Opera & British print culture in the long nineteenth century

Uittreksel

Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century explores the multiple points of interaction between British opera, print culture, and music in the long nineteenth century. Past scholarship has often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but this book embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays analyze how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles. As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.

Inhoud

The interdependence of print and opera. "Mr Hawes is Mr Hawes" : opera and music publishing in early nineteenth-century London / Peter Horton. Giovanni in print / Christina Fuhrmann -- Shaping a public persona. Authoring the managerial memoir : print culture and John Ebers's Seven years of the King's Theatre (1828) / Jennifer Hall-Witt. "Domestic affliction" and a "relaxed throat" : reporting on the tribulations of Mary Shaw / Matildie Wium -- Shaping national identity. The "failure" of provincial opera : nineteenth-century opera and print culture in Edinburgh / Jennifer Oates. A special battlefield : opera and print culture in nineteenth-century Ireland / Timothy Love. Opera as gaelige : revivalism and reception in fin de siecle Irish opera / Maria McHale -- Shaping taste. A "cosy corner chat" about opera : fashioning new femininities in The gentlewoman and The lady, 1885-1914 / Michelle Meinhart. Wagner, the British press, and taste education at the Britisn Music Festival, 1869-1914 / Charles Edward McGuire -- Operatic literature, literary opera. British Wagnerism, George Moore, and popular print culture at the end of the long nineteenth century / Julia Grella O'Connell. Music and magazines : dissenting from opera in the print public sphere / James Grande. Wanting more : Oliver Twist as Beggar's opera / Phyllis Weliver -- Afterword / Leanne Langley.