Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York

Acknowledgments

ix  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  This book is the result of nearly twenty years of research. It would not have been possible without the pioneering work and continuing encouragement of David Mayer, theatre historian and professor emeritus of drama at the University of Manchester. He is the first and lasting inspiration for this study. I am also grateful to my editor at the University of Iowa Press, Thomas Postlewait, especially for his keen eye, sharp pen, and sage advice . I am unable personally to thank Anne Dhu McLucas, one of the first musicologists to undertake serious research in music and English-­language melodrama, but I know that before her untimely death she was looking forward to the completion of this study and would have been pleased to find in its pages much evidence of her foundational work. Other historians of theatre and music as well as research librarians deserve special thanks for their generous responses to requests for information and advice. Chief among them are Stephen Banfield, Philip Carli, Stephen Cockett, Annette Davison, Richard Divall, Joseph Donohue,Victor Emeljanow, Annette Fern, Christina Fuhrmann, Aubrey Garlington, John Graziano, Sarah Hibberd, David Hulme, Bridget Keown, Marian Wilson Kimber, John Koegel, Bob Kosovsky, Alan Lewis, Katherine K. Preston, Margaret Sherry Rich, Deane L. Root, Emilio Sala, Laurence Senelick, Denise Walen, and Don Wilmeth. Also special thanks to my supportive colleagues and friends throughout this project: Ralph P. Locke, T. J. Hochstrasser , Karen Robertson, Mark and Qin Stubis, and Christopher Huebner. What really fueled my passion for this topic was a deep and abiding love for drama, already in evidence at age twelve when I tried to inveigle neighborhood kids to participate in a backyard production of Gilbert and Sullivan ’s H.M.S. Pinafore. I owe my practical experience with the theatre to years spent as an assistant conductor for several major opera companies, including the Houston Grand Opera, the Seattle Opera, Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera, and the Opera Company of Boston. In this capacity, I worked with remarkable singer-­ actors such as Karan Armstrong, Mirella Freni, Marilyn Horne, Diane Kesling, Jon Vickers, and Thomas Stewart and directors such as Colin Graham, Jean-­ Pierre Ponnelle, Götz Friedrich, Sarah Caldwell, Stephen Wadsworth, Francesca Zambello, and Frank Corsaro. I witnessed effective collaboration between such visionary artists and equally visionary x Acknowledgments orchestra conductors, especially Leonard Bernstein, John Mauceri, Steuart Bedford, and John DeMain. Any identification that I was able to establish with the larger-­ than-­ life but long dead nineteenth-­ century actors, managers , and orchestra leaders was possible largely through my associations with these remarkable twentieth-­ century figures. ...