Italian Musical Migration to the British Isles

Location
The Dome - Bramall Music Building - University of Birmingham
Dates
Wednesday 10 April 2019 (09:15-18:00)

The study of migration and mobilities is crucial to the modern histories of Britain and Italy, particularly with respect to their complex artistic exchanges.

This one-day conference will shed light on this interdisciplinary field of investigation by focusing on Italian musical migration to the British Isles from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. It aims to provide a new critical overview of the diffusion of Italian singing culture and instrumental music in British theatres and concert halls, the migration of Italian-born musical professionals and entrepreneurs to the British Isles, and the publication of Italian scores by British publishers.

The long time period will help to create a sense of the profound impact of these musical transfers and networks on British politics and society, on the institutionalisation of national and regional identities in modern Europe, and on the development of Italian cultural diplomacy and colonialism following Unification (1861).

Invited speakers:

  • Susan Rutherford (University of Manchester) – Keynote
  • Alexandra Wilson (Oxford Brookes University)
  • Flora Willson (King’s College London)

Italian street musicians

Conveners:

  • Nicolò Palazzetti (Université de Strasbourg)
  • Ben Earle (University of Birmingham)

Programme committee:

  • Ben Earle (University of Birmingham)
  • Matthew Gardner (University of Tübingen)
  • Federica Nardacci (Royal College of Music)
  • Nicolò Palazzetti (Université de Strasbourg)
  • Rupert Ridgewell (British Library)
  • Amelie Roper (British Library)

The conveners would like to thank the Institute of Musical Research (Royal Holloway, University of London) and the Department of Music of the University of Birmingham for their financial and organisational support.

Conference programme

9.15 am – Registration and Welcome

9.45 am – Introduction

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10.00 am – Keynote
Susan Rutherford (University of Manchester)
Vocal Pedagogy and Italian Musical Migration, 17001950
Chair: Matthew Gardner (University of Tübingen) 

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11.00-11.30 am – Coffee break

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First Session
Chair: Ben Curry (University of Birmingham)

11.30 am – Anisha Netto (University of Southampton)
The Final Da Ponte Trilogy: Libretti for Peter (von) Winter, King’s Theatre, London, 18031804

12 noon – Judit Zsovár (Independent scholar)
In Favour with Queen and Nation: Giulia Grisi, the ‘Fugitive Norma’ in London

12.30 pm – Massimo Zicari (Conservatorio di Lugano)
Opera Reception and Cultural Stereotypes in Victorian London

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1.00-2.00 pm – Lunch 

Second Session
Chair: Colin Timms (University of Birmingham)

2.00 pm – Nicolò Palazzetti (Université de Strasbourg)
Italian Musical Migration to London in the Age of Diaspora

2.30 pm – Simone Laghi (Cardiff University)
Italian Chamber Music Compositions in London, 1765–1790: The Rise and Fall of a Repertoire

3.00 pm – Federica Nardacci (Royal College of Music)
Alberto Antonio Visetti: a Promoter of Italian Music in England

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3.30-4.00 pm – Tea break

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Third Session
Chair: Paul Rodmell (University of Birmingham)

4.00 pm – Flora Willson (King’s College)
Touring for Posterity: Falstaff, Manon Lescaut and the Italian Opera Tradition in 1894 London

4.30 pm – Alexandra Wilson (Oxford Brookes University)
Opera for the ‘Country Lout’: Italian Opera and the 1920s Battle of the Brows

5.00 pm – Andrew Holden (Oxford Brookes University)
A Slice of Operatic Life in the East End of London, 18801950

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5.30-6.00 pm – Closing Remarks

Abstracts

Susan Rutherford (University of Manchester)
Vocal Pedagogy and Italian Musical Migration, 17001950

My intention in this paper is to trace the emerging patterns across the period of both individuals and families of Italian singing teachers who settled (sometimes only briefly) in Britain, and explore their impact and influence on ideas of singing. Across the period, vocal technique was perceived as an intimate disclosure of ideas of national culture and identity. The new Italian style was thus the sound of italianità as much as it was a pragmatic mode of vocal production. Moreover, the physical migration made by the Italians in bringing such sounds to Britain required a corresponding act of intellectual and aesthetic journey-making from British singers, who found themselves required to absorb these new vocal techniques in order to compete effectively within the operatic marketplace. At the same time, the encounters between these two vocal cultures initiated debates about what constituted (or should constitute) an ‘English school of singing’: debates that would find particular purchase at the beginnings of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will concentrate on these specific temporal pressure points through examining the work of key Italian musicians resident in Britain during those times (Pier Francesco Tosi in the early 1700s, Domenico Corri, Gesualdo Lanza and Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari in the early 1800s, and Paolo Tosti in the early 1900s) and the degree to which they challenged or accommodated British vocal culture within their teaching of Italian style and technique.

Susan Rutherford is Professor of Music at the University of Manchester. Her publications include The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (co-editor, 1992), The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Verdi, Opera, Women (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and London Voices 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories (co-editor with Roger Parker, University of Chicago Press, 2019), as well as numerous essays on voice, performance, and nineteenth-century Italian opera. Her current project (funded by a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2016–2019) is entitled A History of Voices: Singing in Britain 1690 to the Present. 

Chair: Matthew Gardner (University of Tübingen)

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First Session 11.30 am
Chair: Ben Curry (University of Birmingham)

Anisha Netto (University of Southampton)
The Final Da Ponte Trilogy: Libretti for Peter (von) Winter, King’s Theatre, London, 18031804

Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), who is today perhaps most associated with the libretti he wrote for Mozart in the late 1780s, had a long and fascinating career that had in many ways just begun with his resounding success in Vienna. After leaving Vienna in 1792, he finally found a position at the King’s Theatre, London in late 1793. Over the course of the next twelve years at London’s Italian opera house, Da Ponte held the position of poet of the theatre until 1799, during which time he even had a short-lived renewed collaboration with Martín y Soler (1795). However, entanglement in the precarious finances of the Theatre part-owned and managed by William Taylor also meant that Da Ponte’s fortunes changed with Taylor’s, and from 1799 he was only loosely associated with the Theatre. By 1800, he was bankrupt, although he continued to work in London until 1804.

Amidst these dramatic circumstances surrounding the end of his stay in London, he wrote three libretti for the German composer Peter (von) Winter (1754–1825), Kapellmeister at Munich – La Grotta di Calipso (May 1803), Il Trionfo dell’Amor fraterno (March 1804) and Il Ratto di Proserpina (May 1804), which were to form the last of Da Ponte’s libretti. Although very favourably received in London, they never found mention in his extensive autobiography, Memorie (1823–29), and have not yet been studied in detail. In this paper, I propose to contextualise the Winter–Da Ponte trilogy with respect to the repertoire and performers at King’s Theatre and to examine its initial reception in order to critically analyse the various levels and layers of cultural transfer involved in producing Italian opera for the London stage. In a broader context, I shall also briefly look at the revivals and translated forms in which these works were circulated in the continent.

Anisha Netto is currently a PhD student at the Department of Music, University of Southampton, and holds a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities for Languages. Her doctoral research focuses on the late eighteenth century German translations of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Viennese libretti, their reception and subsequent implications on the Singspiel as practice as opposed to genre, within the broader framework of cultural transfer.

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Judit Zsovár (Independent scholar)
In Favour with Queen and Nation: Giulia Grisi, the ‘Fugitive Norma’ in London

Giulia Grisi (1811–1869), the first Adalgisa in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma (Milan 1831), broke her Italian contract and left for Paris in 1832. There she became prima donna under Gioachino Rossini at the Théâtre Italien and starred inter alia as Semiramide (Semiramide 1832) and Elvira (I Puritani 1835). In addition, she made her London debut in 1834, replacing Maria Malibran in the young Victoria’s eyes and ears with her singing, acting, and flawless beauty, especially in the operas of the future Queen’s favourite, Bellini.

Grisi also excelled in dramatic roles such as Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Rossini’s Desdemona, yet her real goal was to conquer Giuditta Pasta’s throne by embodying Norma: she first performed the role in London in 1835, and then in almost every season until 1861. Despite her success, she was unjustly attacked for copying Pasta, as established by Thomas G. Kaufman. Bellini himself likewise misjudged her, stating that the ‘elevated characters she doesn’t understand, doesn’t feel, because she has neither the instinct nor the education to sustain them with the nobility and the lofty style they demand. [...] In Norma she will be a nonentity; [...] the role of Adalgisa is the only one suited to her character’. Nonetheless, even hostile critics like Henry F. Chorley had to acknowledge that ‘Her Norma, doubtless her grandest performance, [...] was an improvement on the model [i.e. Pasta]; [...] there was in it the wild ferocity of the tigress, but a certain frantic charm therewith, which carried away the hearer – nay, which possibly belongs to the true reading of the character’.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Grisi’s London reception in its complexity: to unfold not only its musical and artistic, but also its social factors, primarily in the context of her Norma performances. 

Soprano and musicologist, Judit Zsovár gained her doctorate at the Liszt Academy Budapest in 2017 with a dissertation on Anna Maria Strada and has published inter alia in the Händel-Jahrbuch. Her other research field is bel canto singing with particular interest in the soprano sfogato voice. She collaborates on the ‘Viennese Kärntnertortheater’ project (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and assists Reinhard Strohm with the edition of Scipione for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe.

Judit studied singing with Marek Rzepka as well as coach Stephen Hopkins (Vienna State Opera) and participated in masterclasses with eminent artists. She was member of the Erkel Chamber Opera and appeared at the Vienna Konzerthaus (Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg/Bolton), the Helsinki Music Centre, the Nádor- and the Liszt halls (Budapest); among her future engagements is a recital at the Handel House in London (2019). Judit has been awarded the Handel Institute Research and Conference grants, the DAAD, the Zoltán Kodály and Hungarian state scholarships.

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Massimo Zicari (Conservatorio di Lugano)
Opera Reception and Cultural Stereotypes in Victorian London

The story of Giuseppe Verdi’s reception in Victorian London begins in 1845, with the first performance of Ernani, and unfolds chronologically until the premiere of Falstaff at Covent Garden in 1894. In the period spanning the years 1845–1894, Verdi came to be understood not only as the most influential representative of Italian opera worldwide, but also as the symbol of a musical tradition that was said to be in a constant state of decline. This tradition would long be qualified by a number of musical and cultural stereotypes. In other words, at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was still understood as the country whose very language was music, and where the gondolieri chanted the stanzas of Tasso to self-invented tunes. It was the country where singing came natural even to the uneducated, and opera-goers cherished their favorite diva to the point of dragging her carriage home and serenading her until sunrise. At the end of the century, Italy still was the ‘land of song’, whatever hid behind those words.

Conversely, Victorian culture was dominated by the urge to give English music a fresh start after a long dark age initiated by Handel and characterized by the hegemony of Italian opera. A journal like The Musical World, for instance, was clearly conservative and its proselytism in favour of English national music stemmed from James Davison’s (its editor) personal beliefs, a circumstance that resulted in a general hostility towards foreign musicians.

By exploring the response of the London press to the invasion of Verdi’s operas in Victorian London, this paper tries to shed some light on the cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices that may have accompanied the reception of Italian music at large in nineteenth-century London

Massimo Zicari, PhD, is Deputy Head of Research at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, where he also teaches music history since 2005. In 2009 he was Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research (IMR) for a project concerning the reception of Verdi’s operas in London. His research focuses mainly on opera production and reception and his most recent publication in this domain is a 2016 monograph on Verdi in Victorian London. His research areas include also the historically informed performance practice of Italian opera (‘Expressive Tempo Modifications in Adelina Patti’s Recordings’, Empirical Musicology Review 12: 1–2 [2017]). He takes an interest also in the investigation of music teaching and pedagogy (J. MacRitchie, M. Zicari, and D. Blom, ‘Identifying challenges and opportunities for student composer and performer peer learning through newly-composed classical piano scores’, British Journal of Music Education 35: 2 [2018]).

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Second Session 2.00 pm
Chair: Colin Timms (University of Birmingham)

Nicolò Palazzetti (Université de Strasbourg)
Italian Musical Migration to London in the Age of Diaspora

Thirteen million Italians left their country between 1880 and 1915, pioneering the creation of a ‘global nation’ (Mark I. Choate). Recent scholarship has emphasised the impact of this artistic and intellectual diaspora on the construction of Italian national identity, from unification (1861) to the establishment of Fascist imperialism (1936). This paper, based on an archival research carried out at the Royal College of Music and the British Library, focuses on the Italian musical migration to London from the late Victorian era (ca. 1860) to the Edwardian era (ca. 1910).

Though most Italians came to the British Isles from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as economic migrants from the mountainous and southerly regions of Italy, there had been educated Italian expatriates in Britain since the Renaissance (such as the navigator John Cabot or later the patriot Giuseppe Mazzini). It is well known that from the beginning of the eighteenth century Italian musicians played a major role in the Georgian society. During the Victorian era, despite a relative lack of scholarly research, new generations of Italian musicians moved to London, acquiring a highly recognised social status. It is worth noting that, during this period, many Italian economic migrants also made a living in Britain as street musicians and organ grinders.

Nicolò Palazzetti is a musicologist and cultural historian. In 2017, Nicolò completed a doctoral thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) on the reception of Béla Bartók in Italy. Since January 2019, Nicolò works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the LabEx GREAM of the Université de Strasbourg, studying the impact of the Web on operatic music and culture. From September 2017 to December 2018, Nicolò served as a Teaching Fellow in Music at the University of Birmingham (UK).

Palazzetti’s articles and reviews have been published in English, French and Italian in Analitica, Archival Notes, Dissonance, Il Saggiatore Musicale, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Revue de Musicologie, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Transposition. Since July 2018, Nicolò is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Musical Research (IMR/Royal Holloway).

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Simone Laghi (Cardiff University)
Italian Chamber Music Compositions in London (1765–1790): The Rise and Fall of a Repertoire

The social and economic dimensions of the late eighteenth-century Italian chamber music have stood in relative obscurity in comparison to its Viennese contemporary, and suffered neglect both in the academic environment and in the concert hall. The intent of this paper is to re-evaluate this repertoire with particular reference to string quartets and trios, in order to define them as a separate branch of the genre with its specific features, and not merely as a by-product of the Mitteleuropean tradition.

The Italian string quartet flourished in the early history of the genre (roughly from 1765 to 1790). In these years, a number of quartet publications appeared in major European centres like Paris, London and Amsterdam. These populous cities were characterised by a common condition: a lively publishing market that fulfilled the increasing demand from members of the local aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie. At the same time, Italy was neither a market nor a lively publishing place, and therefore local musicians took every chance to seek their fortune abroad. The Italian string quartet especially flourished in London, where it found a comfortable nest in private salons. The main reasons of its success were the presence of an active publishing market, an enthusiastic demand for Italian music and the consequent presence of a large number of composers and performers revolving around the opera environment. The interest in this repertoire diminished from 1790 onward, with the arrival of Haydn in London and the subsequent diffusion of the Austro–Germanic repertoire, mainly represented by the triad Haydn–Mozart–Beethoven.

The main intent of my research is to promote this repertoire and to make it accessible for performers, scholars and chamber music enthusiasts.

Simone Laghi studied Early Music at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where he graduated in Violin in Lucy van Dael’s class. Particularly interested in the eighteenth-century Italian repertoire, he published and recorded works by Pietro Nardini, Ferdinando Bertoni, Bartolomeo Campagnoli, Emanuele Barbella and others. In 2017 he completed a PhD in Performance at Cardiff University. He is Artistic Director of Ensemble Symposium and he is also active as freelance viola player with major European ensembles such as Europa Galante, I Barocchisti, Arte dell’Arco, Modo Antiquo. Since 2018 he is Artistic Secretary of Theresia Youth Orchestra (Lodi, Italy), a mentoring program for young professional performers specialised in classical repertoire. 

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Federica Nardacci (Royal College of Music)
Alberto Antonio Visetti: A Promoter of Italian Music in England

Alberto Antonio Visetti, born in Dalmatia in 1846 to an Italian father and an English mother, grew up and had his musical education in Italy, studying at the Milan Conservatoire. He moved to England in 1871 and became a British citizen in 1880, as Albert Anthony Visetti.

He established himself in the local musical environment as a highly respected singer and conductor. He taught at the National Training School, forerunner of the Royal College of Music, where he became singing teacher in 1883. While in England, he never lost his relation with Italy and his ‘mission’ seemed to create a musical connection between these two countries, which he felt to belong to in equal way. One of his first attempts to promote English music and culture in Italy was the translation of John Pike Hullah’s The History of Modern Music in 1878; this was followed by many other translations of English musical texts.

Nevertheless, one of the most important achievements of Visetti was the creation of a consistent musical exchange between the Royal College of Music and the Bologna Conservatoire, managing to throw the Directors of the two institutions together: Sir Huber Parry and Giuseppe Martucci. This connection led to the performance (and, therefore, the promotion) of English music in Italy – at that time completely absent in Italian theatres – and to the introduction of Italian symphonic repertoire in England, where it was completely overshadowed by operatic culture. Some epistolary documents related to Visetti, held at the Royal College of Music, testify to the origin and development of this remarkable musical initiative.  

Federica Nardacci is a pianist, musicologist and writer. She is Assistant Librarian at the Royal College of Music and a member of the music association Recercare (Rome) and of the Royal Academy of Music. Federica has been manager at the Istituto di Bibliografia musicale (Rome) and curator of the ‘Goffredo Petrassi’ Archive in Latina (Italy), publishing a number of articles on Petrassi’s correspondence.

She contributes to BBC concerts and Proms and to Italian and British magazines, such as Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana and Opera. Her interviews with well-known contemporary composers and musicians (including Ennio Morricone and Charles Rosen) are now collected in the book Universi Sonori (2014).

Federica’s research is now focused on the renaissance of Italian instrumental music in the second half of the nineteenth century and she is editing a book on Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909), one of the protagonists of that renaissance.

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Third Session 4.00 pm
Chair: Paul Rodmell (University of Birmingham)

Flora Willson (King’s College London)
Touring for Posterity: Falstaff, Manon Lescaut and the Italian Opera Tradition in 1894 London

On Monday 14 May 1894, a new season opened at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The venue – previously known as the Royal Italian Opera – had assumed its current name only two years earlier in a change that was the most obvious symptom of a move towards a more international operatic outlook spearheaded by the company’s manager, Sir Augustus Harris. His new season nevertheless opened with two high-profile Italian debuts: first, that of the young Giacomo Puccini, with his third opera, Manon Lescaut; second, five days later, the keenly anticipated first London performance of Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff.

This paper examines the circumstances of and critical response to these two much-discussed performances as a means to address the cultural capital and historiographical status of Italian opera in London, at the end of the century in which it had arguably been the hegemonic cultural form. The Italian world premieres of Manon and Falstaff only eight days apart in February 1893 – a coincidence overseen by their publisher Giovanni Ricordi – have long proved a provocative moment for commentators and scholars alike, gesturing perhaps toward what Michele Girardi has called a ‘passing of the mantle’ from Verdi to Puccini. My paper interrogates this putative staging of continuity – and of Italy’s continued operatic dominance – in the context of London’s distinctly international operatic landscape in the 1890s: a landscape in which Ricordi enjoyed a major commercial and aesthetic foothold as a publisher and ‘influencer’; but which must ultimately be understood in a still broader context, as a node in a late-nineteenth-century transnational network of operatic centres. 

Flora Willson is a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. Her research primarily concerns the place of opera in nineteenth-century urban history and culture. She has published in journals including 19th-Century MusicCambridge Opera JournalMusic & Letters and Opera Quarterly as well as in various edited collections; and she is writing a book about networks in operatic culture in 1890s London, Paris and New York. She is also the current Review Editor for Cambridge Opera Journal, has produced a critical edition of Donizetti’s 1840 grand opera Les martyrs (Ricordi, 2015), occasionally writes about music for The Guardian and is a regular guest on BBC Radio 3 and Royal Opera House Live broadcasts. 

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Alexandra Wilson (Oxford Brookes University)
Opera for the ‘Country Lout’: Italian Opera and the 1920s Battle of the Brows

A hard-fought battle took place during the 1920s about whether various forms of culture were ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’, or that newly invented thing, ‘middlebrow’. The so-called ‘battle of the brows’ has been widely discussed from the literary perspective but has, until recently, attracted little attention from musical scholars. The debate about where opera sat on the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum (and the answer was by no means a clear-cut one) coalesced around a range of topics: the make-up of the audience for opera; the places where opera was performed; the extent to which opera was interacting with various forms of popular culture; opera singers as celebrities; and the types of opera being performed. All of these discussions were infused with anxieties about national identity.

Through an examination of the diffusion and reception of Italian opera in 1920s Britain, this paper considers where this particular repertory sat in the interwar discussions about cultural hierarchies and taste formation. Italian opera was extremely popular with 1920s audiences and at the heart of the contemporary repertory, but nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Italian works and composers came in for much condemnation from self-appointed highbrow critics. (The response to much older Italian repertory, such as the newly rediscovered oeuvre of Monteverdi, was different.) Underpinning such prejudices were long-standing anxieties about Italian opera’s modularity, its collaborative model of production, its failure to conform to Romantic notions of the lone artistic genius, and its historic associations with an unthinking sector of ‘Society’. But there were other nationalistically driven facets to the discussion too: the problems for British singers in performing roles perceived to be so profoundly at odds with the national character; a deep suspicion of ‘passionate love let loose’. Finally, this paper will also consider responses to the Italian singers who performed in Britain during this period.

Alexandra Wilson is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of three books: The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press); Opera: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld); and Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (Oxford University Press), the latter funded by a mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy. She has recently completed the manuscript of a book about La bohème (under review for the OUP Oxford Keynotes series) and holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the period 2018–2021, during which she will work on a large-scale project about the opera and elitism stereotype. At Oxford Brookes, Alexandra co-directs the OBERTO Opera Research Unit with Dr Barbara Eichner. She can regularly be heard discussing opera on BBC Radio 3 and has published articles in BBC Music Magazine, Opera magazine, and The Times and The Guardian online.

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Andrew Holden (Oxford Brookes University)
A Slice of Operatic Life in the East End of London, 18801950

On a bright spring day in 1928 Queen Mary emerged from a theatre in Bethnal Green, East London, through a guard of honour formed by Neapolitan peasants, having been treated to a performance of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci by the Oxford House Settlement Choral Society. This unlikely scene illuminates a neglected space in which Italian opera thrived in England from the late nineteenth century until after the Second World War. Scholarship on the circulation of Italian opera beyond Covent Garden and the West End in this period has focused predominantly on places outside London. Yet the rapid eastward expansion of London during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including waves of Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants, stimulated an explosion of musical activity including street performance, institutional societies, music halls and theatres where Italian opera was given in a range of concert and staged settings.

Paternalist initiatives promoted the arts as an instrument to improve the condition of working people, and offer leisure opportunities to the aspiring classes of East London away from the West End. The Drapers Company’s foundation of the People’s Palace in 1887 created opportunities for operatic performance which brought together philanthropist volunteers and local people for performances which attracted people from across the new suburbs stretching beyond the Mile End Road. These included from as early as 1893 ‘costume recitals’ of ‘scenes from popular Italian operas’, and later regular seasons by the main touring Italian opera companies.

This paper will use archive sources from a range of institutions alongside literary and musical periodicals and local press to suggest ways in which Italian opera was viewed, in relation to native and other foreign repertoire, and what this operatic slice of life reveals about popular ideas of italianità in East London across this period.

Andrew Holden is currently finishing a PhD at Oberto, the opera research unit at Oxford Brookes University, ‘Opera Avanti a Dio! Religion and Opera in Liberal Italy’. In 2017 he organised and co-hosted ‘Opera in the East End’ in partnership with Queen Mary, University of London, an interdisciplinary workshop on operatic cultures in the East End of London, including a Witness Seminar on the London Opera Centre and a semi-staged performance of Erwartung (Schöneberg) and Twice through the Heart (Turnage) by Shadwell Opera in the Octagon of the People’s Palace. His publications include Makers and Manners: Politics and Morality in Post-war Britain (Politico, 2005).