ABSTRACT
Henry Fothergill Chorley’s hearing of Les Huguenots during his first visit to Paris altered his perception of the potential of music drama. Chorley’s critical fascination with the power of Herr Meyerbeer’s new kind of music drama and its effect on audiences affected his thinking and writing about the nature of opera for the rest of his career. Music and Manners was modestly successful, and added to Chorley’s reputation as a writer on music capable of discussing it within wider cultural context of literature and art. The reception of Benjamin Lumley’s season of 1846 in the popular press seemed to bear out many of Chorley’s claims that the press was on Lumley’s side. Lumley perceived his relations with the press to be generally good, but believed that those who opposed him were motivated by personal spite. In 1854, thirteen years after he published Music and Manners in France and Germany, Chorley issued a substantially altered two-volume reworking of it.
