According to a widely held view in eighteenth-century Britain, Britons were somehow inherently unmusical. 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 towards Italian opera and its singers, this turn was a bold attempt to offer British audiences a new vision of themselves: a vision of Britain as a singing nation.
Voicing Britannia begs the question of whether Britons could indeed sing, and how song and music were negotiated in the British public in the evolving cultural landscape. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, 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 while challenging prevailing gender norms and social categories. These attempts gave rise to a certain interplay, and to an insistent reticence that clung to the conventional. Over a period of several decades, attempts to adopt opera as a national vehicle helped galvanize a guarded attitude toward music - one that Britons were forced to admit was constitutive of their national identity, and that was profoundly influenced by artists at the margins of British society.
According to a widely held view in eighteenth-century Britain, Britons were inherently unmusical. Through a detailed historiography of singers breaking new ground for opera in the country -- high-pitched men, virtuosic prima donnas, and Jews -- Voicing Britannia explores how the changing landscape of opera was negotiated in British society.
