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.
Binding: Hardback