Repertory Opera and Canonic Sensibility

This essay explains how “repertory opera” as a dominant programming structure was established at the King’s Theatre in London from the late 1820s. With many of the same operas repeated from season to season, and with especially dramatic moments often staged as separate items, the audience developed an unprecedented familiarity and emotional connection with this repertory. What emerged as a result—a sense of the most popular operas as canonic—can be thought of as a “canonic sensibility” that was different from the more intellectual notion of “canon.” This chapter draws attention to that difference and argues that this sensibility may be seen as an intermediary step in the historical trajectory from repertory to canon, even as it developed in dynamic tension with the canonic values embraced by many music critics of the early to mid-Victorian period. This chapter is paired with Michael Burden’s “From recycled performances to repertory at the King’s Theatre in London, 1705–1820.”