ABSTRACT
Litde attention has been paid to these adaptations, however, despite the glimpse they give us into the mid-nineteenth-century English view of a genre both foreign 1 The research for this study was undertaken with assistance from the Obermann Center for
and elite.3 Through brief case studies of burlesques of Emani, II trovatore and Ea traviata, this article makes a preliminary examination of the nature of operatic burlesques, why they existed, and how they functioned artistically and sociologically. My larger purpose is threefold: to investigate the manner in which burlesque interpreted the foreign art form of Italian opera in a culture self-consciously identified as English, to consider how these works traversed class differences, and to ask how we might understand the these works in relation to the cultural codes of Victorian London. On 10 May 1855 the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden gave Verdi’s II trovatore its London premiere. The following year on 24 May 1856 Ea traviata graced the London stage for the first time, at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Both of these works endured in London theatres longer than Verdi’s earlier operas. Each of them was produced at the ‘other’s’ theatre the season after its premiere. These works also became the first operas by Verdi to be performed in English: as The Gipsys Vengeance on 24 March 1856 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and as Ea traviata, or The Blighted One on 9 June 1857 at the Surrey Theatre. (Staging foreign opera in English was evidently part of a renewed effort to raise public awareness of the value of English music and musical artists.4) Their immediate critical reception was not unlike that received by productions of Verdi’s earlier works: a mixture of condemnation and commendation.
