English Opera Research Articles

Thomas Clayton’s Arsinoe (1705) Reconsidered: An English Opera in the Italian Manner

Abstract Thomas Clayton’s opera Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (1705), while acknowledged as the first opera in the Italian manner produced in England, is also possibly the most reviled opera of the era, a reputation launched in 1709 by the anonymous author of ‘A Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’. The opera’s success during its three-season run is at odds with its present reputation. This article offers a reconsideration of Arsinoe based on examining the historical sources and corrects misconceptions about Clayton’s authorship and attribution of the libretto to Peter Anthony Motteux. Examined are the opera’s recitative, aria forms, melodic style and dramaturgy. It argues that critics have been evaluating Arsinoe according to inappropriate criteria drawn from later eighteenth-century Italian-style operas of Scarlatti, Bononcini, and Handel. After tracing the genesis of the opera, the article examines the recitatives and the structure and melodic style of the arias. The arias do not follow the usual forms of later opera. The melodic style of the short sectional arias is not ‘Italianate’ and is closer to the native multi-sectional English theatre song. Understanding of the opera’s dramaturgy has been hindered by the graphic layout of the 1705 London wordbook. To aid comprehension of the opera and its relation to its Bologna source libretto and to readily assess the work of the librettist, three online supplements to this article present: (1) parallel texts of the London and Bologna librettos (given in translation); (2) a facsimile of the London wordbook indicating text set by Clayton as aria, duet, or chorus; and (3) a reformatted version of the London wordbook. The article argues that Arsinoe should not be seen as a failed Italian-style opera but as an innovative, sui generis realization of the ideal of an all-sung dramatic entertainment that would meet the expectations of a London audience that had not yet become familiar with the operatic style of Bononcini and Scarlatti. One feature added to the London libretto, the Epithalamium musical entertainment, shows the opera’s link to England’s dramatic operatic tradition.

Optimization of vocal singing training method based on intelligent big data technology

Abstract With the advancement of science and technology, the relationship between vocal singing training methods and big data technology is getting closer and closer. The application of training methods is a means of expressing vocal compositions. Emotional expression is the ultimate purpose and meaning of method optimization. Training methods and emotional expression are equally important in vocal singing, and both are indispensable. In this paper, a VSSA-separation model is established based on the Vocal Signal Separation Algorithm (VSSA). Focus on optimizing the training method of vocal singing. Through in-depth discussion of existing works, I try to find its inner influence and outer connection. In order to better understand the grasp and application of vocal singing method and emotional expression balance. It can be seen from the calculation that the image shaping in the song language accounts for 83% of the optimization of the training method. Inverse word processing in song language has a different proportion of the optimization of the training method. It accounts for 71% of English operas. It accounts for only 13% of Chinese operas. Artistic effects have the highest average optimization difficulty among the training methods. Its optimization difficulty is as high as 89%.

The Stage Interpretation of Literary Themes in the Music of Benjamin Britten

Stage interpretation and adaptation of literary texts in the opera genre is a very complex phenomenon. Any musician undertaking this task will find himself/herself confronted with the problem that arises from the juxtaposition between the original text and its new version. Sometimes a composer and even a librettist has to transform the original text in a radical way to adapt it to its medium of music successfully. The present paper demonstrates the ways in which literary texts are interpreted in Benjamin Britten’s two famous operas Midnight Summer Dream and Death in Venice. An English composer and pianist, Benjamin Britten is an important figure in the history of the 20th century classic music. He is often regarded as a “father of English opera” whose multi-genre works are still popular today. The sources of Britten’s famous works are as diverse and versatile as the texts of Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, H. James, A. Tennyson, W. Blake, B. Johnson, J. Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, R. Burns, Th. Hardy and many other well-known authors. Shakespeare’s play Midnight Summer Dream is a source of Britten’s opera under the same title. First musical interpretations of this play date back to the 17th century, when a great English composer Henry Purcell composed an opera The Fairy Queen. This play became the source of inspiration for many composers. Britten composed Midnight Summer Dream in 1959. Directed by Britten himself, it was first staged on the 11th of June in 1960. Britten composed the opera without libretto - it was directly based on Shakespeare’s play. The composer made essential changes to the source text. These changes are especially evident in the first act. The main part of the first act was not included in the opera version. Unlike the play, the whole plot is set in the forest and, consequently, the functions and roles of the characters are completely changed. Like Shakespeare, who uses different poetic languages for his characters, Britten’s musical material is also divergent. We should especially mark out the figure of Oberon whose extraordinary character is easy to see in his musical party which was written for a countertenor. This helped to intensify Oberon’s magic and his sense as a weird character. Oberon’s party is a combination of contrasting, expressive and dramatic possibilities. On the one hand, it reminds us musical traditions of the past time and castrates who are simultaneously associated with power and femininity, on the other. The role of Titania is a powerful Soprano overshadowing Oberon both dramatically and musically at the beginning, but the balance is shifted in the third act. Titania’s phrases become simple and dull. As a matter of fact, the opera does not tackle the problems that are raised in Shakespeare’s play. Death in Venice is Britten’s last opera composed not very long before his death. Its central theme is death. The source of libretto is Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. Britten attempted to create an English version of the German novella that is full of complex philosophical ideas. His Achenbach can be regarded as a very sensitive, reserved intellectual, English gentleman with deep thoughts of death and mysticism. As we have seen, Britten’s above-discussed works differ from the original texts of Shakespeare and Thomas Mann. They offer specific interpretations of the material in order to realize the composer’s intention. Consequently, they are moving away from their original sources and can be understood in different ways.

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

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...

Introduction: Performance and the Paper Stage, 1640–1700

IntroductionPerformance and the Paper Stage, 1640–1700 Emma Depledge (bio) and Rachel Willie (bio) the second half of the seventeenth century was marked by attempts to limit access to the London theaters and by important developments in the trade in playbooks.1 The public theaters were closed when civil war broke out in 1642, and they remained closed for eighteen years. The punishments for performing plays during the ban were severe; as ordinances for theater closure state, punitive measures included the confiscation of profits and costumes, public whipping, arrests, and fines for audience members.2 The theaters were reopened shortly after the monarchy was restored in 1660, but only two playhouses were licensed for performance in London for most of the period 1660–1700, with their managers—William Davenant (Duke's Company) and Thomas Killigrew (King's Company)—to "suffer no rival companies."3 This was further reduced to just one theater from 1682 to 1695, and admission prices radically increased in comparison to the Elizabethan and Jacobean outdoor playhouses.4 Thus, although Restoration is used frequently to describe the supposedly simultaneous return of the monarchy and the theaters, for [End Page 1] many Londoners, the licensed theaters remained as inaccessible after 1660 as they had been during the ban on acting. As this special issue demonstrates, although state officials attempted to control when, where, and by whom theater could be produced and consumed, late seventeenth-century actors, managers, and audiences continuously sought out ways to defy the authorities and, in so doing, maintained a vibrant theatrical culture. Theater historians used to portray 1642–59 as a period in which theater became limited, elitist, and inert, but work by scholars including Janet Clare, Dale B. J. Randall, Rachel Willie, and Susan Wiseman has demonstrated that these years were instead marked by theatrical innovation, particularly in print culture as a dramatic form.5 Davenant (1606–1668) sought to circumvent the ban on stage plays by developing innovative methods of theatrical performance and by persuading the authorities to allow him to perform "moral entertainments," as exemplified by his Siege of Rhodes (1656), which contained recitative and other elements associated with the court masque and the development of English opera. An underground theater market also developed, in which new dramatic genres such as drolls, play ballads, play pamphlets, and dialogues, as well as the continued practice of dumb shows and dramatic commonplacing, helped to keep theatrical culture alive. These novel pieces were short and could be performed quickly to avoid detection by soldiers, or else they could be delivered privately without the need of professional actors or purposebuilt performance venues.6 There is evidence to suggest that these dramatic forms continued to flourish after 1660. In the early 1680s, the London-based playwright Elkanah Settle decided it would be expedient to take "one Coish [coach] & severall others to act some playes or Drolls in the citty of Yorke."7 As this example shows, performances took place beyond the capital, in York and also in places such as Norwich and "Sturbridge Fair" in Cambridge.8 Thus, it is important to recognize that [End Page 2] surreptitious performances took place during the midcentury ban on acting and that theater culture extended beyond the two patent theaters licensed to perform from the 1660s. Further, it is imperative to speak of theater histories in the plural to reflect the coexistence of state-sanctioned and underground theater culture as well as London and countrywide performances across the late seventeenth century. Actors and the Ban on Acting Prior to the ban on acting, in 1629, a French acting troupe performed at the Blackfriars playhouse. Their company followed Continental European practices and comprised female players, who met with a negative reception despite being admired at the English court.9 Evidently, English playgoers were not ready to experience women acting on the professional stage. Yet in 1656, Davenant obtained special permission to produce The Siege of Rhodes and cast Catherine Coleman to sing and act the part of Ianthe; it was first performed in the dining room of Davenant's home at Rutland House before transferring to the Cockpit theater in Drury Lane. Davenant was casting not only a female...

Dance as a Key Element of the Masque in the Royal English Court of King James I

The historical aspect of the formation and flourishing of the genre of the English court Masque, which is associated with the period of the reign of the Stuart kings, is considered. The performances of the Masques of the reign of James I of England were financially costly, requiring the joint efforts of the best poets, set designers, composers, musicians, and choreographers. It was found that the court Masque of the era of James I, began with the Antimasque, which was the invention of the leading court poet and playwright B. Johnson. Antimasque is a kind of mirror that reflected the best traditions of ancient Greek pantomime. Antimasque did not imply the presence of actor's remarks. The function of the Antimasque was to contrast, to oppose the highest virtue, which was undoubtedly possessed by the King and the aristocracy, against all sorts of human vices. The Antimasque looked like an amateur show, with obscene dances, caustic humour, whimsical dance figures, ugly costumes and Masques. The confrontation between Masque and Antimasque acquired a moral and social aspect. It is described that French and Italian dance masters had a significant influence on the choreographic performances of English Masques, and Italian dances dominated and were cultivated at the court of James I. The functions of dance in the Masque, which formed the core of the performance, had cementing properties typical for the royal family and its court. The sequence of dances in Masques is established — from the calm and measured (mezher) to the fast and easy: galliard, lavolta, branli, moriski. It was found that the cost of luxurious costumes, Masques, decorations and stage effects, and the services of foreign choreographers approached astronomical figures. It is proved that the epilogue of the court Masque was marked by a joint dance with the audience. This emphasized the secular-spiritual, sacred-ritual significance of the Masque, although the performances of the Masques did not go beyond the generally accepted norms of a society with patriarchal values. The functions of the Masques are substantiated, which were mainly reduced to the demonstration of the wealth and power of England and the assertion of the status of the anointed king of God. The Masques of James I are seen as a dynamic bright spectacle, a phenomenon of the Stuart era. In the future, the choreographic elements in the Masques become a prerequisite for the development of English ballet, and the musical and theatrical elements of the Masques — the prototype of English opera.

Performing interpretation of the opera in the spectacles of the Opera Studio of the Kharkiv National I. P. Kotlyarevsky University of Arts in the late 20th – the early 21st century.

Performing interpretation of the opera in the spectacles of the Opera Studio of the Kharkiv National I. P. Kotlyarevsky University of Arts in the late 20th – the early 21st century.

A Study on the impact of English Soap Operas on the Youth of Chennai

Television has been one of the most penetrated mediums in the society. From its introduction television has always featured soap operas. It has been one of the major reasons why this medium reached the masses. Soap operas initially discussed subjects of social interest. It slowly started penetrating into other genres and drama became the most sought after genre. Dramas included subjects like love, family, relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, office issues, etc. These topics have been beaten to death that the audiences are no more interested in such soaps, especially the youth. The age group of 18–25 felt no more attracted to such soap operas. This created a paradigm shift in the viewership. After the advent of internet and the availability of English soap operas online, the youth started watching them. This study has helped in determining that the youth are influenced by these operas. The findings from focus group discussion suggest that there is a certain level of acceptance of their lifestyle and family norms. Apart from that, the survey results show that youth consider our family structure superior than theirs. But they also think their lifestyle and norms cannot be followed unless they are bent in a certain way to suit our culture. On the other hand, it has enhanced the personalities of the youth and has also broadened their perspectives. Yet the situation might go out of hand any moment and it could be an accelerator for cultural deterioration as too much of anything is not good.

L’identité anglaise dans Dr Dee : An English Opera de Damon Albarn

Composée par Damon Albarn et présentée dans le cadre des manifestations culturelles organisées autour des Jeux Olympiques de Londres de 2012, Dr Dee : An English Opera est une œuvre qui traite de l’identité anglaise. La place d’Albarn dans le paysage culturel britannique est avant tout liée à ses succès dans la musique populaire, notamment avec le groupe Blur. Fer de lance du mouvement Britpop dans les années 1990, Blur explorait déjà les liens entre musique et identité nationale. L’analyse des référents musicaux et visuels utilisés dans Dr Dee révèle une conception exclusive et conservatrice de l’identité nationale, proche de celle de la Britpop. Ainsi, Dr Dee réfère à une identité historique liée à la période impériale et omet de fait l’apport des migrations postcoloniales. D’un point de vue musical, l’analyse montre que le rock demeure le genre privilégié pour représenter la nation, laissant peu de place à la musique savante ou aux musiques issues des migrations postcoloniales. Paradoxalement, Dr Dee est présenté dans un contexte olympique où l’accent est mis sur une identité nationale multiculturelle. La comparaison avec d’autres projets musicaux d’Albarn révèle des visions contrastées, voire contradictoires de l’anglicité, traduisant le malaise identitaire actuel dans la société britannique.

“The Frighted Stage”: The Sensational Proliferation of Ghost Melodrama in the 1820s

DIEGO SAGLIA “The Frighted Stage”: The Sensational Proliferation of Ghost Melodrama in the 1820s I N A LETTER OF II SEPTEMBER 1823, MARY SHELLEY INFORMED LEIGH HUNT, then in Italy, that she had attended a performance of Richard Brinsley Peake’s adaptation of Frankenstein as Presumption; or, the Fate ofFrankenstein, which had opened at the English Opera House, the former Lyceum, on 28 July. As is well known, she enjoyed Thomas Potter Cooke’s acting as the nameless Creature (indicated as “__________ ” in the playbill), some­ thing that not only confirms the importance of naming in her novel, but also throws into relief the peculiarly spectral nature of this stage version of Frankenstein’s creation.1 To be sure, Peake’s text constantly refers to its material presence: the doctor initially dubs it “a huge automaton in human form” and then goes on to list its repulsive physical traits by echoing vol­ ume 1, chapter 4, in the novel.2 Yet the play also repeatedly qualifies the Creature through the language of the supernatural, and spectrality in par­ ticular, as Frankenstein’s assistant Fritz calls it “a hob-goblin” and Franken­ stein a “Demon” (in the Larpent version) and a “dreadful spectre of a human form.” Moreover, the Creature’s first and highly spectacular ap­ pearance presents some of the features of evanescence, since it is “discov­ ered at door entrance in smoke, which evaporates,” and then exits by “dis­ appearing] through [a] casement.”3 A year later, on 22 August 1824, Mary Shelley wrote again to Leigh Hunt to tell him that London audiences were in thrall to Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischutz. She had seen it in the version that premiered This article is dedicated to the memory ofJane Moody and her affection for Italy and all her colleagues and friends there. 1. Shelley, Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraj't Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 136. 2. Peake, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 397, 398. 3. Peake, Presumption, 398, 399. SiR, 54 (Summer 2015) 269 270 DIEGO SAGLIA at the English Opera House on 23 July 1824, and gave the following account: . . . the music is wild but often beautiful—when the magic bullets are cast they fill the stage with all sorts of horrors—owls flapping the[ir] wings—toads [hopp]ing about—fierly [szc] serpents darting & the [ ] ghostly hunters in the clouds, while every now & then in the [ ] of a stream of wild harmony comes a crashing discord—all forms I assure you a very fine scene, while every part ofthe house except the stage is invelloped in darkness.4 Offered by several London theaters in competing versions during 1824, Der Freischiitz was filled with superstitions and omens, apparitions and sublime landscapes, while its action, mostly set on a darkened stage, pivoted on the scene of the casting ofthe bullets, a veritable tour de force ofsupernatural ef­ fects. Although Weber’s original was an opera, the earliest of its London adaptations was a straightforward melodrama (The Fatal Marksman; or, the Demon of the Black Forest, Coburg, 26 February 1824), and even operatic versions such as those at the English Opera House and Covent Garden bore a heavily melodramatic stamp.5 While confirming the popularity ofghost plays on the Romantic-period stage, Mary Shelley’s accounts testify to the sustained investments by play­ wrights and managers in new ways of combining spectrality with the acting style and increasingly striking spectacular effects ofmelodrama in the 1820s, the decade that, in Matthew Buckley’s words, saw “the genre’s emergence as a dominant dramatic form. ”6 In this respect, in her groundbreaking work on illegitimate theater, Jane Moody underlines how technical innovations and “monstrous generic hybridity” lay at the center ofthe “dramatisation[s| of supernatural terror” and “[supernatural monstrosity ... as both human and alien” in such popular melodramas from the 1820s (most of them star­ ring T. P. Cooke in their opening run) as Peake’s Presumption, James Rob­ inson Planche’s The Vampire; or, the Bride ofthe Isles (English Opera House, 9 August 1820), Henry Milner...

A Dinner Engagement (1954) de Lennox Berkeley : un opéra-bouffe anachronique ?

Commissioned by The English Opera Group, written on a libretto by Paul Dehn and created at the Aldeburgh Festival on 17 June 1954, A Dinner Engagement is a comic opera by Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989). The instrumentation follows that of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring. As regards Albert Herring, it served to a certain extent as a model for Berkeley’s opera as is illustrated by the way the text was set to music, by the use of the repetition of musical motifs, etc. A Dinner Engagement’s musical language is essentially tonal and the structure of the work is akin to a number opera. Musically speaking, the opera of the British composer is closer to some operas by Britten, Menotti and Poulenc than to works by Berg, Schoenberg and the composers of the European avant-garde of the 1960s. The musical tensions between vernacular and extra-vernacular elements foreground the difficulty of defining what an English opera is, most particularly at a time when Benjamin Britten tried to renew English opera.

“A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism”: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age

AbstractSoprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.

English opera reformed

English opera reformed

Sea-changes: Melville-Forster-Britten: The Story of Billy Budd and its Operatic Adaptation. By Hanna Rochlitz.

During the autumn of 1948, after discussions with E. M. Forster, Benjamin Britten decided that Billy Budd would be his next opera, with Forster and Eric Crozier as librettists. Between those initial discussions and the first performance at Covent Garden a little more than three years later, on 1 December 1951, Britten, now in his late thirties, fulfilled many other commitments: the completion of the Spring Symphony, the composition of Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep), an edition of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and various smaller works, including Lachrymae and the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid. There were also many performances with Peter Pears and the English Opera Group, often involving extensive travel, not to mention nurturing the fledgling Aldeburgh Festival, which had been launched in June 1948. Britten’s energy and productivity were never more remarkable than at this stage of his career. Yet it should be no surprise if the famed ambiguities and equivocations of his compositions sometimes turn out to have as much to do with loose ends and acceptable compromises—determined by tight performance deadlines and the pressing need to move on to other things—as with the modernist aspiration to embody ambivalence as multivalently as possible in any finished work. That this is likely to be true of Billy Budd is reinforced by the composer’s decision to produce a revised two-act version of the opera during the autumn of 1960, nine years after the first performance of the original four-act version, and the differences between the two, as well as the reasons why each version took the form it did, have been exhaustively discussed by many writers down the years. Now the documentary evidence of the work’s fraught and speedy genesis is given an even more comprehensive dusting down by Hanna Rochlitz. Rochlitz justifies her claim that she is the first scholar ‘to give extensive consideration to all the currently available material’ (p. 27). It is regrettable, given the high level of quotation from so many diverse sources, that the book’s Index is so sketchy. Yet, even when she might not always seem to allow for the full range of ideas considered by some of those sources, Rochlitz still offers several useful corrections to earlier commentators.

I am the very model of a special purpose vehicle

PurposeThis paper aims to provide a critical comment on complex funding systems.Design/methodology/approachThis is a critical comment written in the form of a poem. The poem is in the style of the English light opera composers Gilbert and Sullivan, and is a variation on their song “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, from The Pirates of Penzance.FindingsThe poem spotlights financial failure.Originality/valueThe poem spotlights the crazy names and poor transparency of special purpose vehicles.

Sullivan, Scott andIvanhoe: Constructing Historical Time and National Identity in Victorian Opera

Arthur Sullivan's Walter Scott-based operaIvanhoe, despite attaining great success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. Taking its bearings from such criticisms this paper explores Sullivan's problematicmagnum opusfrom the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels – his opera's musical-dramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan's music,Ivanhoecan be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stasis and stability located in the past – highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and to found a new tradition for future English opera. Moreover, investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity. These features are teased out in the context of Scott's impact on the Victorian mind and their affinities with other historicist tendencies in the arts such as the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

Chinese Chuanqi Opera in English: Directing The West Wing with Modern Music

Part of a lab theatre experiment, this chuanqi opera production was an attempt to revive audience experience of the golden age of Chinese xiqu through text parallelism and music parallelism. Text parallelism requires the matching translation of the lingual features of a chuanqi text into its English double; such features include colloquial lexis, dense rhyming, language parallelism, and a measure of compensation in the adoptive language for the lost tonal patterns of the original. Music parallelism mimics the Ming China practice of employing music contemporary to the audience and composing the libretto to existing popular melodies .

„A work so truly English in its story and its music“. Arthur Sullivans Ivanhoe und die Suche nach einer englischen Nationaloper

In order to overcome the persistent cliché of a “land without music,” considerable efforts were made in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century to establish what is now labelled the English Musical Renaissance. One of the movement’s main concerns was to establish both institutionally and artistically a National Opera for the production of English works. In this context, the opening of a newly built opera house, the Royal English Opera, by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte in 1891 created a great stir. The Royal English Opera was inaugurated with Arthur Sullivan’s “Romantic Opera” Ivanhoe. Sullivan tried to give his score an especially English flavour without using folksongs or other overtly national musical characteristics. His composition can be seen as a synthesis of German, French and Italian influences, which intentionally mirrors the fusion of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman elements to form the English nation under King Richard the Lionheart as presented in the opera’s plot. Unfortunately the story of D’Oyly Carte’s enterprise was a short one and Sullivan’s opera quickly passed into oblivion.

Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers: a cosmopolitan voice for English opera

As debates raged about the parlous state of English opera in the first decades of the 20th century, the composer Ethel Smyth saw her opera The Wreckers staged in London. After writing two operas directed towards the German market and in an idiom steeped in the German Romantic tradition, Smyth consciously re-focused her style for The Wreckers, exploring the possibilities of creating opera that might simultaneously find favour in England and appeal to theatres on the continent.This paper will consider The Wreckers as an essay in a cosmopolitan style, that simultaneously employed internationally recognised tropes of Englishness. Written between 1903 and 1905, The Wreckers speaks to Smyth’s interest both in French opera as exemplified by Bizet and Massenet and in elements of verismo. The Wreckers has largely been viewed in the context of English opera and this paper aims to re-situate Smyth’s most significant opera within her cosmopolitan milieu.