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From Satirical Piece to Commercial Product: The Mid-Victorian Opera Burlesque and its Bourgeois Audience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
Current studies of burlesque position it as a subversive genre that questioned cultural and social hierarchies and spoke to diverse audiences. Central to this interpretation are burlesque's juxtapositions of high and low culture, particularly popular and operatic music. This article problematizes this view, proposing that mid-Victorian burlesques lost their satirical bite. Demonstrating little concern for the tastes or interests of the poorer or the most elite members of the audience, they specifically targeted the bourgeoisie. The article places three mid-Victorian burlesques in the wider context of the commercial development of the West End following the 1851 Great Exhibition. It proposes that this broader context, and not the genre's perceived social role, provides the key to understanding the impulses driving the musical choices. It argues that juxtapositions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music were far from subversive; rather they were included for commercial reasons, offering variety – but variety within strict bourgeois limits.
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- Copyright © 2017 The Royal Musical Association
References
1 See, for example, Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (London, 1984), and Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham, 2011).
2 See Michael Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York (Iowa City, IA, 2014). Derek Scott's current ERC project ‘German Operetta in London and New York, 1907–1939: Cultural Transfer and Transformation’ promises an equivalent rigorous study for operetta. Details of the project may be found at <http://music.leeds.ac.uk/news/scotts-german-operetta-project-secures-e1m-erc-funding> (accessed 23 February 2016). Particular composers and works, including the ballad operas of Henry Fielding and John Gay and the operettas of Johann Strauss, Offenbach and Lehár, have also garnered interest, forming a new type of ‘canon’. See Leroy John Morrissey, ‘Henry Fielding and the Ballad Opera’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 (1971), 386–402; Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington, KY, 1993); Camille Crittenden, Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge, 2000); and Micaela Baranello, ‘Die lustige Witwe and the Creation of the Silver Age of Viennese Operetta’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 26 (2014), 175–202.
3 See Frank Kidson, The Beggar's Opera: Its Predecessors and Successors (New York, 1969); Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of “English” Opera’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122 (1997), 24–51; and Vanessa Rogers, ‘John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 11 (2014), 173–213. Some studies on the interconnections between melodrama, opera and film music include David Neumeyer, ‘Melodrama as a Compositional Resource in Early Hollywood Sound Cinema’, Current Musicology, 57 (1995), 61–94; Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, CA, 2004); and Sarah Hibberd, ‘“Si l'orchestre seul chantait”: Melodramatic Voices in Chelard's Macbeth (1827)’, Melodramatic Voices, ed. Hibberd, 85–102.
4 See Rachel Cowgill, ‘Re-gendering the Libertine, or, The Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the Early Nineteenth-Century London Stage’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 10 (1998), 45–66; Laura Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep: Byron's “Manfred” in London Theatres’, Music and Letters, 87 (2000), 212–36; and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued: A Glimpse into Mid-Victorian Theatrical Culture’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 15 (2003), 33–66. Some older studies of burlesque offer descriptive overviews, rather than critical commentary: see, for example, Victor Clinton Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London, 1952). Richard Schoch's Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002) is an excellent study of Shakespeare burlesque. An equivalent is yet to appear for opera burlesques, which present different issues regarding national and cultural meanings and the function and meaning of musical choices.
5 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 18.
6 Ballad operas satirized issues of the day and musical and theatrical tastes and practices. See Rogers, ‘John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire’, 189–91. For more detail on the development of burlesque from ballad opera and extravaganza, see Walter H. Rubsamen, ‘The Ballad Burlesques and Extravaganzas’, Musical Quarterly, 36 (1950), 551–61, and Michael Booth, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1969–76), v: Pantomimes, Extravaganzas and Burlesques, 2–52.
7 For a time, ballad opera seemed to offer hope of an English operatic tradition, but its popularity was fleeting. The genre entered the theatre with the première of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and declined around a decade later. See Eric Walter White, The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951), 69.
8 Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre, 111–16.
9 Booth, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, v, 38–40.
10 During the period examined in this article, W. B. Donne fulfilled this role. He was Acting Examiner from 1849 to 1856 and Examiner of Plays from 1857 to 1874.
11 For a fuller discussion of how the patents and licences worked, see Gabriella Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry: Opera at the Second Covent Garden Theatre, 1830 to 1856’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College London, 1997), 18–65.
12 Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 46.
13 For details, see Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry’, 21.
14 Eric Walter White, A History of English Opera (London, 1983), 295.
15 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 151–87. Schoch also argues that burlesque functioned as a critique of contemporary Shakespeare performers and productions, reclaiming Shakespeare from those who would unintentionally harm him through ‘bardolatry’. See ibid., 4; see also Schoch, ‘“Chopkins, Late Shakespeare”: The Bard and his Burlesques, 1810–1866’, English Literary History, 67 (2000), 973–91.
16 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 2.
17 Ibid., 18. This is certainly true of the burlesques examined here. The manuscripts submitted to W. B. Donne and held at the British Library (Add. MSS 52991 P, 53047 G and 53073 D) show that licences were granted within 24 hours, and there is no evidence that changes were requested. On other occasions the licensing process could be unwieldy, intrusive and contradictory, demanding cuts, suppressing entire plays and seeming to allow a play to be performed and then retracting the decision. For details, see David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–1832 (Oxford, 2006), 103–32. Worrall examines an earlier period than this article, but even later in the century the Examiner of Plays happily exercised his powers of censorship. See David Thomas, David Carlton and Anne Etienne, Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford, 2007), 24–68.
18 Moody argues that because illegitimate drama was so centred on visual and musical language, there was no provision for scrutinizing its untraditional texts. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 18. However, other researchers of censorship have found that the remit of the Examiner of Plays included genres such as pantomime, ballet and song lyrics. Worrall, Theatric Revolution, 38. Managers and playwrights would have found creative ways around censorship, perhaps through mime and improvisation, but it seems unlikely that such a subversive genre would enjoy the kind of freedom that Moody suggests.
19 She argues that burlesques of Medea offered a forum to comment on contemporary debates about women's inequalities in marriage. See Fiona Macintosh, ‘Medea Transposed: Burlesque and Gender on the Mid-Victorian Stage’, Medea in Performance 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Oxford, 2000), 75–99 (p. 82).
20 Laura Monrós-Gaspar, Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology (London and New York, 2015), 15.
21 Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 219, 222.
22 George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre: A Survey (Oxford, 1967), 13.
23 Roberta Montemorra Marvin, however, has examined mid-Victorian burlesque in a number of chapters and articles, including ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’; ‘Handel's Acis and Galatea: A Victorian View’, Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot, 2006), 249–64; and ‘Burlesques, Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries’, Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (Aldershot, 2006), 203–10.
24 For an overview of the ‘conservative’ school of thought, see Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York, 1994), 28–9, and Amber Day, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate (Bloomington, IN, 2011), 11–12.
25 Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 231.
26 Ibid., 235.
27 Macintosh, ‘Medea Transposed’, 85.
28 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 13.
29 Jim Davis has undertaken considerable work on theatre audiences, but has not examined burlesque specifically. Even so, his findings have been invaluable to this study. See Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Hatfield, 2001), and Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn (Cambridge, 2007), 57–70. See also Michael Booth, ‘East End and West End: Class and Audience in Victorian London’, Theatre Research International, 2 (1977), 98–103.
30 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 131.
31 See Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 217, and Monrós-Gaspar, Victorian Classical Burlesques, 10–11.
32 Macintosh, ‘Medea Transposed’, 85.
33 Monrós-Gaspar, Victorian Classical Burlesques, 12.
34 Montemorra Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’, 42.
35 Ibid., 44.
36 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 82.
37 Montemorra Marvin, ‘Burlesques, Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries’, 206–9.
38 Montemorra Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’, 44.
39 Derek Scott argues that ‘high- and low-status music cannot be mapped directly onto high- and low-class consumers’. See Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York, 2008), 9. Paul Rodmell has also highlighted the diversity of opera audiences in the provinces during the Edwardian period, arguing that opera was more affordable and accessible, and audiences ‘far less socially segregated’, than in the West End. All of this problematizes traditional categories of high art and popular entertainment. See Rodmell, Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918 (Farnham, 2013), 131–83.
40 Some influential texts that have focused on these issues include Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 1991); Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1995); and John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2007).
41 William Weber, ‘The Muddle of the Middle Classes’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 3 (1979–80), 175–85 (p. 180).
42 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), 1–14.
43 Langland, Nobody's Angels, 27–9.
44 Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), 8.
45 The development of burlesque in the second half of the nineteenth century into a ‘bourgeoisified’, commercial genre mirrors the concurrent ‘popular music revolution’ which Derek Scott has argued was driven by a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of the bourgeoisie. See Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 8. Davis and Emeljanow identify the period 1851–80 as a time of rapid development in the West End, with a boom in theatre building after 1866. See their Reflecting the Audience, 179–85.
46 Schoch, Not Shakespeare, 110.
47 The exception can be found in Tunbridge's article. She includes a transcription of one of the numbers from Gilbert Abbott à Beckett's Man-Fred. The rest of the discussion of music is based on the lyrics and titles provided in librettos. See Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 217–30.
48 Hugh Maguire, ‘The Victorian Theatre as a Home from Home’, Journal of Design History, 13 (2000), 107–21 (p. 107).
49 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 168–9, 173.
50 Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 4. Rappaport has highlighted this change in her study of how the West End became constructed as a place of pleasure for bourgeois women.
51 Ibid., 4–8.
52 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 172.
53 Ibid., 170–2.
54 See Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 179–82, and Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 9.
55 Montemorra Marvin, ‘Verdian Opera Burlesqued’, 38.
56 ‘The Theatrical and Musical Examiner’, The Examiner, 14 April 1860, 230. Punch magazine contained similar criticisms of the slipping standards of burlesque in 1865: ‘A pretty story, neatly and dramatically told, opportunities for arch and graceful or humorous acting, smart satire, and ingenious allusions to topics of the time, pointed writing, and well-timed parodies, were expected in a burlesque. […] burlesques of this kind imply wit in Authors and art in Actors; both things difficult to find, and which, when found, come expensive.’ ‘Mr. Punch's Handy-Book of the Stage’, Punch, 25 February 1865, 77.
57 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998), 17.
58 Sydney G. Checkland, The Rise of Industrial Society in England 1815–1885 (London, 1964), 301.
59 John M. Golby, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England, 1750–1900 (London, 1984), 84.
60 This is a central argument of Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Harmondsworth, 1985). Wiener argues that the middle classes and the aristocracy accommodated one another, sharing similar tastes, education and values, leading to a ‘culture of containment’ and the decline of industrialism in England.
61 Checkland, The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 304.
62 ‘Strand Theatre’, The Morning Post, 20 November 1865, 6. The Morning Post was aligned with Lord Palmerston's liberal government and mostly circulated among the nobility and gentry. See Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), 18, 61.
63 For details of how the narrative of the moral transformation of West End theatres was constructed, see Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 97–164.
64 See Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, 61, and Theodore Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press 1785–1830 (Carbondale, IL, 1994), 7–10.
65 ‘Gaiety Theatre’, The Times, 24 December 1868, 3. Like the Morning Post, The Times was also bought by the nobility and gentry, carrying advertisements for servants. It also had an extensive business section and appealed to City workers. Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, 18, 245–6.
66 ‘The Gaiety Theatre’, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1 January 1876, 15.
67 Unlabelled newspaper cutting dated 14 April 1860, ‘Theatre Box: St James's Theatre 1860’, Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives (hereafter V&A; date added post hoc).
68 Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 4.
69 The song lyrics are not provided in the manuscript submitted to the Examiner of Plays (British Library, Add. MS 52991 P), but they do appear in the published playbook. See Leicester Silk Buckingham, Lucrezia Borgia! At Home and All Abroad, Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, 40 (London, 1860), 27.
70 Roger King and John Rayner, The Middle Class (London, 1981), 49.
71 Ian St John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London and New York, 2010), 200.
72 Between 1854 and 1875 the exemption limit for income tax was £100. People earning £100–£150 paid tax at a lower rate. See Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75 (London, 1979), 101.
73 See Day, Satire and Dissent, 11–12.
74 Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 219.
75 Buckingham, Lucrezia Borgia!, 28.
76 Tunbridge, ‘From Count to Chimney Sweep’, 220. Tunbridge has pointed to its use in Man-Fred, in which Count Manfred is a chimney sweep.
77 William Schwenck Gilbert, Robert the Devil; or, the Nun, the Dun, and the Son of a Gun (London, 1868), 35.
78 Golby, The Civilisation of the Crowd, 157.
79 Stephen Page, Tourism Management: An Introduction (4th edn, London and New York, 2011), 55. Those of the middle classes who were lower down the income scale would have holidayed in the UK, and many people from the lower middle and working classes enjoyed day trips. See Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 222–8.
80 Stephen Williams and Alan A. Lew, Tourism Geography: Critical Understandings of Place, Space and Experience (3rd edn, New York and Oxford, 2015), 38.
81 Francis Michael Longstreth, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (London, 1988), 262.
82 See the section ‘Creating a niche: Robert the Devil at the Gaiety Theatre’ below (p. 102) for more detail on Gaiety audiences.
83 These strategies would become even more pronounced at the turn of the century with the advent of musical comedy. See Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 178–214.
84 Barry Duncan, The St James's Theatre: Its Strange and Complete History 1835–1957 (London, 1964), 60.
85 Walter Macqueen Pope, St James's: Theatre of Distinction (London, 1958), 42.
86 To put these prices into perspective, in the 1860s working-class men could earn anything between 12s. (as a general labourer) and 35s. (as a skilled craftsman) per week. Middle-class males could earn between £150 a year (a junior clerk's salary) to £1,000 a year (a London doctor or lawyer's salary). See Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 109–10, 115–17.
87 Unlabelled newspaper cutting dated 8 October 1859, ‘Theatre Box: St James's Theatre 1859’, V&A (date added post hoc).
88 ‘The Dramatic and Musical World of London’, J. V. P. Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, 1 May 1860, 177.
89 Unlabelled newspaper cutting dated 8 October 1859, ‘Theatre Box: St James's Theatre 1859’, V&A (date added post hoc).
90 ‘The Dramatic and Musical World of London’, J. V. P. Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, 1 March 1860, 52.
91 ‘The Dramatic and Musical World of London’, J. V. P. Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, 1 September 1860, 431.
92 Duncan, The St James's Theatre, 16.
93 Christina Fuhrmann positions the success of Der Freischütz in 1824 as a crucial event, highlighting the rhetoric of fidelity in criticism and the success of Henry Bishop's ‘faithful’ Drury Lane production. See Fuhrmann, ‘Continental Opera Englished, English Opera Continentalized: Der Freischütz in London, 1824’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 1 (2004), 115–42. Rachel Cowgill has noted a similar shift towards ‘fidelity’ and a work-orientated approach in London productions of Mozart operas, but has placed the production of Don Giovanni at London's King's Theatre as marking ‘a decisive swing toward work-oriented operatic values’. These values were shared first by critics and then by audiences. See Cowgill, ‘Mozart Productions and the Emergence of Werktreue at London's Italian Opera House, 1780–1830’, Operatic Migrations, ed. Montemorra Marvin and Thomas, 145–86. Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992) is a classic text on the development of the concept of an authoritative and authentic ‘musical work’, but applying Goehr's ‘work concept’ to opera is problematic. Operas are the product of multiple authors, combine different mediums and often exist in several contrasting versions. The role of performers coupled with practical performance and staging issues present further complications. Roger Parker has discussed some of these issues and examined ways in which a number of canonical operas have changed and been revised by composers and other authorial voices, challenging the notion of an authentic version or text. See Parker, Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (Berkeley, CA, 2000).
94 See Christina Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge, 2015) 1–38, for an overview of how operas were adapted at London playhouses.
95 Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry’, 286–7.
96 Ibid., 286–343.
97 Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses, 10.
98 Ibid., 31–3, 122. Ballads were highly popular and represented the backbone of English opera. See George Biddlecombe, English Opera from 1834 to 1864 with Particular Reference to the Works of Michael Balfe (New York and London, 1994), 36–43, for an overview of the role and style of the ballad in English opera.
99 Christina Fuhrmann, ‘Scott Repatriated? La dame blanche Crosses the Channel’, Romanticism and Opera, ed. Gillen Wood, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2005), <https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/opera/fuhrmann/fuhrmann.html> (accessed 21 August 2015), 13.
100 Derek Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing-Room and Parlour (Milton Keynes, 1988), 16.
101 Biddlecombe, English Opera, 5.
102 ‘Royal English Opera, Covent Garden’, The Morning Chronicle, 19 March 1860, 5. The success of the opera was also mentioned in ‘Royal English Opera’, The Standard, 24 February 1860, 7. The Standard was financially dependent on the conservative party and was aimed at artisans and small tradesmen. See Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, 62–3.
103 ‘Drama, Music &c.’, Reynolds's Newspaper, 26 February 1860, 4. Reynolds's was a highly popular paper and enjoyed massive circulation. It carried miscellaneous popular and entertainment features, and dramatic crime reporting. It was liberal-radical in its politics. See Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, 66, 96.
104 Susan Key, ‘Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of Stephen Foster’, American Music, 13 (1995), 145–66 (p. 145).
105 Ibid., 147.
106 They often dealt with moral or spiritual concerns, attempting to educate audiences. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 65–9.
107 Anon., ‘St James's’, The Standard, 10 April 1860, 2.
108 Derek Scott, ‘Blackface Minstrels, Black Minstrels, and their Reception in England’, Europe, Empire, and Spectacle, ed. Cowgill and Rushton, 265–80.
109 Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (Aldershot, 2008), 5.
110 Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 40.
111 Michael Pickering, ‘Fun without Vulgarity? Commodity Racism and the Promotion of Blackface Fantasies’, Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, ed. Wulf D. Hund, Michael Pickering and Anandi Ramamurthy (Zurich and Münster, 2013), 119–44 (p. 134).
112 See Duncan, The St James's Theatre, Chapter 3: ‘The French, the Magicians, the Ethiopians under John Mitchell 1842–1854’ (pp. 60–95).
113 Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 17–18.
114 Pickering, ‘Fun without Vulgarity?’, 130–4.
115 Ibid., 138.
116 Ibid., 133.
117 Anon., ‘St James's’.
118 Ibid.
119 Playbill for Zarah the Gypsy Girl, 20 June 1855, ‘Theatre Box: Queen's Theatre 1855–8’, V&A.
120 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 142.
121 Playbill for Zarah the Gypsy Girl.
122 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 154.
123 Unlabelled newspaper cutting dated 22 April 1865, ‘Theatre Box: Prince of Wales's Theatre 1865’, V&A (date added post hoc).
124 Ibid.
125 Maguire, ‘The Victorian Theatre as a Home from Home’.
126 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 155–7.
127 Ibid., 158.
128 For a substantial feature on Bancroft, see ‘Men and Women of the Day’, The Hornet, 18 December 1878, 65.
129 It was common at the time for women to be cast as the lead role in burlesques of Don Giovanni. For details, see Cowgill, ‘Re-gendering the Libertine’, 45–66.
130 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 189.
131 See Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (Boston, MA, and London, 1981), for a thorough examination of spectacle in popular Victorian theatre.
132 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 174.
133 ‘Boxing Night at the Theatres’, The Era, 31 December 1865, 12.
134 ‘Multiple Arts and Popular Culture Items’, The Standard, 27 December 1865, 2.
135 Magnesium started to be mass produced in 1866, and the burning of magnesium powder to create stage effects became widespread only in the 1880s. See Terence Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London, 1978), 78–9, 145.
136 Jennifer Hall-Witt positions the complete staged première of Don Giovanni in London in 1817 as a turning point for middle-class audiences entering the opera house. See Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London 1780–1880 (Hanover, NH, and London, 2007), 146–7. See also Rachel Cowgill, ‘“Wise Men from the East”: Mozart's Operas and their Advocates in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford, 2000), 39–64. Although the staged première of Don Giovanni was slow to take place for a number of practical reasons, much of the opera had been heard in different contexts, including isolated numbers that were inserted into pasticcios and comic operas, in mixed concert programmes and in private stagings. See Rachel Cowgill, ‘Mozart's Music in London, 1764–1829: Aspects of Reception and Canonicity’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College London, 2000), 140–93.
137 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 18.
138 ‘Coursing’, Sporting Gazette, Limited, 10 February 1866, 95.
139 Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 60–3.
140 See Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (London, 1976), 92–8.
141 Ibid., 97. Social and economic factors converged to make the piano a desirable and affordable commodity for every respectable home.
142 For an overview of the genres that were performed in the drawing room, see Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, Chapter 1: ‘The Foundations of the Drawing-Room Genre’ (pp. 1–44).
143 Anon., ‘Music and the Drama’, Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 30 December 1865, 3.
144 For details, see Pickering, ‘Fun without Vulgarity?’, 135.
145 The ways in which minstrelsy was received have been of interest to scholars. William J. Mahar has suggested that ‘non-plantation elements’ of minstrel shows, particularly burlesque humour, were often central to their appeal. See Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, 1999). For an overview of developments in minstrelsy scholarship, see Philip F. Gura, ‘Review: America's Minstrel Daze’, The New England Quarterly, 27 (1999), 602–16.
146 Dagmar Höher, ‘The Composition of Music Hall Audiences, 1850–1900’, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey (Milton Keynes, 1986), 73–92 (p. 76).
147 Ibid., 85–7.
148 Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge, 1996), 77, 99, 136.
149 The policeman provided a common figure of fun in Victorian popular culture, particularly in music hall. See Dave Russell, Popular Music in England 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester, 1987), 101. For an examination of Victorian policemen's engagement with musical culture, see Rachel Cowgill, ‘On the Beat: The Victorian Policeman as Musician’, Music and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul Rodmell (Farnham, 2012), 221–46.
150 Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 16, 19.
151 Henry James Byron, ‘Little Don Giovanni, or Leporello and the Stone Statue’, British Library, Add. MS 53047 G (G.L.C. Plays Dec. 1865, fol. 9r–v).
152 Jane Moody acknowledged that burlesque is a genre which ‘flatters the cultural knowledge of genteel spectators’, but this aspect of burlesque has received little scholarly interest. Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 139.
153 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 186.
154 ‘Gaiety Theatre’, The Times, 24 December 1868. The author of a review in The Morning Star, 23 December 1868, also commented on the ‘elegant lines’ and ‘rich ornamentation’ of the theatre. Newspaper cutting, ‘Theatre Box: Gaiety 1868’, V&A.
155 Interestingly, the Penny Illustrated Paper paid particular attention to literature and the arts. It targeted the working classes specifically with the aim of decreasing ‘“intellectual and cultural inequalities” among the different social classes in imposing on its readership dominant ideas and cultural tastes’. See Michèle Martin, ‘Conflicted Imaginaries: Victorian Illustrated Periodicals and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71)’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36 (2003), 41–58 (p. 45). With this democratic aim in mind, it seems likely that the middle-class owners of the periodical believed that the Gaiety burlesque was a dominant cultural phenomenon that its readers should know about and ideally participate in themselves. The coverage of the event in a working-class periodical may also suggest that even though the Gaiety audience was constructed as fashionable and upper middle class, it may in reality have been more diverse.
156 Jim Davis has examined the intersection between theatrical painting and public opinion, arguing that audiences ‘realised that they too were part of the representation taking place within the theatrical space they inhabited’. See Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, 67.
157 Walter Macqueen Pope, Gaiety: Theatre of Enchantment (London, 1949), 87.
158 ‘Here, There, and Everywhere’, Fun, 2 January 1869, 165.
159 See Sarah Hibberd, ‘Grand Opera in Britain and the Americas’, The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 2003), 403–22 (esp. pp. 404–11).
160 British Library, Add. MS 53073 D.
161 For details of these premières, see Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (London, 1984), 22–49.
162 Playbills advertising burlesques at other theatres contained an overview of the plot and scene changes, but contained no information about the music, other than crediting the arranger. At most burlesque performances patrons could buy programme booklets, which contained dialogue. Programme booklets included (often misspelt) titles of the musical numbers and so could function in a similar way, but they did not usually reference the composer, the original opera or the publisher.
163 Typical means used by publishers to advertise music included press reviews and soirées in which new ballads were showcased. See Scott, The Singing Bourgeoisie, 56–7.
164 An example can be found at the V&A. An image may be found at <http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O132946/silk-programme-r-ward-sons> (accessed 23 February 2016).
165 Adverts from Robert the Devil Gaiety programme booklet, 21 December 1868, ‘Theatre Box: Gaiety 1868’, V&A.
166 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 183–4.
167 Rappaport has argued that audiences associated theatre-going with shopping, rather than treating it as an isolated experience. See ibid., 183.
168 Unlabelled newspaper cutting dated 21 May 1885, ‘Theatre Box: Gaiety 1885’, V&A (date added post hoc).
169 Davis and Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience, 173.