Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Winner of the 2024 H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award from the American Musicological Society

Recently, studies of opera, of print culture, and of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century have proliferated. This essay collection explores the multiple point of interaction among these fields. Past scholarship often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but these essays demonstrate that print and opera existed in a more complex symbiosis.

This collection embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays explore: how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles.

As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.

Christina Fuhrmann is Professor of Music at Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music and edits BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute. Her research has been published in venues such as The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Her book, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses, from Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge University Press, 2015) received the Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music, awarded biennially by the North American British Music Studies Association.

Alison Mero holds a PhD from Indiana University. Her research focuses on the discourse surrounding English-language opera in the nineteenth century. She has published in Notes and has an essay in Musicians of Bath and Beyond edited by Nicholas Temperley (Boydell, 2016). Currently she is executive managing editor at Clemson University Press where she acquires titles in music and manages production for all of Clemson’s academic books.