The purpose of a business is to make a profit. Opera has a reputation as one of the most effective methods yet invented of losing money. A connection between the two is surely a contradiction in terms?

Daniel Snowman, in his Social History of Opera series for the BBC, argued that the history of opera tells the story of who picks up the deficit. Private or public funders; idealistic artists or intrepid entrepreneurs; individuals or consortia: these are the players with the power to shape the way opera is made. Nor is it a story with a straightforward chronological progression from a primitive example to the complex model(s) of today. At different times during opera’s four centuries and in different places, different practices may be contrasted. Sometimes they are locked in combat, at others one or other is in the ascendant. While there is no blueprint of best practice, judgements may be made as to how well the opera business adapted itself to the needs of its creative forces. And questions may be asked about how the opera has been moulded to the needs of the business.

The question of genre might appear more attuned to the interests of the natural sciences than to opera studies: to the need to identify a specimen in terms of genus and species, and to name and list each item into ordered sets, with thoroughness and precision. And yet such laborious collecting and classifying is unavoidable in the realm of opera too, as attested by the copious and disparate typologies offered by musicological dictionaries. So, what is opera in terms of genre? Since the concept of genre refers quite simply to kind or sort, then we have to ask first of all what sort of art (and craft) is opera? How does it define itself: as a kind of music? Or, perhaps, as a kind of theatre? Then, a second question emerges as soon as we try to account for a specific work from the past, or if we decide to compose or produce an opera: which sort of opera is this opera?

These basic questions already invoke a theory of opera (or what historically has been described as a ‘poetics’, after Aristotle’s own genre-defining text of that name on literary and dramatic theory). Genre, in other words, is a term that pertains to abstract conceptualizations of opera whose coordinates may not necessarily coincide with specific cases. Rather than retracing the exhaustive paths of musicological dictionaries in enumerating all the genres of opera, these pages will instead offer a transversal historiographical and theoretical account. Also, rather than adopting the literary discourse of genre theory in a search for how it can be relevant to opera, this chapter will pose the problem the other way around and ask what opera can do for genre theory. The first section returns to the questions above in order to introduce theoretical issues invoked by the term ‘genre’. This is followed by a historiographical outline of generic definitions in opera. The closing section returns to theoretical discourse on genre and maps out some possible intersections between concerns typical to opera studies and their relevance more broadly for genre theory, in particular in relation to performance.

How was it that the Victorian novel appeared to be in the hands of all social classes in 1870, even if not everyone was reading the same novel? What brought the Prime Minister and his servant together was the sheer pleasure of reading exhilarating fiction, despite the fact that William Gladstone was probably devoting himself to the two hefty volumes of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869) and his scullery maid was snatching a few pages of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s latest piece of popular fiction. Like most readers of the Victorian novel, they immersed themselves in a world teeming with vital characters jostling through different social landscapes; they encountered people from town and country, from the outposts of empire, and from across the Atlantic; they read about London high life, the Yorkshire moors, and African adventure. And in addition to being moved to tears by the death of characters such as Paul Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and terrorized by ghosts and villains in sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), readers of Victorian fiction also received an education in such matters as intellectual debate about scientific discovery, the possibility and consequence of a loss of religious faith, and the urgent need for parliamentary political reform.

During the Victorian period, the novel confronted a new definition of human nature that challenged Enlightenment models of individualism. Across a swath of disciplines – not only biology and natural history, but sociology, psychology, theology, moral philosophy, and political economy as well – liberal individualism struggled with the problem of man as a population or species. Writing in a form that had traditionally aimed at forming a household that would in turn reproduce self-governing individuals, Victorian novelists could hardly avoid this problem. To maintain the novel’s preeminence, they had to maintain the individual’s viability in a milieu newly hostile to individualism. Victorian novelists of all stripes responded to this challenge by staging the conflict between individual and species as a conflict between gender and sexuality. In carrying the novel into new areas of modern social and not-so-social life, they also broke it into pieces when serialization began. This change in the mode of publication coincided with the novel’s formal fragmentation into multiple narrators and plots, none of which had an exclusive purchase on truth. As a genre, moreover, the novel devolved into such subgenres as detective fiction, gothic fiction, children’s literature, adventure stories, the novels of the romance revival, and sensation novels, all of which reveal how gender relations – and by proxy liberal society – fail either to encompass or to exclude the populations on which the middle classes were coming to depend. An account of gender and sexuality in the Victorian novel is consequently an account of a conflict that did not yield satisfying resolutions so much as a variety of memorable failures.

The Victorian novel was predominantly a novel of domestic manners, not a novel of ideas. As a general rule, Victorian novelists did not give intellectual propositions the status of themes, or employ characters to debate them – unlike later writers such as Thomas Mann or André Gide. In fact, Victorian reviewers and readers put serious pressure on novelists to downplay intellectual subjects, which were often regarded as anti-aesthetic. Intellectual life was also considered a male preserve, and intellectual subjects a threat to “masculinize” the novel. The strict separation of private and public spheres in Victorian culture necessarily set the domestic novel apart from intellectual concerns. Nevertheless, an influential branch of intellectual fiction was sustained by a few major Victorian novelists – most notably, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Close attention to the work of these writers (which I will provide later in this chapter) can help define a set of intellectual engagements that were, in fact, broadly shared by other novelists – even if those engagements often took place beneath the surface of domestic fiction, in matters of form and method, or in the intrusion of non-literary discourses, or in novelists’ ambivalent fascination with the figure of the intellectual. In fact, intellectual debates informed so many aspects of Victorian fiction so powerfully that it would not be inaccurate to say that those debates governed both the form and the substance of the genre.

The veiling of intellectual debate is, however, an important issue – not simply because of the effort it now takes to recognize how, despite appearances, Victorian novels engaged intellectual life, but also because the sublimation of ideas in Victorian fiction helped shape them in particular ways. For example, fiction was one of the few cultural domains in which women could legitimately express themselves, which meant that the novel could inflect ideas with women’s perspectives – often covertly. The novel was also a medium in which the impact of ideas on private life, or on non-privileged social groups, could be dramatized. And the novel, given its natural tendency to embody ideas within a social drama, could reveal the dynamics of social power entwined with supposedly disinterested speculation. In other words, the Victorian novel did not simply engage intellectual debates, either directly or indirectly. It also embodied them in the social relations that made up its subject matter.

In a volume in the ‘Cambridge Studies in Opera’ series, Victoria Johnson has pointed to the ‘blossoming of opera studies’ that has occurred in recent decades in the wake of the cultural and historical ‘turns’ experienced by the social sciences and humanities since the 1970s. Two new directions in opera research which Johnson has termed the ‘material conditions’ and ‘systems of meaning’ approaches have reshaped in a fundamental way our thinking about the relationship between opera, the state and society, and in so doing have laid a firm foundation for further work in this area. While the ‘systems of meaning’ paradigm with its roots in the New Cultural History has reconstructed the time-bounded ‘horizons of expectation’ that opera’s librettists, composers and audiences shared during different periods of the genre’s four-century lifespan, the ‘material conditions’ approach, strongly influenced by social history, has delineated the ways in which political and legal – as well as social and economic – factors have shaped operatic production and reception.

This research has uncovered three paradigmatic systems of production and reception that one might call the impresarial, the statist and the impresarial-statist, each of which embodies a distinct pattern in the relationship between opera, the state and society. In the impresarial system, found in its purest form in Italy between the advent of public or commercial opera in 1637 and unification in 1861, in Britain until 1939 and in the United States right down to the present, central states and local governments create the framework conditions for opera production through the enforcement of contracts but provide only minimal financial assistance while leaving the organization of opera seasons in the hands of private businessmen (the impresarios) or associations aiming – but often failing – to turn a profit. Local urban-based social and economic elites choose the opera house as a locus of sociability and status differentiation while influencing the character and content of works through their expectations and tastes.

At first glance, realism seems easy to grasp and define. Even the most casual readers have a strong sense of what feels lifelike to them, and consider themselves perfectly within their rights to object to implausible plots and exaggerated characters. Many critics would broadly agree that realist writers rejected allegory and symbol, romantic and sensational plots, supernatural explanations and idealized characters, and opted instead for the literal, credible, observable world of lived experience. And yet, no consensus has ever emerged among scholars about the essential qualities of a realist novel. Critics have produced a lengthy and various list of definitions over the past half-century, and new scholarly characterizations appear with remarkable frequency. The year 2008 alone saw two major contributions: Richard Menke’s Telegraphic Realism, which makes the case for the realist novel as an expression of crucial shifts in Victorian media, and Daniel Novak’s Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, which argues that Victorian realist writers drew from photography, yet, surprisingly, understood the photograph as a highly constructed, artful form rather than a transparent window onto the world. Realism has variously been associated with the ordinary, the middle class, the present, historical consciousness, industrialization, the city, and the nation; it has been linked to omniscient narration, free indirect discourse, vernacular dialogue, extended description, open-ended narrative, the panoramic, and the detail; it has been seen as a way to explore the interior lives of characters and the exterior movement of objects; it has been cast as totalizing or particularizing, as naïvely invested in transparency or as highly self-conscious about the problem of representation. Realism has also constantly crossed boundaries, claiming English, French, US, Brazilian, Japanese, Indian, and African traditions – among others – and spanning centuries, media, and genres.

One of the most often-quoted descriptions of opera is that of Dr Samuel Johnson, who famously defined opera in the mid-eighteenth century as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’.

Johnson’s response to opera was at one with a prevailing English attitude of curmudgeonly roast-beef-and-ale xenophobia presented as bluff common sense, and was aimed primarily at Italian opera. His suspicion of Italian opera was shared by writers such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, the poet Alexander Pope (who represents opera as a foreign ‘harlot form’ in The Dunciad), and the painter William Hogarth, who satirized the Whig aristocracy’s cultivation of Italian opera (and other such foreign affectations) in prints and paintings.

The literal meaning of exotic is, indeed, ‘foreign’ (as Johnson’s own dictionary explains), and this may be all that Johnson implied when he used the term, in this instance quite accurately; for, despite indigenous attempts at the form in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century opera was perceived as an essentially foreign import to Britain, being largely performed there in a foreign language with foreign performers. And for most countries in the world for the first two centuries of its existence opera would be exotic beyond Italy since, France aside, it was generally assumed that opera was Italian per se. The majority of opera composers were Italians, many working in countries outside of Italy; but many non-Italian composers such as Handel, Gluck, Haydn or Mozart predominantly set operas in Italian, usually outside of Italy too.

The singer is the defining feature of opera: the living crucible in which music, drama and spectacle coalesce into a single art form. The history of opera was thus shaped in part according to changing concepts about the singer – about his or her relationship with each of opera’s constituent arts; about ideas of vocal and dramatic virtuosity; about the singer’s place within the hierarchy of the opera house and the gaze of the spectator. In the discourses around opera, the singer is considered both as an embodied musical performer, and also in more abstract terms as pure ‘voice’. Modern opera studies draws on both aspects in its exploration of the singer’s art and performance practice, the social history of the singer, and the investigation of the singer as cultural phenomenon.

Initially, however, the singer was largely ignored during the awakening of critical interest in opera in the 1980s. Despite an opening article by John Rosselli in the first edition of the Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it was not until the mid-1990s that English-language scholarship began to take the same interest in the singer as was already evident in continental Europe, albeit from rather different methodological perspectives. This chapter explores various aspects of both historical and contemporary approaches to the singer in relation to voice, text, spectacle, technology, the operatic market place and the audience.

When the emancipated slave William Wells Brown visited England in 1850, he made a short visit to the “far-famed city of Oxford … one of the principal seats of learning in the world.” Here, he admired the architectural beauties of the university, and, when night fell, walked around the colleges that back onto Christ Church meadow:

Brown’s focus of interest is salutary. Reading provoked a good deal of anxiety during the Victorian period. At the center of this anxiety about what constituted suitable reading material and ways of reading lay concerns about class, and concerns about gender. In both cases, fiction was regarded as particularly suspect: likely to influence adversely, to stimulate inappropriate ambitions and desires, to corrupt. But in the case of Brown, a man who is painfully aware of the value of education, and of the advantages which privilege bestows, we see someone who is less troubled by the thought that this young man might be learning dangerous lessons from his novel, than that a privileged student is frittering away his time, wasting those opportunities for learning from which others could gain so much. Brown seizes the chance to regret how “few of our own race can find a place within their walls,” and to emphasize the need, among black people, to turn their attention seriously to self-education.