In Henry James’s influential account, criticism of the Victorian novel began in 1884, when Walter Besant’s essay “The Art of the Novel” called forth James’s response of the same title. Up to that point, James claimed, “there was a comfortable, good-humored feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding.” But such complacency had long been challenged by vigorous critical discussion of the novel, which reflected its stature as the dominant cultural form of the age – as well as its relative novelty and the sheer heterogeneity of its formal structures. (What James mistook for “comfortable” common sense often reflected the maddening difficulty of finding artistic principles shaping such a protean form). To be sure, the field of debate could itself be unruly; the vast bulk of Victorian criticism unfolded in reviews rather than in more systematic treatments, and the dominant modes of reading were more unguardedly personal than those of contemporary academic criticism. Victorian discussions nonetheless frame what would become central concerns in twentieth-century criticism of the novel: the varieties and coherence of the form; novelistic style and its relation to an implied author; the substance of “character” and its relation to plot; the moral dimensions of the novel, its subject matter and effect; the narrator and modes of “presentation” (particularly point of view); the novel as a vehicle of social criticism; the relations of the novel to history, both that of its own forms and that of the world in which it was produced; and, above all, the nature of realism.

When Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the novel was still widely regarded as an idle amusement, which inflamed evangelical mistrust of vain and ungodly indulgences, and exasperated many earnest Victorians. This mistrust persisted throughout the century in a fabled Victorian prudishness about subject matter, vividly incarnated in Dickens’s Podsnap. Though Bulwer Lytton declared in 1853, “It is the treatment that ennobles, not the subject,” this was an eccentric view until the 1880s, and the fiercest battles over novelistic decorum came in the 1890s, particularly in the reception of Zola and Hardy.

In 1998 the American soprano Renée Fleming fell foul of what one journalist has called ‘the style police’ at La Scala in Milan. Performing the title role in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Fleming encountered opposition from the conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti when she introduced some decorative appoggiaturas into her vocal lines. As Philip Gossett puts it in his account of the event, Gelmetti has ‘an exaggerated respect for notation’. Since composers like Donizetti normally left appoggiaturas to the intelligence of performers they did not write them into their scores, and Gelmetti had taken this as authority for refusing Fleming’s additions. The tensions that occurred in preparation for the performances led to a classic La Scala brouhaha on the opening night in which, in Gossett’s words, ‘general havoc reigned and Gelmetti collapsed’.

The incident was caused by two contradictory understandings of the nature of the operatic score: an approach that understands the score as a prompt for performance, and a more fundamentalist understanding of the score as a quasi-biblical authority whose every letter must be observed in performance. In his study of nineteenth-century music the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus argued that musical activity in that century could be divided into these two camps, characterized by Italian opera (but also including virtuoso instrumentalists such as Liszt and Paganini) and German instrumental music:

News of Charles Dickens’s sudden death on June 9, 1870, reached Bret Harte several weeks after the event while the American writer was staying in San Rafael, California. He immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back for twenty-four hours the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. “[I]n two or three hours” he composed “Dickens in Camp,” an elegy to the dead author which recalls or imagines (probably a bit of both) a group of tough gold miners at the California diggings in the mid nineteenth century, spellbound by a reading of Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop:

1. Till one arose, and from his pack’s scant treasure

2. A hoarded volume drew,

3. And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure

4. To hear the tale anew;

5. […]

6. The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,

7. Listened in every spray,

8. While the whole camp, with “Nell” on English meadows,

9. Wandered and lost their way.

In 1778 the Italian journalist and historian Pietro Verri, noting the frequent complaints by critics from northern Europe about the lack of dramatic coherence in Italian operas, wrote ‘In my opinion, northerners are wrong to criticise our opera with the laws of the theatre;…ours are a spectacle of another sort.’ In this chapter I want to examine what Verri may have meant by ‘spectacle of another sort’, and to suggest that any operatic performance might usefully be understood as a ‘spectacle of another sort’.

In Chapter 10 I suggest that an operatic text should perhaps be seen as the pretext for a performance, rather than the performance serving to realize the operatic ‘work’. But we also have to recognize that performances themselves serve as pretexts for events. Reinhard Strohm has suggested that baroque opera in particular must be understood as primarily ‘event-like’ rather than ‘work constituted’, but Carolyn Abbate insists that this is true for all operatic performance: ‘what counts is not a work, not, for example, Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in the abstract, but a material, present event’. Although modern cultural activities are often work focused (I attend a performance of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler because I want an opportunity to experience an infrequently performed opera, not to hear the particular singers or to be seen at the Royal Opera House), even today this is far from being exclusively the case: many people attend performances because they are more interested in singer x, conductor y or director z than in the work being performed. And people also attend theatrical or musical performances as a social activity: to celebrate an event in their lives; as the occasion for a date; to identify themselves as part of a particular community; to participate in a social or political ritual.

In 1860 the French poet Charles Baudelaire heard a concert performance of excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Writing about the overwhelming impact that the music had upon him he expressed his desire to understand better its ‘mysterious intentions and method, which were all unknown to me. I resolved to make myself master of the why and wherefore, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.’

We could have no better account of why we might be led to study something, most particularly something that gets under our skin, as Wagner had got under Baudelaire’s skin, and as opera gets under many people’s skins. We study something firstly because we want to understand ‘the why and wherefore’ of it: why it is, and why it is as it is. We want to understand its constituents: how they are put together and why they are put together in that way. And, secondly, we want to understand why it has the effect that it has upon us, so as to know better the values that form our own subjectivity; to gain understanding of the basis of our own pleasures or displeasures, as individuals and members of particular groups and communities. And, finally, we study something for the light it casts upon the society and culture within which the object of our study exists (or existed). Even if Baudelaire didn’t express this last concern immediately, he was certainly one of the first critics to have understood how works of art tell us about their specific historical moment. These three modes of explanation broadly provide the map by which this book has been put together, indicating what I take to be the three main fields of interest in current opera studies.

Mrs. Gradgrind is one of Dickens’s least impressive characters. A “little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily,” for most of the novel she hovers on the verge of extinction, “always taking physic without any effect,” and being “stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her” whenever “she showed a symptom of coming to life” (Hard Times, chapter 4). During her lifetime, Mrs Gradgrind repeatedly demonstrates her inability to sympathize with the feelings of other people. At death’s door, she is finally unable even to identify her own. There’s a “pain somewhere in the room,” she admits to her daughter, but it may or may not belong to her. As a result, she fails the most basic test of personhood in the nineteenth-century novel: the ability to feel and to identify that feeling as one’s own. As James Mill explains in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), “In the very word feeling all that is implied in the word Consciousness is involved.” To feel is to know that one exists. In the absence of the power to claim such feeling, therefore, there is nothing left for Mrs. Gradgrind to do but to die.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century both the nature and the supposed dominance of realism in Victorian fiction were interrogated by critics concerned to explore the non-realist or anti-realist aspects of canonical Victorian novels, and/or to redirect literary historical attention to the cultural significance of a range of bestselling and sometimes controversial nineteenth-century fiction texts, such as the sensation novel which emerged to dominate the bestseller lists and critical column in the 1860s and a number of fantastic narratives from the fin de siècle. Both the mid-century sensation novels, which were often criticized by contemporary reviewers for their fantastic plots, and the degenerationist fantasies and imperial and scientific romances which flowered in the late nineteenth century can be seen, in their different ways, as mutations, transformations, or modernizations of gothic, which, broadly defined, is perhaps the paradigmatic form of the fantastic in Victorian fiction.

The extent to which the sensational and fantastic pervaded Victorian fiction can be seen in the success of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant (like Gaskell, better known now as the author of realistic chronicles of family life) as writers of ghost stories and other tales of terror and the supernatural. Even George Eliot, the doyenne of realist fictional practice as well as one of the major nineteenth-century theorists of realism, produced a strange and disturbing occult novella, The Lifted Veil (1859), whose narrator and central protagonist develops clairvoyant powers following an illness, and is subsequently haunted by his ability to read the minds of others and by his (fore)knowledge of the fate that awaits him. Even more interesting than these forays into fantastic subgenres is the irruption of sensation and the fantastic into novels that cannot easily be assigned to a single generic category or mode of representation, including those that have been cited as examples of Victorian realism. Examples include the demonic characters, gothic scenes, and dreams in the novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë; Dickens’s frequent use of gothic or ghostly scenes, interludes, or interpolated tales; the melodramatic excess and sensational plotting in Dickens’s fiction generally and in Gaskell’s social problem novels; the sensation plotting and sensation effects in George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876); and some of the novels of Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy.

Opera is a multivalent art form: it combines dramatic and literary traditions with vocal and instrumental music and the visual and plastic arts to tell a story. One recurring question in opera studies is exactly how do these diverse modes of expression interact with one another? In an art work that brings together multiple, and possibly competing, expressive ‘systems’ what creates structure and makes an opera cohere? Is the poetry the primary purveyor of narrative and form? Is the music the chief dramatic and structural agent? If so, do recurring melodies or tonalities take primacy in determining form? Or should we be concerned with formal coherence at all?

How critics and musicologists have answered the above questions – in fact, even the questions raised – depends upon which of opera’s domains has been given precedence and what analytical approach has been taken. At various points in opera studies’ history, incongruencies and frictions between expressive systems have been smoothed over in favour of demonstrating synthesis, tonal progressions have received more attention than texts, thematic relations across a work more priority than individual numbers. Which parameter has been used as a starting point has resulted in a number of seemingly conflicting, yet overlapping, findings to questions of form. In short, opera’s musico-dramatic structures stand in counterpoint to one another, a counterpoint that the field of opera studies itself reflects.

Virginia Woolf’s contrast, between the centrality of women as represented in fiction and their virtual absence from the roster of those who have created fictional representations, may readily yet incompletely be adapted for the history of opera. It is easy enough to insert operatic heroines into Woolf’s sardonic parade of martyrs, dominatrices and self-sufficient charmers: ‘Certainly, if we consider it, Violetta must have had a way about her; Carmen, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Susanna, one might conclude, was an attractive girl.’ And, as in the history of literature, women have been all but absent from the operatic activities that received scholarly attention before the late 1980s: few traces remain of women composing, staging, theo-rizing about or paying for opera. Yet at the same time it would be absurd to describe women as ‘all but absent from [opera's] history’, when women – not only as dying heroines but as living divas – have been so central to this art’s fascination for audiences, patrons, enthusiasts and critics.

It might seem curious to the average modern music lover that opera, that most elite of genres, came to be seen as music’s pre-eminent contributor to nationalism. This apparent contradiction derives, however, from two common misconceptions: on the one hand, that nationalism was essentially an expression of popular (nineteenth-century) revolt; on the other, that opera’s associations with the aristocracy should debar it from relevance to more general political concerns. Such misconceptions might seem appropriate for an ideology such as nationalism, which has always covered the traces of its invention by rewriting history in its own image, but opera too is defined by its continual reinvention of itself.

Indeed, as both opera and nationalism are at heart concerned with origins and with representing themselves as originary – both defining themselves as ‘always already’, whether in theoretical or dramatic terms – their interaction can be symbiotic. The anxiety perpetually expressed in operatic criticism and theory about ‘naturalness’ (generic, vocal, aesthetic) is thus neatly complemented by nationalist ideology, the prime hegemonic strategy of which has been similarly to self-authenticate as inherent and instinctive. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that nationalism has been subject to stringent scrutiny as an ideology, its essentialist claims unpicked as historically contingent on (variously) incipient capitalism, industrialization, mass communication and the decline of religion. Scholars such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and Liah Greenfield have seen nationalism as an invention of the modern period (from c.1800 onwards), and have offered trenchant critiques of the ideology’s essentialist mystification. Nonetheless, with nation states remaining powerful political and cultural forces (despite the effects of globalization) and the right to national self-determination still invoked in pursuit of new political entities, the idea of the nation continues to be a significant social paradigm – and continues to be the principal way we parcel up history, whether operatic or otherwise.

Opera is a form of theatre, but the degree to which theatre participates in opera is an issue over which battles, many of them surprisingly vituperative, continue to be fought. In fact, over the last several decades, as the stage director has laid claim to being an artist with a creative presence equal to that of the composer and librettist, the intensity of the dispute has increased. The director has been seen as the saviour of an art form in danger of extinction; according to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: ‘for now [the director's] duty is really to keep the entire repertory alive so it doesn’t just exist in a museum’. On the other hand, directors have been accused of wantonly damaging the operas they direct; for example, a distinguished scholar of Handel writes of modern productions: ‘Whether the producers’ [stage directors’] antics have stemmed from ignorance, cynicism or the lust to explore a hyperactive ego…the result has been the same. The work of art is defaced by graffiti. The servant is exalted above the master.’ While all of us can think of directors whose work has interfered with our enjoyment of the opera, the final sentence indicates more than a passing dislike for some individual’s work; it implies that theatre is only admissible in opera when it is subservient to the demands of the music and the libretto.

This chapter will take issue with this assumption. In accepting that opera is a genre of theatre, it will identify those conventions and practices that have been central in the production of opera and it will consider too the documents that enable us to understand them and ask whether they might provide some guidance as to how opera should be performed today. It will also account for the rise of the modern stage director and question whether his or her work ‘defaces’ opera, and suggest ways in which we might decide this issue for ourselves.

For most of the eighteenth century the novel’s physical form was highly variable: it might be published in one or two volumes, but it was equally likely to appear in three or more. Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796) was published in five volumes, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) in six, Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1748) in seven, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in nine volumes spread over eight years (1760–67). By the early nineteenth century things had started to stabilize, and the standard number of volumes for a first edition of a novel had settled down to three or four. Each volume was usually priced at five shillings or six shillings so a three-volume novel would normally retail at between fifteen shillings and eighteen shillings.

The author who changed all this was Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s influence on both poetry and prose in the early nineteenth century was immense. He may be little read now, but in his time and for a few decades afterwards his poems and novels were probably more widely distributed and consumed than the work of any other serious contemporary writer. At the height of the Romantic movement, many more people read Scott’s poetry than Wordsworth’s. In terms of copies printed and copies read, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley were negligible. Only Byron was sometimes able to rival Scott in terms of numbers of readers. It was later, during the Victorian period, that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, acquired their belated and relative popularity. To a large extent this was due to the effects of copyright law that allowed publishers monopolistic control over pricing. Many publishers preferred selling fewer copies at a high price to the risks of the “stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap” approach. Commonly, it was only when works moved into the public domain that reprint publishers could move in and, as they were competing with one another, drastically reduce prices.

“All is race; there is no other truth.” So says Sidonia, Benjamin Disraeli’s fictional Jewish sage and alter ego. The novel in which Sidonia makes this pronouncement is Tancred (1847), the third in Disraeli’s Young England trilogy. Even during his years as Prime Minister, Disraeli continued to believe in race as an all-encompassing explanatory category. Thus, in his 1870 novel Lothair, Paraclete, a Syrian, tells the young protagonist:

The metaphor of “choicest families,” suggesting divinely chosen branches of the one “great race,” provides Disraeli with a formulaic – indeed, stereotypic – explanation of western civilization and its two ancient sources, classical Greece and Judaeo-Christianity.

That Disraeli, through Sidonia and Paraclete, is expressing a widely held Victorian view of race as the mainspring of world history is evident from Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which poet and critic Matthew Arnold employs “Hellenism” and “Hebraism” as racial terms to distinguish the chief tendencies of western civilization. Arnold believed that he was echoing the latest findings of “ethnology,” an early version of physical anthropology that scholars today treat as a pseudo-science of racial difference. “Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it”: so, sounding like Sidonia, declared Dr. Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850). Foreshadowing Count Gobineau’s influential Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published in France in the early 1850s, Knox argued that historical change is due to the physical and mental inequalities among races; that race hatred and conflict are inbred factors in human nature; that war and imperial expansion are the results of this hatred; and finally, that where climate does not affect the outcome, the fair, stronger races invariably defeat and either enslave or exterminate the dark, weaker races.

At 6 a.m. on June 20, 1837, less than one month after her eighteenth birthday, Princess Alexandrina Victoria of the House of Hanover was called upon by William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Francis Conyngham, Lord Chamberlain of the Household. They informed her that her uncle William IV had died, thus making her the new monarch, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Although this moment conveniently marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the “Victorian period,” most cultural and literary historians look to two earlier political events as indicative of the social changes that distinguish the era. In 1832 Parliament passed what is now often referred to as “The Great Reform Act.” Along with restructuring the electoral boroughs of England and Wales and increasing the representation of many of the large towns that had experienced unbridled growth during the industrial revolution, this act extended voting rights to men who occupied land worth at least ₤10 per year. The size of the electorate in England and Wales accordingly increased by more than 50 percent, giving about one in six adult men eligibility to vote. Two years later, in 1834, Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, commonly referred to as the “New Poor Law.” Widely supported by the Philosophic Radicals and heavily informed by the political economy of Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and David Ricardo, this law effectively wrested responsibility for the poor from the Church and its parishes, creating a state-run system of “poor law unions,” or districts, to oversee their welfare. Relying on the assumption that assistance provided by the Church (known as outdoor relief) actually promoted pauperism by discouraging the poor to seek work, the New Poor Law abolished outdoor relief, substituting in its stead the option of the workhouse. Building upon the “principle of least eligibility,” which assumes that when faced with a choice people will always decline the more onerous alternative, the New Poor Law offered those seeking aid the option of either entering the workhouse, where they would be fed and sheltered, but where conditions would be harsh and demanding; or remaining “out of doors” and supporting themselves to the best of their abilities without any assistance.