Le roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle à l’opéra : la sentimentalité, Pamela et The Maid of the Mill

Abstract

This article returns to the well-known notion of sentimental culture, and specifically, to sentimental opera derived from the English novel. The notion that goodness must triumph, that a poor but honest girl should ‘make good’, and that such goodness should form a binding force between humans, was such a strong force in late 18th-century culture that it has been used as a means to define it as an ‘age’. Among the most important formative work in this ‘sentimental’ style is Richardson’s novel, Pamela, that came to the attention of the writer Isaac Bickerstaffe (1733?-1808) who re-worked it as an English opera, remarking that the piece ‘however trifling in other circumstances, was the first sentimental drama that had appeared on the English stage for forty years’. The work set to music by Samuel Arnold (1740-1802), was representative of a new musical genre, the pastiche opera that incorporated the music of others. From a musical point of view, the opera is not hugely important; in modern day terms, the lack of a single identifiable composer or compositional aesthetic makes it a problematical artistic object to assess today. And yet the very simplicity of the music was the defining attribute that allowed the ‘sentimentality’ of the story to shine through, and did herald a new genre in English opera, the pastiche. This article will argue that the very particular circumstances of an English performance played a vital role in the development of sentimental opera in London.

Keywords

• opera
• pastiche
• Italian opera
• sensibility
• Richardson Samuel
• Bickerstaffe Isaac