This chapter moves beyond the primarily German, elite context in which E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 was initially received, to consider musical Romanticism in its broader European (and in particular, French) context. In so doing it highlights three expressive modes in which music was understood as operating in partnership with real and imagined visual stimuli: the melodramatic tableau, the unsung voice, and symphonic scenography. These modes pervaded European culture and offer a perspective on musical Romanticism that acknowledges its breadth and the social diversity of its audiences, as well as the variety of listening experiences. Theatre and concert works by Benda, Cherubini, Beethoven, Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn are considered.

This introduction to the volume provides overviews of theories of the sublime and musicology’s engagement with the sublime, before outlining the fresh perspective brought by this collection. The focus is on historically specific experiences of the sublime: although the centre of gravity is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the well-known centres of intellectual debate on the sublime in Europe, a widened purview considers performers and audiences, as well as composers and works, as agents of power. The authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. A significant cross-temporal finding to emerge from the collection is music’s strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power; this is allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The density of this thematic complex in music is a keynote of the dialogue between the chapters. The volume opens up two avenues for further research, suggested by the adjective ‘sonorous’: a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that has porous boundaries with other sounding phenomena.

The idea of being overwhelmed by musical and visual effects is a recurrent theme in the critical reception of Cherubini’s three Parisian operas of the 1790s. The word ‘sublime’ is frequently employed, and in ways that suggest something more specific than a critical shorthand for excellence: a quality rooted in revolutionary experience. In Médée, it was the talents of the singer Julie-Angelique Scio in the title role that most attracted the term: the vengeful heroine murders her children and leaps into the flames that are consuming the palace. When Médée premiered in 1797, the nation was still recovering from the trauma of the Terror following the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794: Parisians of all political stripes were coming to terms with this extended period of violence and vengeance. The power and vulnerability apparently conveyed by Scio in the role can be understood as allowing spectators to experience Médée’s sublimation of her fury as the sublimation of their own unresolved emotions following the Terror.

Introduction

Britain and the Americas, lacking any significant and continuous native operatic traditions, depended upon foreign opera for much of the nineteenth century. Although Italian opera (and to a certain extent French opéra comique) often formed the basis of the repertory, German and serious French opera became increasingly popular in certain areas of Britain and the Americas in response to local circumstances: the nationality of immigrant populations, the tastes of a ruling élite, the experiences of local impresarios and the impact of political events.

In the 1830s the phenomenal popularity of grand opera – works such as Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828) and Gustave III (1833), Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Halévy's La Juive (1835) – spread quickly throughout Europe and across the Channel. In London such works were translated into Italian or English and performed in a variety of faithful productions and pirate adaptations. From Europe they were exported to the East coast of America, often by English impresarios. Travelling troupes in America incorporated occasional grand operas into their still largely Italian repertories, and took them across the continent from where they entered Central and South America and were absorbed – to a lesser extent – into the repertories of local companies. Celebrated singers who had performed these operas in Paris brought to new audiences the roles for which they had become known.

The ‘first’ grand opera, La Muette de Portici, has been remembered since its première in 1828 for its revolutionary sentiments: the depiction of a violent but unsuccessful revolt in seventeenth-century Naples, resonant with the events of 1789. Two years later it was performed following the successful July Revolution in Paris and it apparently sparked the Belgian revolt against the Dutch in the same year, which resulted in the independence of Belgium. Thereafter it was regularly recognised in France as a symbol of national spirit, during such events as the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. At this same moment, Wagner famously associated the opera with subsequent political events, recalling how ‘[La Muette], whose very representations had brought [revolts] about, was recognised as the obvious theatrical precursor of the July Revolution, and seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection with a world-event’. More than a century after Wagner, Jane Fulcher commenced her book on the political role of opera in nineteenth-century Paris with an assessment of La Muette as a dangerous and seditious work with a populist message.

Yet, in spite of the undoubted turbulence in Paris in 1828, it was not the political aspect of the opera that exercised its first audiences and critics, but rather its mute heroine. This is shown not only by the reports of the Opéra's literary committee and by newspaper reviews, but also by the unprecedented response of various state-funded and commercially run theatres in the city.