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Sullivan, Scott and Ivanhoe: Constructing Historical Time and National Identity in Victorian Opera
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2013
Abstract
Arthur Sullivan's Walter Scott-based opera Ivanhoe, despite attaining great success at its 1891 premiere, has since quickly fallen from musicological grace. Substantive criticism of this work in the twentieth century has concentrated on the static, tableau-like dramaturgy of the opera, a lack of dramatic coherence, and its undeniably conservative musical language. Taking its bearings from such criticisms this paper explores Sullivan's problematic magnum opus from the perspective of its relationship with time, understood from multiple levels – his opera's musical-dramaturgical, historical, and music-historical temporalities. Starting from Michael Beckerman's insightful analysis of what he terms the ‘iconic mode’ in Sullivan's music, Ivanhoe can be viewed as an attempt at creating a different type of dramaturgical paradigm that emphasizes stasis and stability located in the past – highly apt for a work seeking both to crystallize past history and to found a new tradition for future English opera. Moreover, investigating this work and the composer's stated aesthetic concerns more closely reveal a conscious desire to opt out of continental European narratives of musical progress and build a composite, pageant-like vision of English history, therefore inevitably partaking in a process of constructing national identity. These features are teased out in the context of Scott's impact on the Victorian mind and their affinities with other historicist tendencies in the arts such as the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
Footnotes
I would like to thank Michael Allis especially for his kind suggestions for improving the first version of this paper presented at the Seventh Biennial Conference for Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Bristol University, 25 July 2009. Phyllis Weliver and Brooks Kuykendall also offered helpful comments on earlier versions and Robin Gordon-Powell was extremely generous in providing the musical examples from his edition of Ivanhoe.
References
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64 Scene 6 of The Golden Legend is probably the best illustration of these traits and one of the high-points of Sullivan's oeuvre.