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Masculinity and Legitimacy on the English Musical Stage: The Mature Male, 1800-1845

THAT MUSIC HOLDS AN UNCERTAIN PLACE in Anglo-American culture is clear to many musicians sensitive to issues of respect. Although widely enjoyed, from Elizabethan times it has sometimes failed to receive a degree of esteem consistent with its extensive pursuit. Denigrated as ephemeral or suited only to women, foreigners, lower classes, and those of limited aptitude, music--often singing or playing the piano--has been seen as inconsistent with an idea of meaning based on verbal expression. Eighteenth-century British intellectuals such as Lord Chesterfield and John Locke most famously argued the point, Chesterfield in letters to his son ("I would rather be reckoned the best barber than the best fiddler in England"), Locke in his writing on education ("Amongst all those things, that ever came into the List of Accomplishment, I think I may give it [music] the last place"). (1) In the nineteenth century, similar attitudes were played out in ideologies of music as a feminine accomplishment to be pursued at length but without serious attention or ambition. (2) The disjunction between belief and practice has long characterized the English-language musical theater. English-speaking audiences have been less enthusiastic about all-sung opera than their counterparts on the European continent, and instead have favored a tradition of dialogue opera, musical comedy, and a host of other theatrical genres with music. (3) The use of speech creates options that can exaggerate the differences between music and words by allowing for characters who do not sing. In this way, musical theater can define the limits of musical expression, circumvent important questions of musical style and representation, and draw a line between music's sphere and the world beyond. These tensions are especially noticeable in the musical theater of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a hugely popular institution and repertoire based in London and scattered throughout Britain and North America. (4) In London the amount of music in a theatrical production was even regulated by law. The patents granted in 1662 by Charles II still gave permission to perform staged entertainment in London and to build two permanent theaters for it. Under the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737, the two theaters, by that rime Drury Lane and Covent Garden, (5) were authorized to offer word-based comedy and tragedy with no music at all. By the 1790s, they had been dubbed the "legitimate" stage. (6) The many others, known as "minor" theaters to mark their lower status, were to produce "entertainments"--not "plays"--required to include music of some kind. (7) Along with substantial amounts of music in genres such as melodrama, pantomime, burletta, and pastiche, they incorporated stage machinery, elaborate lighting, occasionally animals, and other spectacular effects. They were usually also replete with topical content; themes such as the French Revolution and its aftermath, slavery and the slave trade, industrialization, and social dislocation showed their ability to respond to the upheavals of the era. (8) And finally (and hardly surprising), they were consistently condemned in the press for these characteristics, along with impropriety and disregard for intellectual property. (9) Thanks to the licensing system, the differences between the patent and minor theaters and between the legitimate and illegitimate stage were clear in word and spirit. But in practice, the laws were, as Frank Rahill has put it, "legally dubious, frequently violated, always unpopular and capriciously enforced." (10) Indeed, the interpenetration of theatrical vehicles and personnel between the patents and the minors, along with the latter's subterfuges (Jane Moody's term) used to meet the legal requirements, is a key characteristic of the theater of the time and a main source of its extreme generic fluidity. (11) The exchange of musical repertoire and techniques (such as melodrama and pantomime) between the patent and minor theaters speaks to an underlying acknowledgment of music's appeal among presenters and a diverse audience. …