Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel ed. by Colin Timms and Bruce Wood

2019; Music Library Association; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2019.0022

1534-150X

David Hunter,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel ed. by Colin Timms and Bruce Wood David Hunter Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel. Edited by Colin Timms and Bruce Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. [xv, 268 p. ISBN 9781107154643 (hardback), $99.99; ISBN 9781108124973 (e-book), $80.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In the decades to come, the challenges of climate change—wildfires, rising sea levels, atmospheric pollution, resource depletion and heightened [End Page 513] competition for what remains, waste disposal, species extinction, civil strife—might make the time before the application of fossil fuels to human endeavor seem Edenic. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England and elsewhere lacked steam engines, effective pumps, the spinning jenny, and other marvels of what has come to be called the Industrial Revolution. But Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel put their talents to use alongside slave trading and the development of plantations in the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard of North America on land seized from the indigenes. In 1720, Handel invested in the Royal African Company (Britain's official slave-trading company), which was led at that time by his patron James Brydges, Duke of Chandos. The slave economy (as it has come to be called) comprised not only the forced transportation of Africans to the New World but also the domestic consumption of sugar, tobacco, rice, and other commodities produced by slave labor as well as the businesses in such sectors as shipping, shipbuilding, insurance, and the manufacture of trade goods and luxury items. Not such an Eden after all. The authors and editors of Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel are under no obligation to consider the broad social context of the dramatic art works they examine, but in not doing so they risk a charge of dilettantism, an art-for-art's-sake foray into the minutiae of sources, characters, and aesthetic judgments. Perhaps as a way of avoiding that charge, all but one of the authors invokes the audience, the fourth element (and least regarded) of the theatrical world, the efforts of authors and composers, impresarios, and performers typically receiving the lion's share of scholarly attention. In fact, the travails of impresarios are not to be found in this volume, and neither are the vocalizations of performers. Famous castrati such as Nicolini and Senesino and female sopranos such as Francesca Cuzzoni and Margherita Durastanti go unmentioned. The focus is on composers and the authors of the texts they set. Google tells me that forty-six instances of "audience" or its plural are to be found in the book. (The index is limited to personal and place names and work titles.) That many of the instances could be rewritten to eliminate mention of the audience without loss of understanding suggests that the term is being deployed as a fig leaf. Not only does its use imply real world issues are at stake (attendees thought and did such and such), it also disguises the embarrassing truth that we know far less about the actual audiences at theatrical performances than we care to admit. We learn nothing of audiences but only what our authors consider that they might have known, appreciated, or thought. Even the chapter that avoids summoning "the audience," Wolfgang Hirschmann's "The British Enchanters and George Granville's Theory of Opera," comes close as he resorts to the locution "the English" when summarizing Silke Leopold's view of the supposedly strong resistance by London audiences to sung dialogue (p. 39). Two chapters that could reasonably have been expected to abjure audiences, Peter Brown's "Ombre mai fu: Shades of Greece and Rome in the Librettos for Handel's London Operas" and Reinhard Strohm's "Handel and the Uses of Antiquity," turn out to have the most mentions! If textual criticism based on close reading is the goal, then recourse to imagined audience opinion, knowledge, or need is unnecessary. The chapters in Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel had their initial public hearing at the "Purcell, Handel and Literature" conference held at Senate House, University of London, 19–21 November 2009. Several...