Voicing Britannia

According to a widely held view in eighteenth-century Britain, Britons were somehow inherently unmusical, and this supposed shortcoming was, in fact, a virtue. George Colman explicated this view when he wrote in 1762 that "for arts and arms, a Briton is the thing! John Bull was made to roar—but not to sing." However, he was responding to an already changing cultural landscape. The 1760s saw the emergence of English-language opera, and the rise of a new generation of British singers ready and able to perform it. In response to long-held suspicions toward Italian opera and its singers, this turn was a bold attempt to offer British audiences a new vision of themselves: as a singing nation. This is the books central theme: the question of whether Britons could sing, and how it was negotiated in public discourse within an evolving cultural landscape. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, the text follows three groups of groundbreaking singers—high-pitched men, virtuosic prima donnas, and Jews—who sought to shift the landscape of opera in Britain, all the while challenging the prevailing gender norms and social categories. These attempts gave rise to a certain interplay—between an evolving cultural form seeking approval, and an insistent reticence that clung to the conventional. Eventually, the effort to adopt opera as a national vehicle, over a period of several decades, only helped to galvanize a guarded attitude toward music—an attitude that Britons were forced to admit was constitutive of their national identity.

Uri Erman is a cultural historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. A lecturer in the Humanities Program at Shalem College, Jerusalem, he studies how audiences made sense of performers—using opera and theater as lenses through which to explore questions of identity, gender, and social order. His work has appeared in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies and Journal of British Studies, as well as in edited volumes. This is his first book.