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19 results

The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • With contributions by George Biddlecombe , Hilary J. Grainger , Denise Gallo , Catherine Hennessy Wolter , Roberta Montemorra Marvin , Jann Pasler , Michela Ronzani , Jon Solomon , Jeffrey S. Sposato , Nicholas Vazsonyi and David C. H. Wright
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016
  • Art and money, culture and commerce, have long been seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, the connections between them have tended to resist full investigation, particularly in the musical sphere.The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930, is a collection of essays that present fresh insights into the ways in which art music, i.e., classical music, functioned beyond its newly established aesthetic purpose (art for art's sake) and intersected with commercial agendas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Understanding how art music was portrayed and perceived in a modernizing marketplace, and how culture and commerce interacted, are the book's main goals.
    In this volume, international scholars from musicology and other disciplines address a rangeof unexplored topics, including the relationship of sacred music with commerce in the mid nineteenth century, the role of music in urban cultural development in the early twentieth, and the marketingof musical repertories, performers and instruments across time and place, to investigate what happened once art music began to be understood as needing to exist within the wider framework of commercially oriented culture. Historical case studies present contrasting topics and themes that not only vary geographically and ideologically but also overlap in significant ways, pushing back the boundaries of the 'music as commerce' discussion. Through diverse, multidisciplinary approaches, the volume opens up significant paths for conversation about how musical concepts, practices and products wereshaped by interrelationships between culture and commerce.

    CHRISTINA BASHFORD is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois.

    ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN is Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also on the faculty.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Christina Bashford, George Biddlecombe, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, Catherine Hennessy Wolter, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Fiona Palmer, Jann Pasler, Michela Ronzani, Jon Solomon, Jeffrey S. Sposato, Nicholas Vazsonyi, David Wright

  • 4 - Jenny Lind, Illustration, Song and the Relationship between Prima Donna and Public

  • Edited by Christina Bashford, Associate Professor of Musicology, School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., Roberta Montemorra Marvin
  • With contributions by George Biddlecombe , Hilary J. Grainger , Denise Gallo , Catherine Hennessy Wolter , Roberta Montemorra Marvin , Jann Pasler , Michela Ronzani , Jon Solomon , Jeffrey S. Sposato , Nicholas Vazsonyi and David C. H. Wright
  • Book:
    The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016, pp 86-113

  • Summary

    WHEN, in his 1888 book The Prima Donna, Henry Sutherland Edwards played on longstanding assumptions that prima donnas paid scant respect to the mores of the British public and pursued lifestyles marked by vast incomes and dubious morals, all compounded by their foreignness, he was accentuating a gulf between the singers’ world and that of the population at large. This characterization of the relationship between prima donnas and society should not be accepted unquestioningly, however, for it overlooks an important factor: the cultivation of a perception of major female singers as, on the contrary, espousing respectable social and cultural values. To explore this issue, the present chapter focuses on the case of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820–87) to investigate the role of imagery, as used by the sheet-music and print-producing industries, in promoting the notion of the archetypal prima donna as endowed with admirable personal qualities in addition to feminine attractiveness. It also considers Lind's choice of repertoire for performance beyond the opera house – a means by which famous singers engaged with society on a broad scale. Here the discussion will concentrate on the ballad, a major genre of English-language song, in relation to her performances in Britain and America.

    Having begun her career in her native Stockholm, Lind established an international reputation in Berlin and Vienna before making her London debut at Her Majesty's Theatre on 4 May 1847. Two years later she withdrew from the stage – a decision attributed to anti-theatrical religious sentiment – and turned exclusively to concert and oratorio performances. She undertook a concert tour of the United States from 1850 to 1852, later settling in Britain.

    Lind was of a generation able to benefit from a number of important developments that had occurred in the fields of image-making and marketing since 1806, when the etchings that marked the London debut of Angelica Catalani, the outstanding soprano of the early years of the nineteenth century, were created and disseminated. Particular advances dated from the 1820s to the 1840s. Print production increased greatly; indeed, Rodney K. Engen has referred to these decades as having seen a ‘boom in the print industry’. The same period saw crucial developments in music publishing, which has been described by Derek B. Scott as ‘[a]longside the promotion of public performances, […] the most important musical money-making enterprise of the new commercial age’.

  • Secret Letters and a Missing Memorandum: New Light on the Personal Relationship between Felix Mendelssohn and Jenny Lind

  • George Biddlecombe
  • Journal:
    Journal of the Royal Musical Association / Volume 138 / Issue 1 / 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2020, pp. 47-83
    Print publication:
    2013

  • The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death. The notion that Mendelssohn would have written such letters conflicts strikingly with the received view of his character. Nevertheless, the veracity of the material is beyond doubt, and, while it does not include specific evidence that Mendelssohn and Lind began an affair, it points more clearly than has hitherto been possible towards an answer to this question. Thus it necessitates a radical revision of perceptions of these two major musicians. For Otto Goldschmidt, Lind's husband, destroying the letters was crucial in protecting the reputations not only of his wife and Mendelssohn but also of himself and his family.