Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol), The Puritani Quartet in London and Paris, c.1840

Event details

For this week's Research Seminar, please join Professor Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol) to discuss their research on 'The Dynamics of the Puritani Quartet: Tamburini in the Limelight (1836)'

Antonio Tamburini sang in the premieres of Bellini’s I puritani and Donizetti’s Marino Faliero in 1835 and appeared in a stream of other works in Paris and London as part of the so-called Puritani Quartet, with Luigi Lablache, Giovanni Battista Rubini and Giulia Grisi. Together they were central to the dissemination of Italian opera in these cities – and, I argue, its development beyond the Italian peninsula. Tamburini has been remembered as the first modern baritone, and when in 1840 he was replaced in I puritani at Her Majesty’s Theatre (London) by another singer, the audience rioted. However, contemporary reviews often side-lined the comparatively unassuming singer in their reviews, and my paper examines this apparent tension between being indispensable and invisible through three musical examples in order to illuminate what was at stake.

This Tamburini case study is part of my broader to aim reveal the dynamics and chemistry between the voices and personalities of the Quartet, and so I frame my discussion with consideration of some scientific and social debates of the mid-nineteenth century concerning self-organisation and embodied thinking.

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Meeting ID: 967 9721 8269

Passcode: 878342

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About the speaker

Professor Sarah Hibberd

Sarah Hibberd is Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on opera during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in Paris and London. Her publications include French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009) and edited volumes Melodramatic Voices (2011), French Art, Theatre and Opera 1750–1850 (2014, with Richard Wrigley) and Music and the Sonorous Sublime (2020, with Miranda Stanyon). Her articles have appeared in Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, etc. Sarah is just completing a book entitled French Opera and the Revolutionary Sublime, and is working on a Leverhulme-funded project ‘Italianità abroad: The Puritani Quartet in Paris and London, 1830–50’.  She was writer in residence at the Royal Opera House in 2014 for their production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, and will be scholar in residence (with Francesca Brittan) for the Bard Music Festival in New York this year, which is devoted to Berlioz. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.