Music and Magazines

Abstract

This essay explores the presence of opera within the formation defined by Daniel White as the “Dissenting public sphere.” Recent accounts have shown how the reception of opera in early nineteenth-century London was conditioned by questions of politics and social class. This essay argues that responses to opera were shaped equally by religious politics and examines a range of writings by Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. Music occupies an equivocal place within the culture of religious dissent, at once central to nonconformist identities—above all, through the practice of congregational hymn-singing, prohibited by the Church of England until 1820—and a continual source of anxiety, tainted by its associations with luxury, commerce, ritual, and unreason. While the hermeneutic aporias of instrumental music are a persistent theme of dissenting discourse, Italian opera forms the most frequent subject of dissenting anxieties about music. The chapter takes up responses to opera from William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Henry Crabb Robinson, and Amelia Opie, focusing on periodicals such as the Examiner, London Magazine and New Monthly Magazine, while also integrating the evidence of diaries and letters.