterloo, French performers returned to London in significant numbers. A subscription series of French plays was offered at the theatre on Tottenham Street beginning in 1815. Lingering tensions from the Napoleonic Wars affected their reception: according to the famous French actor François-­Joseph Talma (1763–­1826), some audience members reacted angrily to what they felt was a “French invasion” and almost destroyed the stage.12 Nevertheless, over the following years the “French Plays” or “Soirées françaises” became a regular feature in London. An exclusive series of performances was held in the Argyll Rooms, organized by a group of aristocratic women; tickets were sold in advance and by subscription.13 The repertoire typically included short vaudevilles, farces, sentimental comedies, and older classics (usually Molière), played by émigrés living in London or actors who had travelled from Paris. Pierre-­François Laporte (1799–­1841), a central figure in the development of the French Plays, arrived in the capital as early as 1821. Laporte is primarily known as manager of the King’s Theatre from 1828, initially in collaboration with Émile Laurent. His final season in 1841 culminated in the tumultuous “Tamburini Row” and was quickly followed by his death.14 However, he began his career on the popular stage. His father Jacques-­François Laporte (dit Delaporte, 1775–­1841) was a celebrated Harlequin and one of the founding actors of the Théâtre du Vaudeville.15 Pierre Laporte joined his father at the Vaudeville in 1822, but very soon after he turned his sights to London. He began performing in the French Plays at the Royal West London Theatre (on Tottenham Street) and, certainly by 1825 if not as early as 1823, he co-­managed with Jean Cloup and Pelissié the company of French actors.16 In January 1828, the French Plays were produced at a new venue, the English Opera House (Lyceum Theatre), a series that continued until the

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theatre was destroyed by fire in 1830.17 The season ran from early January until Lent, with performances on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Evenings were triple bill, usually one or two vaudevilles and a comedy in prose or verse. The public chose a subscription of twenty or forty evening performances; prices for the forty-­evening subscription ranged from 160 guineas for boxes to three shillings and threepence for the parterre.18 In 1836, actress Jenny Vertpré, a veteran of the French Plays, managed the company for a season at St James’s Theatre.19 The venue became the permanent home for French theatre from the 1840s: its stationery read “Théâtre français, King Street à Londres.”20 Proprietor John Mitchell, who had founded the Bond Street theatre ticket agency (Ashton & Mitchell), engaged a permanent company under the direction of Mlle Eliza Forgeot along with a series of visiting stars and repertoire from a broad spectrum of Parisian theatres, from vaudeville and farces to opéra-­comique and provocative modern melodramas. By the 1860s, John Hollingshead, manager of the Gaiety Theatre between 1868 and 1886, remarked: “English people and especially Londoners, are almost as familiar with the best performances in Paris as the Parisians themselves.”21 Although the range of repertoire produced throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was remarkably wide, vaudeville was the French Plays’ bread and butter. The reasons were numerous. Theatre legislation in London prior to 1843 reserved “legitimate,” spoken drama for the patent theatres; the minor theatres therefore required productions focused to some degree on music and spectacle, which vaudeville could provide.22 Vaudeville used spoken dialogue intermingled with sung numbers, usually short airs with new text on borrowed tunes, called timbres. It was France’s most exported genre during the period, in part because it was so abundant. Between 1815 and 1830, there were 1,300 new vaudevilles, compared to 369 comedies, 280 melodramas, and about 200 opéras-­comiques.23 The high production ratio is explained in part because vaudevilles were short (one or two acts) and very popular, licenced for production at several theatres at different moments during the period: the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Théâtre des Variétés, Théâtre des Nouveautés, Théâtre du Gymnase-­Dramatique, and Théâtre du Palais-­Royal.24 The genre then circulated internationally. The vaudevilliste Ernest-­Georges Petitjean claimed that by 1838 vaudeville was being performed by local or travelling troupes as far as Moscow, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Milan, Rome, Naples, and Bucharest.25 Besides vaudeville’s prevalence, brevity, and accessibility, its popularity both at home and abroad might be explained by its reputation as a “quintessentially French” or “eminently national” genre. The works remained

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firmly rooted in contemporary Parisian or provincial life, with references to political and literary figures, events, and even new forms of technology. Vaudeville during the French Restoration and the July Monarchy treated topics of the everyday, with characters drawn from the petty and middle bourgeoisie and restricted to situations that could be developed in one or two acts: romantic rivalries, parental opposition to marriage, ruses to obtain an inheritance, and all kinds of quiproquo (misunderstandings).26 Vaudeville, particularly as it was practised at the Théâtre du Vaudeville and the Théâtre des Variétés, where Jenny Colon spent most of her career, generally abandoned its grivois roots to unveil morally upright plots that ended well, usually in marriage. During her visits to London, Colon did not perform any works drawn from the repertoire of the Palais-­ Royal, a theatre where, according to one nineteenth-­century journalist, one went to laugh but would never bring young ladies.27 Her London repertoire fit comfortably into the category of light sentimental comedy, often exploring the struggles of a young couple who must overcome an obstacle in order to marry. There were some exceptions: during her second visit in 1834 Colon performed Dumanoir and Camille’s Une Fille d’Eve (1833, retitled as Le Caprice d’une femme), in which the lead character, Hermance, coquettishly rebuffs the adulterous advances of a young military man, and, to defy her husband, takes up smoking.28 In 1829, however, the singer had personal reasons that might have motivated her to present a more wholesome image to the English public. Only a few weeks into her first visit to London, Colon married her colleague Pierre-­ Chéri Lafont amid rumours of a pregnancy: one journalist remarked wryly that the reason why she was announced as femme Lafont was already apparent.29 Selecting more respectable works was probably a conscious decision by the managers to accommodate English social and moral standards at the theatre. At the same time, John Bishop has convincingly argued that English critics evaluated original French-­language plays and their English-­language adaptations on quite different terms, accepting “French immorality” or “un-­English sentiments” in the original piece but decrying them in translation or adaptation. As long as it openly displayed its foreignness, a “dangerous” French play could be relished by the public. However, the same situations presented in a translation or adaptation would be declared unfit. In this way, the St James’s became “a conveniently fenced-­in space where foreignness might safely be sampled.”30 The French Plays in the 1820s and 1830s certainly did not mask their foreign character but, rather, endeavoured to promote their connections to France and to maintain a strictly francophone atmosphere. Playbills were

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entirely in French, actors were drawn exclusively from Parisian (and occasionally provincial) theatres, and, by all appearances, the works performed were those originally premiered in Paris, without much, if any, modification.31

Speaking French Vaudevilles were, first and foremost, created for Parisians and French speakers with a discerning ear.32 The airs were sung to well-­known and previously composed tunes, newly composed music, or recent music borrowed from the latest hits of the lyric stage. Identifying and understanding the references required knowledge and familiarity with a wide range of repertoire, particularly for those airs that created double entendres between the song’s original text and the new lyrics. In addition to the genre’s intertextuality and intermusicality, Daniel Lemahieu describes myriad forms of language play: invented words, homonyms, puns, par­ odies, incorrect liaisons or mistaken words ( pataquès), slang, foreign expressions, dialects, accents, bawdy or salacious language, and double entendres.33 Without explication, nonnative speakers would undoubtedly have had difficulty catching the subtleties and may even have struggled to acquire more than a rudimentary understanding of the narrative. The genre’s formulaic nature and its heavy reliance on choreography, props, and gesture for the comic situations would certainly have assisted spectators, and the musical excerpts provided entertainment and pleasure, even if the references were not always recognized. But despite vaudeville’s potential opacity, the concentration of Parisian culture and the French language were also what made the French Plays attractive to foreign audiences. As Petitjean put it in 1838, vaudeville gave foreign spectators access to French esprit. “France’s superiority used to be represented by dance masters and hairdressers,” Petitjean declared. “Today, the vaudeville actor alone represents France and its intellectual strength. Ask a German what is made in France; he will certainly respond, ‘vaudevilles.’ Speak to him about the French character; he will have read about it in Scribe.”34 The “Théâtre-­Français” in nonfrancophone cities was generally targeted to an elite public that had mastered French (or sought to), and the French Plays in London were no exception.35 The audience was decidedly aristocratic: in 1818, the Morning Post identified about twenty-­five fashionables present at performances, including Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, the Grand Duke Michael, and various foreign ministers.36 In 1829, the list of attendees included the Dukes of Sussex, Wellington, Devonshire, Bedford, and Somerset; Prince Polignac and Prince

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Esterhazy and Ladies Mount Charles and Tankerville Jersey. Once the French Plays were permanently housed at St James’s Theatre, Queen Victoria became a regular patron.37 French nationals also made up a fair portion of the audience of the French Plays, wishing to keep up to date with the latest plays and to hear—­and speak—­their native tongue.38 French was the second language spoken by England’s educated population, often taught by French émigrés, whose numbers increased substantially from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.39 The flood of French asylum seekers arriving in 1792, shortly before the outbreak of the Terror, might have motivated Londoners to brush up on their French. According to Kirsty Carpenter, conversations in polite society took place in French as often as in English during the early 1790s. Already in 1791, Lady Malmesbury wrote to Lady Elliott advising her to study French “as the whole island will be full of them soon.”40 By the middle third of the nineteenth century, the French had become a sizeable population. During her visits to London in the 1830s, Flora Tristan claimed that there were over fifteen thousand French in the city; according to the census records from 1851, by midcentury the number had increased still further.41 The French frequently came to London on business; others worked as teachers, as theatre performers, or in the diplomatic corps.42 The French Plays provided an opportunity for those not yet fluent (or native) an occasion to work on their language skills. In 1846, a journalist at the Morning Post declared that the French Plays offered “the best models of that language which is the universal medium of communication in Europe,” calling the theatre an institution (along with Italian opera) that “behoves all educated persons, for the sake of models in art, as well as for amusement, to maintain in their utmost perfection.”43 Many people attended the plays, one spectator suggested, as one would attend a French class: to learn the language and improve their familiarity with the repertoire.44 The plays even became pedagogical tools for French instructors. A certain Delaporte (perhaps related to actor and director Pierre Laporte?) wrote a letter to the editor of the Morning Post in 1829 advertising his “Conversations Françaises” classes. Beginners would be offered lessons using his practical method entitled “Les 1,400 Mots.” Those with a better mastery of the language could study more topical repertoire. With over 500 different French plays in his possession, including “little Comedies and Vaudevilles” as well as “our best modern masterpieces,” Delaporte would read and explain the plays performed at the French theatre.45 These modern masterpieces included a selection of contemporary comedies in

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verse or in prose written for the Comédie-­Française in Paris, such as Casimir Delavigne’s L’École des vieillards (1823) and Eugène Scribe’s Valérie (1822). The latter was performed during Comédie-­Française actor Mademoiselle Mars’s tour in 1828 and had been by far her greatest London success. Mars attracted, John Stokes surmises, a literate audience that could appreciate her restrained delivery of the part of Valérie, a blind girl who miraculously regains her sight at the play’s end.46 The frequent tours of celebrated French actors to the capital similarly motivated Londoners to improve their knowledge of the repertoire. For those wishing to get better acquainted with the fashionable plays, Delaporte also offered individuals the opportunity to read the texts themselves with the assistance of a dictionary, charging merely one shilling a sitting. Delaporte’s offer to vulgarize the French plays on the boards suggests that some spectators were not wholly capable of appreciating the pieces at first hearing. While the audience generally reacted strongly to the physical comedy in the plays, many remained cold to the subtleties of French dialogue.47 In diary entries about his experiences attending the theatre, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–­1867) often complained that he did not understand the French pieces.48 Imperfect aural comprehension meant that spectators sought recourse to textual aids. Although many international “Théâtres-­Français” during the century produced pamphlets with a detailed plot summary or even the complete texts of the plays in the native language, this does not seem to have been the case at the French Plays in London, at least in the 1830s.49 In a letter to the Times, one spectator recounted his disappointment that the original text for the play was not available for purchase at the theatre. He praised the French Plays for affording Englishmen an excellent opportunity for perfecting their knowledge of French; for this reason, he had brought his children along with him. However, he declared himself frustrated by the lack of materials to facilitate their comprehension of the language.50 The man’s wish to provide his family access to French culture, despite their lack of fluency in the language, is indicative of the social aspirations of the middle classes. For the English elite in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Robin Eagles argues, thorough education in French culture and language was essential. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, many upper-­class families sent their children on the “Grand Tour,” at once a touristic as well as an educational experience on the Continent that typically included instruction in riding, fencing, dancing, music, mathematics, and philosophy.51 But perhaps more important than the knowledge gained of these subjects and activities, the Grand Tour provided access to French qualities and mannerisms that are

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less easily taught than learned through imitation. Many of the elite felt that familiarity with French life was “the only truly certain guarantee of good breeding.”52 The French Plays offered Londoners an opportunity to immerse themselves, albeit temporarily, in the subtle details of the French character without the necessity of travel to the Continent.

Acting French For several London critics, the textual aspects of vaudeville—­integral to its value for the French public—­were of less interest than its performative properties, particularly its performance of Frenchness. Vaudevilles, although they were considered light entertainment or even “airy nothings,” offered the public a glimpse into French habits, manners, and character.53 The critic of the Morning Post, for example, found the pieces generally “slight in plot and almost barren in incident”; however, he felt that “they still afford opportunities, which are never lost by the performers, for interesting and delighting the audience in a degree not surpassed by the more solid productions of dramatic art.”54 Another critic, at the Monthly Magazine, characterized the genre as “light and sketchy, yet philosophical and humorously illustrative of living manners, with its brilliancy, brevity, and epigrammatic point.”55 Vaudeville’s slim, conventional plots in fact brought more attention to its performative dimension. As Crabb Robinson somewhat cantankerously put it, “the French pieces require the setting off of good acting to be tolerable.”56 But what Robinson saw as a flaw was a key aspect of the genre. According to Lemahieu, “In vaudeville, to speak is to do, to profess is to act.”57 Much of the narrative proceeds through gesture and stage movement: actors gesticulate when they are unable to speak; they hide when another character unexpectedly enters the scene; they physically prevent other characters from carrying out certain acts; and so on. Comic situations are intricately choreographed and often require very little dialogue. Many of the dramatic constructions rely heavily on physical movement: face-­to-­face encounters, quiproquo, and (mis)recognition. With its reliance on physical movement for the plot’s development, vaudeville provided performers with all kinds of opportunities to foster not depth of character (which would imply a degree of psychological development foreign to the genre), but rather a kind of saturation of nuances and gestures that made the performance appear “natural.”58 The most valued actors in London were those who became thoroughly implicated in their roles. The critic of the Examiner favourably compared French actors to English ones, stating that the former never strained after

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abrupt effects; rather, they produced a result through persistent attention to the minutiae of the character.59 Hugues Bouffé (1800–­1888), a star comic of French boulevard theatres who performed at the Haymarket in 1831, was praised for completely identifying himself with his role and for producing a unique interpretation for each play.60 Pierre Lafont (1797–­ 1873), who performed opposite Jenny Colon and married the actress during her first London tour, was singled out for perfectly impersonating a Frenchman. According to the critic of the Spectator, Lafont, “by a hundred little variations and interjections struck off casually, and arising, as it were, involuntarily, makes what he says as much his own as though he had the moment conceived the ideas to which he gives utterance.”61 But not everyone in the audience shared his capacity to appreciate Lafont’s perfectly natural Frenchness, the critic conceded. It is no accident that this particular critic slipped frequently into French during his review, drawing on dialogue from the pieces or peppering his text with French expressions. Just as comprehending the French voice—­or, even better, having perfected one’s own French voice—­revealed social and cultural distinction, so too did the recognition of French manners and habits: what it meant to “act French.” Vaudeville was thoroughly immersed in the everyday rather than in fantastical or historical plots. For this reason, the genre was often described, both in London and in France, as a theatre of “manners.” In contrast to melodrama’s emphasis on incidents and events, opined the critic of the New Monthly Magazine, vaudeville was preoccupied with manners and feelings, with the actors communicating information about the character predominately through gestural performance.62 Another critic provocatively described vaudeville as “moving pictures of the manners of the day” and “faithful counterparts” of French life and character, as if the sequence of gestures deployed throughout the play could be broken down into an infinite series of stills that each captured the quintessence of France and its people.63 Perhaps only slightly tongue in cheek, one author wondered “whether the best history of the progress of ideas and social life in France, or at least in Paris, might not be supplied by a complete edition of all the successful vaudevilles.”64

Frenchness, Personified Leaving aside the wholesale conflation of French theatre with French history, the interpretation of vaudeville as “moving pictures” of French life provides an excellent point of entry into the London reception of  Jenny Colon during her first tour in 1829. Colon’s reception in the press was

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overwhelmingly positive. English critics focused particularly on her mastery of facial expression, her comic timing, her singing, and her vocal inflections, and described in minute detail her performance of key scenes, providing a keen sense of her gestural and vocal aesthetic. Praised above all were her simplicity, truthfulness, and naturalness. The critic of the New Monthly Magazine penned an extensive portrait of Colon in January 1829. Calling her “Mars of the boulevards,” he nevertheless differentiated her from the Comédie-­Française actress by arguing that Colon performed “the truth as it is in Nature” rather than the “truth as it is in poetry.” Her style of acting correlated with the aesthetic of vaudeville, which he referred to as the comedy of real life; that is, the manners, customs, and expression of early nineteenth-­century Parisian society.65 With his insistence on vaudeville’s proximity to (French) reality, his analysis of her acting similarly spins out a connection between the character, the actress, and the (French) woman. The grace, naivety, and simplicity that Colon exhib­ ited, the critic insisted, were “the grace, naïveté, and simplicity of the nat­ ural woman—­(the natural Frenchwoman, be it always understood,) not the accomplished actress.”66 The critic felt the most striking moments could emerge from seemingly trifling dialogue. Colon’s use of vocal inflection, accompanied by simple gestures, condensed layers of meaning into a single voiced sylla­ ble. He gave several examples from Duvert and Duport’s one-­act vaudeville, Kettly, ou Le Retour en Suisse (1825). Kettly encounters Senneville, whom she met during her youth and has loved ever since. Upon Senne­ ville’s return to Switzerland, he is invited to lunch at Kettly’s inn and there recounts his misadventures in love in France. When Senneville asks Kettly if she is not horrified at the treatment he received from the lady who scorned him, her response consists of a single syllable: Non! “Yet this one word,” the critic contends, “as she pronounces it, and accompanies it by a commentary of speaking-­looks, is more full of meaning, and more effective, than the longest speech in Racine.”67 His claim that profound meaning could be derived from a single utterance might seem hackneyed; however, these moments of condensed signification were frequently used to demonstrate the different aesthetics of French acting—­ particularly French actors’ approach to the “natural”—­in English criticism during this period.68 Critics expressed delight with Colon’s vocal inflections and her charming manner of delivering the text. The critic of the Spectator was particularly struck by her performance of Emmeline in Scribe’s vaudeville Les Premières amours, ou Les Souvenirs d’enfance (1825). Emmeline’s persistent love for her childhood sweetheart, her cousin Charles, almost prevents

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her from marrying a more appropriate suitor whom her father has invited to their home. The critic dwells on Colon’s performance of the scene in which Emmeline’s father announces the suitor’s impending visit. Quoting the French dialogue directly from the play, he attempts to reproduce Colon’s voice and her inflections through graphic modifiers: To the fretfulness which is apt to rise in such a breast, so occupied, at the mention of a suitor recommended by parental authority, Mademoi­ selle colon gave an expression delightfully comic. It was but yesterday that Emmeline had thus been threatened, and—­“depuis hier j’ai la migraine ou la fièvre . . . je ne sais laquelle; mais ça me fait bien mal.” This assumption of valetudinarian—­this sudden discovery of herself in a rapid decline at the prospect of an odious suitor and the absence of the favoured one—­was a fine stroke of girlishness sentimentally in love. But true as it was to nature, the charm of it was surpassed by that of another speech immediately following. In a demi-­pathetic tone she half weeps over the image which fancy conjures up of her father lamenting over her early grave; whilst at the same time she half smiles with a consciousness of the ruse she is playing off on him.—­“ ‘Ma pauvre fille!’ she imagines him exclaiming, ‘Ma pauvre Emmeline, qui était si gentille!’—­mais il ne sera plus temps.” This was perhaps the most delightful touch of a performance replete with the attractions of consummate nature.69

Clearly, Colon’s delivery transformed the text, making the scene more effective and comic. To convey her voice and its affects in written form, the critic used an array of devices—­italics, uppercase letters, dashes, and ellipses. Although the textual glossing inevitably falls short of replicating Colon’s vocal expression, it makes a valiant attempt at illustrating how her performance closely attended to the fine details of characterization by controlling the shape and tone of the spoken text. She played the part, the critic insisted, with “exquisite precision.” Moreover, as in many reviews of the French plays, her characterization was necessarily read in terms of her nationality: she was “French sentiment personified.” As the critic sinks profoundly into his recollections of her performance, the French voice takes over his own. In addition to all the quoted material from the original play, French terms and expressions frequently replace the English (as they do in his other reviews), demonstrating by example that the true connoisseur must necessarily be bilingual—­and, it seems, must genuinely love French theatre. His following review begins by stating: “That there is one place under heaven where a man can be rationally

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amused, is well known to all who frequent the French play—­from love and not for fashion.”70

Singing French Although the Spectator critic focused exclusively on Jenny Colon’s spoken voice and dramatic skills, her singing generally impressed her London audience—­not for its “science” or cultivation but for its simplicity, charm, and expression. The New Monthly Magazine critic characterized her singing as the most delightful thing on the French stage: a voice that appealed directly to the heart.71 Critics appreciated a use of vocal expression and ornamentation that enlivened simple vaudeville songs.72 Colon, perhaps the most talented vaudeville singer of her generation, was generally regarded as exceptional: most of her colleagues had passable voices, some quite fine, but they rarely possessed her vocal range or flexibility. After her departure from London, one critic lamented that her successor, Mlle Florval, omitted many of the songs in Jean, ou le Pouvoir de l’éducation (1828) that Colon had interpreted so well.73 London critics were nevertheless ambivalent about vaudeville songs, preferring to focus on the spoken dialogue. One spectator who visited the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris in 1816 found the alternation of spoken dialogue and song distracting but grew accustomed to the melodies that took up half the stage action.74 The mixed medium was certainly nothing new for Londoners, given the long history of comédies en vaudevilles imported from France and the development of English ballad opera in the eighteenth century. The volume of sung material varied quite dramat­ ically in the nineteenth century. In the early part of the century, songs occupied a substantial portion of vaudevilles. Joseph Pain and Bouilly’s Fanchon la vielleuse (1803), for example, contains about fifty airs over three acts. By midcentury, however, songs had all but disappeared from the plays: with the competition arising from operetta and, in 1864, the changes to theatre legislation that regulated genre, vaudeville’s text became exclusively spoken.75 During the height of Colon’s career in the 1820s and 1830s, songs remained an integral part of the vaudeville aesthetic. What is more, Colon even helped to raise the musical profile of the genre for a brief moment. Throughout her career, she cleverly exploited opportunities to push generic boundaries, whether by expanding the role and difficulty of the music within vaudeville, or by using certain venues that produced multiple genres as a means for crossover. In the early 1830s she pursued additional vocal training, in secret and in earnest, which would eventually permit

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her to make the remarkable leap from the boulevard theatres back to the Opéra-­Comique, where she had begun her career in 1822; such moves were usually made in the reverse.76 She premiered principal and secondary roles in a dozen works at the Opéra-­Comique between 1836 and 1840, although most, with the notable exception of Auber’s L’Ambassadrice (1836), did not remain long in the repertoire. In 1840 the former vaude­ ville  actress climbed a final rung in the theatre hierarchy to sing grand opéra and opéra-­comique at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels.77 Colon’s roles at the Théâtre des Variétés a few years prior to her high-­ profile move reveal changes in the selection and difficulty of the songs. La prima donna (1832), for example, is laden with musical references to contemporary operas. Colon plays Batilda, a peasant girl who becomes an Italian prima donna, La Signora Rosellina. In scene 3, when Batilda and the Marquis knock at a farmhouse door, desperate for shelter during a violent storm, Batilda sings an air from Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, “Noble châtelaine” (act 2, scene 1), originally sung by Comte Ory and his men, disguised as pilgrims, outside the convent walls during a storm.78 In scene 6, as Batilda describes her stage début, she borrows another air from Le Comte Ory, the title character’s cavatina in act 1, scene 3; the second part of the aria uses Rose’s couplets (no. 7 in act 2) from Auber’s opéra-­comique Emma (1821). In scene 11, Batilda and Pippo perform a scene from their youth, with Batilda playing the shepherdess. Her air uses Meyerbeer’s “Le ranz-­des-­vâches d’Appenzell” (text by Scribe, ca. 1828). Meyerbeer’s song comprises five couplets, with a refrain that becomes increasingly virtuosic. In the vaudeville, Batilda sings four couplets plus the refrain in an arrangement by Tolbecque. Finally, the music for two ensembles (scene 16 and the final scene) is borrowed from a galop from La Tentation.79 In Paris, critics were generally enthusiastic about the expansive role of music in Colon’s roles: Le Figaro encouraged the public to “go and see Mlle Jenny Colon and, above all, hear her.”80 Jules Janin, theatre critic of the Journal des débats, did not appreciate the changes; however, his review sheds light not only on the modifications that Colon was making to the vaudeville repertoire at the Théâtre des Variétés, but also on the effect that these changes had on the genre’s identity. He claimed that rather than embracing vaudeville’s wordplays, misunderstandings, exaggeration, bawdiness, and improvisation, Colon wanted to sing continuously and only act occasionally. He accused her of transcending generic bound­aries, stating that she sought vocal virtuosity in a genre that normally relied on simple tunes and that she borrowed music from too wide a range of genres. “She sings anything,” Janin deplored, “as long as it has a lot of triple crochets. . . . The other day once again, in the new piece, my God,

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what didn’t she sing? She sang Rossini, she sang Meyerbeer, she sang all the way to the ballet from La Tentation (1832).”81 Jenny Colon opened her second visit to London in the summer of 1834 with La prima donna, which she gave five times. Her performance run was shorter than in 1829: only thirteen shows from 9 July until 11 August. The repertoire comprised thirteen vaudevilles, five of which she had recently created at the Variétés and the Gymnase, with another six recycled from her previous visit. Generally speaking, there was far more singing during her second tour. English critics noted that Colon’s voice had become richer and more cultivated, and compared her vocal qualities to that of Laure Cinti-­Damoreau (1801–­63), a star Parisian operatic soprano who excelled in florid writing.82 Not only did Colon perform vaudevilles in which music played a more prominent role, but excerpts of Italian opera and French ballet also regularly filled the entr’actes. During Laporte’s dual management of the French Plays and opera at the King’s Theatre in the 1830s, he brought together performers from both theatres for special events, enabling a physical and sonic rapprochement of the two companies and genres—­and their publics. During Colon’s visit, there were five benefit concerts—­for Pelissié, Last, Cloup, Laporte, and Colon herself—­at least four of which included singers and dancers from the King’s Theatre. Colon crossed generic boundaries during one of these evenings, singing an (unspecified) Italian aria and a duet from Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide with the tenor Rubini.83 The range of musical borrowings in the vaudevilles during her run was wide, and frequently cited new operas and opera-­ballets at the Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra), as well as works from the Théâtre-­ Italien and the Opéra-­Comique. In addition to those already cited, Le Mariage impossible (1828) borrowed a chorus and an aria from La Muette de Portici (1828) and Léocadie (1824); L’Espionne russe (1829) borrowed an aria from La gazza ladra; and Une Fille d’Eve borrowed from Le Philtre (1831), La prima donna (1832), and Robert le diable (1831), as well as a popular salon romance, “Une jeune fille aux yeux noirs” by Théodore Labarre. The London audience might well have recognized these imported tunes. In addition to original French-­language theatre, adaptations and translations of French plays and operas often featured on various stages, with the King’s Theatre regularly programming French ballet. Christina Fuhrmann has identified the adaptations of over twenty French operas and opéras-­comiques in the London playhouses between 1814 and 1833 alone: La Muette (May 1828 and May 1829), Fra Diavolo (1830 and 1831), Le Philtre (1831), and Robert le diable (1832), among many others.84 Much of this music thus travelled from one stage to the other, and vaudeville,

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with its wide variety of musical citations, helped to consolidate the network of musical references. English spectators might perhaps not have caught the double entendres that sometimes resulted from these musical citations; understanding sung French would have been more challenging than spoken French.85 The music of the vaudevilles was nevertheless becoming increasingly familiar, as it was circulating not only between theatres but also from the French stage into English homes through the publication of sheet music. As early as 1826, the conductor J. Doche announced that he was preparing the first of several volumes of Jolies airs des vaudevilles arranged for voice and piano, to be available for purchase via subscription.86 Colon’s second—­and final—­visit to London reveals important developments not only in her own career and the refinement of her operatic voice, but also in the management and context of the French plays in the English capital, as foreign artists—­French actors and Italian opera singers—­from two theatres were brought together on several occasions. Fuhrmann’s study of operatic adaptations in London reveals how the circulation of performers, audiences, and works among major and minor theatres reveals the increasing uniformity of musical taste and skill among the various venues.87 The role of French vaudeville in this process has been largely overlooked in favour of more prestigious genres—­ performances and adaptations of opera and opéra-­comique. And yet it might be that the public first heard these operatic tunes at the French Plays, sung by actors from the Parisian boulevards. “The tarry-­at-­home traveller of Western London may, if he please, visit the Français, and the Vaudeville, and the Variétés, and the Gymnase, and even the Palais Royal, without moving to any point more distant than the elegant little theatre in King Street, St. James’s.”88 So John Oxenford described in 1853 frequenting the French Plays in London, about a decade after the company had found its permanent home at St. James’s Theatre. French theatre and actors in London were, however, still not immune to controversy. The arrival at Drury Lane of the Théâtre Historique company, displaced by the 1848 revolution, was not well received: the actors were chased off the stage by English actors and supporters of a national, English drama. Foreigners, and foreign theatre, were acceptable, it seems, only if safely contained within dedicated venues.89 Policing borders between English and French drama was nevertheless an impossible task. Adaptations of French plays were rampant—­even vaudevilles from Colon’s first visit in 1829 were translated and adapted for the English stage: Les Premières Amours furnished secondary plot mate-

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rial for Michael Rophino Lacy’s pasticcio The Casket at Drury Lane in March 1829, and Le Mariage impossible was adapted as A Husband at Sight by J. B. Buckstone, for the Haymarket in August 1830.90 At the same time, maintaining the distinction between foreign and national was essential to the French Plays’ attraction for its London audience. It permitted the public to travel to the Parisian boulevard and state theatres without leaving their native city, to sample the classic repertoire and the latest hits of the Parisian stage, to become immersed in Frenchness by observing French characters, habits, and quirks, and to hear and speak in a foreign voice, even just for the evening. “How is the attached audience of the English Opera-­house ever to part with Mad.lle Jenny Colon?” mused the critic of the Spectator, after fawning over Colon’s latest performance as Denise in La Laitière de Montfermeil (1827).91 “It must go, by deputation, and say—­‘Denise, vous êtes tout pour moi; sans vous, point de bonheur [ . . . ]’—­to which Denise with one of her happiest looks and kindliest tones, must respond—­‘Messieurs les Anglais, ne mourez pas . . . Vous voulez ma mains . . . la voilà . . . la voilà’: upon which the whole deputation exclaims: ‘Bonheur suprême!’ ”

Notes 1. “French Plays,” Times, 6 January 1829. 2. “Mademoiselle Jenny Colon Lafont,” Spectator, 31 January 1829. 3. Eluned Brown, ed., The London Theatre, 1811–­1866. Selections From the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), 117. 4. Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–­1815 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 14. 5. Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 168. 6. Christina Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 17. 7. Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, “Introduction,” in A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, ed. Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2013), 1–­12, here 4. 8. Vanessa Rogers notes that there was “a vast network” of French musicians and dancers working in London in the early eighteenth century. Vanessa L. Rogers, “John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire,” Eighteenth-­Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014): 173–­213, here 181. 9. On French theatrical entertainment in London in the eighteenth century, see Erica Levenson, “Travelling Tunes: French Comic Opera and Theatre in London, 1715–­ 1745” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2017). 10. Rogers, “John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire.” See also Daniel Heartz, “The Beggar’s Opera and opéra-­comique en vaudevilles,” Early Music 27, no. 1 (1999): 42–­54. 11. Rogers, “John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire,” 185–­97.

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12. Marcel Moraud, “Le Théâtre français à Londres sous la Restauration,” French Review 22, no. 1 (October 1948) : 18–­24, here 20. Such passionate and chauvinistic responses to French theatre continued throughout the century. See John Bishop, “ ‘They Manage Things Better in France’: French Plays and English Critics, 1850–­1855,” Nineteenth-­Century Theatre 22, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 5–­29; Ignacio Ramos Gay, “ ‘He Had French Immorality on the Brain’: Adaptation et censure du théâtre français à Londres (1837–­1901),” Romantisme 147, no. 1 (2010): 109–­19. 13. Moraud, “Le Théâtre français à Londres,” 21. See also John Stokes, The French Actress and Her English Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 14. On Laporte as opera impresario in London, see Jennifer Hall-­Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–­1880 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 158–­70; Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera, 170. 15. Henry Lyonnet, “Laporte, Jacques, François, Claude Rozière, dit Delaporte,” Dictionnaire des comédiens français (ceux d’hier), biographie, bibliographie, iconographie, 2 vols. (Geneva: Revue Universelle Internationale Illustrée, 1912), 2:289. 16. See notices in Soirées françaises, par souscription [A Series of Playbills, 1825–­1827] (London: Royal West London Theatre). 17. Laporte was listed as a proprietor of the English Opera House in 1829; he was also organizing French Plays at the King’s Theatre (Theatrical Observer, 25 November 1829). 18. For comparison, a box at the King’s Theatre in 1833 for forty-­seven nights was 300 guineas; Hall-­Witt, Fashionable Acts, Appendix A, 280. 19. Vertpré had been performing in London since 1828 (if not earlier). W. MacQueen-­ Pope, St. James’s Theatre of Distinction (London: W. H. Allen, 1958). 20. Barry Duncan, The St. James’s Theatre: Its Strange & Complete History, 1835–­1957 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), 60. 21. Quoted in Stokes, The French Actress, 10. 22. The patent theatres kept a close watch on the French Plays. Antoine Catherine Chedel, a manager of the Soirées françaises at the Royal West London Theatre, was subject of a lawsuit in 1828 put forth by the Haymarket Theatre, which alleged that Chedel’s production of French plays did not contain music or dance; “Information Against French Plays,” Morning Chronicle, 22 September 1828. 23. Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–­1848,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 2 (May 2006): 221–­48, here note 6, 222. 24. Nicole Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens (1807–­1914) (Lyon: Symétrie, 2012). 25. Ernest Davrecour [pseudonym], “La Comédie française à l’étranger,” Le Monde dramatique 7 (1838): 232–­34. There were permanent “Théâtres-­Français” in many cities in the nineteenth century: Jean-­Claude Yon names St Petersburg, Moscow, The Hague, Berlin, and New Orleans as the most important centres, and also mentions Cairo, San Francisco, Iași (Romania), Vienna, Turin, New York, Warsaw, Madrid, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Smyrna (now İzmir). See Yon, “Introduction,” in Le Théâtre français à l’étranger au XIXe siècle. Histoire d’une suprématie culturelle, ed. Jean-­Claude Yon (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2008), 10. 26. Léon Metayer, “Le Vaudeville de l’Empire et de la Restauration,” Europe 72, no. 786 (1994): 39–­48, here 44–­45; see also Anne Ubersfeld, “Gautier ou l’anti-­vaudeville,” Europe 72, no. 786 (1994): 54–­68, here 60. 27. Henri Gidel, Le Vaudeville (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986), 116. 28. A small handful of works in the mid-­1820s appeared in playbills with the generic description “vaudeville grivois.”

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29. Theatrical Observer, 14 February 1829. The actual date of their marriage is shrouded in confusion; announcements about it can even be traced back to 1826. A son was born sometime in 1830 during Colon’s temporary absence from the stage and was attributed to Lafont; press clipping, “Les petits mémoires,” in Recueil factrice d’articles de presse concernant Jenny Colon, F-­Pn, Arts du Spectacle, Rt. 6593. In early 1830 the marriage was annulled by the French court: Colon’s mother successfully argued that she had not given consent, the event having occurred when Jenny was still a minor; Times, 1 February 1830. In 1838 Colon married a flautist at the Opéra-­Comique, and Lafont eventually married the ballet dancer Pauline Leroux. 30. Bishop, “ ‘They Manage Things Better in France,’ ” 20 and 16. 31. A Collection of Play Bills of the Soirées françaises at the English Opera House (London Lyceum Theatre), 1828–­1829. 32. Yon, Une Histoire du théâtre à Paris, 293. 33. Daniel Lemahieu, “Vers une poétique du vaudeville?” Europe 72, no. 786 (October 1994): 101–­12. 34. “Autrefois, la supériorité de la France à l’étranger était représentée par des maîtres de danse et des coiffeurs. Aujourd’hui, c’est l’acteur de vaudeville qui représente à lui seul la France et sa puissance intellectuelle. Demandez à un Allemand ce qu’on fait en France ; à coup sûr il vous répondra—­des vaudevilles.—­Parlez lui du caractère français;—­il l’aura lu dans M. Scribe.” Davrecour, “La comédie française à l’étranger.” Eugène Scribe (1791–­1861) was a prolific writer of vaudeville in the nineteenth century (in addition to numerous libretti for opéra-­comique and grand opéra) and, according to Yon, his works were performed nationally and internationally more than any other French playwright of the century. Yon, “Introduction,” in Le Théâtre français à l’étranger, 20–­21. 35. Yon, “Introduction,” in Le Théâtre français à l’étranger, 10. 36. See, for example, Morning Post, 29 June 1818 and 13 July 1818. 37. “English Opera House—­French Plays,” Morning Post, 10 February 1829. 38. One critic remarked: “The house was very full; the greater proportion, however, foreigners.” The Standard, 17 January 1828. 39. Philip Mansel, “Courts in Exile: Bourbons, Bonapartes and Orléans in London, from George III to Edward VII,” in A History of the French in London, ed. Kelly and Cornick, 99–­127. 40. Quoted in Kirsty Carpenter, “The Novelty of the French Émigrés in London in the 1790s,” in A History of the French in London, ed. Kelly and Cornick, 69–­90, here 74. 41. Maire Cross, “The French in London during the 1830s: Multidimensional Occupancy,” in A History of the French in London, ed. Kelly and Cornick, 129–­53, here notes 51, 147. 42. Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (Paris: H.-­L. Delloye, 1840), 19–­20. 43. “French Plays,” Morning Post, 14 November 1846. 44. “We may state, by the way, that one visit to the theatre on the part of those persons who are studying to become proficient in the language is worth a dozen lessons”; Morning Post, 19 January 1835. 45. “French Plays & Conversations Françaises. To the Editor of the Morning Post,” Morning Post, 21 February 1829. The author signed his letter as “Delaporte, a Native of Paris, from the Royal College of Versailles.” 46. Stokes, The French Actress, 29. On Mlle Mars’s reception in London, see Stokes, The French Actress, 25–­45. Mlle Mars (1779–­1847), a celebrated actress from the

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Comédie-­Française, performed her repertoire at the King’s Theatre in 1828 and at Covent Garden during Laporte’s brief tenure in 1832. 47. Moraud, “Le Théâtre français à Londres sous la Restauration,” 23. 48. Brown, ed., The London Theatre. 49. Yon, “Introduction,” in Le Théâtre français, 12. Booksellers sold anthologies of French plays: “The French Drama,” with explanatory notes in English by A. Gombert, was published between 1825 and 1834 by J. Souter. However, the series was restricted to classic French theatre (the works of Molière, Racine, and Corneille). See advertisements for the series in the Spectator, vol. 7, 1052; and the announcement “Series of French Plays,” Morning Post, 2 July 1828. 50. “A frequenter of the French plays,” in “The French Plays,” Times, 15 January 1829. It was possible to borrow the plays at lending libraries: in 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that he had borrowed two plays, only one of which was performed at the French Plays (Brown, ed., The London Theatre, 112). The London Library, permanently situated on St James’s Square by 1845, was an important institution for lending French novels during the period. See Juliette Atkinson, “The London Library and the Circulation of French Fiction in the 1840s,” Information & Culture 48, no. 4 (2013): 391–­418. 51. Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 151–­52. Although the outbreak of the French Revolution initially led to an increase in British travellers to France, those numbers diminished abruptly during the Terror in 1793 and remained low during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Travel to France resumed in 1815 with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. 52. Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 160. 53. “On French Comedy and Vaudevilles,” Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science and the Fine Arts, January 1824, 37–­40. 54. “Theatre. English Opera House,” Morning Post, 8 January 1829. 55. “Victor Ducange,” Monthly Magazine, or, British Register, May 1833, 539–­44, here 539. 56. Brown, ed., The London Theatre, 124. 57. “Au vaudeville, dire c’est faire, affirmer c’est agir”; Lemahieu, “Vers une poétique du vaudeville?” 102. 58. The performative dimension of vaudeville had important implications for the success of adaptations, according to one critic: “The English adapters consider that, because a vaudeville has been popular at Paris, of course it must be so in London, but that is by no means a just criterion. What is ‘L’Ambassadeur,’ or ‘Le Savant’ without Perlet—­‘Fortuné,’ in ‘Le Bossu a la Mode,’ without Vernet,—­or ‘La Femme de l’avoué,’ without Jenny Vertpré? The managers of some of our theatres can tell us to their cost. A vaudeville requires very little plot, but much care is bestowed in the delineation of the characters, and which by the time they have assumed an English garb, have altogether ceased to be what the author intended them, and the adapter has nothing to rely on save the plot, and the consequence is a most vapid piece, discreditable to the theatre that produces it and the translator who has bungled it.” B, “The Drama in France,’ Monthly Magazine, or British Register, February 1836, 147–­48. 59. “Theatrical Examiner,” Examiner, 11 January 1829. 60. “His great distinction is that of always completely identifying himself with his part. He is never the same.” “Haymarket Theatre,” Dramatic Magazine (March 1831), 61–­62. The proprietors of the French company at the Haymarket were Laporte, Pelissié, and Cloup, according to the Morning Post, 3 January 1831, which also lists the company for the season.

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61. “French Theatricals. Messrs. Lafont and Laporte. Mademoiselle Jenny Colon,” Spectator, 14 February 1829. 62. “Portraits of the French players, No. II. Jenny Colon,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, February 1829, 415–­20, here 416. 63. “Haymarket Theatre,” Dramatic Magazine (March 1831), 61–­62. 64. “The French Vaudeville Comedy,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1837, 623. 65. “Portraits of the French Players, No. II. Jenny Vertpré and Jenny Colon,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, January 1829, 327–­33, at 327. 66. “Portraits of the French Players, No. II. Jenny Colon,” 415. 67. “Portraits of the French Players, No. II. Jenny Colon,” 417–­18. 68. Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson), who struggled to appreciate Mlle Mars’s acting style with its graceful mannerisms, eventually conceded that interpretations of the natural were unavoidably partisan. She affirmed that “genuine comedy takes the relations of civilised and modern society for its subject: and the actor embodies them in the manners and forms of the country, for which they are written, and to which he represents.” Quoted in Stokes, The French Actress, 30. 69. “Mademoiselle Jenny Colon Lafont,” Spectator, 31 January 1829. 70. “French Theatricals. Messrs. Lafont and Laporte. Mademoiselle Jenny Colon.” 71. “Portraits of the French Players, No. II. Jenny Colon,” 416. The critic also specified: “Being the perfection of chaste and unpretending simplicity, we of course do not mean to compare it with the brilliant and scientific efforts of those among ourselves who are singers by profession and exclusively.” 72. “French Plays,” Times, 6 January 1829. 73. “Theatrical Examiner,” Examiner, 16 January 1831. 74. “Le Bouquet Parisien. Extract of a Letter from Paris,” Theatrical Inquisitor, and Monthly Mirror, April 1816, 268–­70. 75. Gidel, Vaudeville, 51. On the airs in Scribe’s vaudevilles, see Patrick Berthier, “Un moment dans la vie de Scribe, ou le vaudevilliste à l’Académie,” Europe 72, no. 786 (1994), 49–­58. 76. On her vocal training and return to the Opéra-­Comique, see Adolphe Adam, “Nécrologie. Madame Jenny-­Colon-­Leplus,” La France musicale, 12 June 1842. 77. Colon gave a series of performances in September 1840 (Le Domino noir, L’Ambassadrice, La Reine d’un jour, Robert le diable, Le Chalet, Le Pré-­aux-­clercs, Le Planteur) and temporarily filled the position of “première chanteuse à roulades” in the company. See Jacques Isnardon, Le Théâtre de la Monnaie depuis sa fondation jusqu’à nos jours, préface d’Arthur Pougin (Brussels: Schott frères, 1890), 303–­5. 78. The new text follows the original very closely, with the same rhyme scheme, and quotes the final two lines verbatim. 79. Perhaps from act 2, nos. 2–­4? See Marian Smith, Opera and Ballet in the Age of Giselle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 158. 80. “Allez donc voir Mlle Jenny Colon et surtout allez l’entendre”; Le Figaro, 26 July 1832. 81. “Elle chante tout ce qu’on veut, pourvu qu’il y ait beaucoup de triples croches. Plus la musique est noire et plus elle est belle. L’autre jour encore, dans la pièce nouvelle, que n’a-­t-­elle pas chanté, grand Dieu ! Elle a chanté Rossini, elle a chanté Meyerbeer, elle a chanté jusqu’au ballet de la Tentation.” Jules Janin, “Théâtre des Variétés. La Prima Donna, vaudeville en un acte, de MM.  Jules et Achille,” Journal des débats, 3 December 1832.

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82. See reviews in the column “Olympic Theatre,” from Morning Post, 10 and 15 July 1834. 83. “Olympic Theatre: French Plays,” Morning Post, 26 July 1834. 84. See Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera, Appendix 1, 195–­99; and Gabriella Dideriksen and Géraldine Deriès, “Mener Paris à Londres: L’utilisation du répertoire français par le ‘Royal Italian Opera’ dans sa lutte pour la survie artistique,” Histoire, économie et société 2, L’Opéra à la croisée de l’histoire et de la musicologie (April–­June 2003): 217–­38. 85. On the role of musical citations in vaudeville, see Barbara T. Cooper, “Playing It Again: A Study of  Vaudeville and the Aesthetics of Incorporation in Restoration France,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 2 (1989): 197–­210. 86. The following announcement was inserted into the playbills from 1826: “MM. Doche, Barnet, et Last ont l’honneur d’annoncer aux Souscripteurs du Théâtre Français, que d’après les demandes réitérées qui leur ont été faites, ils vont, sous le patronage de plusieurs Familles de distinction, publier incessamment les plus Jolis Airs des Vaudevilles, arrangés avec Accompagnement de Piano, par Monsieur J. DOCHE, chef d’orchestre.” Vaudevilles included Michel et Christine, France et Savoie, Léonide, Fanchon la vieilleuse, Le juif, Les cuisinières. 87. Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera, 170. 88. John Oxenford, “A French Audience,” Household Words, 11 June 1853, 349–­52, here 350. 89. See Bishop, “ ‘They Manage Things Better in France,’ ” 27; Duncan, The St. James’s Theatre, 82. 90. “Drury-­Lane Theater,” Times, 11 March 1829 (the work borrowed music from Mozart’s Idomeneo); “Haymarket Theatre,” Athenaeum, 21 August 1830. 91. “French Theatricals. Messrs. Lafont and Laporte. Mademoiselle Jenny Colon.”

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Ch a p t er 10  

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“Singer for the Million” Henry Russell, Popular Song, and the Solo Recital Sus a n Ru ther for d

A CLAP Trap, a name given to the rant and rhimes that dramatick poets, to please the actors, let them go off with; as much as to say, a trap to catch a clap by way of applause from the spectators at a play. —Nathan Bailey (1727) 1

Applause—­that rushing, roaring wave of affirmation, admiration, or gratitude breaking on to brief silence after the last phrase dies away. For Theodor Adorno, the primitive rhythm of ritualistic applause evokes the earliest, most ancient impetus of music itself: at the end of music’s sounding, the percussive noise of the listeners’ response gestures back to its very origins.2 The cycle of music-­making from composition to performance, we might surmise, is thus encouraged to begin again. Other notions of applause are less profound and more suspicious. As the above quotation demonstrates, “clap trap” was an eighteenth-­century term to describe the means of tricking applause out of an audience, often through the display of “cheap, showy sentiment”—­or so the Oxford English Dictionary tells us.3 Henry Russell, Britain’s first singer-­composer with a truly extensive popular reach, spent most of his life snaring those audible signs of approbation, as John Hill Hewitt (writing in 1877 but recalling the late 1830s) described: He was an expert at wheedling audiences out of applause, and adding to the effect of his songs by a brilliant pianoforte accompaniment. With much self-­laudation he used often to describe the wonderful influence of his descriptive songs over audiences. . . . This miserable bombast did not always prove a clap-­trap; in many instances it drew forth hisses.4

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Hewitt’s ambivalence, sometimes even antipathy, towards Russell lay not so much in distrust of the singer’s applause but rather on how it was obtained. The issue of “clap trap” versus artistic integrity anticipated modern methodologies for investigating popular music performance, which point to a distinction between commercialism and ideas of “autonomy and authenticity.” Joseph Kotarba and colleagues define authenticity as entailing “independence from shallow values—­think fame, economic success, political collusion, and so on—­that ‘corrupt’ the ideal purity of musical expression.”5 Roy Shuker is less demanding: the term “authenticity” bears “connotations of seriousness, sincerity, and uniqueness,” with the musician(s) concerned playing a “pivotal” role in the act of creation and performance.6 Russell’s career both exposes the fault lines in such definitions and reveals something about the way in which the “quest for authenticity” that has come to dominate popular music discourse had its roots in the culture of almost two centuries ago.7 Above all, it invites the question: how “authentic” is “authenticity”?

Henry Russell Henry Russell (1812–­1900) was a “London voice” in many senses: a voice in and of London, heard in the city’s theatres and concert venues, and also first fashioned there through its particular nexus of training and performance opportunities (or lack thereof). And it was a voice that carried its London accent beyond the city and even beyond the sea. In 1848, at the peak of his career, Russell was dubbed “the singer for the million.”8 His road to popular success epitomizes London’s free trade in music, by crossing the boundaries between elite, religious and popular singing, as well as initiating an important development in the form of a specific type of entertainment: the solo recital. Aspects of Russell’s professional journey recall John Fiske’s comment: “All popular culture is a process of struggle, of struggle over the meanings of social experience, of one’s personhood and its relations to the social order and of the texts and commodities of that order.”9 Such a definition could well be applied to life in general, but there are certainly traces of “struggle” with identity and social experience in Russell’s development. Rus­ sell chronicled his own life in an autobiography (probably ghost-­writ­ten by his grandson, the author Henry St John Cooper) five years before his death.10 The Times reviewed it in equivocal terms: As he was in his songs, so he is in his “Memories,” kindly, cheerful, contented, homely, and withal just a little commonplace. It is not his

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fault that he has no very eventful story to tell; it is his merit that he tells it so pleasantly and without a trace of affectation or pretence.11

There is much in this one short paragraph to which we could return, but that last phrase, above all, could not be more misguided. Russell’s volume needs to be read in conjunction with Andrew Lamb’s recent biography, which meticulously identifies each instance (and there are many, almost on every page) where his account suffers from either a lapse in memory or deliberate obfuscation.12 Some of the inaccuracies are so brazen that it is difficult to understand why Russell or his ghost-­writer grandson thought they might be believed. A lengthy example is his supposed meeting with the actor William Macready in New York in 1849 during riots sparked by the supporters of a rival American actor, Edwin Forrest, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-­three people. In Russell’s autobiography, this event is casually moved a decade earlier, as if Macready’s own detailed journal had not been published in 1875 and as if any deception would not therefore be plain to see.13 One almost wonders if the Times review was an essay in quiet sarcasm: Russell’s life had indeed been so uneventful that he was forced to fictionalize an entirely different one. And yet from a music historian’s perspective, Russell’s career was remarkable enough in itself, well deserving of narration without embellishment. One intriguing facet was the way he crossed so many genre boundaries, illustrating the qualities of flexibility and persistence a singer needed in order to make a viable living. He was born in 1812 on the Isle of Sheppey into a prominent Jewish family named Levy, who moved the fifty miles or so to London in Russell’s infancy. Piano and then singing lessons, initially with Charles M. King, began his musical training. His first recorded professional engagement took place at the Surrey Theatre in 1828 as a boy alto; a few weeks later he formed part of Elliston’s new Juvenile Opera Company and its first production, singing alongside the child star of the decade, Master Joseph Burke (1817?–­1902). Russell also began composing songs at this age. Around 1830 he went to Italy. His own account of the tour included supposedly studying first as an external student at the Bologna Conservatory, and then with Rossini in Milan; playing piccolo in the orchestra of the city’s Teatro Carcano, studying harmony and counterpoint with Bellini, and meeting Felice Romani and Michael William Balfe; and then travelling with Balfe to Varese, where Russell was employed as maestro dei cori at the opera house. There is little confirmation of any of this; indeed, much of it can be disproven.14 On returning home via Paris, Russell became a chorus master at the King’s Theatre and a singing teacher. He first emerged again in the press at his

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own benefit concert on 8 July 1833, where he had the support of some of the most prominent names of the season: Maria Malibran and Charles de Bériot, Antonio Tamburini, and Henry Phillips, among others. He was still not yet twenty-­one and was listed on advertisements as a pupil of Tamburini. Significantly, in the review of the Literary Gazette the only number performed by Russell that receives a mention was his rendering of his own arrangement of a ballad, “The Old English Gentleman.”15 That Russell was intent on building up a career as a singer and singing teacher is confirmed by his publication in 1835 of a singing manual entitled L’Amico dei Cantanti. The Singer’s Friend. A Treatise on the Art of Singing, dedicated to Princess Victoria.16 It was a bold move to publish such a work given Russell’s age and inexperience. Not surprisingly, the volume was a largely simplistic affair offering basic advice (such as on keeping the voice steady and on various mouth positions) and was prefaced by a highly exaggerated account of Russell’s Italian sojourn. It later emerged that the exercises in the volume were mostly plagiarized from Jean-­Joseph Rodolphe’s Solfège ou Nouvelle Méthode de musique (1784, revised 1790).17 In the meantime, Russell’s own singing career showed only modest development. He had so far failed to make a living as a soloist either in opera or on the concert platform. Not having sung in cathedral choirs as a boy owing to his Jewish upbringing, his access to the oratorio circuit was also compromised—­the Jewish tenor   John Braham (1774–­1856) had suffered similarly. Nonetheless, Russell was making more apparent progress with his compositions, publishing a set of scriptural songs, setting the poetry of Letitia Elizabeth Lan­ don to music in Fisher’s Drawing-­Room Scrapbook for 1835, and composing an opera, The Bride’s Band (to a text by William Bayle Bernard), advertised in 1834 as scheduled for future performance at the Lyceum Theatre. It is curious, therefore, that just as London seemed to be providing increased opportunities, Russell departed for the New World (Canada, in the first instance) in 1835. A possible spur, Lamb suggests, was his marriage on 20 April to Isabella Lloyd, the Quaker great-­granddaughter of Sampson Lloyd, one of the founders of Lloyds Bank; Isabella was almost certainly pregnant at the time of her marriage, given that her daughter arrived some few months later. The couple would have another five children together, dividing their time from the late 1840s between residences in London and Boulogne. Much later, Russell began a clandestine relationship with Hannah de Lara, from a highly musical Jewish family, with whom he had two sons in 1871 and 1873 (later to become the opera impresario Henry Russell and the conductor and composer Sir Landon Ronald).18 On the death of Isabella in 1887, Russell married Hannah and was

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finally able to acknowledge his youngest sons.19 Neither of his wives, nor any of his eight children, figure in his autobiography. All that was to come. In the meantime, it was in Rochester, then a small town in upstate New York far removed from the extensive musical habitus of London, that Russell formulated the key ingredients of his forthcoming success. The crucial element was self-­reliance. If (as he claimed) jealousy prevented other musicians from performing with him, then he could at least design a programme around his own abilities.20 Over the next six years, on tours mainly through the north-­eastern United States until his return to London in 1842, Russell developed his concert performances in a radical new format.

The Solo Recital At this time, almost all forms of public concert relied on the notion of “miscellany”: grouping together different items in a pleasing interplay of musical textures, instruments, and performers.21 Liszt was the first well-­ known instrumentalist to begin offering solo programmes, in Paris in 1836.22 A slightly different model had emerged earlier in the theatre. Russell would later cite his main “predecessors” as Samuel Foote (1720–­77), Charles Dibdin (1745–­1814), and Charles Mathews (1776–­1835).23 Each of these actors offered solo entertainments of different formats. Foote’s efforts lay in his satirical imitations of various public figures, including the oratorical lectures of the actor Charles Macklin (ca.1690–­1797), whom he termed “The Great Panjandrum.” Dibdin’s “monodramatic” entertainments began in 1788 and continued until around 1805; they consisted mainly of self-­accompanied performances of his own songs, enlivened (according to George Hogarth) by a specially designed instrument that combined a piano and chamber organ, to which was “attached a set of bells, a side drum, a tambourine, and a gong” in order to “give a pleasing vari­ ety to his accompaniments.”24 Russell’s third model, Charles Mathews (the elder), offered variety through characterization.25 Like Foote, Mathews was a formidable mimic. An experienced actor, he established his “At Homes” or “mono-­poly-­logues” in 1818 with an initial run of forty nights at the English Opera House. Primarily sketches interspersed with songs, these events were presented in an intimate, domestic setting complete with easy chair and table. Unlike Dibdin, Mathews had an accompanist, Mr Knight. Jane Moody sees Mathews as analogous to Dickens in his use of “a rich and subtle combination of family caricature, social satire . . . and delicate pathos.”26 Although Mathews drew on aspects of vulgarity

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in his characterizations, he was applauded by Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt for avoiding coarseness himself.27 Russell could have encountered the work of Foote and Dibdin only through publications of their material (of which there were many),28 but he claimed a personal acquaintance with Mathews, describing him as “a man who possessed a charm of manner and a fund of anecdote that I have seldom seen equalled.”29 That much, of course, might have been gleaned from witnessing the actor on stage; but in any event, Russell was drawing on personal knowledge of Mathews, he certainly attempted to reproduce a similar sense of intimacy, using anecdote to punctuate the music in his own shows, as Mathews had used song to frame his sketches. A major difference, however, lay in the thematic emphasis of Russell’s performances. While the format of Russell’s recitals was loosely inspired by both Dibdin and Mathews, their content owed something the American politician and founder of the Whig Party, Henry Clay. Russell supposedly witnessed Clay’s distinctive skills during the orator’s visit to Rochester, and credits him as “the direct cause of my taking to the composition of de­ scriptive songs.”30 He had been intensely struck by Clay’s voice with its “peculiarly musical tone, at once sweet and sonorous,” as well as the moralistic thrust of his speeches: Why, if Henry Clay could create such an impression by his distinct enunciation of every word, should it not be possible for me to make music the vehicle of grand thoughts and noble sentiments, to speak to the world through the power of poetry and song!31

Thus emboldened, Russell supposedly sat down that very night and composed a setting of Charles Mackay’s “Wind of the Winter Night, Whence Comest Thou?” Lamb points out that there are serious discrepancies in this account: there is no evidence supporting a visit by Clay to Rochester in 1836, and in any case the song had been deposited for copyright in London in May 1835 shortly before Russell’s departure.32 Regardless of where or when the song was composed, however, it furnished the model for a style of vocal writing that Russell would use on many occasions: a scena built largely of recitative and arioso, usually prefaced by a long piano introduction and depicting some striking or harrowing event often involving multiple characters. Other examples in later years would be “The Ship on Fire” (Charles Mackay), “The Maniac” (Matthew “Monk” Lewis), “The Gambler’s Wife” (Reynell Coates), and “The Newfoundland Dog” (Frederick William Naylor Bayley)—­the cover of the last of these includes the words “Sung with enthusiastic applause by Mr. H. Russell.” Certainly, these

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self-­penned songs seemed to release an unusual energy in Russell’s singing, and found a corresponding response in his audiences. A review by Knickerbocker of one of Russell’s early performances in 1836 in New York emphasizes how his vibrant delivery of such songs brought bringing something new to the concert circuit. Classical music is described as a foreign import alien to the innate natural taste of the American public: “Foreign music-­masters and professors, with their shakes, trills, and whiskers—­‘difficult passages’ and moustaches—­diamond rings, self conceit, and quavers—­have succeeded in imposing upon the Atlantic cities a ‘fashionable taste,’ in relation to music.”33 Whilst this music may impress, the critic wrote, it did not touch the “affections” of the public. Enter Russell, whose voice was “round, full, and rich—­capable of high elevation and deep depression, without losing either its sweetness or its softness. His execution is chaste, simple, and faultless, beyond the reach of the disciples of the ‘difficult school.’ ”34 And although Russell clearly sang a mixed programme, it was his own songs (“The Old English Gentleman” and “Wind of the Winter Night”) that apparently had the greatest effect: So distinct was the singer’s enunciation, and so perfectly adapted his voice and manner to the event which he was portraying, that we remarked an involuntary shudder—­a general “holding of the breath for a time”—­in the hushed listeners around him. The shipwreck was before the eyes of every hearer: the grating keel—­the crash of the fallen mast—­the flapping of the storm-­rent sail—­all were present.35

Plainly Russell had the ability to transform the more conventional concert format into a vivid, quasi-­theatrical experience for his listeners, one that transported them into the fabric of the song. Critics differed in their assessment of Russell’s voice with regard to both timbre and technique. While some professed admiration,36 others were less complimentary. The British periodical the Connoisseur in 1846 puzzled over Russell’s popularity, given that “he does not possess a fine voice, nor execution”;37 in the same year the Illustrated London News described his voice as of “very inferior quality.”38 Hewitt (sometime lyricist for Russell) claimed that the singer “was a baritone of limited register; the few good notes he possessed he turned to advantage.”39 The precise na­ ture of that “advantage” was noted by the American lawyer George Tem­ pleton Strong in a diary entry on 18 December 1839: I don’t wonder Russell is such a favourite. He differs in toto from the other “vocalists.” Sings like a gentleman and not like an ass or an actor;

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and with a voice nowise remarkable for power or sweetness, he produces a greater effect than all the rest together, solely, I think, by freedom from affectation, distinctness in articulating, and the expression he throws into every note. I must hear him again.40

Indeed, the one thing all critics agreed on was Russell’s exceptional power of declamation. Russell himself claimed to have been told by the actor Edmund Kean during his juvenile opera days about the importance of speaking “distinctly and clearly. Unintelligibility and slovenliness are the curse of the profession.”41 Later in life, Russell argued that the human voice was commonly regarded as “superior” to all musical instruments because the singer conveyed not only “beautiful sounds” but “ideas.”42 His own skills in this respect were surely connected in part to his reliance on his own compositions, which could be skilfully adjusted to maximize his vocal talents, ensuring that no phrase took him beyond his natural range and giving him the greatest possible freedom to respond to the drama inherent in the words: all facilitated by accompanying himself on the piano. But Russell’s limitations as a singer were also his strength. There is a notable resemblance between accounts of his voice and Hogarth’s description of Charles Dibdin: His voice was a baryton (a medium between the tenor and the bass) of no great power or compass, but of a sweet and mellow quality. He sang with simplicity, without any attempt at ambitious ornament, but with a great deal of taste and expression; and, being a poet as well as a musician, he was particularly attentive to a clear and emphatic utterance of the words.43

In both men, the instrument did not claim too much—­it aspired to “ex­­ pression,” not virtuosity; although modestly endowed in range and col­­ our, it possessed some inexplicable quality that invited attention. Its popular appeal was precisely because it did not differ too much from the voices of its audience; indeed, it suggested something “authentic” to listeners, as Strong revealed with his comment above that Russell did not sing “like an ass or an actor.” Notions of “authenticity” in the modern sense, however, require an alliance of performance style with music that “intends to solicit or arouse support for a moment or cause, create solidarity and cohesion, promote awareness or evoke solutions to social problems, or simply provide hope.”44 As already noted, Russell’s early songs in the 1830s tended to be either descriptive scenas outlining some dramatic incident (shipwreck, lunacy), or sentimental ballads. Nostalgia featured heavily in the latter. Hewitt claimed

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that Russell was much drawn to the “prefix of old”—­so much so that “a wag of a poet once sent him some words addressed to an ‘Old Fine-­tooth Comb’ . ”45 Frequent references to an “old” object or place or person are indeed noticeable in Russell’s repertory, figuring particularly in the songs based on Eliza Cook’s poems: the first to make her reputation, in fact, was “The Old Arm-­chair” (1838), set by Russell in 1840.46 By 1841, satirists were mocking this tendency: “The Old Night Cap,” composed by an unknown source but with words by William By and “dedicated to the Admirers of Henry Russell,” demonstrated just how many times the adjective “old” could be used in one song (forty-­six by my count, including the title).47 In his autobiography, Russell defended this emphasis on an idealized past as a means of provoking spectatorial emotion: “I have seen a man, whose heart has been hardened by the influence of time and misfortune, melted to tears on hearing a melody which has recalled the associations of his youth, and reminded him, perchance, of the strength of a dead mother’s love.”48 To modern ears, such sentiment might appear maudlin; his own audiences thought rather differently. On 12 March 1840, Strong “enjoyed” himself “most comfortably” at another concert by Russell: One secret of his success is doubtless his care in selecting what he sings. His songs, with a very few exceptions, breathe a healthy, hearty, vigorous spirit quite different from the favourites of other performers. Either, like “The Old English Gentleman” and “The Song of the Oak,” etc., they are of the olden time, or else their subject is mountain and river and free air and bright sunshine, and “a life in the woods.” But there’s something genial and glorious about nearly all of them. There are some exceptions, to be sure. There’s a certain degree of humbug about “The Maniac,” though it’s most effectively disagreeable.49

Russell’s popularity with his American audiences survived even the attacks of “Honestus,” a correspondent to the Philadelphia National Gazette, who in November 1837 demolished the singer’s extravagant claims about his Italian training in his L’Amico dei Cantanti and other press material. It was “Honestus” who exposed the plagiarism in the singing manual, as well as accusing Russell of pirating the music of others in some of his songs.50 A more vicious version of those charges appeared in the London press in 1839, in a Musical World article entitled “The Way to Give Concerts in America.” Without naming Russell directly, it depicts his entire career as a scam designed to fool a gullible American public, concluding: “Practice every sort of trickery and deceit that you can think of, and so long as your brass holds out, you will succeed in gaining full houses; be

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considered as the ‘only man who can give a concert alone’ . . . and then you can return to Europe with a handsome fortune.”51 While such attacks must surely have harmed Russell’s standing amongst his fellow musicians, his audience patently did not care whether Russell had studied with Rossini or not; if the latter, indeed, then all to the good. More problematic was Russell’s engagement in politics and his avowed support for General William H. Harrison, the successful Whig candidate for the ninth US presidency in 1840.52 An article in the New York Herald on 17 April 1841 (following Harrison’s death a month after taking office) claimed that at a private party in Boston two years previously, Russell had cited Andrew Fletcher: “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,” and then boldly suggested: “I can elect General Harrison.” His subsequent adaptation of “The Old English Gentleman” to new words by William Hayden, wrote the journalist, had initiated the “famous Tippecanoe minstrelsy, which revolutionized the country—­thus confirming the great maxim, that songs have greater effect on a sensitive people than laws.”53 While Harrison’s campaign was widely recognized as the first in which songs and slogans were employed to significant effect, there is no other confirmation of this newspaper story; Lamb suggests that Russell may have planted it himself.54 If we pick up again Strong’s diary entry in 1840, however, we can see something of the audience response to Russell’s rendition of the “Whig National Song”: .  .  . and the “Whig National Song” is unmitigated humbug. Quite a kickup it raised tonight. It was met at first by hisses, bahs, and penny trumpets from a miserable minority of Locofocos [a faction of the Democratic party], but this opposition, though received again and again, was always overwhelmed utterly by thunderous applause; and it ended with hats off and in the air, and three cheers for Harrison that would have done honour to Masonic Hall [at this period a Whig shrine]. Some slight attempt was made to get up a fight thereafter, but it failed, and the belligerents (query: is  belliminants  good Latini En­ glish?) took it out in talk. Hurrah for the Whigs! Harrison forever!!!55

Singer for the Million On his return to London in 1842, Russell found that British audiences were similarly receptive to his self-­accompanied songs, his “fine, manly baritone voice” (as one critic put it),56 and his ability to hold an audience’s attention entirely by himself.57 While the more upmarket periodicals initially held their approval in reserve, it was soon plain that Russell

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was an undeniable hit both in the capital and on provincial tours: reviews from his first concert in London describe crowded audiences and “incessant applause.”58 The baritone Henry Phillips, recalling his own mixed efforts on the concert circuit during the same period, described the “stupendous stranger” who inexorably became “the most popular singer of the multitude”: Belonging to no particular school, possessing no particular voice, not particularly gifted as a musician, as a declaimer not particularly refined—­still on he came, and day by day advanced in public favour, casting into shadow the most accomplished vocalists, and seizing with vigour, and firmness subjects that enthralled the audience, held them firm within his grasp, and overwhelmed them with a commonsense wonder.59

The “subjects that enthralled the audience” were, as we have seen, often settings of already published material by liberal poets. Russell later wrote that all his songs (around 800 in total, he claimed) had been composed “with a beneficent object,” addressing issues such as slavery (“The Slave Ship,” “The Slave Auction”), private lunatic asylums (“The Maniac”), underpaid and overworked seamstresses and shop assistants (“The Song of the Shirt,” “Time is a Blessing”), poverty (“The Pauper’s Drive”), migration (“The Emigrant’s Farewell”), gambling (“The Gambler’s Wife”), and alcohol (“The Dream of the Reveller,” “The Gin Fiend”). But he also produced songs of hope and optimism that predicted a life of liberty and plenty ahead: “There’s a Good Time Coming,” “The World Is on the Move,” and “Cheer! Boys, Cheer!,” with the audience often joining lustily in the chorus. In concerts, Russell underlined the philanthropic intentions of his songs by suitable introductions. The Musical World, noting that the focus of his material attracted “great interest amongst a numerous class of the community,” the reported that Russell prefaced his performance of “The Song of the Shirt” (poem by Thomas Hood) at one of his London concerts in 1850 with the following explanation: Ladies and gentlemen, I owe some apology for continuing to bring this composition so constantly before your notice, but I desire that my songs have a wider aim than a mere momentary gratification. I use music as a medium for bringing this unfortunate class constantly to public notice, hoping thereby to ameliorate, to some extent, their present horrible position.60

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The reception of such material was framed in the 1840s by the growing political impact of Chartism.61 While Russell did not align himself with the Chartists as overtly as he had supported Harrison’s bid for the US presidency, many of his songs drew on authors associated either directly or indirectly with the movement. Eliza Cook, for example, was a self-­educated, working-­class poet, and considered a radical figure with her short hair, mannish dress, and close relationships with other women; her readership nonetheless spanned political and social class divides. Cook’s writing was often imbued with the nostalgia so prized by Russell, but she was also a committed Chartist, whose poems often appeared in the Northern Star during the 1840s; her own magazine, Eliza Cook’s Journal (1849–­1854), revealed her continuing support for the movement’s aims and principles.62 Charles Mackay, Russell’s other most prominent lyricist, was a Scottish journalist, writing first for the Morning Chronicle (the leading Whig and Liberal newspaper) from 1835, and becoming editor of the Illustrated London News in 1852.63 His poetry similarly was published in Chartist newspapers, although in his later memoirs he dismissed the movement as a “formidable nuisance.”64 Some Chartists also appropriated Russell’s work for their own purposes. One prominent activist in the latter part of the campaign, Ernest Jones, set new words to Russell’s “A Life on the Ocean Wave” in 1856, turning its paean to freedom on the seas into a claim for liberty on the land.65 By 1848, Russell’s popularity was acknowledged by an article in the Mirror Monthly Magazine dubbing him as “the singer for the million.” The phrase “for the million” was common enough in the early decades of the century,66 but it acquired a new relevance with the emergence of Joseph Mainzer’s vocal treatise, Singing for the Million, in 1841.67 A lapsed Catholic priest from Trier, Mainzer had recently arrived in London to set up his singing classes for working men, having been forced to leave first Germany and then France because his classes awoke suspicion about their political intent. Four months before Mainzer’s arrival, John Hullah had begun his own classes first in Battersea, then in Exeter Hall on the Strand.68 While the singing classes of both men prospered, the title of Mainzer’s work caught particular journalistic notice. Punch produced one of the earliest spins on the title, with an article on “Dancing for the Million” in 1842; Joseph Hewlett (writing as Peter Priggins) contributed a satirical effort with Poetry for the Million. Poems by a Member of Parliament.69 The term came to be applied to anything that had a self-­help or populist angle: hence George Glenny’s Farming for the Million (1860)70 or James William Gilbart’s Logic for the Million (1865).71 In that revolutionary year of 1848, as uprisings broke out across Europe and the Chartist movement in Britain attained its peak of agitation,

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the Mirror Monthly Magazine’s listing of Russell as “the singer for the million” at first appeared to associate him with that rebellious community: This gentleman may be truly styled the singer for the million—­his voice is clear and resonant, his style declamatory and dramatic; the selection of his poetry, whether political in its tendencies or domestic in its interests, is admirable—­the fervency of his manner, the intensity of his passion, and his popular demeanour, all subserve to place him as the true—­and powerful, because true—­exponent of various and dissimilar emotions to the masses. He stirs their passions as with the sound of a trumpet; he moves their emotions with the skill of a dramatist; he probes the innermost depths of their hearts with the skill of an orator; and over all he pours the magic of song. Never have we heard a public so swayed and moved at will as by the spell cast around them by Henry Russell.

But as the article unfolds, it is plain that Russell was being positioned more against the revolution than in tune with it. His hold over his public was aligned with an essentially conservative approach, because his songs demonstrated that “words are better than blows,” “law is better than licence,” and “pens are better than pikes”: We earnestly believe that more good has been achieved to allay the political excitement of the labouring classes in the great manufacturing and agricultural districts—­to inspire them with hope for the future and oblivion of the past, by the songs, “There’s a good time coming, boys!” and “The world is on the move!” than will be believed by those who pore over stupid folios on Political Economy, and crazy treatises on Communism, and the Rights of Labour. Let those who doubt, behold the flushed brow, the heightened colour of the cheeks, the starting veins of the multitude as they join the in chorus of these soul-­stirring songs of the people. With such there is no fear of disloyalty—­such as these meet not in holes and corners to plot, to murder, and to rob, to concoct fire-­balls, and calculate on the comparative merits of gunpowder and oil of vitriol.72

One wonders what lay beneath such words. Was this an attempt to moderate suspicion that Russell’s songs might have contributed to the recent political unrest?73 That summer had constituted the greatest threat of Chartism in its transformation from peaceful mass protest into a more conspiratorial movement allied to armed insurrection, provoking fears that the violence on the Continent might similarly erupt on British shores.

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Then, following a number of arrests by the authorities, public support (especially among the middle classes) began to shift away from Chartism. The framing of Russell in this fraught political context invites some questions. Was the Mirror Monthly review an example of what Dennis Denisoff describes as the Victorians’ perspective of popular culture: a “site of ideological contestation for control of the hegemonic understanding of class, age, gender, commerce, morality, and education”?74 In other words, Russell’s popular appeal could be seen by some as acceptable, even desirable, primarily because his songs acted as a safety valve and a container for social unrest. That, along with other similar manifestations of popular culture, might go some way to explaining the “contradictions” that marked the 1830s and 1840s, noted by Boyd Hilton: Yet no feature was quite so paradoxical as that of a working-­class protest movement, the most dangerous in English history, which ultimately fostered an ethos of self-­improvement and respectability. Somehow the mad, bad, and dangerous classes of the later Hanoverian period became the loyal, docile, and dutiful subjects of Queen Victoria.75

Kate Bowan and Paul A. Pickering, however, argue differently about the role of popular culture, claiming that “Chartism provides many examples of the working classes producing the same kinds of music that others would try to use and ‘improve’ them; they were dynamic agents, not passive receivers of reform imposed ‘from above’ . ” Here, it seems, much depends on levels of political consciousness: agency can be exerted provided that the parties concerned are able to distinguish which directions will prove liberating rather than stifling. And so did Russell’s songs defuse political agency or promote it? His own views on popular music, for which he reserved several pages in his autobiography, provide no clear answer. His swipe at music composed for the “half-­educated” suggests an antipathy to cheap commercialism and the superficial gentrification of popular entertainment:76 It is written for the genteel and the semi-­genteel. It reeks of the villa parlour and the little back shop. It is not educated music, or heart-­felt music, it is simply vulgar and trashy music. The popularity of the half-­bred song, the parlour prelude, and the rowdy refrain, even while it lasts, must be degrading and demoralising to a people, who possessing ears sufficiently sensitive to grasp at one tune, would be equally capable of acquiring another of a superior kind.77

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He laid the blame for low musical standards on snobbery and class divisions. Classical music had benefitted from the leadership of composers such as Stanford, Cowen, Sullivan, and Parry, but similar guidance was lack­ing with regard to popular music: No such men are as yet to the fore in the preservation of the moral tone of the words and music for the masses. And, may I ask, is the taste of the masses to be despised? Is the tendency of their morals, their thoughts, and their ideas, a thing to be lightly passed over, as of little moment?—­or has it occurred to any thoughtful man that the young fellows who are to be seen crowding the music halls, joining in the choruses of degrading songs, laughing, and applauding the pictures of cheating, drinking, and lust that these songs portray, and revelling in the general ridicule of truth and virtue, that these same individuals are to be the fathers of our future generation, are to choose the mothers of their children, and maintain the moral tone of their home?78

• In some ways Russell exemplifies the modern classification of “autonomy and authenticity.” He composed his own music, selecting lyrics that were aligned with radical political movements and spoke of the suffering of the weak, the hope of the dispossessed, and the vigour of the strong. His act of self-­accompaniment ensured that the whole musical expression was within his own domain. His voice struck the audience as a simpler, more direct expression than that of many (especially classical) vocalists, and thus more “real” and reflective of their own voices. Yet we can hardly claim that Russell was unconcerned about fame or money: he sought (and obtained) both with clear determination. Nor were the political connotations of his work stable. The slippery nature of mu­ sic and its resistance to fixed meaning allowed his songs to be reused with different words to suit different (sometimes opposed) communities—­for example, both the Confederates and the Unionists during the American Civil War had their own versions of “Cheer! Boys, Cheer!”79 As for Shuker’s more modest requirement of “sincerity,” it is difficult to gauge the extent to which Russell fulfilled it. How, for example, does his ambig­ uous approach to truth and factual accuracy square with his charitable acts or his advertised concern for the oppressed? Were the latter indicative of deeply held convictions or merely instances of “clap trap,” a careful manipulation of the public mood? We can never know. In either case, perhaps there are broader issues about the nature of “authenticity” in

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performance to be considered here. It might be argued that Russell, as a Jew compelled by prejudice to occlude his religion and ethnicity by anglicizing his name and marrying outside his faith, experienced life himself partly through a fabricated persona: he was thus more aware than most that in some sense identity is largely a construct, and that what audiences essentially demanded above all was a convincing illusion. For Russell, genuine “authenticity” in performance lay primarily in the immediacy of the moment, in the visceral sensation of communication with his audience. The realness of that brief but intense exchange, its imprint on the minds and memories of the spectators, was the only one that mattered. Russell’s singing career ended abruptly. One night late in 1857, he apparently had some kind of nervous breakdown in the midst of “Ship on Fire”; he strode off the stage, never to return.80 All that “incessant” applause, once the surging imperative for another and yet another song, like so many waves of a great sea rolling on to the shore, had finally pounded his voice into endless silence.

Notes 1. Nathan Bailey, The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Cox, 1731), 2:n.p. The second volume of Bailey’s dictionary included lesser-­used words; the term “clap trap” was not included in the first volume published in 1721. See also Charles Dibdin’s use of the term in 1788: “The dialogue of this piece [Sheridan’s The School for Scandal] is as accommodating as the rest of it. Mr. heron points out the tinsel scattered up and down by way of sentiments, which, by the theatrical people, are known by the name of clap traps”; Charles Dibdin, The Musical Tour of Mr Dibdin (Sheffield: J. Gales, 1788), 261. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Natural History of the Theatre,” in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1998), 65–­66. 3. See “claptrap, n.” in Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com, accessed 7 August 2017. 4. John Hill Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall, or Glimpses of the Past: A Retrospect of the Past Fifty Years (Baltimore: Turnbull Bros, 1877), 80. 5. Joseph A. Kotarba, Bryce Merrill, J. Patrick Williams, and Phillip Vannini, eds., Understanding Society through Popular Music (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 115. 6. Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 99. 7. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), ix. 8. “Henry Russell,” Mirror Monthly Magazine, October 1848, 484. 9. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010), 23. 10. Henry Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer! Memories of Men and Music (London: J. Mac­ queen, 1895). Charles Henry St John Cooper (1869–­1926) was the son of Russell’s second daughter, Frances Marcella Russell (1845–­1911).

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11. Times, 31 October 1895, 11. 12. Andrew Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave: The Story of Henry Russell (Croydon, UK: Fullers Wood Press, 2007). 13. The Astor Place riot took place on 10 May; Russell was performing in Brighton during that month, and was advertised for concerts in Greenwich on 9 May and in Can­ terbury and Dover on 17 and 18 May. See Theatrical Journal 10 (May 1849): 140; West Kent Guardian, 12 May 1849, and Kentish Gazette, 15 May 1849. 14. For example, Russell claims that he stayed in Milan with “Sarasi, the great banker,” who had “leased” the Teatro Carcano. Lamb identifies this figure as the marchese Francesco Sampieri (1790–­1861), with whom Michael Balfe stayed in Bologna. But “Sarasi” was surely Pietro Soresi, a Milanese banker who, along with the businessman Giuseppe Marietti and Duke Pompeo Litta, formed a committee to run the Teatro Carcano for the 1830–­31 season. If Russell did know Soresi, then it is possible that he could have met Bellini and Romani, as he claimed. 15. London Literary Gazette, 20 July 1833, 460. 16. Henry Russell, L’Amico dei Cantanti. The Singers Friend. A Treatise on the Art of Singing (London: G. Ruff, 1835). 17. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 83. 18. Hannah De Lara (1844–­1922) was the cousin of Russell’s son-­in-­law John Davies, who had married Russell’s first child Isabella in 1857. 19. Russell’s funeral, conducted by his eldest son, Rev. Henry Lloyd Russell, who had become an Anglican priest, was not attended by Hannah, nor by his third son from his first marriage, William Clark Russell, who had distanced himself entirely from his father following Russell’s abandonment of his mother. See Andrew Nash, William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel (London: Routledge, 2016), 16. On 13 December 1900 the Jewish Chronicle described the “great surprise and disappointment” of the Jewish community that Russell was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery with “Christian rites.” Russell’s headstone is in the shape of an armchair, perhaps in tribute to one of his most famous early songs with text by Eliza Cook. 20. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 82–­83. 21. Janet Ritterman and William Weber, “Origins of the Piano Recital in England, 1830–­1870,” in The Piano in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture: Instruments, Performers and Repertoire, ed. Therese Ellsworth and Susan Wollenberg (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 171–­92, here 171. 22. Kenneth Hamilton, “Creating the Solo Recital,” in After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33–­72, here 43. 23. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 187. 24. George Hogarth, “Memoir of Charles Dibdin,” in The Songs of Charles Dibdin, chronologically arranged with notes, historical, biographical and critical, 2 vols. (London: How & Parsons, 1842), 1:20. See also Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian New­ man, eds., The Art of Miscellany: Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 25. On Mathews, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–­1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193–­96; David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–­1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 65. 26. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 196. Worrall credits Mathews with developing a “new relationship between actor and audience”: one designed for a “plebian

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public sphere” that was swiftly reflected within print culture “in a racy combination of nationalism, domesticity, song and humour”; Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 23–­24. 27. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 196. 28. Just under twenty publications of Foote’s collected works were produced after his death in 1777, and there were still performances of certain plays in the nineteenth century; see Susan Lamb, “The Popular Theatre of Samuel Foote and British National Identity,” Comparative Drama 30, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 245–­65, here 246. 29. Cit. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 24. 30. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 60–­61. 31. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 60–­1. 32. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 50–­51. 33. Knickerbocker 8, no. 5 (November 1836): 620. 34. Knickerbocker, 620. 35. Knickerbocker, 620–­21. 36. “Mr Russell has as perfect a command over his vocal organ as any living singer: every note is true, round, and beautifully finished; an unequal or imperfect note never escapes him.” London Journal 8, no. 206 (2 February 1849): 337–­38. 37. Connoisseur 2, no. 12 (March 1846): 60. 38. Illustrated London News 8, no. 197 (7 February 1846): 98. 39. Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall, 80–­82. “The ‘Old Arm-­chair,’ for instance, has but five notes in its melodic construction.” 40. Cit. Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, vol. 1: Resonances, 1836–­1849 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 28. 41. Cit. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 9–­11. 42. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 260. 43. Hogarth, The Songs of Charles Dibdin, xx. 44. Kotarba et al., Understanding Society Through Popular Music, 115. 45. Hewitt wrote that in order to comply with Russell’s insistence on the use of “old,” he penned some lyrics for him beginning, “The old lamp burned on the old oaken stool.” According to Hewitt, Russell “made money” on the song, but never paid Hewitt for his services. Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall, 80–­82. 46. Russell claimed in his autobiography that the title was his intervention; Cook had supposedly thought of entitling it “My Favourite Arm-­chair,” but Russell argued that “The Old Arm-­chair” was better. This was surely another invention: Cook first published the poem in the Weekly Dispatch, a radical newspaper, in May 1837; it then appeared in her second volume, Melaia, and Other Poems (1838); see Victor Shea and William Whitla, eds., Victorian Literature: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 478; and “Notable Living Women and the Deeds: Eliza Cook,” Beeton’s The Young Englishwoman, November 1875, 615–­19, here 616. 47. Here, for example, are the first two lines of the second verse (out of six in all): “This grogram old gown, and an old flowered vest; / Put an old English gent, in an old oak chest.” “The Old Night-­Cap, a Descriptive Ballad, sung by Principal Comic Singers in the United States. Poetry by William By Esq., music by The Composer, and dedicated to the Admirers of Henry Russell” (New York: Millet’s Music Saloon, 1841?). 48. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 254. 49. Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music, 68. 50. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 82–­91.

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51. “The Way to Give Concerts in America,” Musical World, 20 June 1839, 113–­16. 52. The American Whig party differed from the Democrats in their support for a written constitution and the rule of law (as against majority rule), “state intervention to regulate social behavior,” including “temperance legislation,” and an educational system run by the state, along with protection of minority interests. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68–­9. 53. New York Herald, 17 April 1841, 2. 54. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 143. 55. Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music, 68. 56. Musical World, 10 March 1842, 77. 57. See, e.g., Musical World, 2 June 1842, 173. 58. Morning Chronicle, 25 February 1842 and 9 March 1842, 6; see also Musical World, 2 June 1842, 172. For some, the noise of a Russell concert did little to enhance the occasion. Caroline Healey Dall experienced the negative side of fervent applause during one of Russell’s concerts in Boston on 15 February 1840: “Bit my lip during all the hissings clappings and screamings—­hoping that the time is yet to come when a really well behaved audience will allow me to enjoy music without these at-­present inseparable adjuncts.” Cit. Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 124. 59. “The very coarseness which caused a shudder in the refined listener awoke the enthusiasm of the throng.” Henry Phillips, Musical and Personal Recollections during Half a Century, 2 vols. (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1864), 1:285–­87. 60. Musical World, 6 April 1850, 218. 61. “The People’s Charter” (1838) was a manifesto written by William Lovett and Francis Place that laid out “Six Points” demanding greater equality and fairness in parliamentary representation (“universal manhood suffrage, secret ballot, annual elections, constituencies of equal size, payment of MPs, and abolition of the property qualification for becoming an MP”). The movement attracted widespread public support—­its Second National Petition acquired well over three million signatures in 1842, backed by strikes and demonstrations—­and vigorous opposition by the authorities. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–­1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 612. 62. Solveig Robinson, “Of ‘Haymakers’ and ‘City Artisans’: The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook’s Songs,” Victorian Poetry 39, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 229–­53. 63. Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature and Public Affairs, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877), 1:77–­78. 64. Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections, 2:50. Russell’s relationships with his lyricists rarely ended well. Both Hewitt and Mackay claimed that they were never paid for the use of their poetry. Cook printed a review (probably written by herself) in her journal in 1853 criticizing his most recent songs as “insipid dilutions of his original melodies”; the latest (a setting of Lydia Sigourney’s “God Bless the Widow’s Son”) was a “spooney, vapid, common-­place affair” and fit only for the wastebasket. “Our Musical Corner,” Eliza Cook’s Journal 9, no. 222 (30 July 1853): 221. 65. “A vote in the laws they make? / A home on the land I till! / Where the hearts of many break / The cup of the few to fill. / By the right of their laws I pine / But what are their laws to me? / For I live by right divine, / And that is the right to be free.” “Song for Cromwell’s Time,” Frederick Leary, The Life of Ernest Jones (London: Democrat

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Publishing Office, 1887), 43. See also Kate Bowan and Paul A. Pickering, “ ‘Songs for the Millions’: Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition,” Labour History Review 74, no. 1 (April 2009): 44–­63, here 56. 66. The term was used to imply the masses, as in the reference to the provision of soup “for the million” who “wake devoid of food.” “Art. VI—­The Millennium,” Critical Review 33 (November 1801): 276. But it was also deployed more positively in the context of popularity: a concert at the Eisteddfod in Welchpool in 1824 was described by the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review as “a concert for the million—­it was as pleasing as popular”; Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 6, no. 24 (1824): 427–­28. 67. Joseph Mainzer, Singing for the Million: A Practical Course of Musical Instruction (1841; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 68. Although inspired by Mainzer’s work in France in 1837, Hullah eventually con­ centrated on using Guillaume-­Louis Wilhelm’s method, translating his treatise in 1841. See John Pyke Hullah, Wilhelm’s Method of Teaching Singing, Adapted to English Use (London: J. W Parker, 1841); Howard E. Smither, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 270–­74; Charles McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-­Fa Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 20–­21. 69. Peter Priggins (pseudonym of Joseph Thomas James Hewlett), Poetry for the Million. Poems by a Member of Parliament (London: Whittaker, 1842). There were also more serious usages of the term. The work of the eighteenth-­century historian and philosopher David Hume, who was “read by everyone,” could be “truly characterised as History for the Million”; London Quarterly Review, March 1844, 292. 70. George Glenny, Farming for the Million (London: Houlston & Wright, 1860). 71. James William Gilbart, Logic for the Million: A Familiar Exposition of The Art of Reasoning (London: Bell & Daldy, 1865). 72. “Henry Russell,” Mirror Monthly Magazine, October 1848, 484. 73. The plan for the third Chartist petition in 1848 was to muster half a million protestors on Kennington Common on 10 April, and then deliver the petition to Downing Street. A force led by the Duke of  Wellington comprising 170,000 special constables, plus police and troops, was assembled in response. but far fewer demonstrators arrived than anticipated (the Chartists claimed 150,000; government claimed 25,000) and all passed off peacefully enough. The petition of just under two million signatures proved to have a number of falsified names (including those of Victoria), and was rejected by Parliament. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, 613. 74. Dennis Denisoff, “Popular Culture,” Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135–­55, here 136. 75. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, 627. 76. Dave Russell, “Popular Entertainment, 1776–­1895,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 2: 1660–­1895, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 369–­87, here 383. 77. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 250–­51. 78. Russell, Cheer! Boys, Cheer!, 256–­57. 79. See E. Lawrence Abel, Confederate Sheet Music ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 204; Basil W. Duke, History of Morgan’s Cavalry (Cincinnati: Miami Printing and Pub­ lishing Company, 1867), 147. 80. Lamb, A Life on the Ocean Wave, 284.

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Ch a p t er 11  

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Vessels of  Flame Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Improviser’s Voice Mel ina E sse

In 1824 the Italian improviser Tommaso Sgricci was conducting his first in­­ ternational tour, and his visit to London was much anticipated. Indeed, London in the 1820s was fascinated by improvvisatori: periodicals published histories of poetic improvisation, reviews of famous improvisers, and poems about fictional improvisers, while eulogies of Byron bestowed high praise in claiming him as an “English Improvisatore.”1 In this heady atmosphere, accounts of Sgricci’s triumphs filled the press, praising his spontaneous creativity and arguing that his ability to extemporize entire tragedies on themes provided by the audience, in which he played every role, had to be witnessed to be believed.2 After his success in Paris that year with the tragedies Bianca Capello and The Death of Charles I (reviewed by Stendhal in the New Monthly Magazine), Londoners were eager to see for themselves if the man lived up to the hype.3 How puzzling it must have seemed, then, when Sgricci finally arrived after a delay of two years and, in a performance in the Argyll Rooms, chose to read aloud from a copy of The Fall of Missolonghi, a drama he had improvised in Paris two months before. In a feat of impersonation, Sgricci played the roles of seven characters and chorus, but the Literary Gazette, at least, found the presence of the book he held in one hand distracting, almost as distracting as the improviser’s habit of stroking his “profusely arranged” hairstyle with the other.4 Angela Esterhammer has described Sgricci’s decision as indicative of the broader transformation of the practice of Italian improvisation on its journey to England. “Imported into the cultural marketplace of 1820s London,” she argues, “the Italian genre of poetic improvisation undergoes significant remediation.” The claim, based on the work of Bolter and Grusin,5 is that improvisation in London becomes subject to translation

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into other media (in particular print); distanced from the live event, performers and writers had to “resort to hypermediacy or multiple layers of mediation in order to simulate immediacy or lack of mediation.”6 Sgricci’s decision, she acknowledges, may have been partly an effort to shape his performance for a different context: in London, improvisation was more likely to be folded into public lectures or appear as part of benefit concerts than to occasion the large-­scale, competitive extravaganzas common on the Continent. There were also other precedents for this mode of dramatic performance: Filippo Pistrucci produced one-­man readings of contemporary tragic drama combined with original improvisations, and comic actor Charles Mathews enchanted audiences at his semi-­improvised performances (called “At Homes”) by impersonating during the finales each of his characters in quick succession, like Rameau’s nephew.7 But “whatever Sgricci’s motivation,” Esterhammer writes, “his non-­improvisation in the Argyll Rooms ultimately has the effect of bringing his 1826 performance closer . . . to the experience of reading. . . . Sgricci is doing something similar to the reviewers who re-­create his performances in print . . . [he] eliminates most of the spontaneity and unpredictability of the improvisational genre.” Esterhammer similarly argues that published reviews of orally improvised poetry are another form of “remediation,” transforming an event produced and experienced “under the relentless pressure of time” into texts that readers can enjoy in solitude and are able to “stop, leave, return, and re-­read at any time.”8 Bringing poetic improvisation “closer . . . to reading” implies a silencing of the improviser’s voice, replaced by the internal voice of an absorbed reader. But I would argue that rather than muting the improviser’s voice, remediation allowed it to fracture and multiply. Certainly the intersections between improvisation, writing, publication, and reading are nuanced and complex. But I want to be wary here of unwittingly perpetuating the idea that improvisation was somehow separate from or prior to print culture, or that improvisation’s relationship with print culture is necessarily a trip down a one-­way street, along which something essential is invariably lost.9 The acts of writing and publishing were already part of the practice of poetic improvisers (even on the Continent), as shown in the advice improvvisatori gave aspirants to practise improvisation by writing or in the close relationship between improvisation and transcription (both authorized and not). Even Stendhal’s review of Sgricci recommends background reading for those who want to see the improviser perform: “A good preparation for hearing him will be to read, some time in the day before going to his Accademia an act or two from Aristodemo, or Cajo Gracco of Monti, or from the works of any other Italian dramatic

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poet.”10 Here the printed word, as Esterhammer argues, “precedes and sets the parameters” for the improvised performance.11 That Stendhal should be assessing Sgricci’s efforts in comparison to reading them in print is no coincidence, for improvisatory practice was by then fully entwined with print culture, no matter how assiduously improvisation’s devotees tried to keep it in a unique space. Sgricci’s improvisations, for example, were published immediately after he finished them, allowing reviewers and readers in other cities to own a piece of his performances, reading—­and reciting aloud—­his words at their leisure. Like other commentators, Esterhammer suggests that a defining characteristic of improvisation is the fact that creation takes place in “real time”—­that it happens on the spot. But as she rightly points out, this was an illusion: “poetic improvisation appealed to Romantic audiences largely because of the illusion that it provided access to an immediate experience of poetic creation, even a direct conduit into the mind of the poet.”12 It is certainly tempting to claim that once you take away the extemporaneous, spontaneous gesture, what remains is something scripted, closer to text, and thus by extension lacking the risk and excitement of true improvisation. Esterhammer seems to imply that in forgoing spontaneity, Sgricci’s performance was not really an improvisation (she calls it a “non-­improvisation”) and that it was probably not recognized by the audience as such: “The key element of spontaneity was eliminated, leaving Sgricci to impress the audience with his ability to impersonate seven different characters, to move from one into the other instantaneously, and to arouse emotion by an impassioned performance.”13 But even a cursory look at how people actually improvised (by drawing on a stock of learned and remembered gestures, by imitating, by rearranging preexisting vocabulary into new discursive statements) complicates the picture. I could go further and make the counterintuitive claim that, in some situations, anything done by an “improviser” (perhaps, paradoxically, even writing and reading) can be understood as improvisatory. Ultimately, the distinction between spontaneous and scripted is not the only useful measure for assessing improvisation; Sgricci’s emphasis on both impersonation and lightning fast shifts between characters (and affects) can be understood as crucial elements of an improvisatory aesthetic. In this essay, then, I want to argue that printed evocations of poetic improvisation are more than attempts at remediation; they also testify to the persistence and the polyvocal quality of the improviser’s voice. This essay explores the repercussions of this (sometimes imagined) sound in two poems: Letitia Landon’s “The Improvisatrice” and Giacomo Leopardi’s “Ultimo canto di Saffo.”

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Revoicing Corinne 1824 saw the publication in London of “The Improvisatrice,” a long narrative poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (better known as L.E.L.).14 Lan­ don was only the latest writer to follow the lead of Madame de Staël’s fictional improviser Corinne;15 her poem could be thought of as a retelling of the iconic improvvisatrice’s tale of genius warring with star-­crossed love. Landon also revisits, in the first of many poems-­within-­a-­poem, that most ancient improvising poet, Sappho. In many ways, her poem seems to support Esterhammer’s argument about the remediation of improvisation in 1820s London. It is given voice and narrated by an improviser who bears more than a passing resemblance to Staël’s Corinne. What is more, “The Improvisatrice” abounds with self-­referential gestures. As Glennis Stephenson has argued, this is typical of the poet’s style: “Landon’s works teem with poets and minstrels, and, even when such characters are not featured, Landon is likely to provide the reader with at least one digressional exploration of poetic identity.”16 In so doing, Landon’s work displays a kind of consciousness about its own effectiveness as a poetic performance. But because we are dealing with words on a page, not words chanted or sung extempore, “The Improvisatrice” uses a multitude of techniques to blur the distinction between improvising and writing while at the same time attempting to capture the frisson of live performance. Most prominent among these is what we might call “hypermediacy,” the piling on or exaggeration of different mediated experiences. In this case, the writing veers between multiple genres (sung poetry, travel writing, art criticism, storytelling), and the structure of the poem is like a hall of mirrors: dense with nested poem-­songs that comment on the unfolding action. Landon seems to have felt some need to prepare the reader for the idiosyncrasy of the work, while at the same time carefully avoiding overdetermining its reception. Her brief preface wrestles with how much to say and how much to leave unsaid: Poetry needs no Preface; if it do not speak for itself, no comment can render it explicit. I have only, therefore, to state that The Improvisatrice is an attempt to illustrate that species of inspiration common in Italy, where the mind is warmed from earliest childhood by all that is beautiful in Nature and glorious in Art. The character depicted is entirely Italian,—­a young female with all the loveliness, vivid feeling, and genius of her own impassioned land. She is supposed to relate her own history; with which are intermixed the tales and episodes which various circumstances call forth.17

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In a few sentences, Landon manages to situate her unnamed narrator at the centre of this sometimes wandering and episodic narrative, while also touching on its ambiguous status as a published poem about improvisation: her poetry, she insists, must “speak for itself ” (suggesting the oral and performative mode of the improviser); but the status of the “intermixed tales and episodes”—­the improviser’s own poems—­is left curiously unexplained. Some of these inserted poem-­songs are clearly performed by the improvisatrice within the arc of the narrative, occasioning praise and applause from other characters; others simply appear at appropriate points, their fictional status—­transcribed spontaneous song or poetry written by the narrator?—­less clear. The structure of Landon’s poem is certainly intriguing. It begins with a kind of prologue in which the improvisatrice confidently assures the reader that she is equally skilled as a painter and a “minstrel:” “My power was but a woman’s power; / Yet, in that great and glorious dower / Which Genius gives, I had my part: / I poured my full and burning heart / In song, and on the canvas made / My dreams of beauty visible; / I knew not which I loved the most—­/ Pencil or lute,—­both loved so well.”18 Then follows a detailed description of the first two of her paintings to bring her fame—­the first of Petrarch (and Laura) and the second of Sappho, who is captured in the moment of despair before her suicide. The description of Sappho on canvas is catalyst to the first embedded poem: My next [painting] was of a minstrel too, Who proved what woman’s hand might do, When, true to her heart pulse, it woke The harp. Her head was bending down, As if in weariness, and near, But unworn, was a laurel crown. [ . . . ] I deemed, that of lyre, life, and love She was a long, last farewell taking;—­ That, from her pale and parched lips, Her latest, wildest song was breaking. SAPPHO’S SONG Farewell, my lute!—­and would that I Had never waked thy burning chords!19

Sappho’s song is differentiated from the poetry that precedes it by its clear form (five stanzas of four lines each) and a rhyme scheme of  ABAB. Sappho,

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too, is called a minstrel—­and thus it is clear that Landon is aligning her narrator (and perhaps herself) with the historic poet whose talent would prove her downfall. The opening of Landon’s poem connects it both to the history of “great poetry” (Petrarch, Sappho) and to the timeless theme of unrequited love, framing the subsequent action: our narrator, like so many other improvvisatrici, is headed for doom in the realm of  love. She will meet and fall for the beautiful Lorenzo, who eventually weds another, an orphan (and heiress) to whom he was betrothed at a young age. When he returns to our narrator (who has no name, making it easier for the reader to elide her with Landon) it is too late: the improvisatrice is in a long decline: a hectic fever, to which her burning genius has made her susceptible, ultimately claims her life. The images of flame in “Sappho’s Song” form another link to the eventual fate of our narrating improvisatrice. But who is singing this song? It is not entirely clear. The lines preceding the poem suggest that we are meant to take them as Sappho’s own—­to imagine that “from her pale and parched lips, / Her latest, wildest song was breaking.” But given what we know about our narrator, who has touted her ability as a minstrel, it is also likely that this is the improvisatrice’s own song, either prompted by or meant to accompany her painting. In any case, Landon’s insertion of “Sappho’s Song” requires the reader to perform an imaginative shift between performative registers, to conflate several moments of spontaneous performance in a kind of palimpsest: the last cry of the historic Sappho, the improviser’s imagining of that cry, and Landon’s own work writing down this many-­layered moment. While the songs that follow “Sappho’s Song” are more clearly identified as sung by the improvisatrice (and are perhaps meant to be read as transcriptions), the poem is often vague about how such songs came into being. Usually they are spurred by stimulation of the senses—­by inspiring sights, sounds, smells. But they also seem to emerge from some deeper, more mysterious places: “memory,” strange forebodings, “history.” Although the songs always emerge spontaneously in the narrative, Landon makes very little effort to portray them as spontaneously composed in the moment, suggesting that she may be operating under a different notion of what constitutes an improvisatory aesthetic. “A Moorish Romance,” the song that will spark the meeting between the narrator and Lorenzo, grows out of a sensual plenitude that stirs mem­ ory. Drifting one June evening on the Arno, the improvisatrice revels in the music and scents wafting over her on the breeze, stirring her lute strings and “rais[ing] my own sweet minstrel power.” She takes up her lute as thoughts play over her: “And mingled with these thoughts there came / A tale, just one that Memory keeps—­/ Forgotten music, till some

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chance / Vibrate the chord whereon it sleeps!”20 Improvisation here is characterized as an apt response that crystallizes a fleeting moment; the appropriate song (words and music) is wakened from “memory” and thus apparently not composed extempore, but that does nothing to reduce its power. Her audience, rapt, draws close in their boats and applauds her performance. It is then that she notices Lorenzo; in a fantastic scene, she continues absent-­mindedly to strum her lute as a sort of soundtrack to their electric meeting of eyes. “The Charmed Cup” is sung by the improvisatrice after this charmed meeting. Alone in her room, she is exalted but somehow unable to sing anything but sad songs: “I touched my lute,—­it would not waken, / Save to old songs of sorrowing—­/ Of hope betrayed—­of hearts forsaken—­/ Each lay of lighter feeling slept, / I sang, but, as I sang, I wept.”21 Again, Landon portrays this moment of singing not as flamboyantly spontaneous, but as a kind of unconscious welling-­up of “old songs of sorrowing,” suggesting works already composed, perhaps even written by another. Landon thus seems to be drawing a clear association between accessing the past (“old songs,” “memory,” “forgotten music”) and improvisation. Embodying and portraying the exotic is also part of the improviser’s task, a talent for theatrical impersonation that recalls Sgricci. The next two songs, “The Hindoo Girl’s Song” and “The Indian Bride,” are performed by the improvisatrice “in character” at a masked ball. But again, Landon makes little effort to impress on the reader their status as composed in the moment: One night there was a gorgeous feast For maskers in count leon’s hall; . . . I went, garbed as a Hindoo girl; Upon each arm and amulet, And by my side a little lute Of sandal-­wood with gold beset. And shall I own that I was proud To hear, amid the gazing crowd, A murmur of delight, when first My mask and veil I threw aside? For well my conscious cheek betrayed Whose eye was gazing on me too! And never yet had praise been dear As on that evening, to mine ear lorenzo! I was proud to be Worshipped and flattered but for thee!”22

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The visual disguise is here a justification for the subject matter of her two songs, but it is the unveiling before the performance that is given emotional weight in the scene. Afterwards, the plaudits seem hollow: “I heard the words of praise, but not / The one voice that I paused to hear; /  .  .  . Where was lorenzo?—­He had stood / Spell-­bound; but when I closed the lay, / As if the charm ceased with the song, / He darted hurriedly away.”23 As in the scene on the Arno, these performances occasion applause, but our narrator is only interested in the response of one person: Lorenzo, who flees after her performance, as if released from an enchantment. Here things start to unravel: Lorenzo leaves her with no explanation; later, while touring a church, the improvisatrice happens to witness his marriage to another. The last two songs, like the opening “Sappho’s Song,” emerge from the improvisatrice’s stark loneliness and despair. The first, called simply “Song,” she sings at night, when her tears have dried, and features “words that love wrung from despair.”24 This is the closest Landon comes to suggesting a composition in the moment; by the last song, “Leades and Cydippe,” we are yet again in the realm of the past. The poet explicitly paints an improvisatrice preoccupied with “legends of olden times in Greece. . . . Amid its many songs was one / That suited well my sick mind.”25 Landon’s improvisatrice, then, can above all find a suitable song for any occasion, and can virtuosically serve as vessel for a multitude of voices. Like the chanting of a medium who can channel stories from distant times and places, each poem of the improvisatrice attempts to capture the sensual experience of exotic or ancient scenes, while subtly altering language to speak in these different poetic “accents.” This shifting between places, times, and points of view mirrors the broader narrative’s shifts between genres—­at times our improviser describes landscape and art with the flair of a travel writer or critic, but the scenes of love and betrayal have a melodramatic panache (recall the lyre-­ as-­soundtrack when the two lovers meet on the Arno). Why choose to shift between genres and multiple voices? Landon’s poem is episodic—­at times deliberately antinarrative, as if the improvisatrice is walking the reader through various settings like a tour guide, or reciting her accomplishments (first I painted this, then that, and now let me sing you a song). We could read this tendency as evidence of hypermediacy and thus as a compensatory move in a written poem dealing with improvisation; but I would argue that the multiple episodes describing paintings, city views, and natural scenes, in conjunction with the nested songs, allows Landon

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to perform a kind of overdetermined authorship. She is the originator of these images: her poetic voice makes them come to life in the same way that her improviser-­narrator paints the scenes that open the poem. Such theatrical effects—­of scene-­setting, of nested performances, of virtuosically shifting between voices—­also allow Landon cannily to write in her own reception, in the form of both Lorenzo’s adoration of her genius and the enthusiastic applause of her listeners, whether they hear her strumming on the Arno in her gondola or performing at a masked ball.

Ossianic Saffo Landon’s poem reads quite differently placed next to another “remediation” of the improviser’s voice, this one by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. His “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” written two years earlier than “The Improvisatrice,” forms a neat chiasmus with Landon’s poem.26 If Landon’s work was an attempt by an English poet to inhabit a Italian archetype of improvised performance, Leopardi recasts a classical figure of spontaneous poetry in the mould of a Northern bard. His version of Sappho’s final song was influenced by the Italian craze for translations of Ossian (a craze itself imported from London), who was imagined as an anti-­Homer capable of reinvigorating a hidebound Italian poetic tradition. Those who advocated for Ossian as a new poetic model felt that Italy should break away from the classical past; the bard’s outpourings were thought infused with the beneficial influence of his wild natural environment and therefore ideally designed to spark a renaissance of poetic creativity. This revolution never arrived, but Ossianic themes and poetic styles abounded and allowed for new ways of imagining an authentic poetic voice. “Ultimo canto di Saffo” retells the story of Sappho’s final song in a new, more northern-­inflected voice, while retaining some of the important markers of classical tradition. Leopardi’s Sappho is characterized primarily by her ugliness and her melancholy—­the poem is a meditation on the tyranny of beauty (of “semblances”) and on mortality. None of Sappho’s talent or poetic skill will ensure her lasting fame—­and she muses on the cruel fate that drives her to suicide. In its use of wild, turbulent nature imagery, Leopardi’s work could be understood to borrow aspects of Ossianism to critique the imperative of beauty in Italian aesthetics. Sappho is only pleased by the stormy skies, by wind, by the panicked flight of birds. Indeed, nature does not smile on her; she is rejected by the gentler, more beautiful aspects of the natural world, which stand in for her unrequited love for Phaon:

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me non il canto de’ colorati augelli, e non de’ faggi il murmure saluta; e dove all’ombra degl’inchinati salici dispiega candido rivo il puro seno, al mio lubrico piè le flessuose linfe disdegnando sottragge, e preme in fuga l’odorate spiagge. the coloured birds do not salute me with their song, and the murmur of the beech trees is not for me; and where the clear stream spreads its pure bosom beneath the bending willows’ shade, as my foot slips, in scorn it draws its mobile water back, pressing the scented bank in flight.27

Birds do not sing for her, the beech trees do not murmur to her, even the river’s flowing water shrinks away to the other bank at the touch of her clumsy foot. Leopardi’s unrelenting litany of rejection—­not only by the hardly-­mentioned lover, but most importantly by the natural world—­ makes Sappho’s suicide seem all the more understandable: her plight becomes something more than a mere failed love affair. This universalizing of Sappho’s despair is made clear in the last stanza, where her stark observation “morremo” (“we shall die”) reads not just as the cry of an individual sufferer but as calm acceptance of humanity’s universal fate. A wild, unruly Romanticism, then, beats against the cage of the classical blank verse, which bluntly describes not the triumph of the beautiful and the good (those necessities of neoclassical aesthetics) but the fate of the ugly. In doing so, the verses make a case for the value of that which is unique and thus excluded from the circle of both nature and society, engendering sympathy in the reader not only for Sappho’s plight but also for other freaks, oddities, and rejects. Even more significantly, Leopardi’s characterization of Sappho as isolated and solitary plays on the notion of the authentic poet as somehow set apart from her environment. The poem portrays Sappho as cut off from the human senses of sight, touch, and sound—­not unlike, perhaps, writers and readers of poetry, whose activities remove them from the material world (dismissed by Leopardi as mere “sembianze” [semblances]) while giving them access to something more profound. Sappho is separated from that familiar font of inspiration, nature, and even her own songs are unheard—­her lyre and (recited) poetry fall silent because sight, alas, trumps sound:

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Alle sembianze il Padre, alle amene sembianze, eterno regno die’ nelle genti; e per virili imprese, per dotta lira o canto, virtù non luce in disadorno ammanto. To semblances alone the Father, to pleasing semblances gave eternal dominion over men; and through all valiant exploits, through studied lyre or song, no virtue shines in unembellished dress.28

Leopardi thus creates a Sappho whose poetic voice is figured as wholly original precisely because of her melancholy isolation. But this ideology of the lone voice in the wilderness, the unheard poet, cannot muffle the very real influences of other voices in Leopardi’s poem: the cadence of the eleven-­and seven-­syllable lines, whose rhythms recall recitative, and the vivid and sonorous nature imagery drawn from translations of Ossian. Leopardi’s approach to the remediation of the improviser’s voice differs significantly from Landon’s. Instead of piling on the signifiers of live performance “captured” through various media and modes of creativity—­ painting, travel writing, transcribed improvisatory poems, reviews of poetic performance—­Leopardi instead adopts a translational aesthetic. In so doing, he follows the lead of Melchiorre Cesarotti, the first Italian translator of Ossian.29 Cesarotti viewed translation as necessarily involving a recasting of the original in different garb, in a way that isn’t simply “servile” but remakes the sound of the voice into something else: he was comfortable erring on the side of too-­free translation. His approach to capturing the voice of the historical bard-­poet was, in short, more subtle than past commentators have realized. He tried to find a middle path between, on the one hand, credulous acceptance of the historical reality of Ossian and the fidelity of Macpherson’s original “translations” and, on the other, a wholesale dismissal of the bard as an imaginary figure and Macpherson’s writings as elaborate hoaxes.30 Indeed, Cesarotti wrote to Macpherson, casually suggesting (perhaps to encourage an admission) that “people of esprit, to whom the whole dispute is utterly indifferent . . . would find much more power of spirit in a moderne who had been able to transform himself in Ossian than in Ossian himself.”31 In his 1772 dissertation, Ragionamento storico-­critico intorno le controversie sull’autenticità dei poemi di Ossian, Cesarotti writes unequivocally, “He [Macpherson] did not possess the legitimate Ossian, which could not be found in any single version of the retrieved songs, although he

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was scattered in all of them. The true Ossian was only in the compilation made by him and transcribed by his hand.”32 Authority and authenticity lie not in textual evidence but in speaking in a way that sounds true. Here, as Paola Gambarota has argued, Cesarotti “reframes the whole discussion by shifting the question of authenticity from the texts themselves to the poetical voice.”33 Because this is necessarily a “polyvocal” act, as Gambarota points out, it can perhaps best be captured by the transcribing hand of the collector; or indeed, as Landon suggests, in the flickering impersonations of a skilled theatrical performer who can instantly shift from one persona to the next. This articulation of authorship is based on an aesthetic of transcription. The values of compilation, of completion, of comprehensiveness, of a grasp at the spirit of the departed bard’s lost songs, are what is important, as is the notion that they are now “retrieved” from their obscurity, no longer scattered in different geological locations or in the minds and voices of individuals. Authorship thus emerges through imaginative synthesis and the act of writing. There’s a kind of tension here; the voice is the locus of authenticity, but the authentic poetic voice properly emerges in writing, not in song or recitation. But even Leopardi’s sleight of hand—­creating a unified poetic voice that is both tragically and admirably isolated from the inspiring voices of nature—­partakes of a polyvocal aesthetic despite its effort to be heard otherwise. Indeed, even his images of silence are housed in rhythmic metres and mellifluous language that cannot entirely escape the spoken cadence of recitation for the heady realm of philosophical concepts. The duelling images of Landon’s destroying flames and Leopardi’s unfeeling water suggest forms of poetic inscription that are fluid, flickering, and maddeningly ephemeral. While they certainly serve as metaphors for mortality, they also, I would argue, encourage us to understand the supposed textualization of improvised poetry as an equally risky, incomplete, and impermanent undertaking. Set next to Leopardi’s skilful suppression of his text’s multiple voices, we may be tempted to classify Landon’s “The Improvisatrice” as a kind of fan fiction, an imaginative re-­inhabiting of the Corinne story, with the unnamed improviser of the title a nineteenth-­ century Mary Sue.34 But in the end I find it misleading and too easy to read the nameless improviser of Landon’s poem as a thinly veiled author surrogate, in much the same way that, for me, the poem is more than a remediation of improvisatory practice. Instead, Landon can point the way to a different but equally potent understanding of improvisatory aesthetics: one that moves beyond the litmus test of spontaneity. There is a more capacious way to hear her improviser, one that considers polyvocality

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and shape shifting ability. Often, it is the talent of the improviser as actor, as vessel for other personalities, that seems to underpin an assessment of improvisatory skill or indeed creativity in general. The improvisatory genius is figured as one open to inspiration, perhaps inspired to mimicry. This overtly theatrical notion places more emphasis on performance and less on originality, and thus offers us better possibilities for navigating the strange imbrication of performance with texts and vice versa. It might encourage a kind of reading that imagines the instant your eyes meet the page as the ultimate improvisatory moment, and yet another moment of creation—­the sounding of another, new voice.

Notes 1. “Conversations of Lord Byron,” London Magazine, November 1824, 452. 2. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore’: Poetry, Performance, and Remediation,” The Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 2 (2011): 124. 3. New Monthly Magazine 12, no. 47 (November 1824): 509; discussed in Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 124. 4. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 124–­25. 5. J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 6. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 126. 7. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 125. For more on Pistrucci, see Mary Ann Smart’s essay in this volume. 8. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 123–­24. 9. I explore this notion further in my forthcoming book, Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-­Century Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 10. New Monthly Magazine 12, no. 47 (November 1824): 509; cited in Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 124. 11. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 124. 12. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 124 (my emphasis). Ester­ hammer explores Sgricci’s career in more depth—­and revisits his English tour—­in her Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 110–­28. There she reiterates the notion that improvisers “paradoxically—­ perform[ed] natural spontaneity” (128, emphasis in original). 13. Esterhammer, “Coleridge’s ‘The Improvisatore,’ ” 125. 14. L.E.L, The Improvisatrice and Other Poems, 6th ed. (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1825). 15. Madame (Anne-­Louise-­Germaine) de Staël-­Holstein, Corinne, ou l’Italie, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1807). 16. Glennis Stephenson, “Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatrice: The Construction of L.E.L.” Victorian Poetry 30 (1992): 1–­17, here 1. 17. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice. 18. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 3.

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19. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 9–­10. 20. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 14–­15. 21. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 35–­36. 22. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 50–­51. 23. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 60. 24. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 68. 25. L.E.L., The Improvisatrice, 72. 26. Giacomo Leopardi, “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” in Canzoni (Bologna: Nobili, 1824), 99–­106. 27. John Humphreys Whitfield, Leopardi’s Canti (Naples: G. Scalabrini, 1962), 89–­91. 28. Giacomo Leopardi, “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” trans. Stephen J. Willett, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 11, no. 1 (2003): 52. 29. The two volumes of Cesarotti’s translation, entitled Poesie di Ossian, first appeared in 1763 in Padua; several other editions and expansions followed. For a modern edition, see James Macpherson, Poesie di Ossian, trans. Melchiorre Cesarotti, ed. Emilio Bigi (Turin: G. Einaudi 1976 [1960]). 30. Paola Gambarota, Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 156–­57. 31. Melchiorre Cesarotti, Epistolario, vol. 1 (Florence: Molini, 1811), 13; trans. from Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 155. 32. Melchiorre Cesarotti, Poesia di Ossian, vol. 1 (Milan: Editrice Classici), 108; trans. from Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 157. 33. Gambarota, Irresistible Signs, 155. 34. Paula Smith invented the term “Mary Sue” in 1973 to describe a too-­obvious and unrealistically perfect author surrogate in fan fiction; see Cynthia W. Walker, “A Con­ versation with Paula Smith,” Transformative Works and Cultures 6 (2011), http://journal .transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/243/205.

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“Silver Fork” Novels and the Place  of  Voice Cor mac Ne wa r k

The worldwide populist backlash of 2016 provided fresh proof—­as if any were needed—­of how much power still subsists in the metaphor of voice.1 In the United Kingdom, where this wave led to the momentous decision to leave the European Union, it was accepted across the political spectrum, and endlessly repeated, that “the people had spoken” and—­significantly—­that London voices in the referendum had been drowned out by those of the rest of the country.2 As in the United States a few months later, when a hitherto unlikely president was elected, it was precisely the centralized consensus—­the “politics as usual” of the metropolitan (and suspiciously cosmopolitan) elite—­that the people were understood to have pronounced against. Further resonances of the voice metaphor, echoing outside their normal political-­theoretical context, con­ tinued to be heard long after the clamour of voting day had died down. “We in the UK” would no longer be governed by those unaccountable to us—­that is, not obliged to answer to us for themselves and their actions. “We British” would be able to have our own distinctive voice in the world (even if the notion of  “British” is itself often more easily articulated in the sense of “break up” than that of “put into words”). And above all “we” would no longer need to have anything to do with Brussels, where, in more ways than one, they do not speak our language. In Nick Couldry’s terms, voice was asserted not only as a means by which “we” could give to our xenophobic instincts the narrative form necessary to a political position, but also a value, a “second-­order” principle sustaining the normative framework in which such narratives exist.3 The metaphor of voice is also important in opera studies, of course, recently as much as actual voices, and its political dimension has become familiar currency in work on the nineteenth-­century repertory in

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particular. In today’s musicological literature, voice is often interpreted as a site of resistance in the politics of identity: gender especially, but among other things also, just as in the commentary cited here, national self-­determination. Partly this is because it was often thought of that way at the time, and as scholars look at ever-­broader cross-­sections of paratextual opera material from the nineteenth century—­that is, beyond criticism towards fiction and even the discourses of lifestyle consumerism—­ ever-­more-­imbricated readings of opera, operagoing, and opera-­in-­society emerge. In these, voice can be the vehicle for multiple narrative enterprises. Where nationhood and sovereignty were concerned, for nineteenth-­ century commentators the subject was often Italy: natural birthplace of opera and, during almost the entire century, a state in a continual process of becoming. Critics and in particular novelists from all over Europe liked the idea of song as the voice of a people who could not yet speak in the politically constitutive way described above.4 But there exists at least one novel that offers a thoughtful exploration of both gender and representative democracy through opera not in Italy but in England: The Opera: A Novel (1832), by Mrs Gore. What makes this implied long view of the subject so immediately suggestive is that London in the late 1820s and early 1830s was every bit as exercised by questions of political voice as in 2016. The Roman Catholic Relief Act, passed in 1829, officially allowed Catholics to be heard in Parliament at last, and the 1832 Reform Act muted the disproportionately loud speech of the country landowners in the so-­called rotten boroughs in favour of that of the growing population of industrial cities. The latter bill was entitled “The Representation of the People,” which at that time meant no more than a reconsideration of how the aristocracy could continue to do the talking, to and within government, ostensibly on the people’s behalf. And while populism had as limited a connection with opera then as it does now, the latter was certainly intimately bound up with representation—­political as well as artistic. The season at the King’s Theatre coincided with when Parliament was sitting, so in one important sense opera was for the legislature (it was largely its members who could afford to attend) and the two kinds of voice—­both of them elite, metropolitan, and above all cosmopolitan—­were in close and sometimes intimate conversation during the period. More generally, throughout most of the long nineteenth century high society and opera were connected because the opera house was such an important site of social intercourse. This, too, was reflected in accounts of operagoing: reviewers of performances often turned their attention to the comings and goings of the audience (even to what they were wearing),

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just as other patrons did, and novels of fashion featured references to, and often whole scenes set at, the Opera (the capital letter connotes the institution rather any individual theatre). In the more or less contemporary fiction of Balzac, not only does the physical collocation of the audience in the various parts of the theatre provide a model of the social order, the auditorium is as likely to be the scene of dramatic events as its stage.5 Superficially at least, Gore’s aesthetic differs from Balzac’s in that, for all her characters’ operatic savoir faire, she never represents opera as having been fully domesticated. It is always a discrete event, however familiar, rather than integrated into the way characters think and talk about other things. A more significant difference is that although social change is an implicit background to the opera scenes in Balzac and other nineteenth-­ century writers, simply by virtue of being an institution formerly under royal or noble patronage and now increasingly commercialized, Gore was writing in a genre to which it was absolutely central, the so-­called silver fork novel (ca. 1820–­40) that detailed the encroachment upon the old money of the West End by new society from north of Oxford Street.6 As acknowledged doyenne of the genre, Gore could not avoid writing a good deal about operagoing: the dandy classes that are the main focus of her works, not to mention the aspiring middle classes (both characters and readers) eager to rub shoulders with them, saw it as an essential part of how society (not to mention Society) worked. As the title advertises, The Opera in particular features numerous significant encounters at the King’s Theatre. And, in keeping with the social commentary common to opera scenes in the nineteenth-­century novel generally, not only do plot events demand to be read against the operatic extravagances playing out on the stage beyond the boxes, but both plot and operatic soundtrack also resonate suggestively with contemporary discourse outside the theatre. However, where The Opera has something really distinctive to say about “voice” is in the collision of the lyric excess of Gore’s narrative—­the melodramatic denouement, in particular the fact that one of the principal characters is a famous singer—­with another standard feature of silver fork fiction, an ambiguous attitude to the changing social status of women. As the commentary below seeks to show, this collision helps shape an interpretative narrative—­if not quite a political one—­that may be read as compellingly ahead of its time. On the other hand, it does not readily translate into the most common metaphorical frameworks of twenty-­first-­century opera studies either (the postfeminist musicologist will be taken aback to find, for instance, that the soprano survives while more or less everyone else dies). In fact, beyond the fine detail of the historical-­cultural setting and the implicit

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meditation on the nature of the “operatic” in fiction, the main interest of The Opera may be that it raises useful questions about how opera reception documents speak to us not only about opera but about the metaphors we use to understand public discourse—­across the distance of  history, but also through the distorting filter of the now.

The Novel The novel opens not at the King’s Theatre but at the Paris Opéra, with the kind of idle gossip and conversational sallies between members of the European aristocracy for which silver fork fiction was well known. The Duchesse de Montémar and her English friend Lady Welwyn, accompanied by Count Ugo Pignatelli and the Chevalier de Villevargues, sit down in their box to witness a representation of “Le Dieu et la Bayadère” with a premeditated intention of flying into ecstacies at the sight of Taglioni’s attitudes, and melting into the necessary rapture of enthusiasm at the sound of Nourrit’s voice. (1:2)7

Naturally, the occupants of the other boxes are a more pressing object of attention, and very quickly the appearance of certain individuals recalls “the dreadful event which shocked us all so much at the opera last year” (1:8). As Villevargues promises to tell the Duchesse de Montémar the whole story, the omniscient narrator does the same, with a storyteller’s flourish (and, immediately, references both to the for-­now exclusive but increasingly heterogeneous clientele and the tension between various kinds of “operatic” story): The narrative may serve to prove that even a spot, devoted like “The Opera,” to idle amusement—­open to the approach of every vulgar footstep—­and incessantly haunted by those both of the vulgar and illustrious—­may be rendered a scene of interest of the most intense and exciting description;—­that the passions have at times been more actively at work within the familiar walls of the King’s Theatre, than in the cabin, the dungeon, or the palace;—­that they have witnessed the choicest sighs of love, and even the parting breath of mortal nature.—­ Listen! (1:10)

The main action thus announced, the scene shifts abruptly to Lower Austria. Here, in peaceful retirement as the Baron of Elzstein, lives Count

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Randolph Maldyn, originally from Ireland, having served with distinction as an officer in the Imperial Army. His only offspring, Adrian, is away at university in Göttingen: after some youthful excesses that have tried his father somewhat (moderately serious gambling debts and some dubious alliances with the local peasant girls, including giving “music lessons” to one called Stephanine, whom his father then deemed it prudent to send away to a distant conservatory), he appears to have grown into a likeable and stable young man of twenty-­three. But Maldyn has now summoned Adrian back from his studies to deliver important news: the death of Maldyn’s eldest brother without male issue means that Adrian is now heir to the title of Lord Abbotscourt and to a rich estate. Adrian must travel to London to get to know its society in preparation for this future role. Explanation of  Maldyn’s insistence that he go unaccompanied requires a lengthy backstory, which is the sad tale of  Maldyn’s own young manhood, seemingly worthy of any of the literary heroes of the present or previous generation—­Scott, Byron, and so on—­and, indeed, not dissimilar to many of the operas based on these characters. It features sectarian intolerance, political turbulence, and the premature death of  Maldyn’s middle brother, younger sister, and beloved wife—­but not before the last of these is driven mad by her scheming elder sister, Katharine, Maldyn’s nemesis. It is thus Maldyn’s disinclination to revisit the scene of earlier trauma that has formed his resolve that Adrian should go alone to London, along with his conviction that the family is cursed and his concern that his own bad luck should not prove contagious to his son. Only when Adrian is happily married, he says, will he join him and live out his days at Abbots­ court. On that score Adrian’s hopes are already bound up with a young widow, Mrs Perceval, whom he met while (unbeknownst to his father) enjoying the carnival in Paris six months earlier. It is only later that he learns (while attending the Opera, naturally) that Mrs Perceval is in fact his cousin Cecilia, daughter of Katharine. Cecilia was also ignorant of their blood ties, Adrian having been no more than the Baron of Elzstein when they met and formed their attachment. More than the close family relationship, the obstacle to their happiness seems clearly to be the implacable opposition of their warring parents. Either way, the family curse appears far from expiated. Arriving in London in December with his companion from Göt­ tingen, Baron Gustavus Adelberg, Adrian must establish himself in society. He is initially rather bored. The only thing to look forward to is the opening of the opera house, scheduled for the end of January, and the arrival of a new star singer, La Silvestra, already the toast of Europe. In

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the meantime Adrian amuses himself by describing, in the ironic, pseudo-­ ethnographical manner of the outsider, the foibles and peculiarities of London society and its main actors. These include the Duke of Cardigan (the noblest and wealthiest of his new circle), the Pignatelli brothers (Ugo and Anastasio, apparently sons of the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), and Constance Fitzgerald (the unmarried niece of his father’s trusted friend and fellow former officer, Manningfield). Events move quickly after the opening of the opera season: not only does Adrian’s love for Cecilia now look increasingly ill-­starred, but at a ball given by Cardigan for La Silvestra, he makes the astonishing discovery that the feted singer, who now has the whole of London society at her feet, is none other than the peasant girl Stephanine, whose dalliance with Adrian had been cut short by his father. Adrian feels he ought to warn his friends (and in particular Cardigan, who appears smitten) that she is not who she claims to be, the daughter of the retired army officer from Piedmont-­Sardinia who accompanies her; but for the moment he says nothing. It soon transpires that La Silvestra has an ulterior motive for coming to England. Joining the party at Cardigan’s country estate between performances, she contrives to take possession of a ring given to Adrian by Cecilia and allow the latter to see her wearing it; she then tells him that Cecilia’s consequent coldness is due to the suspicion that he now loves Constance. And just in case he might explore other possibilities, she has also told Constance, whose intelligence and wit Adrian greatly admires, about his understanding with Cecilia. La Silvestra openly admits to him that her purpose is revenge, declaring “You know how I have loved you; it remains for me to prove how I can hate” (3:40). Each of the women in Adrian’s life is now set firmly against him: his beautiful former lover, whose dazzling new talents make her at once more dangerous and more seductive; his until-­now unofficial fiancée, who apparently also hates him; and Constance (towards whom Manningfield had been strongly pressing him, to the extent of writing to his father with the news that the two seemed close). There is therefore nothing for Adrian to do but go to the opera and gaze wistfully at each of the three in turn: La Silvestra on the stage; Cecilia and Constance in their respective boxes. The action accelerates, however: in the meantime his father has set off for London too, prompted by Manningfield’s encouraging correspondence. He arrives to the news that there no longer seems to be a liaison, and decides to stick to his earlier resolution and not tell his son of his presence until Adrian’s happy future is secure. Maldyn does come across Cecilia, though, and is touched by her close resemblance to his late wife. Nevertheless, when it becomes clear that it is to her that Adrian has re-

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ally been connected, Maldyn is appalled, concluding that the family curse has struck again. Manningfield tries to cheer him up, not only by telling him repeatedly that she is nothing like her dastardly mother, Katharine, but also by advancing the opinion that in any case Adrian may well be more interested in La Silvestra. Alas, when Maldyn accompanies Manningfield to the opera and recognizes Stephanine for himself, the shock is fatal. And when Adrian, who has left London to see a bit more of the kingdom and in particular his extended family’s property, arrives at one of the estates, it is only to witness the burial of his father alongside his mother. Nor does he survive much longer himself. A postscript to the final chapter tells that Cecilia, although she had been persuaded to think of Adrian as faithless and had instead married a Lord Bruton, becomes estranged from her mother once she learns the upsetting truth of the case; it is intimated that “despair and death had already set their seal upon her frame” (3:312). The postscript also includes the text of La Silvestra’s letter to Cardigan, contemptuously rejecting his offer of marriage: instead she leaves England “with that dread desperation of a broken heart, which feels that its purposes have been accomplished—­its triumph sealed upon the grave of all that was dear to it on earth.—­Farewell for ever!” (3:317).

The Voice As this outline makes clear, the Opera is integral to Gore’s plot: a number of key events occur there; one of the main characters is a celebrated performer; and it is at the theatre, as the principal location for the constitution of society in whichever fashionable capital the characters happen to find themselves, that the visual roll call of who’s who is conducted. Equally clearly, the events of the plot are almost parodically operatic, partly in that they specifically draw on the Romantic melodrama that formed the basis of then-­contemporary librettos, and partly more generally, by adopting tropes of dramatic irony and heightened emotional experience from a range of identifiably music-­theatrical genres: curses, filial duty leading to tragedy, brooding Celtic settings, an inability to escape from the past or to prevent tragic events from repeating themselves, frequent fainting, madness, death from the shock of recognition or a broken heart, and so forth. One of the prominent features of the novel is that these two aspects are held in tension, with affected idleness and frivolity contrasting vividly with passion and death. The story is announced by the foppish Villevargues as “almost too romantic for the age we live in”; where the narrator predicts that Cecilia is not long for this world, he thinks “The

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days of enthusiasm are past; no more crusading,—­no more dying for love!” (1:9). Partly this is implicit (and sometimes explicit) commentary on the cynicism of society life: although one subplot culminates in a duel and the death of one of the most sympathetic characters, Adrian’s friend Anastasio Pignatelli, the scandal is described as being the talk of the town (and an opportunity for those loosely connected with it to dine out on the story) for only a few weeks before being forgotten. More centrally, the contradiction is surely intended to express something about the nature of the operagoing at the time, the intensity of the stage events contrasting with the levity and inattention of many of the audience. Progressively broader aspects of this tension, all deriving directly or indirectly from opera, are explored as the novel goes on. The investigation begins relatively familiarly, as Adrian notes the disproportionate importance of theatrical life in European urban high society. In England, this means that, following the obligatory mention of the weather, conversation turns immediately to the stage. In the press, events of geopolitical importance are crowded out by the most trivial news about even minor performers. And across Europe, when it comes to artists who excel, each commentator tries to outdo the last in the affirmation of that excellence: Every translating scribbler who is called upon for the paraphrase of a Silvestrian anecdote from the “Diario di Roma,” or the “Algemeine [sic] Zeitung,” prolongs, by half a note her heavenly gamut, diminishes a year of her age, and, for aught I know, adds a cubit to her stature. (2:32)

London is more avid in its passion for opera, Adrian thinks, than any other capital he knows. Later he wonders whether these enthusiasms are really to do with the qualities of their objects: Of all the adventitious attractions which tend to the captivation of the human heart, perhaps there is none more powerful than that of popularity. It is this, rather than youth, beauty, or ability, which lends enchantment to the actress. (3:113)

As an analysis of the workings of fashion this is surely not much different from many satires of social life published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Opera is more interesting in that this analysis forms the background to various meditations (literal, in that they are made part of Adrian’s private musings in his journal; or staged, as it were, in the action of the plot) deliberately structured around a series of philosophical binaries: real emotion versus acting, natural versus trained,

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amateur versus professional, old social conventions and practices versus new, all related in one way or another to the central question of the class system. In one of several unsuspectingly ironic references to “poor Stephanine” before he realizes whom she has become, Adrian considers the intersection of natural talent and schooled professionalism and their respective appeal to (implicitly male) spectatorship on the one hand and moral standards on the other: Prince Giustiniani, who arrived from Paris last night, declares that Mara, Banti, Gabrielli, Grassini, Catalani, Camporese, and Fodor,8 contributing the vast variety of their excellencies, could not have formed a more accomplished cantatrice, a more fascinating woman; and protests that she has a blush which ought to add a thousand guineas to her engagement. I am sorry to hear it; nothing irritates me so much as to see a really diffident woman exposed to the publicity of a theatrical life;— ex­ cept indeed to see her when the bloom is off the fruit, and the tremor of her feminine modesty departed! Poor Stephanine! She certainly was born for the stage;—­so much address—­so much tact—­so much self-­ artful possession! How deeply would it have grieved me had my father exercised his sly munificence by facilitating an entrée to the theatrical profession for any other woman who ever interested my feelings! But Stephanine Haslinger was certainly intended by nature to weep imaginary tears, smile fictitious smiles, and alternately assume “the lion port and awe-­commanding grace” of an empress,9 and the playful naïveté of some simple cottage girl. Had her voice been of a better quality, she must have eventually risen high in her profession;—­as it is, I fear the last news that reached me from Prague, that she had eloped with an itinerant showman, will degrade her destinies to their original level. Poor girl! I could wish I had assisted less actively in the work of mischief, but had she been educated in a convent of Carmelites she must still have turned out a scapegrace. I never knew a daughter of Eve with more vocation for emulating the frailties of her progenitress. (2:50–­51)

Naturalness is here and elsewhere in the novel a complex concept: it is a feature of accomplished artifice but also an impediment to it, and, in line with a kind of morally prurient spectatorship familiar from the eighteenth century and still common in the nineteenth, a sign that the faults of the stage character must be mirrored in those of the actress. It is also, in this cosmopolitan context of Pan-­European nobility, a question of voice in the sense of language. Obviously bilingual himself, and possibly

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polyglot, Adrian is nevertheless deeply troubled by the fact that Stephanine seems to have learned such fluent Italian as to convince the Italians themselves, both onstage and off (2:134). And, just as Adrian’s patrician criticism of the potential Stephanine’s singing voice exhibited when he knew her in Elzstein is soon shown to be laughably wide of the mark, in the matter of language, Adelberg, the character who is invested with the greatest operatic discernment (and whose Teutonic seriousness throws the flighty dilettantism of the other characters into sharp relief) is also fooled. After hearing her perform a Ländler at a “déjeûner at the Russian ambassador’s” and preferring her singing in Italian, he opines, also with unwitting irony, that “Silvestra’s soft Italian accentuation was unequal to the peculiarity of our guttural dialect. Depend upon it, Adrian, German lips alone are capable of doing justice to the harsh syncopes of Austria” (2:131, 135). Naturalness and its connection to linguistic and cultural origins is a still more complex idea in the four-­stanza ode, improvised on “Home” (a subject chosen at random) by La Silvestra for Cardigan’s houseguests.10 (2:203–­5) These nonstage performances, with their mixture of public and private, amateur and professional, explore the limits of what Adrian’s circle understands by nobility. As far as they know, La Silvestra’s father is socially respectable; moreover, the army was at that time one of the few careers in which it was established that professional distinction could confer a degree of upward social mobility. On the other hand, even the most free-­thinking of them are inclined to see public performance for financial reward as beyond the pale. Yet La Silvestra gradually wins most of them over: her conduct is reported to have been morally impeccable in all the European cities in which she has appeared, her taste and manners are of the most refined, and she is, above all, sensitive to her hosts’ scruples. The evidence that she is being accepted in the highest circles is that she is no longer asked to perform as such; as the novel goes on she sings to her companions more and more in the contexts in which they themselves sing to each other. Even Constance, “on other occasions so vigilant and discriminating, found reason to admire and praise the tokens of gentle blood visible in her elegant demeanour” (2:134). The fact that she nevertheless remains a professional who must earn her living from performing makes things awkward for Cardigan, who feels keenly that despite this social acceptance he does not want to appear to be taking advantage of her, but also that he would not dream of offering anything so insultingly vulgar as money. He solves the problem by giving her a diamond necklace, which only raises the stakes in what is becoming an increasingly complicated game of affective, gender, and class politics—­

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not to mention the politics around the value of voice. Adrian, who appreciates better than anyone the Duke’s attraction, and is himself all but won over by the transformation of Stephanine, feels more and more uncomfortable on Cardigan’s behalf. As he muses, “How is it possible to rely on the sincerity of a person who is capable of assuming all disguises and the semblance of every human passion at her own good pleasure?” (2:206). At this point in the text, voice as a value is thoroughly problematized.

The Place of  Voice I: Amateur and Professional The scenes of performance in Cardigan’s country house, especially ensemble performance, are in this respect among the richest in the novel. They repeatedly bring to the fore, in different configurations, questions of role-­playing and of what stake in the performance each participant and observer—­including the narrator—­may have. At a read-­through around the piano of “a scene from Bellini’s last opera,” presumably Norma (1831), which breaks up in good-­natured embarrassment when the guests (described by Adrian as “amateurs of superior excellence”) notice that La Silvestra has entered the room silently, we begin to see beyond the studied listlessness of the characters (2:184). And at a vaudeville put together by the Charleville sisters, we gain insight into how artifice is received by those whose entire lives are a kind of playacting: This evening no allusion was made to Mademoiselle Sandoni’s professional excellence, and no reluctance shown to performing in her presence. The curtain drew up immediately after coffee, with as little hesitation as if the prima donna were already Duchess of Cardigan; then, without affecting either to despise or insult the Lady Charle­ villes’ performance by any vehement excess of applause, Mademoiselle Sandoni enacted the part of auditress and spectatress as ably as she acts every other falling to her share. She exhibited no effort of indulgence, but simply seemed amused; and the performers were soon induced to forget the presence of La Silvestra. Lady Clara, indeed, is an excellent actress: one of the best soubrettes I ever saw on the boards. That line of character is invariably overacted by professionals, from its affinity to their own. In playing it naturally they fancy themselves tame and insipid; but the fine-­lady, who studies to appear the waiting woman or the grisette, copies it from the life, as something wholly foreign to her own nature; and the imitation is unchecked by vexatious associations. (2:235–­36)11

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One of Adrian’s less cultivated friends, Lord Brabazon, also raises this question of the purpose of professional performance, saying that the play­ ing of the Lady Charlevilles and Constance is good enough to be pleasing, and bad enough to prove that they have passed some portion of their lives in doing something better than mechanize the movements of their fingers and the expansion of their throats, far better than the cold perfection of a professional performer. (2:248)

But even Stephanine, speaking frankly to Adrian, seems to share these doubts, although she does not herself seem to have much patience for amateurs, calling the vaudeville participants “the idiots who were labouring, from mistaken vanity, through the duties which I am compelled to adopt for hire” (3:38–­39). Thus, whereas The Opera addresses questions that were also commonplaces of opera criticism at the time, such as naturalness and artifice, the proper limits of acting, and so on, it does so in new ways. And these commonplaces, alongside more involved questions of professional and amateur performance that are as it were internal to the plot, together appear to have something important to say about various definitions and degrees of patronage. In the novel it seems to be assumed, as one would expect, that patronage is understood as a key concept in the business of putting on opera, particularly the maintenance of the star system, but what is foregrounded is how central it also is to notions of character, dignity, aspiration, and how the classes remain distinct. Quite apart from the different kinds of patronage bestowed on La Silvestra by London society, Cardigan at its head, and notwithstanding his wonder at her transformation, Adrian sees himself in a more complex but parallel role vis-­à-­vis her former incarnation: While Cecilia was safe from any suspicion that the beautiful and artless Sardinian damigella was in fact a mere adventurer, the poetical version of a degraded Lower Austrian peasant, Stephanine, the crafty Stephanine, did not fail to recognise, in  .  .  . “Adrian von Elzstein,”  .  .  . the object of her own intense passion,—­the unwitting cause of her own moral degradation, and elevation in life,—­the origin of all the schemes of her wild ambition. (2:289–­90)

Here and elsewhere (see, for example, the lines 50–­51 from vol. 2 quoted above) Adrian feels he has acted, paradoxically, both as the conventional male aristocrat who has ruined a common woman and as the benevolent seigneur:

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Stephanine was scarcely sixteen—­brilliant with natural graces and talents—­artful as she was intelligent,—­and adding a syren’s voice to attractions of considerable personal beauty. On their first acquaintance, Adrian had been persuaded to give up the leisure hours of his vacation to her instruction in the science of music. (1:38)

As the novel goes on, Adrian recognizes more and more clearly the conflict in his thinking about Stephanine. Later, he sees himself as the victim rather than her, but the sense of being fully responsible for her artistic awakening and education (quite apart from his father’s role in sending her away ostensibly to formalize it) is still there: Above all, it [the Opera] served to develop the more than human powers, and unveil the more than earthly loveliness of the extraordinary being, whom he was sometimes tempted to regard as a gem redeemed by his efforts from the darkness of the mine; sometimes to abhor as an evil spirit, attached to his own destinies. (3:74–­75)

Apart from the implications of this commentary on the origins and cultivation of Stephanine’s voice, and the privileged hearing that it has received, for the broader metaphorical context—­on which more below—­ what comes through relatively clearly here is the contention that aristocratic attention, in the form of various kinds of patronage, is necessary but also harmful to artists and art. Many studies have pointed out the return exacted by male patrons, in particular from numerous unfortunate actresses, ballerinas, and chorus girls, on their investment in the arts, but this is a somewhat unfamiliar emphasis: once La Silvestra is a star, her personal beauty, at least, cannot be bought. Rather, art, here in the shape of Stephanine’s developing expertise, is represented as somehow originally within the gift of the aristocracy. At the same time, its accomplishment and exercise are subject to fine judgements that actually serve to blur the line between technically good and bad performances, according to arbitrary (but not wholly indefensible) notions of good taste as they pertain to proper feeling and naturalness. For the purposes of patronage, aesthetic beauty is located firmly in the monocled eye (or ear) of the beholder. One way of understanding this is that The Opera shows art to be both beyond price and indirectly (in the sense that it can only be instilled and developed, and then appreciated and judged, by the rich) thoroughly monetized. Another, perhaps more relevant to the silver fork discourse generally, might be that transcendent beauty is unable to transcend its own beginnings.

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These ideas are, of course, most obviously in play during evenings at the Opera, when La Silvestra is performing not sociably but contractually. In keeping with nineteenth-­century tradition, the words, characters, and character motivations of the opera extracts described have a passing (but tantalizing) relevance to the plot of the novel. This is implicitly the case, for example, when La Silvestra is summoned back to Cardigan’s country house by Constance and appears so promptly that she has not had time to change out of her costume for the evening’s performance. The name of the character she has been playing—­Fiorilla in Rossini’s Il turco in Italia12—­is not mentioned until the beginning of the next chapter, and there receives no comment, but it loosely fits the context, which is of various characters grumbling about the singer’s social incongruence: Fiorilla is a flirt and compromises the dignity of her respectable but foolish husband just as everyone (Adrian most of all) fears La Silvestra would do if she became Cardigan’s wife (2:185–­86). But in Gore’s novel the function of actual professional performance—­ circumscribed, that is, by formal spectatorship—­is more to give the characters watching and listening an opportunity to reflect, with maudlin sentimentality or irony as appropriate, on this sort of significant echo. This is straightforwardly the case at La Silvestra’s London debut in Rossini’s Otello.13 Adrian arrives late and feels inclined not to stay in the crowded box, but Cardigan persuades him. He cannot see the source of the singing and therefore does not yet know who La Silvestra really is—­which establishes the crucial fact that voice is not to be trusted. Leaning, therefore, against the wall in my obscure corner, I testified my respect to the death-­like stillness with which the house was preparing itself for “L’error d’un infelice;” and when the voice which was to give utterance on this occasion to that touching apostrophe swelled forth from the plaintive tenderness of its first faint notes, I had no longer any inclination to move. Like a “stream of rich distilled perfumes,”14 it seemed to pour a soothing tranquillity into the depths of the heart. If pity and terror be indeed the strongest elements of human interest, Silvestra possesses a miraculous control over her audience. The hoarse echo of the chorus, with its stern sympathy, seemed the involuntary tribute of its compassion towards her afflicting appeal. “Se il padre m’abbandona!”—­Yes! the wrath,—­the renouncement of a father are indeed terrible! Were mine to turn from me with the obduracy of Brabantio, I feel that my own deep agony of soul must equal hers:—­when a parent remains unrelenting, “da chi sperar pietà?”—­15

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. . . On glancing rapidly round the living walls of the crowded theatre, I could perceive that every eye was fixed upon the stage;—­many with tears, all with intensity;—­and that every ear was luxuriating in those pathetic accents which seemed to gush from the innermost warmth of a tender and feeling heart. Hundreds of beautiful women were leaning forward towards the stage; careless for once of their own appearance. . . . (2:84–­86)

Less straightforward, and much less concerned with textual detail, are the resonances of La Silvestra’s performance in Rossini’s Semiramide a few weeks later.16 Certain features of  the plot—­filial loyalty, apparent supernatural intervention—­chime vaguely with the problems that oppress Adrian, but more than them he seems struck by the ambivalence of his feelings about Stephanine, and the coincidence, in both her and the Babylonian queen she is playing, of conflicting passions, even of distinct personalities. It is a coincidence which, enhanced by the pathos of her performance, and just as with Otello, he invests with a heavy sentimental charge: That tremendous assumption of mingled horror and tenderness which imparted to Semiramide at once the dignity of a woman and a queen, the air of a guilty and an innocent victim  .  .  . he almost wept when the piteous confession of her guilt was mingled with the agony of her blighted affections. . . . (3:197–­98)

Similar stock features—­loyalty to a father, a hopeless love triangle, despair leading to madness and death—­hover suggestively over the most extended account of La Silvestra on stage, in Il pirata.17 The performance occurs at some point between the two described above, when Adrian’s romantic prospects seem at their least promising: he has, without meaning to, wounded both Cecilia and Constance (as well as, of course, Stephanine). Later, when the novel approaches its conclusion—­but giving as yet no clear hint of its tragic denouement—­Adrian belatedly sees that nothing good ever happens to him at the Opera and resolves to attend no more (3:282). But for now it is still a place if not of sanctuary then potentially at least of solitude, where he can be alone with his own gloomy thoughts in his own box, while still watching both performer and audience. The curtain was down for the entr’acte when he entered the theatre; and he sat leaning his head on his hand, with his arm planted on the back of a chair, utterly unconscious of all that was passing around him.

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The “pirata” of Bellini, which happened to occupy the stage, is rendered familiar to every English ear by the affinity of its pathetic horrors with those of Maturin’s Bertram;18 and when the curtain rose for the commencement of the second act, the mournful invocation of Imogene’s attendant maidens Prolunghi, o ciel pietoso! il breve suo riposo; Pace per lei sia questa Che desta aver non può, stole plaintively and soothingly into his ears. In the ensuing scene Imogene presents herself to the impassioned frenzy of the pirate; and when La Silvestra’s mellow voice, in reply to his proposals of escape, gave expression to the ejaculation Ah! no, giammai! Son rea, Gualtiero, ed infelice assai, Parti! the tremulous pathos of her accents penetrated the inmost recesses of his heart. He hung entranced upon the tenderness of her tones and demeanour; till in the duet which expresses her final negative to the proposition of Gualtieri, the fervour of Taci! rimorsi amari Ci seguirian per l’onda! Lido che a lor ci asconda L’immenso mar non ha! seemed to spring with an irrepressible impulse from the desolate depths of her own wounded heart. Even Adrian felt his soul expand within him at the sublimity imparted by the cantatrice to this touching appeal! From that moment his attention was riveted on the stage. The ravishing beauty of the Duchess of Caldora in her picturesque costume,—­the deep inspiration of genius lending intensity to her expressions,—­the touching, the almost unearthly plaintiveness of her voice, gave a degree of interest to the piece such as he had not conceived any mere vocal exhibition capable of producing. No sooner did Imogene, frantic with the horror of her guilty widowhood and of her pity for the condemned Gualtieri, advance to the

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front of the stage holding the orphan of Ernesto by the hand, than the sympathy of the audience was riveted by the grief-­struck immobility of her countenance, by her fixed gaze,—­her marble paleness. While the first ravings of insanity burst from the lips of the sufferer, O! s’io potessi dissipar le nubi, Che mi aggravan la fronte!—­è giorno o sera? the almost whispered concentration of tone in which she strove to exemplify the delirium of a broken heart, exhibited the very perfection of art. But a greater effort was still to come. The burst of tenderness with which she snatched her child from the ground, and the agony expressed in her recitative entreating its intercession with the spirit of her murdered husband—­ Deh! tu innocente, tu per me l’implora! was beyond all art, beyond all impulse but that of intense human feeling!—­W hile the tears burst from Adrian’s eyes, and a rhapsody of panegyric from the lips of Adelberg,—­Maldyn felt inclined to retract every evil opinion he had conceived of the prima donna. A woman so tremblingly alive to the best sensibilities of human nature, could not be the worthless being he had lately pictured to himself. (3:68–­71)

In the world view asserted in this passage the operatic voice may not be natural, and it may certainly lie, but it nevertheless has a kind of truth. As Adrian’s last remark here makes plain, the emphasis is once again on the extortion of emotion as catharsis and persuasion, and on its display as currency in an economy of studied disengagement. For example, the tears Constance now sheds for Imogene, just like the narcissism of the “hundreds of beautiful women,” forgotten for the sake of Desdemona, are plausibly different from the premeditated responses described at the very opening of the novel (and above), even though they are equally consis­ tent with fashion. But just as significant is the extent to which this emo­ tion merely affords access to other feelings that the characters already have, and how it facilitates their sentimentalized mapping onto reality of possible worlds they know to be false. Along with Adrian, we strongly suspect that, given the context, the cause of Constance’s tears is not Gualtiero but Adrian himself, and we know full well that while Stephanine may be “tremblingly alive to the best sensibilities of human nature,” this empathy is precisely what she uses to accomplish her revenge. Indeed, he has apparently

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forgotten what she told him herself, only half a dozen chapters earlier, about empathy having nothing to do with producing performance: “I fancied the history of Carlini and the mask was sufficiently well known to instruct all Europe in the natural dulness of all theatrical puppets!” said Silvestra, with some bitterness, and pointedly generalizing herself with the members of the calling to which I had so unceremoniously referred. “Philosophers assure us that the sun which emits such scorching rays possesses no inherent heat,” she continued; “and I, who am so often rewarded with the cheers and laughter of an audience, should find it impossible to elicit a single grain of merriment from my own soul. Even you, who appear to set some value on my powers, I defy even you, Mr. Maldyn, to enliven me to the amount of one genuine smile.” (2:223–­24)19

The Place of  Voice II: Noble and Bourgeois One of the most finely textured ways Gore’s novel reflects contemporary ideas is in its attention to the reliability of reporting on performance. There is always the chance that, as Adrian initially hints, the furore surrounding Stephanine’s voice is driven by the self-­fulfilling prophecy of fashion rather than genuine excellence. In this reading, the positive reports of her performances relayed to the reader are a function of the competing exaggerations Adrian notes in correspondents’ press reports; of incompetence or lack of taste on the part of Adrian’s fellow spectators, musically interested and educated though many of them seemingly are; or, in the case of his own descriptions, projections of his residual erotic interest in her, his fragile emotional state in the wake of his truncated affair with Cecilia, and his susceptible romantic nature generally. If some of this is consistent with the conventions of opera in the novel as practised elsewhere in nineteenth-­century literature, in The Opera it is treated from more perspectives, and arguably more philosophically. There is a sense, too, in which Gore’s interest in the exercise of judgement goes further, and perhaps it is here that operagoing may be seen to have a relevance to her project that goes beyond merely providing a setting for plot situations or truisms of reception, and her novel to resonate more clearly with current opera studies. As surveys of the silver fork novel have pointed out, the genre is part of a broader phenomenon of so­ cial commentary, focused on the noble and ruling classes, that was by no means new in the first half of the nineteenth century but that grew exponentially following the introduction of steam printing in 1814. Not only

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this new kind of novel but also newspapers (with their society and the­ atrical columns, which Gore, through the medium of Adrian’s foreigner-­ in-­London diary, reflects) benefitted from vastly increased production and circulation. Two aspects of The Opera make it an important example of the phenomenon. The first is that it is determinedly contemporary, published in 1832 and set quite precisely in 1831–­32, a period not explicitly specified but easily deduced from numerous references to debating the Reform Bill.20 The operatic works mentioned are also right up to date, from the introductory chapter set at a performance of Le Dieu et la Bayadère to the read-­ through of “Bellini’s last opera,” and their dernier cri status repeatedly emphasized.21 The second, as the quotations from the text included above amply demonstrate, is that it presents opera as model and microcosm for celebrity-­spotting. To do so at exactly the moment when this culture was being so comprehensively mediatized is a striking way of joining up fictional and journalistic (no doubt sometimes also fictional, then as now) reportage. More important, it makes clear that it is not just the appearance of the rich and famous that is being watched, but how they act (how they receive the performance and display affect) and how they interact (with each other and, indirectly, with the celebrities of the stage). The combination of this dissection of public observation with the novel’s simultaneous explorations of the vicissitudes of private reception of operatic performance results in a sustained, but deftly oblique, consideration of the nature and limits of patronage as it pertains to the promotion of particular kinds of performance, and also of taste formation. This consideration, taking place as it does against a real background of increasingly avid scrutiny—­some gratifying, some much less so—­of aristocratic public and private behaviour, and in a political context in which aristocratic power and values are being challenged, amounts to a suggestion by Gore that the process by which artistic judgement is arrived at is open to question as never before. Moreover, it hints that the location of arbitration of that judgement is shifting. In the context of musical reception history it is remarkable that this should be articulated in such comparative detail a decade before the split between the different class factions within audiences at the King’s Theatre (and, respectively, event-­and work-­ based conceptions of opera) and the apotheosis of Mozart in the 1840s, when loyalty to his music became the marker of bourgeois discernment in opposition to aristocratic dilettantism.22 But it is perhaps even more striking that the process by which political judgement is arrived at and expressed—­in other words, the exercise of “voice”—­should be similarly interrogated, and located so squarely with female voices in particular.

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For there is, of course, an even more trenchant interpretation to be imputed to Gore’s use of the political backdrop. As the discussion here has shown, much of the controversy internal to the novel is to do with whether it is socially permissible or advisable to allow professional performers into aristocratic circles. Given that La Silvestra is a woman, the debate is naturally gendered, but, given the usual workings of patronage, this was also the case in society at large. All silver fork novels revolve around the integration, resisted as it might be, of bourgeois characters into the social preserves of the aristocracy, but the extent to which there is a particular concentration on the means by which women might achieve such integration is attested by the best-­known parody of the genre, Thack­ eray’s Vanity Fair (1847–­48):23 Becky Sharp is able to rise from her poor origins all the way to being presented to the King mainly through the seductive influence she exerts over a series of progressively higher-­born men. Significantly, one of the signs of those origins that Becky proudly refuses to efface, perhaps because her mother was a dancer at the Opéra and because she herself is a more than usually gifted drawing room singer and pianist, is her solicitude for the professional performers invited to entertain guests at aristocratic gatherings and then socially ignored.24 In The Opera, Cardigan’s highly respected mother warns him against La Silvestra in familiar terms, deploring the madness of expecting from a person accustomed to exhibit her person and talents on a public stage, that decent modesty of mind which most men covet in a wife; or from a woman accustomed to assume, for hire, the tone and semblance of every passion, good and evil, that delicacy of feeling and sentiment you have ever professed to exact in the choice of your female friends. (3:77)

Manningfield is even more direct: “How do I detest the modern custom of admitting these mountebanks into society!” (2:100). His use of a word that means both common public performer and someone offering bogus elixirs that may be addictive or harmful, and will certainly be costly, nicely captures the sense that music is a drug under the influence of which noblemen may do foolish things, and that female opera singers are a threat to the social order. But discussion of the place of voice, even implicit, against of the backdrop of the Reform Bill in 1831–­32 and the eventual Representation of the People Act of 1832, seems inevitably to suggest a further sense: that the anxiety provoked among characters of The Opera by the protean force of Silvestra’s performance and by her persuasive, seductive singing voice is merely a version of the much more general

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anxiety about evolving political influence, of voice in the sense of direct or indirect suffrage. Specifically, it is an almost irresistible metaphor for the question of the proper place for a woman’s voice, and the limits to be placed on it. Although calls for women’s suffrage had certainly been heard in Regency England, from Jeremy Bentham and others,25 it is left artfully unclear whether, or to what extent, The Opera sets out to expose to scrutiny a general feeling at that time—­in the circles it depicts or those of its intended readership—­that women, especially upwardly mobile ones, might need to be silenced, at least outside the drawing room. And yet, in very many details of the text, what is clear is that the access to society granted to La Silvestra by her talent is the subject that most unambiguously defines the differences between the implacable older characters (the Duchess of Cardigan, Manningfield) and the generation below (Cardigan, Constance, Adrian) who are prepared to be persuaded by her behaviour and conversation. Separately, but by no means coincidentally, the same generation gap is also defined in terms of appreciation of opera: Adrian, Constance, and the rest weep sweet tears, whereas Manningfield thinks that “to have one’s soul tickled into folly through one’s ears, is a grievous compromise of human dignity” (2:101). The unavoidable conclusion is that, in the novel, times are represented as changing, as they undoubtedly were in both Society and society, and that both opera (the performance) and the Opera (the practice and the institution, “incessantly haunted by . . . both . . . the vulgar and illustrious”) are a necessary means of understanding that change. In this reading, the complicated kind of patronage whereby Adrian bestows on Stephanine the instrument by which she will eventually, as La Silvestra, exert influence not only over him, the lord of the manor, but over the younger members of his entire class, is inescapably a matter of the perils of giving women a voice.

The Power of  Voice In her discussion of twenty-­first-­century democratic subjectivity, Aletta Norval observes that “for post-­structuralists, ‘voice’ is  thematised precisely from the perspective of those excluded from the polity.”26 One suspects that Mrs Gore, without troubling herself with poststructuralism, might have espoused a similar view, although it is worth underlining that at the time she was writing, single women in theory had the same (property-­related) voting rights as men: it was the 1832 Reform Act itself that signalled the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement proper owing to its inclusion, for the first time in that particular legislative

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context, of the word “male.”27 And there is no doubt that The Opera makes a strong case for voice as a way of thinking about identity and subjectivity in the public sphere: those who do not succeed in speaking at the right time (like Adrian), or otherwise making their voices heard, perish in despair. Nevertheless, La Silvestra’s voice, its protean power notwithstanding, is not straightforward as a political metaphor. As well as being by definition deployed in the service of operatic fictions, it is explicitly presented as un-­or nonrepresentative, in that its convincing Italianness masks its original Austrianness—­never mind that northern Italy, at least, belonged to Imperial Austria at the time, a detail that merely complicates further, at the level of national self-­determination, the discourse of voice as expressive of identity. Its ostensible function in frameworks of exchange is also undermined, in that it is made an object of fashion, and hence involved in misrepresentation: such extravagant claims are made for it, in a context of such avowed exaggeration and in the absence of any reliable witness (Gore is careful to disqualify the otherwise authoritative opinions of Adelberg and Adrian himself), that by implication it distorts other interlocutory transactions. Most significant, perhaps, it is placed in a delicately balanced economy of interests that militates against the notion of voice as any kind of unmediated expression: for Stephanine, her art is a demeaning but necessary means to revenge; for Cardigan and his set it is something that has a price, and is nothing to do with the purity, aesthetic or moral, they profess to value; for Adrian it is the product, however unplanned, of patronage. For Gore, finally, it is difficult not to conclude that voice on stage is quite as conflicted as voice in (and outside) the polity: whether artful or artless, influential or influenced, voice does not equal freedom, or freedom from interest. All of this was common currency at the time of the Reform Act, as the notion of speaking for others—­landowners for their tenants, husbands for their wives, the patrician classes for the rest—­was debated not just in Parliament but up and down the country. Read one way, the descriptions of La Silvestra’s singing make it not just a site of resistance in the gender politics of 1831–­32, but also, in its compelling expression of human truths and celebration of empathy, a paean to vocative communication that is still audible today. This is, of course, just the kind of positive message that we in opera studies have tended to retrieve from historical sociocultural discourse. Yet as an envoicing of women, Gore’s novel is expressive of nothing so much as the ambivalence of someone who, as popular a novelist as Thackeray in her time, was arguably a keener thinker about issues of representation,

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political as well as literary. Her sneaking admiration for her creation La Silvestra,28 which shines through Adrian’s condemnation and the other characters’ snobbery, helps expose a central complexity in contemporary conceptions of patrician democracy: the singer belongs to a new kind of aristocracy-­in-­waiting, that of mediatized talent, and in the contemporary context of reform her utterance is in theory compatible with the discourse of power, but at the same time association with her disqualifies Cardigan from the representative position, more broadly defined, into which birth has placed him. As expressed here, Gore’s views on voice in the sense of female suffrage may be mixed, but one thing is clear: as a mediatized talent herself, writing during a boom in print culture that disseminated all kinds of commentary on all kinds of cultural production at a wholly unprecedented speed, the place of her own voice was considerable. How clearly it was heard, how influential it proved, and how its significance now should be measured, is another matter.

Notes 1. See, among many commentaries, Adam Taylor, “The Global Wave of Populism That Turned 2016 Upside Down,” Washington Post, 19 December 2016. 2. While the UK capital voted decisively (28 out of 33 boroughs, 3 : 2 overall) to remain, 51.9% of a national turnout of 72.2% chose to leave. 3. Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism (London: Sage, 2010). In Couldry’s analysis, both aspects of “voice” are made irrelevant by neoliberal economic ideology. 4. For example, Honoré de Balzac’s novella Massimilla Doni (1837–­39) famously describes a performance of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto at La Fenice in Venice and its patriotic effect on citizens of various parts of the peninsula, and in George Meredith’s novel Vittoria (1867), the eponymous heroine sings a similarly rousing aria at La Scala in Milan. 5. For more on the literary trope of the soirée à l’opéra see Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6. For an overview of this important composite record of bourgeoisification in nineteenth-­century London, see Edward Copeland, “Opera and the Great Reform Act: Silver Fork Fiction, 1822–­1842,” Romanticism on the Net (special issue “Opera and Nineteenth-­ Century Literature”) 34–­35 (2004), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n34-­35 /009440ar.html; Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially chap. 5. 7. Mrs [Catherine] Gore, The Opera: A Novel (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832). In this first edition the three volumes are paginated separately; quotations from the text here and below are identified by volume and page number, and retain the original orthography, correcting obvious typesetting errors but leaving old or idiosyncratic spelling (mainly of foreign words) untouched. 8. Gertrude Mara (1749–­1833, soprano, née Schnelling), Brigida Banti (1757–­1806, soprano, née Giorgi), Caterina Gabrielli (1730–­96, soprano), Giuseppina Grassini (1773–­1850, contralto, famous for having been successively a lover of both Napoleon and

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Wellington), Angelica Catalani (1780–­1849), Violante Camporese (1785–­1839, soprano, King’s Theatre debut 1817, married to a—­or the—­real Prince Giustiniani), Joséphine Fodor-­Maineville (1789–­1870); see Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–­1830 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). 9. Apparently a quotation from Anne Grant’s “1813: A Poem,” itself a reference to Gray’s apostrophe of Queen Elizabeth I in his poem “The Bard: A Pindaric Ode” (1757), which, prior to its eventual publication, was quoted in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755): “Her lion-­port, and awe-­commanding face, / Attemper’d sweet to virgin grace.” 10. For more on the cultural valency of this passage, see for example Erik Simpson, “Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 255–­59. 11. The work performed is Annette and Lubin (1762), a comédie en un acte et en vers, mêlée d’ariettes et de vaudevilles with music by Adolphe Benoît Blaise and libretto by Justine Favart after Marmontel’s conte moral of 1761. According to Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 163, its treatment of class relations make its inclusion an obvious reference to the debating (within Parliament and around the country) of the Reform Act. 12. First performed in Milan in 1814, and at the King’s Theatre in 1822. 13. First performed in Naples in 1816, and at the King’s Theatre in 1822. 14. Quoted from scene 2 of Milton’s Comus (1634). 15. From the finale of act 2. Desdemona asks forgiveness from her father, who in Berio di Salsa’s libretto is called Elmiro rather than Brabantio: “L’error d’un’infelice, / pietoso in me perdona, / se il padre m’abbandona, / da chi sperar pietà?” 16. Venice 1823, King’s Theatre 1824. 17. First performed in Milan in 1827, Il pirata was the first of Bellini’s operas to be heard in London, at the King’s Theatre in 1830; Stephen A. Willier, Vincenzo Bellini: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2002), 108. 18. Charles Maturin’s five-­act verse tragedy Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobrando had been staged in London in 1816, but Romani’s libretto was based on a three-­act mélodrame from 1826, Bertram, ou Le Pirate by Charles Nodier and Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor (the latter under the nom de plume “Raimonde”). It worth noting that the play, which Adrian asserts is well known to his fellow audience members (and presumably at least somewhat familiar to Gore’s readers) ends differently from the opera. At the end of the former, Ernesto’s knights are in control, Imogine goes mad and dies in front of Bertram, who then commits suicide, Othello-­like; the latter concludes with Imogene having already gone mad and the pirates overrunning the scene to help Gualtiero to escape; he jumps to his death from a bridge and she faints into the arms of her ladies in waiting. 19. The reference is to an anecdote widely repeated throughout the nineteenth century: the comic actor Carlini (possibly Carlo Antonio Bertinazzi, 1713–­83, known as Carlino, the last great exponent of the commedia dell’arte in Paris) goes anonymously to see a Parisian doctor about his depression, only to be advised that what he needs to cheer him up is an outing to the theatre to see the hilarious Carlini. 20. The first Reform Act was initially brought forward on 1 March 1831 and passed into law (i.e., no longer debated in Parliament) on 7 June 1832. The main action of the novel therefore takes place between autumn 1831 (when Adrian is summoned to Elzstein) and the summer season of 1832; it was published later that same year.

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21. Le Dieu et la Bayadère, ou La Courtisane amoureuse by Auber, Scribe, and Taglioni was first performed on 13 October 1830. 22. See Jennifer Hall-­Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–­ 1880 (Durham NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007). 23. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (published in twenty parts between January 1847 and July 1848). 24. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 638. 25. Jeremy Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform in the Form of a Catechism, 1817; William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery: In Reply to Mr. Mill’s Celebrated Article on Government, 1825. 26. Aletta J. Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 141. 27. The first petition to Parliament asking for votes for women was presented to the House of Commons by Henry Hunt MP on behalf of a Mary Smith, on 3 August 1832. 28. Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 198.

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Ch a p t er 13  

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Voice Boxes El l en L o ckh a rt

What a snarl—­what an irremediable tangle of sounds, things, and ideas that can be meant by the word voice. For its measure, the curious reader need look no further than the recent colloquy “Why Voice Now?” helmed by Martha Feldman.1 The colloquy begins with Feldman’s history of voice as a critical category, from Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, through Poizat to Abbate—­whence the term gained positive connotations as a means of contesting the long-­standing hegemony of the score. Within musicology, thinking about voice has meant, at least in part, reconferring value on performance and the bodies that produced it. After all, a point on which most have agreed is that nineteenth-­century modernity had the same naughty effects on the human voice that it had on most of its pilgrims: disembodiment and commodification. Following this critical history, Feldman invites musicologists from a variety of methodological backgrounds to answer the question asked by the colloquy’s title: “why” is “voice” finally (supposedly) “now” experiencing a disciplinary moment of arrival? On this point there is no consensus. A sampling of these short essays will suffice to give a sense of the term’s intimidating array of current usages and meanings—­not to mention the differing priorities of those who speak on its behalf: Were we able to strip away speech, poetry, phonetics, morphology—­ all of language, in short—­we might have the pure terrain of the thing we call voice. (Martha Feldman) Voice promises access to the interior experience of ourselves and others, a writing on the body that can represent both the material world and our embodied experience of materiality. (Emily Wilbourne)

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Spectrograms make certain vocal phenomena available for discursive engagement and analysis. (Steven Rings) Those who want to turn or return to the voice face a unique impasse: Derrida. . . . After Derrida the voice can seem quite outmoded and backward, a sad apologist for the metaphysics of presence. (Brian Kane) It also seems shortsighted to lay all the blame for the loss of “the voice” in favor of just “voice” at the door of the so-­called digital revolution, new digital technologies, a pagan information age, or some amplified heathen delight in never-­ending neoliberal freedom. ( James Q. Davies)

This diversity is both welcome and disturbing. Of course, variety is positive for the discipline (the reverse would be far more sinister). Nonetheless, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that voice here accommodates no shared complex meanings, no shared meanings at all beyond the commonplace—­and, what is more, that the present, oft-­proclaimed moment of arrival of voice studies as sub-­and metadiscipline remains mired in the very acquisitive impulses it so often purports to critique.2 Certainly there is much grasping in those endless claims that “pure” voice is elusive yet ever alluring; in the impetus to locate its material dimensions and, simultaneously, to obscure them in dazzling clusters of unselfconsciously materialist analogy; in the way that disciplinary ownership is differentiated by means of gentle variation. “Voice” is his; “the voice” is theirs; “voices” are ours (and lost); φωνή is Kane’s. My aim here is neither to disentangle these disciplinary strands nor to weave them together (a task Feldman heroically undertakes in her introduction). Nor do I mean to assert the rightness of one over the others. What interests me is that in the time and place considered by this volume—­London in the 1820s and 1830s—­the beginnings of this proliferation may be located. This was a historical moment at which talking and writing about the voice suddenly became more complicated; by consequence it bequeathed to our discipline a profitably manifold locution. The Oxford English Dictionary provides a list of first usages. Only from around 1830 could voice stand articleless, as it does within much of the above-­cited criticism: the word as some kind of conceptual aggregate of imagined-­heard voices is a usage first traced within English poetry of the late Regency. “That ominous Immense / Is full of voice, the murmur of a roar,” wrote poet Sophie Dixon in 1829; for playwright George Payne James in 1831, “The earth was full of flowers, and the woods full of voice.”3

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Soon thereafter, around 1835, the larynx—­the anatomical site of speech and song—­came to be known as the “voice box,” a coinage taking advantage both of voice’s newfound terminological flexibility and a nascent fascination for the materially enclosed utterance, about which more below. (Other related coinages from the same time included jury box, post-­office box, and witness box.) Suddenly, too, one could be “in voice” or “out of voice,” much as a haberdasher could be in or out of silk ribbons, or (later) a worker in or out of the office. The proliferation continued in the second half of the 1830s, when the term gained status as a reflexive verb. From 1836, immaterial things or ideas could find expression by “voicing themselves.” From around the same time, the noun voice could be conceived in terms of property lost or found (a person or thing could “find a voice” or simply “find voice”). The 1840s was the first decade in which one could “study voice” (as opposed to training to sing or speak) or attend a “school of voice.” Other usages, now familiar from criticism, followed. A written text might “voice” something from around 1850; a “particular literary tone or style” could be termed a “voice” about ten years after that. In the following pages I will trace the emergence of one of these new ideas—­the voice box—­as a means of thinking about the larger semantic proliferation around “voice” during these years. As is argued elsewhere, this period saw new ways of thinking about the purchase and sale of the singing voice—­the voice’s moment of arrival as commodity—­alongside a shift in its locus, from the mouth to the dark inner recesses of the body.4 The period gave rise to a host of voice-­related disciplines, from laryngology to phonetics, vocal acoustics, and voice synthesis; it saw the emergence of new technologies, real and imagined, for the enclosure and reproduction of the voice. Yet as this history reveals, even in an era of burgeoning markets and capitalist expansion, the processes by which a sounding or musical thing comes to partake of the characteristics of a commodity are extraordinarily complicated; and in such matters our understanding of London’s finest operatic singers, its concert life, and its music-­publishing culture may be enriched by a glance towards neighbouring attempts to grapple with the question of what “voice” actually was. As we shall see, such a taking stock at this pivotal historical moment means directing our attention not merely to operatic voices but also to strange or deficient voices, imaginary ones, the childish and the Biblical, the false alongside the “pure.” Amongst the many voices fantasized about in London during the 1830s, surely one of the oddest was that vocal artefact known as “Joseph’s ‘Hah!’ ” The Joseph in question was none other than the parent of  Jesus of Nazareth;

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according to legend he had exhaled the “Hah!” in question at a moment of extreme physical exertion. (A later publication described Joseph’s vocalization as “the peculiar aspirate sound you have heard many a carpenter make when he has been delivering heavy blows with his hammer.”5) Most notable, though, was the fact that many believed the original “Hah!” to have been preserved in a glass bottle—­that is, crucially, preserved as sound—­for the intervening 1800 years. The sound’s container, of course, remained sealed and untested, since once it had been released one would encounter great difficulty in persuading the “Hah!” to return to its bottle. A “Popish relic,” shrugged the correspondent for the London Medical and Surgical Journal in 1835; a mere “Popish tradition,” dismissed Charles Wheatstone in his 1837 review article “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” a tradition that was supported “powerfully and worthily” (here Wheatstone was being sarcastic) by the bogus hypothesis of vocal containment put forward by the eighteenth-­century theologian Johann Georg Walch.6 Walch had noted that the human speaking voice passed from somewhere within the vocal cavity to the mouth by means of (in Wheatstone’s paraphrase) “a certain space of intermission”: “If both ends were seasonably stopped, whilst the sound was in the midst,” Wheatstone sneered, the sound of the utterance would “continue there until it had some vent.” Walch had imagined a system of voice containers that might one day come to replace the written word in personal correspondence. “When the friend to whom [the container] is sent shall receive and open it, the words shall come out distinctly, and in the same order in which they were spoken”: so, according to Wheatstone, ran Walch’s grand theory. The legend of Joseph’s “Hah!” had probably circulated in some form or other for centuries, and it is difficult to catch anyone in the act of believing that it could still be heard—­at least not in Wheatstone’s London, where a healthy appetite for wonders was fed in tandem with a general attitude of popular-­scientific scepticism. What matters most for our purposes is that the legend of voice containment was told so frequently at this particular historical moment. The sudden attention given to this relic during the 1830s was surely due, at least in part, to the fact that Wheatstone described its legend in his lectures on sound at King’s College London, where he had recently been appointed professor. While the above-­quoted article on “Speaking Machines” in the London Medical and Surgical Journal appeared before Wheatstone’s famous essay, the earlier author admitted that its first instalment was heavily indebted to public lectures given by the scientist.7 Wheatstone was interested in the ancient “Hah!”—­and in Walch’s imagined system of communication by voice containers, along with a

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host of other premodern, mythic “technologies” of voice preservation and reproduction—­because he aimed to apply scientific reasoning and his own considerable skills of invention to the same goals. He did not (of course) pursue Walch’s uncomfortable inspiration of preserving human voices by means of stopped bottles within the trachea. Yet the principle that a working technology of vocal production could be discerned from a study of the relevant human anatomy had gained traction in the preceding decades among reputable scientists. As is well known, “speaking machines” had been the object of serious enquiry since around 1780, when three men—­the Parisian engineer Abbé Mical; the physicist and medical doctor Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, based in Copenhagen; and the Austro-­Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen—­pursued the topic independent of one another. These devices and their makers are too well known to require a detailed exposition here. What matters for our purposes (and what concerned Wheatstone) was the way in which these early speaking machines were at once instruments of science and simulations of human anatomy: often using musical instrument technologies both to produce the sound and as interface between the “voice” and its operator. Mical’s device was surely the most spectacular: he exhibited his two “colossal, brazen heads” (so Wheatstone called them) at the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1783.8 Figure 13.1 represents Mical’s machine, which consisted of an elaborate, large, pillared edifice (something like the cross between a pipe organ and a large crypt) featuring the bearded heads of two old men on its front. The heads were operated by very different mechanisms: one had a rotating keyed cylinder much like a barrel organ; the other was controlled by a fortepiano keyboard. Both were reported to be able to speak entire phrases in French; lest the heads’ notoriously indistinct pronunciation leave auditors in doubt of their messages, the phrases—­encomiums to the king—­were engraved on the front of the edifice. The fact that both machines were built from musical instruments prompted no less an admirer than Antoine de Rivarol to imagine the heads performing (albeit without emotion) lengthy dramas from score: With a little practice and skill, any person may talk with the figures as with the tongue; and he may give to the language of the heads, the rapidity, the stops and ultimately all the characters which a language can possess which is not animated by the passions. Foreigners may take the “Henriade,” or “Telemachus,” and cause them to be recited from one end to the other, by placing the volumes on the vocal instruments, as we place the book of an opera on a pianoforte.9

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Fig. 13.1   Abbé Mical’s “Têtes Parlantes,” 1783. Source: Gallica Digital Collections, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Because Mical destroyed his heads and left no published account of their design, no one in London in the 1830s could say how the machine worked. Wheatstone had heard that the elaborately engraved front concealed a hollow box, in which a principle of anatomical multiplication obtained. Dozens of “artificial glottises” were pinioned over various “stretched mem­ branes,” with each glottis responsible for a single phoneme.10 Mical’s speaking machine was notable for replicating the visible locus of human speech—­the face—­along with its sounds. In his heads, and in the encomiastic nature of their utterances, Mical’s heir was surely the later American inventor Joseph Faber, whose 1845 Euphonia voiced itself

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via a head and truncated torso in Turkish dress, which sang an eerie rendition of “God Save the Queen” (see fig. 13.2). As these devices suggest, the first vocal synthesizers were uneasily suspended between the automaton and the pipe organ. Kratzenstein, Mical’s contemporary, famously used free-­reed pipes to generate the vowels; all that was required was a source of air. He crafted each vowel-­instrument through a process of trial and error, and without (Wheatstone thought) any understanding of the scientific principles of acoustics: none of Kratzenstein’s five oddly shaped pipes imitated the human voice with more than “tolerable accuracy.”11 The first device that might truly be called a “voice box” was von Kempelen’s speaking machine, developed in the years before his death in 1804. Wheatstone admired it enough to replicate, modify, and demonstrate it to public and specialist audiences in 1835.12 The machine was notable both for the efficiency of its design and the simplicity of its appearance. Von Kempelen worked on vocal synthesis for much of his career; his final design involved a single bellows, just one vibrating reed, and one India

Fig. 13.2   Joseph Faber’s Euphonia, ca. 1860. Source: Illustrated London News, 8 August 1846.

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rubber “mouth,” with a complicated system of manual controls to attain most of the vowels and several useful consonants. What was more, with the exception of the bellows the entire mechanism was contained within a simple wooden box. To produce the vocal utterance, a skilled operator inserted his hands through holes in the sides of the box, in order to manipulate the various tubes and levers differentiating between the vowels and consonants. Figure 13.3 shows von Kempelen’s original device. In Wheatstone’s improved version (fig. 13.4), the lever mechanism was given a keyed interface that could be operated by one hand, while the original rubber “lips” were replaced with a larger leather protuberance intended for massage with the other hand.

Fig. 13.3   Von Kempelen’s Speaking Machine, from Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache (Vienna: Degen, 1791), 439.

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F ig. 13.4  Wheatstone’s Speaking Machine, from Richard Paget, Human Speech (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1930), 18.

Von Kempelen had boasted that his final speaking machine could pronounce a number of complicated words (“malady, astronomy, anatomy, pantomime, Constantinopolis”). It was suitably amorous in French (“vous êtes mon ami—­je vous aime de tout mon cœur”), awe-­inspiring in Latin (“Leopoldus Secundus, Romanorum Imperator, Semper Augustus”), and nearly mute in its inventor’s native language (“a long German word . . . costs me much trouble, and it is rare that I perfectly succeed”).13 Despite Wheatstone’s subsequent improvements to the design, his machine was purported to pronounce only “mama,” “papa,” and “summer,” and these indistinctly: this more modest repertoire was seemingly confirmed by the reproduction of von Kempelen’s device in Saarland. While von Kempelen practised on his device for decades, even he admitted that he had to rely on the tendency of the hearer to “correct” slightly inaccurate consonants (thus he could substitute “p” for “d,” “g,” “t,” and “k,” and so on).14 For these reasons of vocabulary, and also because their pitch ranges were relatively high, the speech of these boxes was most often compared not to men’s or women’s voices but to those of small children.

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Although Wheatstone’s speaking machine greatly resembled von Kempelen’s in its design, there was a significant difference that has gone largely unremarked in recent scholarship. Multiple accounts attest that, for von Kempelen, the speaking box was intended as the working interior of what would ultimately be a fully humanlike automaton. He meant to give his speaking machine the appearance of a six-­year-­old boy, once he was satisfied that the device worked: in part because he was (apparently) so often encouraged to do so, and in part to justify its many slight mispronunciations. One famous and often translated account suggested that von Kem­ pelen toured with his speaking machine as box rather than as child because it was easier to transport in that form; the human parts could be easily assembled once he had arrived in Paris. As plans for the full automaton were endlessly deferred, the inventor seemed almost embarrassed by the plain shape of his speaking machine, covering it with a curtain during demonstrations.15 Public fascination with the device and other “speaking machines” continued largely unabated in London through the 1820s, when rumours even began to circulate that von Kempelen had gone so far as to build a “speaking statue” to house the device (this seems unlikely).16 Wheatstone’s demonstration of his improved replica, in Dublin in 1835, was enthusiastically written up in more than a dozen London journals, the ample press coverage doubtless owing in part to the continued renown of its prototype.17 For Wheatstone, though, there was no question of building an automaton, or concealing the box behind a conjurer’s cloak; the speaking device was complete—­indeed, ideal—­in box form. In the mid-­1830s, by the time he exhibited his new and improved speaking machine (thirty years after von Kempelen’s death), the seat of the voice was increasingly understood to be located in the larynx as opposed to the mouth and lips (this is James Davies’s argument, alluded to above). What is more, there had emerged a broader tradition of referring to the larynx as a “cartilaginous box,” “voice box,” “laryngeal box,” “vocal box,” or simply a “box.”18 This coinage acknowledged the shape of the organ in question: an interior cavern consisting of the vocal chords and the air passage to the lungs, newly visible thanks to Benjamin Guy Babington’s invention of the first laryngoscope (he called it a “glottiscope”), exhibited at London’s Hunterian Society in 1829.19 What embarrassed the later engineers was not the container-­like appearance of their artificial voices, but rather the very notion that lips, tongue, and teeth should be involved. The shape of these inelegant and highly visible organs was due to what Robert Willis (with a proto-­ Victorian recourse to euphemism) called “functions far different and more

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important to the animal economy,” namely, masticating and swallowing food.20 Willis, who was with Wheatstone perhaps the most important theorist of the voice in the first half of the nineteenth century, went so far as to announce his intention of studying vocal production and reproduction “neglecting entirely the organs of speech.”21 The voice, he believed, was properly understood “as a branch of acoustics” rather than “in light of the physiological functions of the human body.”22 Many of Willis’s experiments were demonstrated by means of a simple, adjustable wooden frame, held together by strings.23 While these claims to ignore the shapes of the vocal organs altogether were exaggerated—­after all, as Hankins and Silverman have noted, what was his free-­reed organ pipe of variable length if not a simple model of the larynx?—­Willis’s work is widely understood to mark a shift towards a new, acoustic understanding of speech.24 Wheatstone, who reviewed Willis’s paper “On the Vowel Sounds, and on Reed Organ Pipes” alongside von Kempelen’s and Kratzenstein’s publications in his 1835 essay (“Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.”), counted himself as Willis’s disciple, adopting similar tenets and improving Willis’s account of the differing vowel sounds based on the acoustic phenomenon that Wheatstone called “multiple resonance.” In sum, the burgeoning science of acoustics allowed Willis and Wheatstone to dismiss the work of their predecessors as misled by their focus on anatomy. Willis again: Kempelen’s mistake, like that of every other writer on this subject, appears to lie in the tacit assumption, that every illustration is to be sought for in the form and action of the organs of speech themselves, which, however paradoxical the assertion may appear, can never, I contend, lead to any accurate knowledge of the subject.25

Acoustics was first and foremost the study of wave motion; matter was secondary, being merely its means of containment and transmission. From here onward, voices could exist without bodies, real or made, whole or partial. Wheatstone’s vision was, in the end, closer to Walch’s than he would have liked to admit, and his machine-­produced “mama” and “papa” closer to Joseph’s “Hah!”: the goal was not a single, perfect automaton, but rather a communication system of voice boxes operated by skilled human hands.26 This brief history of speaking machines would seem, then, to progress in parallel with the etymological history of “voice” noted earlier. In the years around and after 1830, both would see a slackening of the bonds

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between vocal utterance and human anatomy—­a move in which the word “voice” gained a degree of abstraction, scientific and critical, both in instrumental terms and in language. What is more, these “voice boxes” partake of a morphological history that is more commonly recounted in relation to the evolution of the fortepiano. Relevant here is Roger Moseley’s notion of the modern Steinway as black box, the concealed mechanism within attesting both to bourgeois leisure and a proto-­Fordist industrial ideology.27 It would be a simple matter, from here, to speculate about the commodification of voice, with London in the 1830s as a—­perhaps the—­deci­ sive moment. The entry of the voice into a burgeoning market of com­­ modities can be understood as in many senses overdetermined by the physical nature of the larynx. Its flexible structure or “frame”—­made of cartilage, the body’s own translucent and rubbery elastic—­was a rectangular prism that could be “elongated, shortened, widened, or narrowed” depending on externally determined needs.28 Thus understood, the voice “box” conferred a timely model of ownership on the sounds it contained; after all, boxes had long been understood not merely as four-­sided vessels but as containers of merchandise, personal property, and money.29 The cartilaginous “box” newly discovered within was a felicitous mirror of the boxes proliferating without, in merchandise-­mad London: from snuff boxes, to bazaar displays, to the vast, cavernous, boxlike edifices newly built to accommodate the flow of capital ( John Soane’s Bank of England) and wares (the West India and St Katherine’s Docks) on a colossal scale.30 What is more, these discourses granted the voice a degree of fungibility: although each person’s flesh was unique, caverns and vibrations behaved the same way no matter who produced them. Not by coincidence did there subsequently emerge a language of describing the voice by relating its “vibrations” to other fungible commodities within London’s burgeoning markets: the more pleasing these vibrations, the more valuable the substance. Thus, for instance, Paul Scudo described Henriette Sontag’s performances in terms of the luxurious wares in a jeweller’s case: “In the magnificent casket of vocal gems which Sontag displayed every night before her admirers, we especially remarked upon the brilliancy of her trills, which sparkled like rubies on a velvet ground.”31 Sontag was also praised for the “metallic vibration of her voice” in her famous chromatic scales: a frequent analogy that implies a pun on “chromatic,” relating both to the pitch gamut and to the newly discovered elemental metal, chrome.32 In a similar vein, although less flattering, one of Malibran’s detractors accused her of trafficking in “tinsel” rather than “sterling.”33 The analogy to precious metals and stones soon migrated from vocal accounts

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into the realm of musical genre. This was the era of that English musical embarrassment, the “gem,” a designation initially referring—­and this is significant—­to instrumental arrangements (transubstantiations) of vocal performances or other songs-­without-­words: Moscheles’ Gems à la Malibran appeared in 1829, with Gems à la Pasta and Gems à la Paganini hard on its heels. When these were published abroad, the designation was changed, usually to Fantasia; at least at this early date, the notion of a musical “gem” seemingly remained incomprehensible outside London. As Davies has suggested, the interest in free-­reed speaking machines during the 1830s may have encouraged the flourishing of a style of “reedy” operatic singing, amongst such operatic performers as Henriette Méric-­ Lalande and Giovanni Battista Rubini.34 Yet the rise of the “voice box” as both a category and an object also fed a fascination for a different kind of singing altogether: what we now call throat singing or overtone singing. Wheatstone often brought to his demonstrations on “speaking machines” one Mr Richmond, a performer entirely unknown to modern scholarship who was, for a time, one of the most famous vocalists in London. His special talent—­for which he was known as the “dual vocalist”—­was for singing two melodies at once. Advertisements in the Illustrated London News and the Athenaeum for a concert given by Richmond at Weippert’s Concert da Camera promised “the dual vocalist, who possesses the extraordinary gift of Singing Duets (the Bass and Treble simultaneously) without the aid of any other person or instrument whatsoever.” A correspondent for Punch wrote, incredulously, on hearing the performer: We have heard of the duality of mind, but a duality of voice is something quite new; and this novelty has at length presented itself in the person of a Mr. Richmond, who can of course sing duets with himself, and while executing a bass he can double his voice by adding a treble.35

Even the Musical World eventually took note, advertising this “Extraordinary Vocal Phenomenon” in between accounts of Ernesta Grisi and Jenny Lind.36 Richmond was first brought to the attention of Londoners in Wheatstone’s lectures, as well as in “On Reed Organ-­Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.” He sang these “duets” in London until at least the late 1840s, both in musical venues and in multiple forums for popular and medical science. It has proved impossible to ascertain who Richmond was—­even his first name is absent from these accounts—­and whether he gained his vocal abilities during travel to a place where overtone singing was practised, or from hours of solitary experimentation.

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What matters for our purposes is that, in the time and place under consideration in our present forum, Richmond’s capacity for singing duets with himself  became a novel means of thinking about what “voice” actually was. Indeed, after Wheatstone—­whose work on acoustics was invariably invoked in accounts of Richmond’s performances—­had ceased to work and lecture on “speaking machines,” Richmond instead lent his talents as a demonstrator to Dr Robert Vesalius Pettigrew, one of London’s foremost medical experts on vocal matters. (Pettigrew also borrowed Wheatstone’s speaking machine.) Pettigrew’s lectures on “the voice,” which took place in such forums as the School of Medicine adjoining St George’s Hospital, and the Royal Institution, were written up at length in the Musical World and the Athenaeum. Richmond’s “dual utterance” was useful to theorists of voice for making audible the divided nature of vocal production as it was then understood, both acoustically and anatomically. The lower pitch could be seen to emanate from the larynx—­as evident from the visible movements of Richmond’s thyroid cartilage (his Adam’s apple) simultaneous to changes in bass pitch—­while the “treble” consisted of overtones resonating in, and manipulated by, the mouth and nasal cavities. In acoustic terms, Richmond’s split singing voice lent proof to Wheatstone’s acoustic account of vocal production, which held that all speech involved both simple resonance and a manipulation of multiple upper partials (the “multiple resonance” phenomenon noted above). In practical terms, the descriptions of Richmond’s singing serve as evidence that the anatomical, the acoustic, the musical, the scientific-­instrumental, and the analogic remained intertwined in theoretical accounts of voice throughout the 1830s and 1840s: The effects produced are the following: two series of sounds are heard; one exactly resembling the notes of a musical snuffbox, the other a succession of bass sounds; or a drone, which necessarily goes along with the higher notes. Of the two series of notes, the first, or those which resemble the tones of a musical snuffbox, are not produced in the larynx; the second or the bass notes, on the contrary, are laryngeal.37 After a very careful examination, assisted by Dr. Macdonald, Prof. Bow­ man, and M. Garsin, the lecturer had arrived at the conclusion that the two tones were thus accomplished: the voice was of course simple and produced in the larynx; the current of vibrations was split, as proved by the flame of a candle,—­the bass notes being modified in the upper part of the pharynx and nasal passages, the treble being

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produced by the tongue forming with the arched roof of the palate a tube, open by a very small aperture in front, the tube being altered in length by the nicest adjustment of its muscles, these latter acting more perfectly from the fixature to the os hyoides and the roof of the mouth.38 [The treble was produced by] the vibration of air over the thin and expanded edges of the tongue, the vibrations being manipulated by the most adroit management of the muscles of that organ. The treble tones cannot be produced unless the tongue be fixed at its base to the hyoid bone, and by its apex to the root of the palate.39

As these excerpts attest, just as Richmond performed in scientific venues as well as musical ones, diverse modes of explanation were similarly entangled, not to mention equally specialized, in musical and scientific publications alike. More broadly, though, this oddest of duets—­emanating from a single body, the “current of vibrations . . . split,” and requiring “no instrument whatsoever”—­sheds curious light on the notion of the voice as commodity during these years. In this sense, what was on display, both from Richmond’s vocal cavity and from Wheatstone’s voice box, was the power of new knowledge to call into question even the most self-­evident particulars of human life and material existence. An inanimate material thing could have a voice. A person could have two. A man could sing treble and bass at once. Both would seem to reflect the tendencies towards proliferation and dispersal noted throughout this essay, a collective reluctance to remain bound by hoary assumptions about vocal production. Back, then, to “voice studies,” and to my opening gambit: that the history recounted here—­in which, by gaining a box, voice became an abstraction, a conceptual aggregate—­may yield insights into the myriad ways in which it is currently implicated in the production of musicological knowledge. “Is there an object for which the nineteenth century did not invent a case or a holder?” asked Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. He went on to list the proliferation of cases for numerous fashionable commodities, including “watches, slippers, egg-­cups, thermometers, playing cards,” as well as “envelopes, housings, loose covers, [and] dust sheets.” The art historian T. J. Clark, recalling this passage in the context of Adolph Menzel’s meticulous threefold depiction of a binocular carrying case (1871), was moved to speculate more broadly on the bourgeois enthusiasm for boxes and containers:

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It is as if an object did not properly exist for this culture until it sat tight in its own interior; and one is hard put to say . . . whether this was because the object was felt to need protection from the general whirl of exchange (or bullets), or whether it was thought to be so wonderful in its own right that a separate small world should be provided for it, like a shell or calyx.40

For modern critics of a post-­Adornian bent (that is, for most of us), the presence of a bespoke box is enough to make any thing contained within it profoundly suspect; the thing-­in-­a-­box was already beholden to the market forces that had rendered—­in Michael Fried’s terms—­“ lived experience” itself a “deeply compromised notion.” Fried links Menzel’s binocular carrying case to Benjamin’s notions of the trace and of the domestic interior, which itself was the “box of the private individual.”41 Things in boxes invite a particular kind of trace reading, an enterprise in which details are clues disclosing important mysteries (Benjamin famously noted Edgar Allan Poe’s fascination with bourgeois domestic interiors); the aim is not merely to open the box but also to examine it and its contents for secrets about the owner. This lineage brings to mind Emily Wilbourne’s claim about the revelatory promise of voice studies, quoted at the beginning of this essay: “Voice promises access to the interior expe­ rience of ourselves and others”; and that of Steven Rings, equipped with the latest digital detectors of vocal mettle: “Spectrograms make certain vocal phenomena available for discursive engagement and analysis.” It may also help to explain the subterranean current of uneasiness within “voice studies,” evident in the frequent muted acknowledgements—­ such as by James Davies and Brian Kane in “Why Voice Now?”—­that the object they press into service could be every bit as compromised as the score. What I find most worthy of reflection, though, is that much of our current fascination with “voice” seems to stem from its ability to exhort what Paul Ricoeur would call a hermeneutics of faith. Scepticism is reserved for the verbal utterance. As “pure terrain” of sound (in Martha Feldman’s terms, stripped of “speech, poetry, phonetics, morphology—­all of language, in short”)—­and, most frequently, irrecoverable sound—­the voice seems to bestow limitless confidences, giving rise to endless associations and virtuosic interpretative fantasias: all true, or at least noncontestable; all revelatory about the human. On this point, finally, scholars in the present day diverge from the historical subjects considered here. “Voice” in London during the period considered in this volume was frequently false, permanently fugitive,

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poetically charged, not necessarily sounding, not necessarily human; it was imagined as easily separable from the body and from anatomy, but never from utterance or the materials of language. If there was an equation to be made between voice and interiority, it was not a straightforward one of equivalence wherein the voice reveals the self. Why should not the acquisitive-­minded have two voices at once, like Mr Richmond; or indeed more? (Punch maintained a lengthy fascination with the dual vocalist, noting that his “secret would be a valuable one to a statesman like Sir Robert Peel, whose transitions, though sometimes very startling and sudden, are, after all, mere changes.  .  .  . It is true he has the benefit of the two voices in their separate form; but to profit by them both at once is an accomplishment he must learn from the dual vocalist.”42) Likewise, Londoners asked, why should not our things talk, “finding voice” through us and us through them? If the affordances of such an aggregate “voice,” whose emergence in analogy and subsequent criticism was noted at the beginning of this essay, have since aged better than the musical “gems” and “jewels” of identical vintage, then it is at least worth re­­ membering their shared origin in 1830s London.

Notes 1. Martha Feldman, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, James Q. Davies, “Why Voice Now?” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 (Fall 2015): 653–­85. 2. Feldman cites new and ongoing “voice projects” at UC–­Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, and the University of Chicago. On the arrival of “voice studies,” see Cecilia Livingston’s review-­article of books by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Naomi Novak in Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 3 (2017): 373–­83. 3. This and the two subsequent paragraphs draw on the entries for “voice, n.,” and “voice, v.”: Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com, accessed 20 August 2016. 4. James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 123–­43. 5. Cassell’s Book of Sports and Pastimes (London: Cassell, 1882), 419. 6. “Speaking Machines,” London Medical and Surgical Journal 27 June, 4 July, 18 July, and 25 July 1835. The first instalment was also published in the Register and Library of Medical and Chirurgical Science. Charles Wheatstone, “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” first published in the London and Westminster Review (1837); reprinted in The Scientific Papers of Sir Charles Wheatstone (London: Taylor and Francis, 1879), 348–­67. Page numbers refer to the later edition. 7. “Speaking Machines,” 25 July 1835. 8. On these, see Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-­Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 140–­43. 9. Quoted in Wheatstone, “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” 364–­65; translation amended.

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10. Wheatstone, “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” 366. 11. Wheatstone, “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” 352. 12. On Wheatstone’s speaking machine, see the essays by Myles W. Jackson and James Q. Davies in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–­1851, ed. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 101–­24, and 145–­74. 13. Quoted in Wheatstone, “Reed Organ Pipes, Speaking Machines, Etc.,” 364. 14. See the entry for “Automaton” in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, ed. David Brewster (Edinburgh: Blackwood and London: Richardson, 1830). In addition to the accounts cited above and below, Kempelen’s device was further brought to the attention of Londoners by Brewster in his Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: Murray, 1834), 179–­211. 15. “This speaker has not yet received the form of a human being; it is simply a square box with certain apertures, though which the Inventor places his hands, in order to put in motion several mutations, springs and valves, according to the words which the machine has to articulate. Not to augment the size of his baggage, during his journey, the Inventor has thought it best to defer, until his arrival at Paris, the exterior dress of this machine. He intends to give it the appearance of a child of five or six years old, because it has a voice analogous to that age; it is likewise more appropriate to the actual state of this machine, which is far from being brought to perfection. If it should happen to pronounce some words inaccurately, it will, from having the appearance of a child, the more easily obtain that indulgence which it yet requires.” Letters of Mr Charles Gott­ lieb de Windlisch on the Automaton Chess-­Player of Mr. de Kempelen, A Free Translation from the German . . . Published by Chretien de Mechel, English trans. M.S.N. (London: Brown, 1819), 29–­30. 16. “Speaking Statue,” in Sholto and Reuben Percy, The Percy Anecdotes: Original and Select, vol. 9: Instinct & Ingenuity (London: Cumberland, 1826). 17. These include the Philosophical Magazine; The Analyst: A Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, Natural History and the Fine Arts (London: Simkins, Marshall, 1836); the Records of General Science (London: Taylor, 1835); Railway Magazine, and Annals of Science (1836); the London Surgical and Medical Journal; and the various house organs of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 18. See, e.g., A. [Anthelme] Richerand, Elements of Physiology, trans. G. J. M. de Lys (London, 1803 and onwards); James Rennie, The Art of Improving the Voice and Ear; And of Improving their Musical Powers (London: Septimus Prowett, 1825), 9; Elmer L. Kenyon, “Larynx, Its Relationship to Certain Disorders of the Voice,” Transactions of the Section on Laryngology, Otology and Rhinology (Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1822), 99. 19. Morell Mackenzie, The Use of the Laryngoscope in Diseases of the Throat (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1865). An account of the device as Babington exhibited it at the Hunterian Society appeared in the London Medical Gazette, 28 March 1829, 555–­56. 20. Robert Willis, “On the Mechanism of the Larynx,” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 4 (1833): 323. 21. Robert Willis, “On the Vowel Sounds, and on Reed Organ-­Pipes,” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 3 (1830): 233. 22. Willis, “On the Vowel Sounds,” 231. 23. Benjamin Pierce, An Elementary Treatise on Sound: Being the Second Volume of a Course of Natural Philosophy, Designed for the Use of High Schools and Colleges (Boston: J. Monroe, 1836), 206.

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24. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 200–­205. Hankins and Silverman’s chapter “Vox Mechanica” (178–­220) provides an excellent overview of two centuries of voice-­reproduction technology. 25. Willis, “On the Vowel Sounds,” 233. 26. Davies, “Instruments of Empire,” 158–­59. 27. Roger Moseley, “Digital Analogies: The Keyboard as Field of Musical Play,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 (Spring 2015), 151–­228. 28. The turn of phrase is from a lecture on the larynx given at the Royal Institution by Dr Vessalius Pettigrew in 1849, about which more below. 29. See “box, n., 2” in Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com, accessed 3 August 2016. 30. Stella Margetson, “The Mercantile City,” in Stella Margetson, Regency London (London: Cassell, 1971), 12–­28; Andrew Saint, “The Building Art of the First Industrial Metropolis,” London—­World City: 1800–­1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 51–­76. 31. Quoted in Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 85. See also the section entitled “Heavy Metal” in Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 107–­9. 32. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 78. 33. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, 74. 34. Davies, “Instruments of Empire,” 159. 35. “Voici,” Punch, or The London Charivari 16 (1849): 101. 36. Musical World, 9 February 1850, 90. 37. Medical Quarterly Review 2 (1834): 483. 38. Athenaeum, 26 May 1849. 39. Musical World, 9 February 1850, 90. 40. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2–­3. 41. Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-­Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 234–­35. 42. Punch, or The London Charivari 13 (1847): 204.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the European Research Council (ERC). It started life in September 2016 as part of the ERC “Music in London 1800–­1851” project (funded as part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme: FP7/2007–­2013, ERC grant 323404) in a workshop at King’s College London. On that occasion, drafts of all the chapters (which had been precirculated) were discussed at length by the contributors, that conversation being enriched by the involvement of a further group of willing and expert interlocutors, all of whom dedicated themselves to the task in hand. Particular thanks, then, to the interlocutors: James Davies, Emma Dillon, Katherine Hambridge, Jonathan Hicks, David Kennerley, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, Diane Tisdall, Laura Tunbridge, Ben Walton, Holly Watkins, Gavin Williams, Flora Willson, and Ingeborg Zechner. The generosity of their comments is testimony to the spirit of collaboration that has marked the enterprise from the start. And thanks also, of course, to our contributors: all were courteous; most were prompt; all responded constructively to the plethora of specialized comment that descended on them. Lastly we should thank Marta Tonegutti and her team at University of Chicago Press. Marta was a staunch supporter of the project even before the first workshop and has been a constant source of encouragement as we made our way to the finishing line. Roger Parker Susan Rutherford

Contributors

oskar cox jensen is Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of History, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Napoleon and British Song, 1797–­1822 (Palgrave, 2015), resulting from his doctorate in history at Christ Church, Oxford. His second monograph, The London Ballad-­Singer (forthcoming), and an edited collection, Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), stem from research on the European Research Council (ERC)–­funded project “Music in London, 1800–­1851” in the Music Department of King’s College London. Oskar is the author of numerous articles and book chapters; he is currently working on a third monograph and on a second edited collection, Music and Politics, ca. 1780–­1850. m e l ina e sse is associate professor of musicology at Eastman School of Music. She is a scholar of opera in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose work explores the connections between gender, materiality, and performance. She has published widely—­on voice and technological mediation, on opera and film, and on gender and the emotive body. Her book  Saffo’s Song: Improvising Nineteenth-­Century Italian Opera  (forth­ coming from  University of Chicago  Press)  probes the intertwining histo­ ries of musical texts and improvisatory performance. She  shows how dis­ courses of spontaneity—­specifically those surrounding the improvvisatrice, or female poetic improviser—­were paradoxically used to carve out a new authority for opera composers just as improvisation itself was falling into decline. sarah fuchs is assistant professor of music history and Cultures at Syracuse University. Grounded in archival research, her scholarship on nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century musical culture is broadly in­terdisciplinary, incorporating perspectives from cultural history and

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anthropology, as well as the philosophy of technology. Her current book project focuses on how audiences, voice teachers, and opera singers used technology to engage with French operatic culture between 1870 and 1914; other ongoing work includes a study of early nineteenth-­century piano-­ vocal scores featuring singers’ embellishments (from which her essay in this volume is drawn) and an examination of French and American women performers who contributed to humanitarian efforts during World War I. ja m e s gra nde is a lecturer in eighteenth-­century literature and culture at King’s College London. He was previously a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project “Music in London, 1800–­1851.” He is the author of William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–­1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and is currently writ­ ing a monograph on music, religious dissent, and literary culture. sarah hibber d is Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on opera and wider musical, theat­ rical, and visual cultures in Paris and London during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her publications include French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009); two edited volumes of essays; a guest-­edited issue of 19th-­Century Music dedicated to music and science (2015); articles in Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and 19th-­Century Music; and chapters in a variety of edited volumes. She was coeditor of Music & Letters (2009–­17) and is incoming coeditor of Cambridge Opera Journal. e l l e n lock ha rt is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Toronto, following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. Her book, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–­1830, was published by the University of California Press in 2017, and she has coedited, with James Davies, a volume on the history of music and science in London in the period 1789–­1851. Her critical edition of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West had its debut at La Scala in 2016 under the direction of Riccardo Chailly. cormac ne wa r k is head of research at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. He works mainly on nineteenth-­century French and Italian opera and literature. He has published articles in journals including 19th-­Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Journal of the Royal Musical Association; essays in various collected volumes; and a monograph, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust, with Cambridge University

C o n t r i b u t o r s  285

Press. He leads a Leverhulme Trust International Research Network project on film adaptations of  Le Fantôme de l’Opéra  and is coediting (with William Weber) the Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). roge r par ker is professor of music at King’s College London, having previously taught at Cornell, Oxford, and Cambridge. He is general editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the Donizetti critical edition, published by Ricordi. His most recent books are Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (University of California Press, 2006), and A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (Penguin [UK] and Norton [US], 2012), written jointly with Carolyn Abbate. He is now working on a book about music in London in the 1830s and was from 2013 to 2018 director of the ERC-­funded project “Music in London, 1800–­1851.” su san ru t her f or d is professor of music at the University of Manchester. Her publications include The New Woman and Her Sisters: Femi­ nism and Theatre, 1850–­1914 (coeditor, University of Michigan Press, 1992), The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–­1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Verdi, Opera, Women (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as numerous essays on voice, performance, and nineteenth-­century Italian opera. Her current project (funded by a three-­year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2016–­19) is entitled A History of Voices: Singing in Britain 1690 to the Present. mary ann sm a rt is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She contributed the articles on Bellini and Donizetti to the revised Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and prepared the critical edition of Donizetti’s last op­ era,  Dom Sébastien, for Ricordi.  She is the author of  Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-­Century Opera (University of California Press, 2004) and of Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy, 1815–­ 1848 (University of California Press, 2018). mat hil die t hom wium is a senior lecturer in musicology and music theory in the Odeion School of  Music at the University of  the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Since completing her doctorate on the music of South African composer Arnold van Wyk (1916–­83) in 2013, she has broadened her research interests to include the musical practices and experiences of female opera singers in mid-­nineteenth-­century London. She has published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and in several

286  C o n t r i b u t o r s

South African journals including South African Music Studies (SAMUS).  Thom Wium regularly performs as a mezzo-­soprano. wie bke t hor m ä hlen is the Area Leader in History at the Royal College of Music in London. Recently awarded a three-­year collaborative research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain), she explores the interaction of the domestic with the public in musical arrangements, in devotional music, and in the relationship between music as domestic social activity and the development of amateur choral societies in Britain. She is coeditor of the Routledge  Companion to Music, Mind and Wellbeing: Historical and Scientific Perspectives (forthcoming); her current book project exposes layers of meaning behind different forms of “musical engagements” in early nineteenth-­century London. cl au dio v ellu t ini is assistant professor of musicology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research interests focus on the cultural and reception history of Italian opera, performance and staging practices, pedagogy, and historiography. His book project examines the role of opera within broader cultural exchanges between Austria and the Italian States in the first half of the nineteenth century. He has published in 19th-­Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Eighteenth-­Century Music, Nineteenth-­Century Music Review, and Notes. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral resident scholar and visiting assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. kim be r ly whit e  is an archivist at the Marvin Duchow Music Li­ brary  at McGill University.  Her research focuses on performers and the economics of the theatre industry in nineteenth-­century Paris and interrogates the cultural discourse surrounding singers in various media from the musical press to popular song. She has published in, or has forthcoming essays in, Women & Music, Revue de Musicologie, Cambridge Opera Journal, Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon and Histoire de l’opéra français (Fayard). Her book, Female Singers on the French Stage, 1830–­1848, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Index

Abell, John, 7 Académie royale de musique (Opéra), 193, 238, 254 Ackermann, Rudolphe, 5 Adelphi Chapel, 169 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 276 Albion Tavern, 162 Alboni, Marietta, 44 Allingham, William, 23–­27 Amateur Concerts, 165 Amateur Music Festival, 161 Ancient Concerts, 162, 163–­64, 167 Argyll Rooms, 181, 221–­22 Athenaeum, 126–­27, 273, 274 Attwood, Thomas, 163 Austen, Jane, 18 Ayrton, Fanny, 7 Ayrton, William, 163, 166 Babington, Benjamin Guy, 270 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 140 Bacon, Richard Mackenzie, 78, 97–­98, 107, 167 Balfe, Michael William, 7, 105, 203, 217; The Bohemian Girl, 12 ballad singers, 15–­31 Balzac, Honoré de, 104, 237 Banti, Brigida, 243 Barnett, John, 7, 131, 163 Barrett, W.J., 20 Barthes, Roland, 261 Barton, Laura, 21 Bayley, Frederick William Naylor, 206

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 44, 140, 162, 163, 169 Begnis, Giuseppe de, 62 Bellini, Vincenzo, 7, 44, 217; Il pirata, 249–­51; I puritani, 93–­94, 96, 99–­103, 109, 125; Norma, 127, 130, 131, 245 Benjamin, Walter; The Arcades Project, 275 Bennett, W. S., 131 Bentham, Jeremy, 143, 255 Bériot, Charles Auguste de, 121, 204 Bernard, William Bayle, 204 Bevan, Mr, 161 Bezer, John James, 24–­26 Billington, Elizabeth, 4, 53, 54 Birchall and Company (publisher), 74 Birmingham Choral Society, 168 Bishop, Henry, 131, 162; “Home! Sweet Home!,” 15, 17, 19 Bishop, John, 183 Blake, William, 34, 141 Bochsa, Nicolas, 62 Boosey, T., and Company (publisher), 81 Bouffé, Hugues, 188 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19, 171 Bracegirdle, Anne, 73 Bragg, Billy, 21 Braham, John, 53, 68, 137, 162, 169, 204 Brewer, T., 161 Brillat-­Savarin, Jean-­Anthelme, 104 Britannia Fields, 151, 152 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 130 Buckstone, J. B., 195 Bunn, Alfred, 132

288 i n d e x

Burgh, Allatson, 53–­54, 64 Burghersh, Lord ( John Fane), 61–­62, 81–­85, 162 Burke, Joseph, 203 By, William, 209 Byron, Anne Isabelle Noel (Lady), 34 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 34, 144, 221, 239 Caledonian Chapel, 142–­43 Callcott, John Wall, 163, 169 Calvinist Methodism, 168–­69 Campbell, John Macleod, 150 Camporese, Violante, 167, 243 Canning, George, 149 Canterbury Theatre, 12 Captain Swing riots, 150 Caravita (translator), 58–­59 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 36, 43, 45, 143, 151 Carlyle, Thomas, 34, 143, 151 Catalani, Angelica, 24, 53, 129, 137, 169, 243 Cavallini, Ernesto, 44 Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count of, 38 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 231 Chalmers, Thomas, 143, 144, 149 Chapel Royal, 168 Chappell and Company (publisher), 74–­77, 79–­80 Charles II, 180 Chartism, 8, 11, 25, 28, 212–­14 Chedel, Antoine Catherine, 196 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, 129, 130 Cimarosa, Domenico, 110 Cinti-­Damoreau, Laure, 193 City of London Tavern, 164 Clay, Henry, 206 Cloup, Jean, 181, 193 Coates, Reynell, 206 Cobbett, William, 115 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 145–­50 Collins, Wilkie, 46 Colon, Jenny, 10, 179–­200 Comédie-­Française, 186, 189 Concert Room (Coventry Street), 162 Congress of  Vienna, 52, 68 Connoisseur, 207 Cook, Eliza, 209, 212

Cook, T. P. (Thomas Potter), 106–­7 Cooper, Henry St John, 202 Corelli, Arcangelo, 162 Corporation Act, 141 Costa, Michael, 161 Covent Garden Theatre, 5, 15, 22, 126, 132 Cowen, Frederic Hymen, 215 Cramer, J. B., Addison, and Beale (publisher), 85 Crivelli, Domenico, 57, 62 Curioni, Alberico, 167 Daily News, 96 Dante Alighieri, 33–­35 Delaporte (French teacher), 185–­86 Demar, Master, 22 De Quincey, Thomas, 1 Derrida, Jacques, 261 Dibdin, Charles, 205 Dibdin, Charles, the Younger, 22 Dickens, Charles, 18, 104–­5, 205, 208 Dixon, Sophie, 262 Doche, Alexandre Pierre Joseph, 194 Donizetti, Gaetano, 7, 33, 44, 105, 163; Marino Faliero, 96, 109–­12 Dragonetti, Domenico, 100 Dramatic Magazine, 110 Drury Lane Theatre, 5, 15, 132, 194, 195 Dylan, Bob, 19 Edinburgh Review, 152 Egan, Pierce, Life in London, 19–­20 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 130 Eliza Cook’s Journal, 212 Elliston, Robert William, 203 English Opera House (Lyceum Theatre), 179, 181–­82, 205 Essex Street Unitarian Chapel, 146 Euterpeiad, 16–­17, 19 Evangelical Church, 170–­71 Examiner, 80, 187 Exeter Hall, 161, 165, 169, 171, 212 Faber, Joseph, 266–­67 Fielding, Henry, 181 Figaro, Le, 192 Fischer-­Dieskau, Dietrich, 19 Fletcher, Andrew, 210

Index  289

Florimo, Francesco, 114 Florval, Madame (singer), 191 Fodor-­Maineville, Joséphine, 243 Foote, Miss (singer), 15 Foote, Samuel, 205–­6 Forgeot, Eliza, 182 Forrest, Edwin, 203 Foscolo, Ugo, 46, 52 Franz I, Emperor, 54–­55 Fraser’s Magazine, 151 Freemason’s Tavern, 163 Gabrielli, Caterina, 243 Gabussi, Vincenzo, 62 Gaiety Theatre, 182 Gall, Franz Joseph, 105 Gallenga, Antonio (alias Luigi Mariotti), 39–­42 Galli, Filippo, 44, 111 Garcìa, Manuel II, 12 Gardiner, William, 21, 23–­24 Garlington, Aubrey, 83 Garrick Club, 121 Gate Street Chapel, 160–­61, 164–­65, 168, 171 Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera, 181 George IV, 104, 180 German Lutheran Church, 169 Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, 55 Gilbart, James William, 212 Gillman, James, 145 Gillray, James, 24, 115 Giubilei (singer), 105 Gladstone, William, 34 Glenny, George, 212 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 37, 55 Godefroid, Félix, 44 Godwin, William, 143 Goldsmith, Oliver, 20–­21 Gore, Catherine, The Opera, 11, 236–­59 Grand Tour, 186–­87 Gratuitous School, 33–­50 Graun, Carl Heinrich, 163 Gray, Thomas, 34 Grisi, Ernesta, 273 Grisi, Giulia, 9, 37, 43, 44, 93–­94, 96, 99 Grua, Ricordi and Company (publisher), 81–­84

Hahn, Reynaldo, 134 Handel, Georg Frideric, 159, 161, 163, 169 Hanover Square Rooms, 33, 43, 162, 163 Harmonicon, 7, 8, 9, 16–­17, 19, 159, 162–­65 Harrison, John, 161 Harrison, William H., 210, 212 Hart, Mr (founder of Sacred Harmonic Society), 161 Hastings, Celina (Countess of Huntingdon), 168–­69 Hawes, William, 9, 62 Haymarket Theatre, 163, 195 Hayden, William, 210 Haydn, Joseph, 140, 163 Haytor, John, 128 Hazlitt, William, 143–­47, 149, 206 Her Majesty’s Theatre, 33, 35. See also King’s Theatre Hewitt, John Hill, 201, 208–­9 Hogarth, George, 205, 208 Hogarth, William, 140 Hollingshead, John, 182 Homer, 229 Hood, Thomas, 211 Hospital Festival Committee, 168 Household Words, 23 Howells, J., 161 Hullah, John, 212 Hunt, Henry, 137 Hunt, John, 153 Hunt, Leigh, 144, 153, 206 Hunterian Society, 270 Illustrated London News, 131, 207, 211, 273 improvvisatori, 221–­23 Incledon, Charles, 4 Irving, Edward, 10, 142–­57 Jameson, Anna, 128–­30, 131–­33 Jameson, Thomas, 104, 105 Janin, Jules, 192–­93 Jeffreys, Mr (founder of Sacred Harmonic Society), 161 Jerrold, Douglas, 27 Jesus of Nazareth, 263–­64 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 130 Joseph, Saint, 263–­64, 271

290 i n d e x

Journal des débats, 192 Jukes, Edward, 104, 105 Juvenile Opera Company, 203 Kean, Edmund, 96, 106, 137, 145, 208 Keats, John, 137 Kemble, Adelaide, 121–­36 Kemble, Charles, 121, 126–­27 Kemble, Fanny, 7, 9–­10, 121–­36 Kemble, John Phillip, 133 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 265, 267–­71 King, Charles, M., 203 King, Mr J., 22 King’s College London, 264 King’s Theatre, 62, 71, 72, 77–­81, 100, 162, 163, 164–­65, 167, 193, 203, 236, 237, 253. See also Her Majesty’s Theatre Knickerbocker, 207 Knowles, James Sheridan, 96 Knyvett, William, 9, 62, 167 Kratzenstein, Christian Gottlieb, 265, 267, 271 Labarre, Théodore, 193 Lablache, Luigi, 9–­10, 43, 93–­119 Lacan, Jacques, 261 Lacey, J. M., 15–­18 Lacy, Michael Rophino, 195 Lafont, Pierre-­Chéri, 183, 188 Lamb, Charles, “A Chapter on Ears,” 10, 137–­42, 146–­47 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (L.E.L.), 11, 204, 221–­34; “The Improvisatrice,” 223–­29 Lanza, Gesualdo, 9, 53–­69 Lanza, Giuseppe, 56 Laporte, Jacques-­François, 181 Laporte, Pierre-­François, 48, 181, 193 Lara, Hannah de, 204 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 105 Lavoisier, Antoine, 97 Lee, Edward, 26 Leigh, Samuel, Leigh’s New Picture, 1–­7 Leopardi, Giacomo, “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” 223, 229–­33 Lewis, Matthew “Monk,” 206 Liberal, 144 Lind, Jenny, 273

Lindley, Robert, 100 Liszt, Franz, 205 Literary Gazette, 204, 221 Liverati, Domenico, 62 Liverati, Giovanni, 62 Liverpool, Lord (Robert Banks Jenkinson), 143 Lloyd, Albert, 27 Lloyd, Isabella, 204 Lloyd, Sampson, 204 Lock Chapel, 171 Loder, Edward, 7, 131 Lomax, Alan, 26 London Choral Society, 33 London Magazine, 137 London Medical and Surgical Journal, 264–­65 Longman, G. (publisher), 72–­73 Louis XVI, 104 Luther, Martin, 146 Lyceum Theatre, 204 Macauley, Eliza, 144 Macfarren, George Alexander, 7, 131 Mackay, Charles, 206, 212 Macklin, Charles, 205 Macpherson, James (see Ossian) Macready, William Charles, 96, 203 Madrigal Society, 163–­65 Mainzer,  Joseph, Singing  for the Million, 212 Malibran, Maria, 99, 204, 272 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 143 Marinoni, Fortunata, 167 Manning, Peter, 146 Mara, Gertrud Elisabeth, 243 Mario (Giovanni Matteo de Candia), 9, 37, 43, 44 Mario, Jessica White, 36 Mars, Mademoiselle, 186, 197–­99 Martin, Isabella, 142–­43 Martineau, Harriet, 34 Martini, Giovanni Battista, 163 Mary Sue, 232 Mathews, Charles, 205, 222 Maturin, Charles, 250, 258 Mayhew, Henry, 20, 24–­26, 40–­41 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 8, 33–­50; “Filosofia della musica,” 38–­38, 44–­45

Index  291

McCormack, Matthew, 95–­96 McVickar, John, 150 Methodists, 170–­71 Mendelssohn, Felix, 9, 121 Menzel, Adolphe, 275–­76 Mercadante, Saverio, 110–­11 Mercandotti, Maria, 144 Méric-­Lalande, Henriette, 273 Metastasio, Pietro, 82 Meyer, Leopold de, 44 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 71–­74, 192, 193 Michal, Abbé, 265–­67 Mill, John Stuart, 34 Milner Gibson, Thomas, 36 Milton, John, 148, 149 Mirror Monthly Magazine, 212–­14 Mitchell, John, 182 Mitford, Mary Russell, 147 Modena, Gustavo, 33–­35 Molière ( Jean-­Baptiste Poquelin), 181 Monthly Magazine, 187 Monti, Vincenzo, 222 Moravian Chapel, 169 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 199 Morlacchi, Francesco, 74, 79–­80 Morning Chronicle, 38, 212 Morning Herald, 35 Morning Post, 22, 99, 139, 161, 162, 184, 185, 187 Moscheles, Ignaz, 273 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 140, 162, 163, 169, 253; Don Giovanni, 62, 105; Le nozze di Figaro, 62 Musical Times, 12 Musical World, 7, 12–­13, 43, 209–­11, 273, 274 Nathan, Isaac, 97, 106, 107 National Gazette, 209 National Scotch Church, 143 Neukomm, Sigismund von, 19 New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 80, 188–­89, 191, 221 New York Herald, 210 Nicolini, Giuseppe, 85 Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club, 163 North, Roger, 22

Northern Star, 212 Nourrit, Adolphe, 238 Novello, Clara, 7, 107 Novello, Sibilla, 44 Novello, Vincent, 140–­42, 152, 161 Opéra-­Comique, 192, 193 Oratorio Concerts, 164 Ossian, 229, 231–­32 Paisiello, Giovanni, 163 Paris Conservatoire, 55 Parker, George, 20 Parry, Hubert, 215 Parry, John Orlando, 43, 49, 99 Pasta, Giuditta, 78, 122, 137 pasticcio, 6 Paton, Mary Ann, 15 Pavesi, Stefano, 83 Payne, George, 262 Peel, Sir Robert, 277 Pentecostalism, 152 People’s Charter, 219 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 163 Perry, George Frederick, 169 Persiani, Fanny, 44 Petitjean, Ernest-­Georges, 182, 184 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch), 225 Pettigrew, Robert Vesalius, 274 Philharmonic Society, 160, 162–­67, 169 Phillips, Henry, 204, 211 Pistrucci, Filippo, 33, 41–­43, 222 Poe, Edgar Allan, 276 Polytechnic Review, 43 Potter, Cipriani, 163 Priestley, Joseph, 97 Priggins, Peter ( Joseph Hewlett), 212 Princess’s Rooms, 43 Punch, 273, 277 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 7, 61–­63, 78–­79, 167 Quarterly Review, 142 Quebec Chapel, 169 Queen Caroline Affair, 35 Racine, Jean, 189 Ralph, James, 181

292 i n d e x

Reform Act, 2, 8, 28, 95, 108, 137, 150, 164, 236, 253, 254–­56, 258 Regent Square Church, 151 Regondi, Giulio, 44 Representation of the People Act, 254 Richmond, Mr (throat singer), 273–­75, 277 Risorgimento, 39 Rivarol, Antoine de, 265 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 145–­46, 186, 187 Rodolphe, Jean-­Joseph, 204 Rogers, Samuel, 36 Roman Catholic Relief Act, 151, 236 Romani, Felice, 203 Ronald, Sir Landon, 204 Ronconi, Giorgio, 44 Rooke, William Michael, 131 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 43 Rossetti, Gabriele, 43 Rossini, Gioachino, 7, 38, 72, 80, 100, 163, 193, 203; Aureliano in Palmira, 81–­82; Guillaume Tell, 44; La donna del lago, 62; La gazza ladra, 37, 131; Le Comte Ory, 192; Otello, 248; Ricciardo e Zoraide, 193; Semiramide, 249; Stabat mater, 33; Tancredi, 78–­79, 81 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 53 Royal Academy of Music, 7, 9, 61–­63, 82, 161, 162 Royal Harmonic Institution, 82 Royal West London Theatre, 181 Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 96, 99, 110–­11, 193, 273 Russell, Henry, 7, 10, 201–­20; L’Amico dei Cantanti, 204, 209 Russell, Henry, Jr, 204 Sacred Harmonic Society, 10, 159–­78 Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 22 Saint-­Simonianism, 37–­38 Sala, George Augustus, 21 Salieri, Antonio, 55–­56 Sampieri, Francesco, 217 Sand, George (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), 130 Sappho, 224–­34 Sartoris, Edward, 121, 127

Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 151–­52 Scott, Sir Walter, 143, 239 Scottish Chapel, 164 Scribe, Eugène, 184, 189, 197 Scudo, Paul, 272 Searle, Mr (founder of Sacred Harmonic Society), 161 Seguin, Elizabeth, 99 Seguin, Mr E. (member of Musical Society), 161 Sgricci, Tommaso, 221–­22, 227 Shakespeare, William, 17 Sharp, Cecil, 26–­27 Shaw, Mary, 131 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 144 Siddons, Sarah, 133 silver fork novel, 237 Sinclair, John, 7 Smart, George, 62 Smith, Adolphe, 39, 42 Soane, John, 272 Sola, C. M., 71–­76 Sontag, Henriette, 272 Southey, Robert, 142 Spectator, 96, 164, 167, 168, 188, 189, 191, 195 Spurzheim, Johannes, 105 Stadion, Count Johann Philipp von, 54–­55 Staël, Germaine de, 122–­23, 130, 224 Stanford, Charles Villiers, 215 Stendhal (Marie-­Henri Beyle), 72, 77–­ 78, 221, 222 Sterne, Laurence, 138 St James’s Theatre, 182, 183, 185 St Leger, Harriet, 125–­26 St Paul’s Cathedral, 168 street music, 9, 15–­31, 33–­50; “organ boys,” 8, 33–­50 Strong, George Templeton, 207–­10 Sullivan, Arthur, 215 Surman, Mr (conductor of Sacred Harmonic Society), 161 Surrey Chapel, 171 Surrey Theatre, 203 Taglioni, Marie, 238 Talma, François-­Joseph, 106, 181

Index  293

Tamburini, Antonio, 9, 43, 44, 96, 100, 103, 181, 204 Tatler, 98 Teatro Carcano, 217 Teatro della Pergola, 71 Teatro La Fenice, 71 Temps, Le, 99 Test and Corporation Acts, 141, 151 Thackeray, William Makepiece, Vanity Fair, 254 Théâtre de la Foire, 181 Théâtre de la Monnaie, 192 Théâtre des Nouveautés, 182 Théâtre des Variétés, 182, 192, 193 Théâtre du Gymnase-­Dramatique, 182, 193 Théâtre du Palais-­Royale, 182–­83 Théâtre du Vaudeville, 181, 182, 191 Théâtre Historique (company), 194 Théâtre Italien, 193 Theatres Act (1843), 12, 182 Thun-­Hohenstein, Count Franz von, 122–­25 Times, 21, 186, 202–­3 Titchfield, Marquis of, 128 Tolbecque (arranger), 192 Tottenham Street Theatre, 181 Toynbee, Joseph, 36 Tristan, Flora, 185 Unitarian High Street Chapel, 147 Unitarianism, 141 Vaccai, Nicola, 62, 85 Vauxhall Gardens, 5

Velluti, Giovanni Battista, 9, 62, 71–­91 Venturi, Emilie Ashurst, 36 Verdi, Giuseppe, 37, 42, 44, 114 Vertpré, Jenny, 182, 196, 198 Vestris, Lucia, 126, 131, 144 Viardot, Pauline, 130 Victoria, Queen, 9, 12, 113, 185, 204, 214 Vienna Conservatory, 55 Vieuxtemps, Henri, 44 Vigarello, Georges, 97, 103–­4 Wagner, Richard, 37 Walch, Johann Georg, 264–­65 Walker, Mr (organist), 161 Ward, Mrs Humphrey (Mary), 130 Watts, Isaac, 141–­42 Weber, Carl Maria von, 19, 163; Der Freischütz, 7 Weippert’s Concert da Camera, 273 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 126, 220 Wellington Club, 36 Welsh, Thomas (publisher and singing teacher), 81–­82 Wentworth, Lady Augusta, 163 Wesley, John, 171 Westminster Abbey, 161, 168 Wheatstone, Charles, 44, 264–­65, 268–­ 71, 273–­75 Wilberforce, William, 143 Willis, Robert, 270–­71 Willis’s Rooms, 163 Woods, Francis Cunningham, 27 Wordsworth, William, 2–­3, 138–­39, 147–­49