Critics and Operatic Performance Practice in London During the 1830s

Abstract

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the musical differences between operatic scores and operatic performances were much greater than they later became. It was commonplace to cut, interpolate, substitute, and otherwise reshape the musical units of operas, while keeping more or less intact many of their characteristic structural features.1 Although the system's heart was in Italy, during the 1830s operatic performances in London?at the King's Theatre, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden?exhibited many of the same characteristics. Composers, performers, and managers all had a financial interest in maintaining or at least accommodating themselves to the prevailing practices, but some opera-goers complained vigorously and published their objections not only in England's main musical journal, the Harmonicon, but also in books and in journals like the Athenaeum and the London and Westminster Review, which had a wider circulation and influence than the musical press. This article is an examination of these performance practices in London in the light of contemporary complaints about them by professional and amateur critics as diverse as P?ckler-Muskau, von Raumer, F?tis, Peacock, Ayrton, and Chorley. It shows that to a surprising extent such alterations were not only noticed but also knowledgeably, even fiercely, analyzed and criticized.