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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2017
Michael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish opera The Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.
1 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Duenna, in The School for Scandal and Other Plays, ed. Cordner, Michael (Oxford, 1998), 87–143 Google Scholar; at 95–96.
2 This character type originated in William Hogarth's Harlot's Progress (1732), and its theatrical adaptation began with Theophilus Cibber's similarly titled afterpiece of 1733. See the discussion in Ragussis, Michael, Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian England (Philadelphia, 2010), 96–97 Google Scholar.
3 Sheridan, Duenna, 96, 103, 112, 120, 140.
4 Music critic George Hogarth noted that “[The Duenna’s] run was probably without a parallel in the annals of the drama,” comparing it to The Beggars Opera’s run of sixty-three performances. Hogarth, George, Memoirs of the Musical Drama (London, 1838)Google Scholar, 2:433.
5 Ragussis, Theatrical Nation.
6 Troost, Linda V., “The Characterizing Power of Song in Sheridan's The Duenna ,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20, no. 2 (Winter 1986–87): 153–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 164–66. At one point, the father, Jerome, explicitly denounces sentimental and romantic singing. See Sheridan, Duenna, 95.
7 HaCohen, Ruth, The Music Libel against the Jews (New Haven, 2011)Google Scholar.
8 Katz, David S., The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994), 107–44Google Scholar.
9 Felsenstein, Frank, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, 1995)Google Scholar.
10 Duncan, Michelle, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Performativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (November 2004): 283–306 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Duncan points to the inherent tension in the experience of the operatic voice, which is heard by listening subjects but which at the same time acts upon them as objects for its own powerful effects. In this way the operatic voice produces a “scandal” of subjectivity.
11 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 1 September 1766. The foreign visitors were also supplied with translations of the performed Hebrew texts. See Roth, Cecil, History of the Great Synagogue (London, 1950), 131–37Google Scholar.
12 See the chapter “The Jew Bill” in Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 187–214.
13 Entick, John, A New and Accurate History and Survey of London, Westminster, Southwark, and Places Adjacent (London, 1766)Google Scholar, 3:357.
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15 Somerville, Thomas, My Own Life and Times, 1741–1814 (Edinburgh, 1861), 156 Google Scholar. Somerville visited the synagogue in 1769.
16 David Conway, in his overview of Lyon/Leoni's life, doubts whether he was born in Germany. See Conway, David, Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner (Cambridge, 2012), 75–78 Google Scholar. However, Lyon's origins are corroborated by two sources. First, a newspaper report referred to him as “the German Boy.” Public Advertiser, 11 December 1760. Second, a biographical sketch of Leoni, which was appended to a poem that satirized him, referred to his German heritage. Both the sketch and the poem were written by his acquaintance John Williams and published under the pseudonym “Anthony Pasquin” as part of the collection Poems by Anthony Pasquin, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London, 1789), 2:168–69.
17 An entry in the diary of the theater's prompter, quoted in s.v., “Leoni, Michael,” in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, vol. 9, Kickill to Machin, ed. Highfill, Philip H., Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward A. (Carbondale, 1984), 240 Google Scholar.
18 Victor, Benjamin, The History of the Theaters of London (London, 1771), 11–12 Google Scholar. The quote from Baker is given at Conway, Jewry in Music, 77.
19 For more about the function of the Meshorer, see HaCohen, Music Libel, 143n37.
20 Observing Jewish worship within the synagogue was already an established practice of early modern English travelers to the continent, who indeed tended to couch their descriptions in “noisy” terms. See Holmberg, Eva Johanna, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination: A Scattered Nation (Farnham, 2011), 68–81 Google Scholar.
21 Various entries in Curwen's diary between October and December 1775, in Curwen, Samuel, The Journal of Samuel Curwen, 2 vols., ed. Oliver, Andrew (Cambridge, MA, 1972)Google Scholar, 1:81, 93, 97.
22 Ibid., 1:122.
23 Scult, Mel, Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, Up to the Mid Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 1978), 56–89 Google Scholar.
24 Wesley, John, The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, 8 vols., ed. Curnock, Nehemiah (London, 1916)Google Scholar, 5:354.
25 Olivers, Thomas, A Hymn To The God of Abraham in Three Parts (London, 1772)Google Scholar. To this day this tune is called “Leoni” in the hymnody of the Anglican Church, as well as other churches. The “yigdal” is a medieval doxology still used today, with Leoni's melody, in the opening or closing of Jewish services.
26 Boswell attended the Sabbath evening service at the Ashkenazi synagogue and the morning service at the Portuguese synagogue in April 1772. Boswell, James, Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774, ed. Wimsatt, William K. (New York, 1959), 92–93 Google Scholar.
27 Leigh Hunt gave a similar description, in which his visits to the synagogue as an adolescent in 1790s London served “to universalize [his] notions of religion, and to keep them unbigoted.” Hunt, Leigh, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 2 vols. (New York, 1850)Google Scholar, 1:115–16.
28 In the chapter “Noise in the House of Prayer: Ethnography Transfigured,” in HaCohen, Music Libel, 126–76.
29 In 1758, Rabbi Zevi Hirsch of the Ashkenazi community spoke against his congregants visiting the theater and opera “instead of gathering in the houses of learning.” Duschinsky, Charles, “The Rabbinate of the Great Synagogue, London, from 1756–1842,” Jewish Quarterly Review 9, no. 1–2 (July–October, 1918): 103–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 123. This was a challenge for many Jewish communities in western Europe. See Feiner, Shmuel, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 2011), 143–57Google Scholar.
30 For examples, see the caricature “A certain Little Fat Jew Macaroni and his Spouse going to the Pantheon” and the attendant text in Covent Garden Magazine, October 1772, 138; and the poem, closely related to the noise libel, depicting a Jew vomiting during one of the “Handel Commemoration” concerts, in Gentleman's Magazine, July 1784, 533.
31 Burnim, Kalman A., “The Jewish Presence in the London Theatre, 1660–1800,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 33 (1992–94): 65–96 Google Scholar.
32 Like Leoni, a Jewish singer named Harriett Abrams was making her debut around that time, prompting one newspaper to note, “The number of Jews at the Theatres is incredible.” London Chronicle, 31 October 1775. However, Abrams largely evaded Jewish associations, even with her overtly Jewish surname. This should be attributed to gendered aspects of the perception of Jews—as opposed to the male Jew, the Jewess was perceived as malleable and as subject to the possession of her viewer. See Uri Erman, “The Jewish Operatic Voice in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (MA thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011), 51–55 (in Hebrew).
33 Franks (1685/92–1777) was the son-in-law of Moses Hart (1675–1756), one of the richest Jewish merchants and a pillar of the community. Endelman, Todd M., Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington, 1990), 34–38 Google Scholar.
34 Walpole, Horace, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, 9 vols., ed. Cunningham, Peter (Edinburgh, 1906)Google Scholar, 6:145. Walpole's report appears in a letter to the Earl of Strafford dated 11 November 1774.
35 Ibid., 151.
36 General Evening Post, 10 January 1775.
37 Public Advertiser, 18 April 1775.
38 The opera was a major success, but as an attempt to initiate a new operatic tradition, it proved unsuccessful. See Aspden, Suzanne, “Arne's Paradox: National Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, ed. Lodato, Suzanne M., Aspden, Suzanne, and Bernhart, Walter (Amsterdam, 2002), 195–215 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 26 April 1775.
40 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 26 April 1775.
41 Ibid.
42 “The managers very judiciously had given him, as a foreigner, but few words to speak.” London Evening Post, 23 November 1775. This consideration is described in more detail in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1826, 25. Although preserving a kernel of ethnographic reality, such observations were molded into the perception of Jews as distorters of vernacular languages and hence of culture at large. See Gilman, Sander, The Jew's Body (New York, 1991), 10–37 Google Scholar.
43 These were Sheridan's own words in a letter to Linley, quoted in Moore, Thomas, Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1825), 160–61Google Scholar. Linley was aided in the composition of the opera by his son, Thomas Linley the younger.
44 Ibid., 169–70.
45 Isaac's reference to Carlos as “coz” appears in Act II, Scene II. See Sheridan, Duenna, 113. This seems more than an oversight, as it appears in all the printed versions of the opera, from the early unauthorized versions to the authorized version first published in 1794.
46 Choudhury, Mita, “Reflections upon Maintaining a Competitive Edge: The Duenna and Her Peers at Drury Lane,” in Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context, ed. DeRochi, Jack E. and Ennis, Daniel J. (Lewisburg, 2013), 83–103 Google Scholar.
47 Sheridan, Duenna, 103–4.
48 In a letter quoted in Fiske, Roger, “A Score for The Duenna ,” Music and Letters 42, no. 2 (April 1961): 132–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 134. The tune was known under various names but mainly as “Gramachree” or “Gramachree Molly.” For a discussion of the origin of the tune, see Hogg, James, Garside, Peter, and Horsfall, Peter, The Forest Minstrel (Edinburgh, 2006), 250–52Google Scholar.
49 Only a vocal score of the songs of The Duenna was published: The Duenna; or Double Elopement, for Voice, Harpsichord or Violin (London, 1776)Google Scholar. A blueprint for a reconstruction of an orchestral score is offered in Fiske, “Score for The Duenna.”
50 Sheridan, Duenna, 104–5. Sheridan's request from Linley is quoted in Moore, Memoirs, 161.
51 The aria was set to a Scottish song, “The Bush aboon Trequair.” Fiske, “Score for The Duenna,” 139.
52 Sheridan, Duenna, 122.
53 William Oxberry, writing years after Leoni's death, indeed could not make sense of the character of Carlos: “He seems like a stranger, who, by some sudden chance, has been flung into a family party; and who, in spite of all his efforts, his bustling assiduities, and a word occasionally thrown in, still remains an isolated intruder.” Oxberry, William, ed., The Duenna, by Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (London, 1818), iiiGoogle Scholar.
54 London Evening Post, 23 November 1775.
55 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 25 November 1775.
56 Ibid., 28 November 1775. The writer misattributes Louisa's phrase to Isaac.
57 London Magazine, January 1776, 52. For other reports on schedule conflicts between Leoni's synagogal and theatrical engagements, see Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 17 January 1776; and Cradock, Joseph, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, 4 vols. (London, 1828)Google Scholar, 1:122.
58 London Evening Post, 21 November 1775.
59 The Devil: Containing a review and investigation of all public subjects whatever, 2 October 1786.
60 London Evening Post, 23 November 1775.
61 Hogan, Charles Beecher, ed., The London Stage, 1660–1800, pt. 5, vol. 1, 1776–1783 (Carbondale, 1968), 35–36 Google Scholar, 42, 54, 69, 123, 132, 139, 145, 159, 205, 210, 226, 242, 246, 305, 307, 310, 325, 328, 388, 390, 412, 419, 427, 465, 469, 473–74, 479, 494.
62 New Morning Post or General Advertiser, 7 December 1776; Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, October 1792, 336.
63 Walpole, Letters, 6:145; London Magazine, January 1776, 48. The King's Theatre at the Haymarket was home to London's Italian opera company.
64 McGeary, Thomas, “Gendering Opera: Italian Opera as the Feminine Other in Britain, 1700–42,” Journal of Musicological Research 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 17–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 Giles, Peter, The History and Technique of the Counter-Tenor (Aldershot, 1994), 55–65 Google Scholar; Aspden, Suzanne, “The Role of the Countertenor on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage,” in Der Countertenor: die männliche Falsettstimme vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart, ed. Herr, Corinna, Jacobshagen, Arnold, and Wessel, Kai (Mainz, 2012), 99–111 Google Scholar. Aspden shows, however, that countertenors found renewed, though limited, favor in Handel's oratorios.
66 Rosselli, John, “The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550–1850,” Acta Musicologica 60, no. 2 (May–August 1988): 143–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 178–79.
67 The last third of the eighteenth century was a period of conscious attempts at operatic experimentations and reform, mainly by the conflation of the Italian and French traditions and the seria and buffa (serious and comic, respectively) operatic genres. See Kimbell, David, Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1994), 216–49Google Scholar. The resultant operas, exhibiting real-time musical response and structural continuity, emphasized the psychological development of the characters as they drive the plot forward.
68 Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004)Google Scholar.
69 In a letter to the Duchess of Gordon dated 16 May 1781, in Elegant Epistles, Being a Copious Collection of Familiar and Amusing Letters (London, 1822), 626 Google Scholar.
70 “Leoni does not suit our taste. His voice engages the ear without affecting the heart. Even in singing there must be nature to satisfy the understanding.” Times, 22 January 1787.
71 Boaden, James, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (London, 1825), 397 Google Scholar; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 28 April 1787; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1826, 25; Westminster Magazine, June 1777, 4.
72 For example, see The Treasury of Wit (Sunderland, 1788), 157 Google Scholar.
73 Selector, November 1776, 57.
74 Quoted in Greene, John C., Theatre in Dublin, 1745–1820: A Calendar of Performances, 6 vols. (Bethlehem, 2011)Google Scholar, 3:1749. See also New Morning Post or General Advertiser, 14 December 1776.
75 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 25 April 1776.
76 For the dog metaphor in relation to Jews, see Stow, Kenneth R., Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
77 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 25 April 1776.
78 Ibid.
79 Gilman, Jew's Body.
80 Already in 1702, an anonymous pamphleteer, discussing the arrival of castrati in England, remarked, “But this Evil increases upon us every Day; there are more of the Circumcision come over lately from Italy.” Quoted in Freeman, Lisa A., Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia, 2002), 77 Google Scholar. During the 1753 “Jew Bill” debates, the trope of circumcision figured prominently in the anti-Jewish discourse. Wolper, Roy S., “Circumcision as Polemic in the Jew Bill of 1753: The Cutter Cut?,” Eighteenth Century Life 7, no. 3 (May 1982): 28–36 Google Scholar. Curiously, one pamphlet from this period mentions a supposedly Jewish castrato who would bring his brethren from the synagogue for support. See The Voice of Discord, or the Battle of the Fiddles (London, 1753), 16–18 Google ScholarPubMed.
81 The most detailed account of the Halifax affair appears in the memoirs of the clergyman Trusler, John, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Dr. Trusler (Bath, 1806), 63–69 Google Scholar. Trusler claims that the girl was rescued by her friends, who “tampered with Leoni, and finding, Jew-like, that money was the only object he had in view, bought him off for the sum of £2,000, and he deserted her.” Ibid., 69. For other accounts of the affair, see London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 17 November 1780; and Mimosa, or the Sensitive Plant (London, 1779), 15 Google Scholar.
82 Gentleman's Magazine, December 1781, 593.
83 Greene, Theatre in Dublin, 3:2185, 2201, 2204–5, 2210, 2216–17, 2231, 2273.
84 Public Advertiser, 3 May 1784.
85 The Jewish comedian James De Castro writes that, after Dublin, “[Leoni] came to England again quite minus.” The Memoirs of J. Decastro, Comedian (London, 1824), 10 Google Scholar. Eventually, Leoni was announced bankrupt. Times, 14 November 1785.
86 General Advertiser, 25 April 1784.
87 An entry from Sylas Neville's diary for 10 September 1784, quoted in s.v., “Leoni, Michael,” in Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Actors, vol. 9, Kickill to Machin, 241.
88 Greene, Theatre in Dublin, 3:2210, 2216, 2217; World and Fashionable Advertiser, 23 August 1787.
89 Times, 30 October 1786.
90 The Royalty Theatre was founded by the popular actor John Palmer in direct challenge to the theatrical patent system. See Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 21–24Google Scholar.
91 An unidentified newspaper cut from 21 March 1787 still refers to him as “Master Abrams.” THM/35/1, John Braham Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive. When returning to the stage as an adult, he was introduced, “MR. BRAHAM, Whose original name was ABRAHAM, is one of the sons of Israel.” Tomahawk, 4 March 1796.
92 The possibility that Braham was related to Leoni is discussed and largely dismissed in Conway, Jewry in Music, 78–80. In the Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, I had the chance to examine a “Biographical sketch,” in what appears to be Braham's own handwriting, that states, without any mention of familial ties to Leoni, “I lost my parents in my infancy—was bound apprentice to Leoni the singer.” THM/35/12, John Braham Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive. This is most likely a draft Braham made for his contribution to Sainsbury's, John A Dictionary of Musicians From the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, vol. 2 (London, 1824)Google Scholar.
93 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 21 April 1787.
94 For the former, see Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 7 July 1787; and Times, 21 August 1787. For the latter, see World and Fashionable Advertiser, 15 January 1787; and Times, 15 January 1787.
95 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 19 February 1787. See also World and Fashionable Advertiser, 15 January 1787.
96 Boaden, Memoirs, 224. A benefit night was a performance whose proceeds (or part of them) would go to a specific performer.
97 A later anecdote spread that the community fired Leoni from his synagogal post for performing in Handel's Messiah. This anecdote emerged long after Leoni died, its first instance being in s.v., “Leoni, Michael,” in Sainsbury, A Dictionary of Musicians, 59. Conway doubts its veracity. Conway, Jewry in Music, 76.
98 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 29 January 1776. The Resurrection was an oratorio composed by Samuel Arnold and first performed in 1770.
99 HaCohen, Ruth, “Fictional Planes and Their Interplay: The Alchemy of Forms and Emotions in St. Matthew Passion,” in Music and Signs: Semiotic and Cognitive Studies in Music, ed. Zannos, Ioannis (Bratislava, 1999), 416–34Google Scholar.
100 See the chapter “British Israel” in Smith, Ruth, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 213–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 British Mercury, 26 May 1787, 48–52. For more on Oswald, see T. F. Henderson, s.v., “Oswald, John (c.1760–1793),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20922, accessed 21 December 2015.
102 John Broughton (1703–89) was the founder of modern boxing as a gentlemanly sport following a set of codified rules. See Boddy, Kasia, Boxing: A Cultural History (London, 2008), 29–39 Google Scholar.
103 British Mercury, 26 May 1787, 51.
104 All English translations are from the King James Version.
105 The psalm opens, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? / The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed.” In Anglican liturgy, it is read during Easter.
106 This scene was at the center of a controversial interpretation of Messiah as an anti-Jewish work. See Marissen, Michael, “Rejoicing against Judaism in Handel's Messiah ,” Journal of Musicology 24, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 167–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Marissen argues that the tenor aria alludes to the destruction of the Temple, whereupon the Hallelujah chorus triumphantly celebrates this divine act of revenge. If true, this claim only serves to accentuate the act of appropriation that our writer here ascribes to the Jews. Marrissen's claims were highly contested, however. See Roberts, John H., “False Messiah,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 45–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
107 British Mercury, 26 May 1787, 51.
108 Similarly, the biblical vision of Jerusalem as the center of the universe, which is usually predicated on the recognition of non-Jews, is here accomplished by their extermination. See Jeremiah 3:27; Isaiah 56:7; Psalms 48.
109 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 21 April 1787.
110 British Mercury, 26 May 1787, 52.
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112 The decade in which this text was written, the 1780s, saw several important instances of religious contention between Jews and Christians in Britain, most prominently the conversion of Lord Gordon and the public debate between the dissenting theologian Joseph Priestley and the Jewish thinker David Levi. The Priestley–Levi debate explicitly revolved around the issue of the Jews' survival and its eschatological meaning. See Ruderman, David B., Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2000), 136–183 Google Scholar.
113 For the canonicity of Handel's oratorios, well established by the 1770s, see Weber, William, The Rise of Musical Classics: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.
114 Here I allude to Freud's concept of the Doppelgänger as part of his study of the uncanny. See Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. Mclintock, David (London, 2003), 123–62Google Scholar, especially at 141–43.
115 Times, 26 March 1789.
116 Barnett, Richard D. and Wright, Philip, The Jews of Jamaica, 1663–1880: Tombstone Inscriptions (Jerusalem, 1997), 79 Google Scholar. The date of his death is given as Sunday, 6 November 1796.
117 Kelly, Michael, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, 2 vols. (London, 1826)Google Scholar, 2:80.
118 New Monthly Magazine, 3 vols. (London, 1834), 1:463.
119 Monthly Mirror, February 1808, 61–62.
120 Lamb, Charles, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols., ed. Lucas, E. V. (London, 1903)Google Scholar, 2:62.
121 For a description of Braham's conquering effect in this recitative, overcoming his “unmistakably Jewish aspect” and ridiculous gesturing, see “Recollections of the Life of Joseph Heywood,” in Cornhill Magazine (London, 1865), 692–93Google Scholar.
122 For Braham's role in the rise of the modern, heroic tenor, see Potter, John, “The Tenor–Castrato Connection, 1760–1860,” Early Music 35, no. 1 (February 2007): 97–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, throughout his career, Braham employed a falsetto extension to his voice, which enabled him to sing certain high notes which lay outside the range of his “natural,” modal voice. This was a common feature in tenors at the time, but Braham's supposedly excessive use of it gave rise to a critical discourse that, again, reverted to his Jewishness as an explanation.
123 In the 13 February 1826 issue, quoted in Ragussis, Theatrical Nation, 83. The aria here alluded to, “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” is actually performed by the soprano.
124 Both letters were published side by side in a variety of publications that week, including Examiner, 19 February 1826; Spirit of the Times, 18 February 1826; and Theatrical Observer, 15 February 1826.
125 New Monthly Magazine, April 1826, 406.
126 In a letter to Thomas Manning dated 26 February 1808, in Lamb, Works, 6:383.
127 I will only mention William Makepeace Thackeray's satirical poem on the front cover of the National Standard, 11 May 1833 (published anonymously); and Leigh Hunt's discussion of Braham in his Autobiography, 112–13. Both are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this article.
128 For the former, see Monthly Mirror, May 1808, 50. The issue of Braham's pronunciation of English surfaced throughout his career: “Surely Mr. Braham might, amongst his acquaintance, find someone Christian enough to tell him that moment should not be pronounced momunt, nor principle, principal, nor indeed, inteet, &c.” Monthly Mirror, November 1807, 47. Lord Byron repeatedly ridiculed Braham's pronunciation of the word “enthusiasm” as “entusymusy,” in his journal or in letters to friends. See Moore, Thomas, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 2 vols. (London, 1830)Google Scholar, 1:440, 603, 2:106, 476; and Hodgson, James Thomas, Memoir of Francis Hodgson, 2 vols. (London, 1878)Google Scholar, 2:77. This was a recurring joke in Byron's social circle, as Leigh Hunt describes. Hunt, Autobiography, 315.
129 Conway points to the year 1816 as the turning point in this respect, after Braham's marriage and his involvement (mostly by lending his name as contributing composer), in Byron's Hebrew Melodies of 1815. Conway, Jewry in Music, 89–90.
130 Nathan, Isaac, Musurgia Vocalis: An Essay on the History and Theory of Music, and on the Qualities, Capabilities, and Management of the Human Voice (London, 1836), 116 Google Scholar.
131 Alderman, Geoffrey, “English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation of Anglo-Jewry,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Birnbaum, Pierre and Katznelson, Ira (Princeton, 1995), 128–56Google Scholar.
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135 Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar.
136 The singers mentioned here, Giuditta Pasta and Giulia Grisi, were two of the most important sopranos of the 1820s and 1830s. Conway claims that both had Jewish fathers. Conway, Jewry in Music, 224, 257. However, this claim is not supported by any cited sources. Pasta's Jewishness is called into question in Kenneth Stern, “A Documentary Study of Giuditta Pasta on the Opera Stage” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1983), 1–2.
137 Two of the composers mentioned by Sidonia—Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn—were at the heart of Richard Wagner's attack on Jewish musicians in his 1850 work, Das Judenthum in der Musik. The attribution of Jewishness to Rossini is unique, as noted in Bohlman, Philip V., ed., Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, xiv–xvn2.
138 The idea of a finished musical “work,” conceived as an idea in the mind of a musical genius, was itself rather new. See Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar; and Poriss, Hilary, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
139 Hannah Arendt famously analyzed Disraeli's use of his Jewish origins for a spectacular display of ethnic exceptionality. Arendt, Hannah, “The Potent Wizard,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973), 68–79 Google Scholar. George Eliot, in her 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda, offered a different configuration of toleration and sympathy engendered by Jewish vocality. For a far-reaching analysis, see HaCohen, Music Libel, 239–85.