The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

Italian Opera and the Concept of “Canon” in the Late Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
Franco Piperno
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Giovanni Paisiello

This essay shows that in Italy for much of the eighteenth century, canonic recognition was granted to the librettist of a famous opera but not to the composer, who was seen as an artisan rather than an intellectual. But the unique long-term popularity of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (1733) led to the honoring of composers in subsequent generations both in musical and in dramatic terms. Even though a stable authorial canon of opera composers failed to establish itself in Italy prior to the triumph of Rossini, strong respect emerged for composers such as Niccolò Jommelli, Niccolò Piccinni, and Giovanni Paisiello, which, together with the rising fame of leading singers, laid the groundwork for the Italian operatic canon of the nineteenth century. This chapter is paired with Michel Noiray’s “The practical and symbolic functions of pre-Rameau opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck.”

John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot's Character

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Leah Orr
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
British Government ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Newspaper Articles

AbstractHow did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie's “Introductory Discourse”

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Public World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Character Types

In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classification should be based on the passions individuals express rather than the fashions they wear. Despite this anticonsumerist stance, however, Baillie's project is shaped by the logic of late-eighteenth-century consumerism: Baillie conceives of passions as items susceptible to inventory, display, and sale. Her interest in establishing a human taxonomy grounded in ostensibly natural and subtle discriminations of character allies her works with other popular consumer goods of the period, from clothing fashions to studies of physiognomy. Moreover, like the aesthetic of the picturesque, Baillie's aesthetic encodes a peculiarly consumerist form of desire, a desire that can never be satisfied because it aims at acquisition rather than possession. In Baillie, the feelings and desires on which modern subjectivity is founded do not spring from deep within but are formed by, and find their meaning in, the public world of the marketplace.

Crime News and the Press

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carter Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Human Interest ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
General Readership ◽  
Crime News

This essay examines crime news between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, focusing on the newspaper press in Great Britain. It lays out trends in crime and media historiography; describes the main press discourses about “crime,” “criminals,” and “criminal justice”; identifies the key agents who created crime news; and considers the press’s role in “moral panics.” Showing that the press has been a dominant source of crime information from the late eighteenth century and that crime reporting has constituted a substantial proportion of newspaper content, it argues that crime news has consistently offered a distorted view of crime, with the greatest attention being given to those crimes that least frequently appear in official statistics; this inaccuracy can reveal distinctive fears and attitudes in particular historical contexts. Moreover, “human interest” reporting, while often sensationalist, has sometimes contained quasi-political social critiques cast in a more digestible language for a general readership.

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