Voicing Britannia

Abstract According to a widely held view in eighteenth-century Britain, Britons were somehow inherently unmusical, and this supposed shortcoming was, in fact, a virtue. George Colman explicated this view in 1762, when he wrote: “For arts and arms, a Briton is the thing! / John Bull was made to roar – but not to sing.” However, Colman was responding to an already changing cultural landscape. The 1760s saw the emergence of English-language opera and the rise of a new generation of British singers who were to perform it. Responding to long-held suspicions toward Italian opera and its singers, this was a bold attempt to offer British audiences a vision of themselves as a singing nation, marking a new period in British musical life. This is the book’s central theme: the question of whether Britons could sing, and how it was negotiated in the public discourse in relation to an emergent generation of British singers. The main chapters follow three groups of singers—high-pitched men, virtuosic prima donnas, and Jews—who sought to break new ground for opera in Britain, while challenging prevailing social categories and gender norms. These attempts gave rise to a certain interplay, between an evolving cultural form, seeking approval, and an insistent reticence that clung to the conventional. Eventually, the attempts to adopt opera as a national vehicle, over a period of several decades, only helped to galvanize a guarded attitude toward music—an attitude that Britons were forced to admit was constitutive of their national identity.