Reaching the Operatic Stage: The Geographical and Social Origins of British and Irish Opera Singers, c.1850–c.1960

Abstract

Abstract The backgrounds of opera singers have received little systematic study and this article attempts to help redress this situation through analysis of a collective biography of 344 British and Irish-born performers active in the century from 1850. It argues that certain areas, notably London and Wales, made a particularly significant contribution to the operatic profession and notes that certain other patterns of regional under- and over-production are discernible. While singers from a broadly defined middle class were numerically dominant within this sample, this study stresses the unexpectedly strong contribution from those born into the lower-middle and working classes. Such performers were able to build on skills honed in the amateur musical sphere partly as a result of an expanding state-funded higher education system, but also due to an extraordinary variety of forms of patronage. The ‘popular’ social tone of singers, however, is shown to have done little to challenge perceptions of opera as an elitist cultural form.

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