Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and its Aftermath 1789-1795 - Hardcover

Milhous, Judith; Dideriksen, Gabriella; Hume, Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198167164 ISBN 13: 9780198167167

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Following on from the volume on The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 (published in 1995), this interdisciplinary study of opera and ballet now turns to London's Pantheon Opera during the period 1789-95. The Pantheon Opera, founded in 1790, aimed to give London a kind of court opera that would feature opera seria and ballet d'action. It tried to hire Mozart to compete with Haydn, but its high aspirations led only to a quick bankruptcy. A recent major archival discovery has permitted startlingly full analysis of the company's repertoire, costumes, staging practices, and finances.

About this title

About the Author:

Gabriella Didericksen graduated from the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and subsequently received her Ph.D. from Kings College, London in 1997. She currently holds an AHRB research Fellowship at the University of Southampton, working on aspects of Mozart reception in the nineteenth century, and is also engaged in writing a book on opera at Covent Garden, 1830-1880.

Robert D. Hume received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and taught at Cornell University. He is currently Evan Pugh Professor of English Literature at the Pennsylvania State University.

Judith Milhous received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1974 and taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Maryland prior to joining the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York, Graduate Centre, where she is now Distinguished Professor.

Review:

"Milhous, Dideriksen, and Hume produced a monumental piece of scholarship that begins to fill a large lacuna in publications on British opera. ... Not only a profoundly detailed history of the Pantheon theatre and opera in late eighteenth-century London, this volume also serves as a valuable reference source for any studies related to eighteenth-century British theatre. Milhous, Dideriksen, and Hume have provided a wealth of information replete with details from archival sources and the most complete picture of the Pantheon theatre yet published."--The Opera Journal

"Not only are the authors undaunted by the strange and devious managerial practices that this host of previously unexplored documents reveals, they revel in them...[A] narrative that is usually enlightening and often entertaining, peppered as it is with the kind of colourful and colloquial prose one is unaccustomed to in archival studies...This is, on the factual-analytical level at least, the kind of broad-spectrum work that opera studies so badly needs. It is a reference work to which scholars in the field will long have recourse."--Journal of the Royal Musical Association

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0198167164
• ISBN 13: 9780198167167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 928