Fielding and Italian Opera

Abstract

As his era’s most prolific writer of ballad operas, Henry Fielding knew music well and was particularly outspoken about Italian opera, the reigning London fashion of the day. While he recognized how moving its “soft alluring Strain” could be, as a nationalist he resented the imported form, which he feared would corrupt and emasculate the English. Moreover, if he objected to it on moral grounds, he did so on aesthetic ones as well. As a believer in the supremacy of the word, he regarded the genre’s elevation of music over text as a reversal of the proper hierarchy; and with the operas performed in a language that the audience did not understand, he saw them as failing in art’s basic mission to inform and instruct. Indeed, in the eyes of Fielding and many of his literary peers, Italian opera came to symbolize the ultimate triumph of sound over sense.