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The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2017
Abstract
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.
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References
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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.
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88 Greene, Theatre in Dublin, 3:2210, 2216, 2217; World and Fashionable Advertiser, 23 August 1787.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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