UC Berkeley

This dissertation identifies a series of “Anglo-Italian musical cultures” that emerged in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, by investigating the movement of musical products and individuals—Roman gut strings, singers, instrumentalists, pedagogues, dilettante composers, expatriate music enthusiasts, and tourists—between British and Italian lands. While Anglo-Italian musical interactions had been common and ubiquitous since at least the early seventeenth century, I focus on the period 1813 to 1830 for three reasons: first, because of Britain’s emergence from the Napoleonic Wars as the most powerful global empire (at the beginning of what Jürgen Osterhammel calls the “European century”); second, because of the post-Napoleonic tourist boom; and third because of the rise of musical institutions in London, such as the Philharmonic Society in 1813 and the Royal Academy of Music in 1822, as well as an increase in music-critical activity and music periodical publication in Britain. I argue that, to understand the global impact of “European music” and indeed the modern invention of “Europe” in the context of the European post-Napoleonic polity, requires intentional focus on musical exchanges occurring between what Francis Jeffrey called the “extremes of civilized Europe”: Italy and Britain. The musical interactions raised to prominence here deserve our attention, because thinking about Anglo-Italianness and the formation of distinct Anglo-Italian musical cultures, works to sharpen our understanding of intra-European migration and structures of power when the very concepts of music history and musical knowledge were shifting.