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Although the singer, in Susan Rutherford’s pithy phrase, ‘is the defining feature of opera’, serious engagement with ‘divas and divos’ is a relatively recent development within musical scholarship. 1 This study seeks to contribute to this process through an analysis of British opera, in itself a belated subject of academic scrutiny, exploring the geographical and social origins of British singers and the impact these exerted on the educational and early career routes that led to the operatic stage. Underpinning this specific agenda is a desire to examine the wider contexts in which British opera functioned and its relationship with the mainstreams of national musical culture. The notion of opera as an elitist activity divorced from ‘ordinary’ life hardened into cliché over the twentieth century, and John Potter’s view that it was ultimately seen as a ‘foreign art form that was extravagant and exotic’ – one that sat uncomfortably with many aspects of British musical and moral sensibility – can seem hard to challenge. 2 However, as Paul Rodmell and Alexandra Wilson have argued in important recent studies, opera did nevertheless enjoy a significant following amongst a broad-based public for much of the period under study. In terms of attendance at live performance this was especially the case from about 1880 to 1914 but even after that point, opera had a presence in a variety of musical settings and was firmly within the compass of the popular media. 3 What follows builds on this rethinking of operatic culture by shifting attention to singers in order to illuminate the substantial space for opera that could be generated within Britain’s daily musical life.
John Rosselli’s groundbreaking study of Italian opera established the importance of examining the social basis of the operatic profession and a number of subsequent writers, most notably Rutherford and Potter, have been alert to this topic. 4 As yet, however, there has been no attempt at systematic study and indeed singers are still generally denied an existence as social actors, as individuals with distinctive personal histories that exist alongside the career profiles (companies joined, parts sung and recordings made) that dominate scholarly concerns. This is at its most stark in encyclopaedias and collective biographies, where singers are frequently reduced to the sum of their...