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Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini by Christina Fuhrmann

2019; Music Library Association; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2019.0043

1534-150X

Lee V. Chambers,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini by Christina Fuhrmann Lee Chambers Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini. By Christina Fuhrmann. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xi, 262 p. ISBN 9781107022218 (hardback), $103; ISBN 9781108722117 (paperback), $27.99; ISBN 9781316348871 (e-book), $77.50.] Music examples, appendices, bibliography, index. Musical and theatrical scholarship on opera in recent decades has turned to both dissemination (Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas, eds. [Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2006]; Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures, Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson, eds. [Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011]) and canon formation (Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music [Oxford: Clarendon, 1992]; William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology [Oxford: Clarendon, 1996]). By highlighting the political nature of operatic programming, these studies brought to light the ideological contexts of operatic canons and institutions as well as a variety of responses to those ideologies in new contexts. Christina Fuhrmann's new study considers canon formation in conjunction with the ideological concerns of new contexts themselves, foregrounding the role of early nineteenth-century London theaters in the construction of both an operatic canon and the interrelated, work-oriented concept of "faithfulness" in opera production. While making her way through specifics of execution and critical reception, Fuhrmann positions the importation of foreign-composed operas within "debates about repertoire, class and nationalism" (p. 2) that pitted performer against author, playhouse against opera house, native taste against foreign style, and immediate response against the ideal of transcendency. Introducing foreign opera to London audiences often required revision, translation, and alteration ranging in degree from pastiche to what Fuhrmann considers more faithful adaptations (versions in which libretto and score remain largely in line with the original). Regarding cultural changes catalyzed by these altered versions of the operas, Fuhrmann argues that the process of adaptation contributed to the emerging concept of the canon by gradually shifting focus to validity in interpretation. [End Page 670] This shift provided a source for critical debates about the "nature and desirability" of that fidelity and served the "rhetoric of canonicity" (p. 2). These adaptations were the primary means by which native audiences came to know foreign operas, and with familiarity they bridged divides between national and more exotic tastes while breaking down "repertoire boundaries" within the often class-bound venues: the "major theatre, minor theatre and opera house" (p. 15). Toward this end, the book's central narrative outlines debates on fidelity, the rise of canonic thinking, and the cultural-political climates entangled with the progression of these ideas. Chapter 1 juxtaposes contrasting approaches by examining two 1814 versions of Adrien Boieldieu's Jean de Paris: one at Drury Lane (which liberally modified the libretto and replaced musical numbers entirely) and one at Covent Garden (which included cuts and interpolations in service of English tastes while taking steps to preserve as much of the original text and music as possible). Fuhrmann compares these productions in order to spatialize historical progression, with the Drury Lane performance representing an older approach to staging foreign opera and the Covent Garden venue as a "'halfway house' on the road to greater musical refinement and hence fidelity" (p. 38). Chapter 2 furthers this line of inquiry into the relationship between critical reception, degrees of adaptation, and assessments of native taste by comparing Henry Bishop's versions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's operas Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni and Gioacchino Rossini's Il barbieri di Siviglia at both Covent Garden and the King's Theatre from 1817 to 1819. She demonstrates the influence of audiences' familiarity with other versions of the tales, social appraisal of Mozart over Rossini, and critics' desire to "improve" taste on the balance of adaptation and fidelity in these productions. In chapter 3, Fuhrmann positions the 1824 success of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz—with eight versions of varying faithfulness to the original—and subsequent commission of Weber's Oberon as turning points in operatic...