London Voices, 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

Abstract

Reviewed by: London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories ed. by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford William Weber (bio) London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker, and Susan Rutherford; pp. 293. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $65.00, $64.99 ebook. Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford designed this volume to lay out "the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues" in the city of London during "two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century." They state that these were years where "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" (2). The thirteen chapters variously trace how movements developed around ballad singers, opera stars, vocal improvisers, French actors, choruses of sacred music, and invented voice boxes, and how these movements expanded the range of London's musical culture between about 1820 and 1840. In the process, the [End Page 128] differences between so-called high and low areas of cultural activity were considerably polarized. What emerges is a fascinating array of disparate cultural institutions whose dynamism and wide social outreach had no parallel in that period. The contributors dig deep into particular contexts to display, in intriguing detail, how Londoners of various social levels experienced developments different from those spreading early in the nineteenth century. The introduction nonetheless warns us that "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" (6). Claudio Vellutini lays out a contextual framework for understanding the social structure of institutions and practices within the world of Italian opera in the period. The King's Theatre, the premier opera house in London since 1704, had presented only opera troupes brought from Italy, but by the 1830s British singers were competing on a par with their Italian colleagues, developing their own supposedly English vocal style. With that change came the commodification of sheet music, permitting a vast public to perform pieces from their favorite operas in their homes. Vellutini argues that such commercial activity was "consistent with the consolidation of the logic of capitalism [that] emerged as a trope on both sides of the Atlantic" (64). For some observers, Italian opera thereby became justified only as long as it assisted in the reshaping of opera in English terms. The chapter by Cormac Newark lays out a conceptual basis for understanding the fundamental reshaping of English opera life. He provides a detailed analysis of comments made in The Opera: A Novel, a book by Catherine Gore published in 1832. Mrs. Gore, as she was always addressed, presented bold new perspectives about the English adaptation of Italian opera, treating opera as a useful microcosm for analyzing the "celebrity-spotting" central to amateur fascination with opera stars. Her book provided a broad array of commentary about the cultural life of the upper classes that grew out of the widespread social commentary that arose during that period. Accordingly, Newark argues, Gore dissected the "vicissitudes" she found in private discussions of the taste for opera that reached a climax in the fervent apotheosis of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the 1840s (253). In effect, Gore brought a bourgeois discernment by defining such taste as separate from the dilettantism that traditionally underlay taste for Italian opera. The concept of "voices" emerges in this volume's analysis of new kinds of cultural discourse within the discordant opinions presented in the press. Singers took on roles as "voices" and thereby articulated radically different roles compared with the ritualized discourse about opera in the eighteenth century. Operas thereby reconceived cultural assumptions long idolized for the unadventurous assumptions of the aristocratic public. Matildie Thom Wium thereby analyzes the "mythology" surrounding the prima donna's assumption of an exotic, in some respects negative, posture (122). That posture made the idolized singer out to be a "divine monster," thereby giving lyric drama a more formidable character compared with the exotically Italianized picture found in the eighteenth century (123). Likewise, Mary Ann Smart shows how adventurous new stagings could become...