London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories

London Voices, 1820–1840

London Voices, 1820–1840

Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories

Edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67018-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67021-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226670218.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Parker, Roger, 1951– editor. | Rutherford, Susan, editor.

Title: London voices, 1820–1840 : vocal performers, practices, histories / edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016539 | ISBN 9780226670188 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226670218 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—England—London—19th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML286.8.L5 L65 2019 | DDC 780.9421/09034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016539

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

INTRODUCTION

London Voices 1820–1840: A Luminous Guide

Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

CHAPTER 1

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her Woice

Oskar Cox Jensen

CHAPTER 2

The Traffic in Voices: The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzini’s London

Mary Ann Smart

CHAPTER 3

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)

Claudio Vellutini

CHAPTER 4

The Castrato as Creator: Velluti’s Voice in the London Sheet-Music Market

Sarah Fuchs

CHAPTER 5

The Essence of Nine Trombones: Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London

Sarah Hibberd

CHAPTER 6

Adelaide Kemble and the Voice as Means

Matildie Thom Wium

CHAPTER 7

On Tongues and Ears: Divine Voices in the Modern Metropolis

James Grande

CHAPTER 8

From Dissent to Community: The Sacred Harmonic Society and Amateur Choral Singing in London

Wiebke Thormählen

CHAPTER 9

Foreign Voices, Performing Frenchness: Jenny Colon and the French Plays in London

Kimberly White

CHAPTER 10

Singer for the Million: Henry Russell, Popular Song, and the Solo Recital

Susan Rutherford

CHAPTER 11

Vessels of Flame: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Improviser’s Voice

Melina Esse

CHAPTER 12

Silver Fork Novels and the Place of Voice

Cormac Newark

CHAPTER 13

Voice Boxes

Ellen Lockhart

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Index

• INTRODUCTION •

London Voices 1820–1840

A Luminous Guide

Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

The Luminous Guide in our title comes from a publication whose frontispiece deserves, even demands, its own indented space:

Leigh’s New Picture Of London; Or, A View Of The Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral State Of The British Metropolis; Presenting A Luminous Guide To The Stranger, On All Subjects Connected With General Information, Business, Or Amusement. To Which Are Subjoined A Description Of The Environs, And A Plan For Viewing London In Eight Days.¹

Assembled and published by the bookseller Samuel Leigh in 1839, this volume was the latest (and last) in a series of travel guides to London first published in 1818. As the spectacularly loquacious title suggests, it set out to provide a painstakingly comprehensive introduction to the city for the tourist or other temporary resident: places to go, people to see, experiences to be savoured. Above all, the book promised its readers a way to make sense of the city—literally to make newly legible a space that was becoming notoriously bewildering even for those who considered themselves natives. Leigh’s publication was, in other words, a practical way of counteracting the overwhelming sense that Thomas De Quincey had identified some years earlier in a famous essay. Encased in a coach flying towards the metropolis, De Quincey had figured London as some kind of monstrous planet, an attracting body, gathering to it the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes; he concluded that the coming metropolis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense of his own utter insignificance . . . a poor shivering unit in the aggregate of human life.² The sense of a gathering storm, even of an approaching quasi-biblical apocalypse, is palpable: small wonder that Leigh needed to proclaim, and loudly, the all-inclusiveness of his luminous approach.

In some respects, the present collection attempts a feat similar to Leigh’s, if with no claim to his compendiousness. But the first part of our title establishes a very different metaphorical ground. While Leigh’s ways of understanding the metropolis are, in common with old Enlightenment terms, resolutely concerned with the visual, we want instead to understand by means of sound, and particularly by means of voice. Such a concentration is in one sense obviously liberating, as would be any sense of clearing the metaphorical air; but such beckoning freedoms as always come with certain constraints. It is clear, for example, that our idea of London voices carries with it some ambiguity. Most obviously, it suggests voice as a noun, thus gesturing to the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues in the city during two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. These were years in which the city’s population expansion was at a height, and when, as a result, different classes were placed in dangerous but—at least to later eyes—culturally fruitful proximity; in which ideas of political and social Reform were constantly in the air, but barely managed to keep in check the forces of unrest that had periodically erupted in London’s great rival capital across the Channel; in which Londoners ignored or even stubbornly resisted the infrastructural changes (in local government, in sanitation, in transportation regulation) that were being proposed with increasing urgency and that would, a few decades later, mark the beginning of a more efficiently networked, more ruthlessly rationalized metropolis.³ To put this more simply, it would be vain to assume that those London voices could ever sing in mutually reinforcing harmony, let alone in a resounding unison.

Equally important for us, though, is that the idea of London voices can also embrace a more active sense: the notion that envoicing a city might be an important step, following an increasing trend in the humanities, towards understanding through attention to sounding communication rather than our habitual visual metaphors. According to this usage, London during these two decades might be supposed, through its inhabitants, its visitors, and its institutions, to voice itself, to proclaim its cultural identity, its sonic apprehensions of existing traditions and the stirrings of modernity. We might, that is, perceive its reluctant but gradual embrace of sounding difference. Wordsworth’s famous sonnet of 1802, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, is interesting in this regard. The poet famously anthropomorphized the city:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

There are, of course, no voices here except the poet’s implied lyric I: necessarily for Wordsworth’s project in the sonnet, the metropolis is immersed in silence, subsumed metaphorically within the natural in order to become sublime.⁴ Three decades on, though, with Wordsworth’s Romantic project in steep decline,⁵ it is possible to argue that London was most authentically itself precisely through its noisiness, its unruly concatenation of voices. Attempts to reduce it to order were, for the present, vague and incoherent: its confusion of sounds resonated richly within its crowded streets.

Above all, though, a concentration on voice means a concentration on human subjects, and thus the possibility of including within one’s purview people of many types and stations. This is certainly part of the reason that the notion of voice has taken such a prominent position in today’s humanities, perhaps particularly in musicology: because it allows (or, some would say, offers the illusion of) a seemingly closer alignment with something loosely called politics.⁶ In engaging with this movement, our essays thus aim to offer a challenging new delineation—or, perhaps better, articulation—of the vocal resonances of the epoch. As James Davies points out in a recent colloquy, voices always belong, and in the following essays they belong in a material sense to specific individuals (personalities and bodies), communities, social conditions, locations, geographies, historical zones, theories and practices, and systems of belief. They manifest privilege and disempowerment; they articulate emotions and ideas with varying levels of coherence; and they were heard or ignored by diverse listeners. Their unifying feature is that they belong to London, demonstrating a sample of the multiplicity of voices that sounded in the city during the early decades of the nineteenth century.⁷

Like Leigh’s New Picture of London, our essays thus strive to touch on a good number of those Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral issues that occupied the city, and do so via a broad array of methodological approaches and topics, many of which would have made unusual bedfellows only a few years in musicology’s past.

One aim of this introduction is thus to sketch some of the peripheries bounding our period and place. We can once again be aided by Leigh’s New Picture. The earliest version of his travel guide, published in 1818, had a slightly different title:

Leigh’s New Picture of London; or, a View of the Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, and Moral State of The British Metropolis: presenting a Brief and Luminous Guide to the Stranger on all subjects connected with General Information, Business or Amusement. Embellished with upwards of One Hundred Elegant Engravings of Royal Palaces, and Public Buildings of all Descriptions in London and its Environs; also A CORRECT PLAN OF LONDON.⁸

The original claim of brevity ("a Brief and Luminous Guide) was later abandoned, as was the emphasis on Royal Palaces, perhaps underlining the fact that metropolitan attractions had by 1839 come to encompass a much wider and more socially inclusive range of enticements. Also abandoned was the initial intention of providing a CORRECT PLAN" of London, perhaps reflecting the fact that by the 1830s the city was changing at such a rate as to defy such aspirations in a volume of this kind. For our purposes, though, the most important difference between the two volumes concerns its treatment of music.

In the 1818 version, music is largely confined to a description of the major theatres and, prominent within them, an extended list of the most well-known British voices of the day:

In the singing department, many of our native performers unite with fine and powerful voices no common portion of science. Mrs Billington, Mr Braham, Mrs Mountain, Mrs Bland, Mrs Dickons, Miss Kelly, Mrs Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss Matthews, Mr Incledon (lately embarked for America), Mr Philipps, Mr Bellamy, Mr Sinclair, and Mr Broadhurst, are justly admired and have acquired much professional fame.⁹

In several respects this is a curious inventory. Two of the singers could not have been heard by London visitors: Elizabeth Billington, although commonly regarded as the most accomplished soprano the nation had yet produced, and with some success in Italy to further enhance her reputation, had retired from the stage in 1811 (Leigh’s Guide was presumably published just before her death in August 1818 in Venice); Charles Incledon was indeed in the middle of a lucrative tour in the United States.¹⁰ The inclusion of Billington and Incledon here speaks to an important and oft-reported aspect of the British stage in the early nineteenth century: the comparative lack of British singers of high calibre.¹¹ Intriguing too is the insistence—in the reference to no common portion of science—that the abilities of British singers combined vocal quality with technique: intriguing because they tended to have a less than flattering reputation with regard to the latter. Significantly, however, this puffery for the capital’s handful of singers is followed by an emphasis on London’s cosmopolitan provision of music. In particular, the opportunities for hearing excellent music sung by some of Europe’s finest (albeit unnamed) singers had supposedly never been better:

The musical votary never had the means of gratifying his taste with a higher relish than at the present period. New compositions of considerable merit daily issue from the press. The list of vocal performers comprises the names of some of the first singers in Europe; and the instrumental performers are no less celebrated. The British bands, in general, exhibit specimens of the highest taste and manual skill.

And in case readers tempted by this array of musical wares were nonetheless hesitant about finding themselves in the notoriously rough environs of London theatres, assurances were also forthcoming about a new moral probity among professional artists, as illustrated by the various marriages between aristocracy and stage performers.

In short, the tone here is deliberately sanitizing, the equivalent, perhaps, of Rudolph Ackermann’s ever-tidy, politely peopled vistas of the capital in his Microcosm of London series (three volumes, 1808–10). The only seeming stumbling block was that the magnificence and grandeur of the two main theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden) was offset by their vast size, which compromised the convenience of seeing and hearing—and made the provision of a suitably astonishing spectacle (and thus seat prices) very expensive. Nonetheless, this part of the guide finishes with a flourish of confidence in London’s musical cornucopia: The talents of the vocal and instrumental performers at the opera and concerts are unrivalled; and probably no city in Europe possesses a place of public amusement more brilliant and magnificent than Vauxhall.

The sunny optimism of this first guide is somewhat clouded in later editions. True, the much-expanded summary in the 1839 version begins promisingly, declaring that there had been a decided improvement in the public taste for music; but the account immediately then takes a turn for the worse with the statement that the science and feeling of professors appear to have retrograded. The first claim is substantiated by the enormous patronage music now received, demonstrating that while it was true that we have by no means the same taste or feeling for the art as the Italians or Germans . . . to say that we are utterly destitute of either, is an insult to common sense and to nature.¹² Yet the increase in audiences or in the enjoyment of music more generally had not been matched by a concomitant development in composition and performance, both of which are said to have deteriorated:

The quality of music, however, is but little considered: and it is viewed more as an innocent pastime than as a scientific attainment and an intellectual gratification. We seldom hear of a truly English original opera, although the last few seasons have been more prolific, but are harassed with cramped imitations of foreign works, produced with infinite labour, little skill, and less effect.¹³

Echoing innumerable publications of the time, particularly those specifically dedicated to music, the guide blames this state of affairs on an imperfect understanding of the finer points of the art, those gained through extensive training: British composers were arrangers of pretty melodies rather than authors of elaborate and scientific works, unable to compete effectively with foreign talent, so decidedly superior to our own in this respect.¹⁴ This, of course, was a reference to the pasticcio genre that had long dominated English opera, comprising a patchwork of music by different composers rather than a coherent, single-authored composition. Finally, despite the earlier claim that public taste had progressed, that taste nevertheless remained untutored and exacerbated by even worse leadership:

Much is attributed to the bad taste of the public: true it is that that taste is bad; but it is for the learned to lead the unlearned: true greatness never yet urged the plea of a mastery beyond it, nor ever required an apology for pusillanimous subserviency.¹⁵

Although exaggerated in some respects, this summary aptly captures the central issues of those two decades, familiar themes in England’s fraught and long-running operatic history, during which various concerns about native performance and composition once again found only fitful resolution. Above all, there was an anxiety that somehow, despite the expansion of London’s venues and audiences, the city was being written out of accounts of musical prowess: that the metropolis, so plainly now the preeminent world city,¹⁶ exceeding all others in overall wealth and reach, had so far failed to make sufficient impact on the musical world. The city’s musical voice, in short, did not match its presumed metaphorical vocality in other matters, as is apparent from the concluding paragraph of Leigh’s Guide: The destinies of the world seem to revolve on [London] as on an axis; and from the heart of this mighty body the voice of liberty, humanity, and morality, is wafted to the distant shores of the globe.¹⁷

Determined efforts were made by some individuals to address the situation. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the calls for an English school of opera and indeed an English school of singing had become increasingly audible. A prime mover was Richard Mackenzie Bacon, who would articulate his theories in the pages of the journal he founded and edited from 1818 to 1828, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review; his aim was to inculcate greater understanding of vocal techniques and bridge the divisions between Italian and English style. Vocal music would also receive special attention in the specialist music periodicals that followed: the Harmonicon from 1823 to 1833, and the Musical World from 1836 to 1891. The perceived lack of native vocal talent was approached by attempts to introduce institutionalized training through the establishment of the Royal Academy of Music in 1822,¹⁸ and by the plethora of singing manuals that were produced in growing numbers, aimed at the keen amateur or putative professional singer alike. The trickle of British singers seeking training abroad, which had begun in the late seventeenth century with John Abell, became slightly more persistent: examples include John Sinclair (1791–1857), Henry Russell (ca. 1812–1900), Elizabeth Feron (ca. 1797–1853), Fanny Ayton (ca. 1806–1833), Adelaide Kemble (1815–1879), and Clara Novello (1818–1908), although not all met with sustained success on their return to Britain. Ideas of opera, still modelled at the beginning of the period on Italian works and English ballad opera, each with their largely separate audiences, were also given new impetus from different cultural directions. The seven adaptations of Weber’s Der Freischütz hosted by London’s elite and minor theatres in 1824, for example, demonstrated opera’s capacity to create remarkable, even terrifying theatrical and musical effect in new ways, as well as its ability to attract a socially diverse spectatorship. Impresarios attempted to capitalize on such success by introducing other German and French operas.¹⁹ Although the Italian repertory, now enriched by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, retained its primacy, by 1840 London opera house audiences were more familiar than previously with a wider range of European compositional and performance styles; in the meantime, the efforts of British composers such as John Barnett, Edward Loder, George Alexander Macfarren, and Michael William Balfe to produce a convincing national style in opera found renewed energy.²⁰

The sections from the various Leigh’s New Guide editions cited above underline the preeminent place that elite musical/theatrical entertainment—opera in particular—was assumed to have in public perception, illustrative as it was of the comforting coexistence of high artistic achievement and political and social patronage. What also, more tentatively, emerges in the guides is a larger sense of voice in London, of the sheer multiplicity of auralities, uses, and identities which lingered on from earlier practices or which were emerging in the rapidly changing city. From the elite theatres and concert halls, and the salons of their audiences, to more lowly theatrical cousins showing melodrama and farce, often now south of the river; to a host of singing raised to the glory of God, as the established Church began—sometimes in the face of great resistance—to encourage its congregation to express itself aloud; to singing in newly formed associations of the middling and lower classes, not to mention the continuation of such activity in taverns and other places of entertainment; and so on down to the lowliest ballad singers in the streets of the metropolis, peddling their songs as a meagre means of subsistence. In other words, voices sounded across and within a vast spectrum of musical and extramusical activities in a diverse range of accents and inflections. What is more, the connections between high and low usages were becoming inexorably more polarized and significant. It is fundamentally this variety and these levels of interconnection that the essays in this book set out to explore.

In this context, it seemed important to start our collection with a pair of essays that powerfully articulate both our breadth of purview and some of the cross-currents newly exposed within the teeming city. Oskar Cox Jensen’s discussion of that most vilified vocalist of the period, the ballad singer, tackles head on the fact that so much of this negative discourse comes from what he calls social superiors. Cox Jensen also underlines how the newly scientific idea that, as the Harmonicon so succinctly put it, voice is the index of the mind, denoting moral qualities, could easily be used as a way of bringing aesthetic judgements into line with (a priori) vilification of the poor and unfortunate.²¹ His closing point, that loud voices from the streets in the 1830s and 1840s, after the Reform upheavals and with the rising tide of Chartism, were becoming newly threatening, chimes productively with Mary Ann Smart’s essay. Smart also deals with street performers, the so-called organ boys who flooded London streets during this period, but locates them as something like commodities in high radical politics: taken up as part of exiled Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini’s educational programme for his less fortunate countrymen. The fact that a staple of the repertoire purveyed by the organ boys was recent hit tunes from Italian opera makes richly ironic the fact that Mazzini’s fund-raising concerts typically featured professional singers of the calibre of Grisi, Mario, and Tamburini, who in their turn purveyed identical musical gems to genteel benefactors, again reminding us (as does the street music debate more generally) of music’s dangerous boundary-crossing potential.

Our next pair of essays engage with a phenomenon that might seem a strange, even uncanny revenant from the ancien régime: the persistence of Italian vocal pedagogy as the gold standard of London elite music-making, and the national anxiety this hegemony continued to generate in a city that considered itself so internationally progressive. Claudio Vellutini’s essay offers yet another angle on the idea of vocal science: this time via the extraordinarily successful singing treatise of Gesualdo Lanza and its troubled cohabitation with more home-grown traditions when, at the inauguration of the Royal Academy of Music in 1823, famed Italians such as the castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti taught side by side with doughty choirmasters such as William Hawes and William Knyvett. Velluti himself comes to the fore in Sarah Fuchs’s essay. Of course for some at the time, famously, the continuing presence of Velluti on London’s stages was the stuff of nightmares: Mendelssohn, catching sight of him in London in 1829, wrote that his voice so excited my loathing that it pursued me into my dreams that night.²² But perhaps, Fuchs implies, this Sarrasine-inflected view of the castrato has been overstressed by modern commentators. Just as Vellutini revealed that singing pedagogy had become a formidable commodity in London’s developing cultural marketplace, Fuchs exposes the commodification of the castrato that came with sheet-music editions of ornamented arias—revealing en route the surprising manner in which amateur consumers succeeded in finding creative ways of making their own voices emerge from within vehicles that seemed on the surface to celebrate unconditionally the foreign professional.

The essays of Sarah Hibberd and Matildie Thom Wium explore further facets of the cult of celebrity that surrounded elite artists, this time by engaging with issues of gender, vocality, and the body. Hibberd’s account of the celebrated bass Luigi Lablache, one of the most prominent singers on the London stage in the 1830s and singing tutor to the young Princess Victoria, reveals how his robust embodiment of masculinity was countered by a simultaneous projection of sympathy and even tenderness. In Hibberd’s words, Lablache might even be thought an avatar of the sound and vision of modern masculinity: perhaps another illustration of the Harmonicon’s idea, quoted earlier, of the voice as index of the mind. Thom Wium’s consideration of the soprano Adelaide Kemble examines the tensions arising from the conflict between a rewarding professional career and longings for domesticity: the picture that emerges is one in which the singer was not only actively engaged in the managing of her public persona but also making mature, independent decisions about renouncing that persona (or aspects of it) in favour of marriage and private life. In the cases of both Lablache and Kemble, lived experience and vocal identity challenged the increasingly narrow definitions of gender spheres that were emerging during this period.

Our next pair of essays, by James Grande and Wiebke Thormählen, bring to the fore provocative new layers to the idea of voice. Grande’s point of departure—an intense reading of Charles Lamb’s famous Chapter on Ears²³—demonstrates that the notion of voice, poetic voice in particular, but also the singing voice of elite music, was thoroughly embedded in the emerging print culture of the period (notably in the serial publications in which Lamb plied his trade). But, as a famous passage from the Chapter reminds us, such notions could be violently juxtaposed with the noise of the London streets. From there it is a short step to the radical religious orator Edward Irving (like Lamb, from dissenting stock), who promulgated an idea of voice very distant from our now-conventional notions of how that collection of ideas might manifest itself in song or Romantic poetry. Thormählen continues the theme of dissenting religion, this time examining its manifestation in the renowned Sacred Harmonic Society concerts of the late 1830s. Again, as in other essays, we have a powerful sense of voice as something that could be closely tied to moral character: here, though, within a gathering of the middling classes that was if anything antithetical to the rise of music elsewhere so often acclaimed as a key part of the spirit of the age.

Indeed, as Kimberly White and Susan Rutherford demonstrate, the secular world was witnessing novel manifestations in singing of the idea of the popular, a key new term gradually emerging in these years, and one that would become increasingly associated with different vocal styles, performers, and listeners. This pair of essays juxtaposes an avowedly foreign example of sung entertainment in the city—the French soprano Jenny Colon’s appearances in vaudevilles imported directly from Parisian boulevard theatres and performed in their original language—with one of the most autochthonous: the solo recitals of Henry Russell. In the first instance, French popular theatre becomes London’s elite entertainment, opening British ears to exotic resonances from abroad and contributing to the growing body of operatic and theatrical adaptations of French works on the British stage. Those French accents contrast around a decade later with the singer-songwriter Henry Russell’s indigenous London voice. Russell fashioned his popularity from his early beginnings in elite music by stripping out elaborate vocalism and focussing instead on the simple communication and performance skills that would earn him a reputation for vocal authenticity and a certain currency within political activism during the growth of Chartism.

Melina Esse and Cormac Newark, our last pair, both focus primarily on representations of voice, but also on the multiplicity of voices that could emerge during this period. Esse’s meditation on Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and her lengthy narrative poem on the so-called Improvisatrice sees the work as at base a celebration of polyvocality: of the myriad ways in which the idea of improvisation can encourage assumption of other voices, becoming, in Esse’s words a vessel for other personalities. In this sense, the essay has many resonances with Grande, in that it pushes back on the too prominent idea of the poetic voice as most authentic when most personal and interior, instead encouraging us to look outwards, to performance, as a means of reconfiguring the vocal within our newly material urban context. This last thought might also set a suitably equivocal scene for Newark’s discussion of another female author, Mrs (Catherine) Gore’s so-called silver fork three-decker novel The Opera (1832), which once more takes us to the gender politics of the period as they intersect with notions of voice. Again, there can be no easy equations of the diva with liberation or triumphant self-expression: rather, we gain a further sense that the period’s obsession with Reform generated multiple levels of equivocation about the power of vocal expression.

We have placed Ellen Lockhart’s essay at the end because it returns us in many ways to our central priorities in assembling this collection, so much so as to form a fitting conclusion. For one thing, its detailed critical examination of the bewildering proliferation of modern musicological treatments of voice is salutary, making clear that the term carries risks in spite of its evident attractions and benefits. Just as important, however, she locates the beginnings of this proliferation precisely during our chosen period: one in which the word became (in Lockhart’s words) a profitably manifold locution. What is more, and drawing in part on James Davies’s work concerning the changes of vocal imaginings in the 1830s,²⁴ she persuasively argues that the sheer variety of contexts and meanings for voice our contributors have unearthed may, in some small way, offer a revealing index of the historical actors at work: of the range of cultural initiatives unleashed or further enabled by the idea of voice in London during these turbulent decades.

Our closely defined period, with its tidy beginning and ending, is by no means strictly adhered to in what follows, and just as well. We have nevertheless become convinced that, as Lockhart argues explicitly, these years did, for a variety of social, political, economic, technological, and cultural reasons, prove decisive for the development of notions of voice. Within this period were set in motion initiatives and strategies that arguably only found complete fruition in the years after our end point. In the most clichéd of cultural-historical terms, the coronation in 1837 of Victoria launched an epoch that, in its sheer length and durability, profoundly shaped cultural life in the capital and the country at large. It also coincided with or possibly even enabled other events more directly linked with our topic. To name but a few: the emergence of the sight-singing movement around 1840, with its huge impact in developing all kinds of amateur music-making, from choral societies to working-men’s choirs; the establishment and regulation of state education and the inclusion of music within that educational system; the reform of church choral singing, the steady rise of hymn-singing congregations and the inclusion of singing within ministry training; the expansion of the musical press, particularly the arrival of the Musical World in 1836 and the Musical Times in 1842, which endowed music criticism with a more professional slant, and a scientific interest in music history; the Theatres Act of 1843, which changed the licensing laws so that the old divisions between patent and minor theatres vanished, creating opportunities for a greater spread of music-based theatre as well as facilitating the development of the music halls (the first, the Canterbury, opened in 1852); the première of Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl in 1843, marking the most successful headway for some time in English opera composition;²⁵ the founding of a new Royal Italian Opera company at Covent Garden in 1847, and thus of a theatrical space that in many respects became the site of a national opera house; Manuel Garcìa II’s invention of the laryngoscope in 1855 and the subsequent emphasis on a scientific approach to vocal tuition;²⁶ and, eventually, the gradual disappearance from London’s streets of the professional ballad singer, who migrated indoors to make way for a new, more acoustically aggressive kind of street music, which in turn fuelled ever more strident debates about the need for legislation to curb those making such unseemly urban noise.

Some things, of course, didn’t change. Despite an increase in their numbers, British singers still struggled to build a career within the international opera repertory in London, to the end of the century and beyond. Yet more broadly, singing was still often held in contempt by some factions—perhaps even more so now that it had become so widely practised in public by different social classes—in comparison to instrumental playing. Witness a tirade in the Musical World in 1844, which claimed:

All vocalists are overpaid—if they be at all popular—in comparison with their fellow-artists in the instrumental line, whose labour and acquirements are necessarily as ten to one—and whose pay is as one to a hundred. . . . Nothing in the world is easier than to sing indifferently—say, par exemple, as nine vocalists out ten—if you are gifted with a voice; no vocation needs so small a share of intellect, and so small share of labour, as that of the ordinary vocalist.²⁷

Although nominally an attack on Italian opera (a routine object of scorn in this periodical, and in much of the burgeoning journalistic discourse), the attitudes in this article, in particular its contention that singing was somehow unworthy because it could—it was assumed—be achieved without labour, were more widespread, and remained especially prevalent among certain religious groups. And yet such views, evident since the commercialization of singing began with the arrival of opera in early eighteenth-century London, rarely exerted sufficient leverage on the broader public or indeed the marketplace in order to limit the thirst for vocal performance as both a listening experience and participatory practice.

In short, from around 1840 the vocal vista began to change, finding more support (or, at times, solidification) in the establishment of various systems and organizations, and gradually shedding some of the exciting unpredictability it had displayed in the post-Napoleonic period. If this book succeeds in charting some of that excitement, it will have fulfilled part of its task. If, in the process, it manages to suggest that a musicological purview which takes voice as a primary building block will be part of an expanded and richer discipline, then that will be a still more important gain.

Notes

1. Samuel Leigh, Leigh’s New Picture (London: Leigh, 1839). This edition is more or less identical to earlier printings in the 1830s.

2. Thomas De Quincey, The Nation of London, in his Autobiographic Sketches (London, 1853), 204–8.

3. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets