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Verdian opera burlesqued: a glimpse into mid-Victorian theatrical culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2003

ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN
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Abstract

Through brief case studies of burlesques of Ernani, Il trovatore and La traviata written for nineteenth-century London, this essay makes a preliminary examination of the nature of Victorian operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences in an evolving socio-cultural milieu, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London.

Type
Regular Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 33 - 66
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research for this study was undertaken with assistance from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, Jay Semel, Director; the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative. Early versions of this study were presented at the Third Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain at the Royal College of Music in London; the ‘Primal Scenes: Staging and Interpreting Verdi's Operas’ Conference at the University of California, Berkeley; and colloquia at Cambridge Univeristy and Oxford University. A short, introductory discussion of the phenomenon of nineteenth-century English operatic burlesque will appear as ‘Burlesques, Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries’, in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama, ed. Roberta M. Marvin and Downing A. Thomas, forthcoming; and a brief survey of parodies of Il trovatore and La traviata appeared as ‘Reflections of Art and Society: Adaptations of La traviata and Il trovatore for the Stages of Victorian London’, in ‘Verdi 2001’: Atti del convegno internazionale, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica (Florence, 2002), 789–809. I wish to thank Joseph Kerman for his interest in my research on this topic and for arranging a partial performance of one of the burlesques of Il trovatore at the University of California, Berkeley.