Chapter 1 traces the transmission of pasticcio, as a practice in oral storytelling tradition, into the proto-literate culture of early modern society. While mass literacy in the nineteenth century brought an end to pasticcio in many narrative artforms, it survived in opera. This chapter explores why. Early opera’s many oral inheritances include the predominance of words over music, mimesis in learning roles and an oral rather than literate relationship with visualisation. Credible motivations are weak in early opera, as they are in storytelling. Rhetoric provided much of the framework for operatic structures and the chapter argues that this classical oral inheritance, although mediated through text, provided another means whereby oral narrative approaches shaped opera in the teeth of an increasingly literate culture. This approach restored a profound type of immersion in a story, one which had largely disappeared from spoken theatre. This kind of immersion was much written about and was a key factor in the popularity of opera. Pasticcio was much used in its creation, but intertextualities intended to be ‘read’ by the audience are argued to belong to more literate periods. References and allusions abound but a pasticcio created a new original.

What was later called pasticcio was widespread in Roman poetry, medieval hagiography and in the cantillated epic tales sung at courts. Seventeenth-century Italian operas continued these techniques and this chapter argues that recitative derives from earlier kinds of sung speech. The contrafactum in liturgy and madrigals is argued to prefigure the reuses of aria texts and settings in opera. Specifically Italian pasticcio practices were passed to Britain in 1656 with Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, though they may have been known earlier. Yet indigenous traditions for reusing pre-existing material had been as deeply embedded in Britain as they were in Italy. Interpolation, ‘dressing’ and collaborative process had characterised spoken theatre before the civil wars, but new encounters with operatic practice emboldened British dramatists, as demonstrated in Davenant’s The Law against Lovers (1662). Spoken theatre became increasingly literate in culture attending to resonances of Protestantism, masculine codes of behaviour, rational motivations, personation and verisimilitude. Opera, on the other hand, in restoring a much-missed emotional engagement, relished the fantastical, the digressive; it was continental and Catholic and repeatedly broke neoclassical rules. It provided an experience which spoken theatre had left behind but the need for which had not yet left society.

If pasticcio operas did not terminate in the nineteenth century and advocates for textual fidelity did not have the influence claimed, how did pasticcio become so marginal to twentieth-century operatic practice? To answer this, the chapter first discusses copyright and performance licensing, arguing that their structures between the 1870s and 1920s contracted the canonical operatic repertoire and militated against pasticcio in leading opera houses. Yet these were virtually the only context where pasticcio was not practiced: from the beginning twentieth-century cinema and television took a pasticcio approach to the use of music and beyond Covent Garden pasticcio opera continued. That pasticcio skills were widespread among the public is evidenced by the thousands of musicians who invented accompaniments to silent films every week. Lines of teacher/pupil descent illustrate how skills were transmitted: Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon’s pasticcio operas were broadcast on television in 1938, and their tutors were taught by Henry Bishop, a pupil of Francesco Bianchi, to whose pasticci Mozart contributed in the 1780s. Pathways back from the margins for pasticcio operas increased after the 1970s when academic rehabilitation sped its return. The book concludes with a pulse-reading of the twenty-first century’s renewed interest in pasticcio opera.

Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with authenticity and originality, the chapter explores the pressure which pasticcio practices experienced across many artforms. Practices changed in sculpture and antiquities as well as opera, to accommodate new Romantic ideals. It was argued in the twentieth century that pasticcio opera was discontinued early in the century as a shift towards fidelity occurred. This chapter lists numerous examples of its continuity, both for operas that designated themselves as pasticci and those that called themselves something else. This continuity is found in regional opera and in London. In recontextualising the centrality of text for nineteenth-century musical practice within the shift towards mass literacy, the chapter proposes that advocates for fidelity did not have the influence claimed. In defining fidelity and pasticcio as binary opposites much is missed: pasticcio practices were often relied on to bring greater fidelity to an opera, bringing it closer to its source material, to what were considered timeless behaviours, to national stereotyping or the locale in which the story was set. These fidelities were achieved at the expense of that to the original score, but these other fidelities were often a greater priority, even for reformers.

The expansion and popularity of pasticcio between the 1660s and the 1780s in many artforms is far from monocausal, but this chapter proposes that pasticcio practices in art were a reflection of how eighteenth-century people performed the self. In a reaction against the embedded factionalism of the previous century, a cult of civility became widespread among the elite and the self-conscious construction and performance of a public self (or selves) was also created through borrowing and assemblage. Pasticcio practices in art were thus complemented by pasticcio in personal behaviour. Another parallel explored is the relationship between opera production and the period’s mania for collecting. Collections, both public and private, are necessarily assemblages of pre-existing parts and pasticcio was a means of bringing narrativity to a collection, conscious and overt or merely implied. Sculpture restorations and operatic pasticci both tailored classical stories to neoclassical tastes and the works of an alien culture to contemporary British mores. Lastly, the chapter examines the vexed issue of pasticcio in conceptions of musical property, arguing that nineteenth-century perspectives often have been too readily projected backwards into the eighteenth century. Pasticcio is argued to be rooted in earlier, orally derived, conceptions of music as property.

The introduction explains what a pasticcio opera is and how the term is defined in the book, outlining where this differs from previous scholarship. The book argues that pasticcio is not a genre of opera, but a construction method that was already widely used before the word ‘pasticcio’ became current. Not all operas created using the pasticcio method designated themselves as pasticci, even while the term was current, but much twentieth-century scholarship only considered an opera a pasticcio if it used this designation. Evidence is given that the practice was more widespread and occurred for longer than previously argued and I challenge assumptions of its termination in the nineteenth century, arguing that pasticcio continued in direct descent from baroque practice into the twentieth century. The introduction also offers a prospectus of the varied arguments made throughout the book and a rationale for its long timeframe. Society’s changing relationship with pasticcio is argued to be closely connected to other socio-cultural and economic changes with long timeframes, such as the transition from an oral to a literate culture, generational changes in the understanding of the self and the contradictory influences of mass production on the arts.

The Mendelssohn family’s handling of the compositional legacy of the two siblings Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, who died young, could not have been more different: While the brother Paul Mendelssohn put almost everything his brother had left behind into print posthumously, very little was given to the public in the case of the sister. On the one hand, this family strategy reflected the father Abraham Mendelssohn’s assessment of his children’s talents and professional abilities. On the other hand, these decisions distorted the image of the developments and abilities of both artists for a long time. The article traces this development, in particular the role of Cécile Mendelssohn, who as a widow was unable to assert herself against this family dynamic.

This chapter discusses modern approaches to understanding Hensel’s music and future scholarly challenges for its interpretation. Nowadays Hensel’s music is written about and performed widely and she has become one of the best-known woman composers. Yet this was not always the case. What had to happen to transform Hensel – in the eyes of scholars, performers, students and lay listeners – from an overlooked and sometimes maligned figure into someone now regarded as one of the most gifted composers of her generation? What lessons can we learn from considering how she moved from the margins toward the centre of the canon? And what challenges lie ahead? Looking back on the past forty years of Hensel studies reveals three main, interlinked developments that have shaped our understanding of her music: a greater awareness of the relationship and differences between her and her brother’s musical styles; a more sophisticated analytical understanding of her music; and a drastic increase in the amount of her music available for study.

Part of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s ‘monarchical project’ following his ascension to the throne in 1840 included his goal of establishing Berlin as a leading centre of culture and the arts on par with other European capitals. Berlin had remained Fanny Hensel’s home throughout her life, where her musical salon formed one of the city’s cultural highlights. In the 1840s, at the urging of the king, her brother gave Berlin another chance; his appointment at the Prussian court brought him closer to his family once more, but placed different expectations on him, not least in the composition of new genres for the court (incidental music, liturgical music). Ultimately Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s project must be judged something of a political failure, while Mendelssohn left after an unsatisfactory and frustrating period. Yet while neither Hensel nor Mendelssohn lived long enough to witness the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, each in their own way played an important role in shaping the contours of everyday life in Berlin of the 1840s.