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Gillen
D'Arcy Wood, "Introduction."
This short introductory essay argues for
the centrality of opera, and its controversies, to Georgian
culture. Further, it demands that the neglect of this
crucial field of inquiry be redressed by romanticist
scholars. Brief synopses of the articles in this edition
follow.
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introduction]
Christina Fuhrmann, "Scott Repatriated?:
La Dame blanche Crosses the Channel"
Scotland, close enough to visit, far enough
to seem untamed and mysterious, enthralled
nineteenth-century composers. Fascination fixated on Sir
Walter Scott, whose works spawned numerous foreign operas.
When these musical mutations migrated across the channel,
however, they often collided with Britain's vision of her
'national' author. This is especially true with Boieldieu's
La Dame blanche (1825). The opera succeeded in
continental Europe, but two separate London productions
failed. What stymied this metamorphosis? As I argue, the
conflict between Londoners' nationalistic possessiveness of
Scott and Scottish melodies on the one hand, yet their
uneasiness with the novels on which the opera was based and
its complex score on the other, placed these adaptations at
a kind of cultural impasse. Ultimately, the layers of
meaning Scott's works had accrued in England made the White
Lady one citizen the English could not repatriate.
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essay]
Diane Long Hoeveler, "Talking About
Virtue: Paisiello's "Nina," Paer's "Agnese," and the
Sentimental Ethos"
This essay will examine how sentimentality
and its valorization of virtue spread through one
particular intersection of opera and literature; that is,
the seduced maiden narrative is enacted in these operas,
once as a comedy of sorts, once as a tragedy. Giovanni
Paisiello's "Nina" (1789) was clearly influenced by the
works of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, while
Fernando Paër's "Agnese" (1809) is a direct adaptation
of Amelia Opie's popular novella "The Father and Daughter"
(1801). Furthermore, both of the operas spin in and out of
ideological orbit with Richardson's novel Pamela; or Virtue
Rewarded (1740-41), which in turn was rewritten by the
Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni in his dramatic
adaptation Le Pamela Nubile (1753), the Irish playwright
Isaac Bickerstaffe as the comic opera The Maid of the Mill
(1765), and which then was later adapted and transformed by
François de Neufchâteau into the opera
Paméla (1793). And certainly we can detect
sentimental familial concerns in Denis Diderot's dramas,
particularly "Le Fils Naturel ou les épreuves de la
vertu" ("The Natural Son; or, The Trials of Virtue," 1757).
What I hope to suggest is that music and literature have
collaborated in constructing a few fairly basic cultural
scripts (domestic, familial, painful, and cathartic: recall
Oedipus or Demeter/Persephone) that are then retold
endlessly, continually readjusting the particulars to
accommodate changing social and political conditions.
Sentimentality as a value system, a potent ideology, almost
a secularization of religion was spread throughout
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European culture
not simply through novels and dramas, but also by being
performed in opera houses from London to Rome and
Naples.
[go to
essay]
J.
Jennifer Jones, "Sounds Romantic: The Castrato and
English Poetics Around 1800"
In contrast to the notion that Italian
opera has no relation to romantic opera or to romanticism
generally, this essay demonstrates that the Italian
castrato was a prominent figure in London during the period
around 1800. The essay argues that the idea of the romantic
castrato makes it possible to revise understandings of the
(aggressive) relationship between sight and sound that is
so often attributed to literary production of this period,
particularly to William Wordsworth. The essay explores the
ways that the castrati-c imagination (ironically)
facilitates an analysis of romantic sound imagery that is
mindful of materiality, offering in particular a reading of
the relation between castrati, sound imagery, and Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein.
[go to
essay]
Jessica K. Quillin, "'An assiduous
frequenter of the Italian opera': Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound and the opera buffa"
By the time he came to add act IV to the
original three acts of "Prometheus Unbound" in late 1819,
Percy Bysshe Shelley had amassed a diverse set of musical
experiences, ranging from the first London performance of
Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia" in March of 1818 to the
grand festivities or "funzioni" in Rome during Easter week
in 1819. While critics and reviewers of the past two
hundred years have struggled to find a suitable analogy for
"Prometheus Unbound" in literature, it seems possible that
Shelley had non-literary models in mind. Indeed, the world
of music provides a clear parallel to Shelley's lyrical
drama in the form of the Italian "opera buffa" that so
delighted the poet and his friends during the London
seasons in 1817 and 1818. This essay argues that the
organization of discourse and the specific dramatic
arrangement of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" have strong
affinities with the Italian operas of his day, particularly
the works of Mozart and Rossini.
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essay]
Anne Williams, "Lewis/Gounod's Bleeding
Nonne: An Introduction and Translation of the
Scribe/Delavigne Libretto"
Librettists Scribe and Delavigne
transformed M.G. Lewis's Gothic episode in The Monk
into a tale conforming to the conventions of
mid-nineteenth-century French "grand opera." Charles
Gounod's setting of this libretto closed after eleven
performances in the autumn of 1854 and has never been
revived. The production was beset with problems arising
from opera-house and prima-donna politics, but its failure
may also imply crucial cultural transformations in Europe
since the revolutionary 1790's when Lewis had published his
novel. A translation of the libretto gives Anglo-American
scholars ready access to this paradoxical opera in the
Gothic tradition.
[go to
essay]
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