Retrospect Opera: Reviving Britain's Operatic Past

Abstract

The average music lover knows little about British opera between Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. Composers such as Thomas Arne, Sir Henry Rowley Bishop and Isidore de Lara are hardly household names, performances and recordings are sparse, and a sense of Britain as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ lingers. In recent years, however, interest in this neglected repertoire has grown. This is in large part due to the tireless efforts of organizations such as Retrospect Opera, founded in 2014 byDavid Chandler and Valerie Langfield to record ‘forgotten’ British operas. To date, they have issued recordings of works by Charles Dibdin, Edward James Loder, Ethel Smyth, Liza Lehman, George Grossmith and Edward Solomon, with projects on George AlexanderMacfarren and Charles Villiers Stanford in progress. This special review section highlights and contextualizes Retrospect Opera’s achievements. Paul Rodmell addresses themany complex reasons why the English Musical Renaissance – the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fromwhichmost of Retrospect Opera’s repertoire comes – did not see the same flowering of opera as of other genres. James Brooks Kuykendall interviews Chandler and Langfield about their beginnings, their goals, and the challenges they face. The section concludes with reviews of their recordings of Raymond and Agnes (Loder) by Justin Vickers and of The Boatswain’s Mate (Smyth), Pickwick (Solomon), and Cups and Saucers (Grossmith) by William A. Everett.