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34 results

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  • Musical Self-Borrowing in Ottocento Opera and the Composer's Toolbox

  • Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • Journal:
    Nineteenth-Century Music Review , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 February 2023, pp. 1-17

  • Self-borrowing was a common practice in primo ottocento opera. Even though commentators of the era could find it somewhat troublesome, composers indulged in the practice. Drawing on existing scholarship, and reflecting on the work of my co-contributors to this journal issue, I ponder a few sundry notions about the procedure and its context, addressing theoretical, historical and practical perspectives relating to composers, historical commentators, listeners and modern-day scholars. I begin with a survey of terminology that has been applied in discussions of self-borrowing and a review of the manner in which selected present-day scholars have characterized the practice. I then consider the nature of self-borrowing in the ottocento opera repertory against a backdrop of contemporaneous theoretical discussions about how to compose opera, and I contemplate the extent to which self-borrowings in this repertory can be deemed to bear meaning. I conclude by raising the possibility of applying concepts from cognitive theory to operatic encounters with self-borrowing, proposing that the practice served as a tool for composers to fuel expectation, predictability, anticipation and even surprise to enhance musical pleasure. My purpose is to prompt reflection on the reasons behind as well as an appreciation for the value of this oft-maligned compositional ‘tool’ in the interest of gaining insight into its impact on the listening experience and the evaluation of musical works.

The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016
  • Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music, i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals.
    In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other disciplines address a rangeof unexplored topics, including the relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth century, the role of music in urban cultural development in the early twentieth, and the marketingof musical repertories, performers and instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse, multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products wereshaped by interrelationships between culture and commerce.

    CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois.

    ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also on the faculty.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S. Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright

  • 10 - Selling a ‘False Verdi’ in Victorian London

  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Associate Professor of Musicology, School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • Book:
    The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016, pp 223-248

  • Summary

    VERDI'S operas were money-makers for opera-house managers in Victorian London. Despite the operas’ frequently mixed critical reception, the public often flocked to hear Verdi's works, making many of them lucrative ventures for London's opera companies. The English capital became the first city outside Italy to hear a world premiere of one of Verdi's operas: I masnadieri, written expressly for Her Majesty's Theatre and manager Benjamin Lumley in 1847. Although over the years Verdi's operas curried favour unevenly with various theatre managers and critics in England, public demand sometimes encouraged multiple productions of a work staged in a single season in various London venues, later in the century by both resident and visiting companies. Il trovatore, La traviata and Luisa Miller were among the Verdi operas that made it to the London stage in English translation: as The Gipsy's Vengeance (24 March 1856, Theatre Royal Drury Lane), La traviata, or The Blighted One (8 June 1857, Surrey Theatre) and Louisa Miller or Love and Intrigue (3 June 1858, Sadler's Wells Theatre).

    Verdi's works burst onto the London scene in the mid nineteenth century, around the time when the cultural geography of opera began shifting. Such shifts were helped along by increased mobilities – of people and goods, of knowledge and information – made possible by new technologies, which characterized the nineteenth century, thereby helping to create the first great era of consumerism. These mobilities affected the dissemination, the understanding, the experiences and the practices of music, as well as the very nature of ideas about music in general and about opera in particular. The traditional, mainly aristocratic and upper-class, audience for opera continued expanding in London throughout the century as a result of these mobilities and, in large part, of continuing renegotiations of class boundaries, the consequence of economic prosperity and social ambition among the classes. With this broadened audience came an extended market for operatic music beyond the theatre, and Verdi's operas produced commodities serving various constituencies outside the opera house in varying ways.

    Public concerts in various venues featured opera excerpts. Often these were sung by star singers who were currently performing with one of London's two resident opera companies; the musical selections thus served dual duty commercially, disseminating and popularizing an opera and also promoting a company.

Music in Print and Beyond
  • Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles
  • Edited by Craig A. Monson, Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    15 December 2013
  • This collection of critical essays examines the diverse ways in which music -- and ideas about it -- have been disseminated in print and other media from the sixteenth century onward. Contributors look afresh at unfamiliar facets of the sixteenth-century book trade and the circulation of manuscript and printed music in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. They also analyze and critique new media forms, showing how a dizzying array of changing technologies has influenced what we hear, whom we hear, and how we hear. The repertoires considered include Western art music -- from medieval to contemporary -- as well as popular music and jazz. Assembling contributions from experts in a wide range of fields, such as musicology, music theory, music history, and jazz and popular music studies, 'Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles' sets new standards for the discussion of music's place in Western cultural life. Roberta Montemorra teaches music at the University of Iowa and is the author of 'Verdi the Student-Verdi the Teacher' (Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2010) and editor of 'The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia' (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Craig A. Monson is a Professor of Musicology at Washington University (St Louis, Missouri) and is the author of 'Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in 17th-century Italy' (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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