At first sight, opera and science would seem to occupy quite separate spaces. The one typically unfolds on the stage of a theatre, the other most often takes place in a laboratory or lecture hall. The one draws on creative inspiration in entwining music, poetry and spectacle, the other on inductive reasoning through observation and experiment; patient activities that, for John Herschel in 1831, constituted the ‘fountains of all natural science’. And while the one offers an opportunity for emotional and intellectual engagement through the public gaze, the other cautiously validates the empiricism of verifiable experience through critical acts of witnessing. To yoke the two together, then, may appear arbitrary.

Yet such a view not only risks caricature through its stark oppositions, but also overlooks a scene of rich interconnection within nineteenth-century European social and intellectual life.