Voicing Britannia: Opera, Gender, and Jews, 1760-1830

By Uri Erman

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 when he wrote in 1762 that "for arts and arms, a Briton is the thing John Bull was made to roar--but not to sing."

However, he 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 ready and able to perform it. In response to long-held suspicions toward Italian opera and its singers, this turn was a bold attempt to offer British audiences a new vision of themselves: as a singing nation.

This is the book s central theme: the question of whether Britons could sing, and how it was negotiated in public discourse within an evolving cultural landscape. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, the text follows three groups of groundbreaking singers--high-pitched men, virtuosic prima donnas, and Jews--who sought to shift the landscape of opera in Britain, all the while challenging the prevailing gender norms and social categories. 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 effort 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0197784046
• ISBN13: 9780197784044
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"