Abstract

In this talk, Professor Alexandra Wilson will draw upon research undertaken for her forthcoming book, Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (OUP, 2025). The book reveals a forgotten history of popular opera-going in twentieth-century Britain, which defies the opera-elitism stereotype that prevails today. The audience for opera for much of the twentieth century was wide and diverse, including, amongst others, factory workers, coal miners, soldiers, secretaries and schoolchildren. Drawing upon a wide range of examples, from Lilian Baylis’s Vic-Wells enterprise and touring opera companies during the interwar years to ENO and the Royal Opera House later in the century, this talk focuses upon the access initiatives, as we would call them today, and promotional strategies opera companies have used in order to build operatic communities. Strategies to be discussed include membership schemes, magazines, social events, the running of companies on a cooperative model, participatory activities, and interesting (or sometimes gimmicky) marketing campaigns. It asks what we can learn today, in an era when companies struggle to make the case for opera to a wider public, from these earlier models of audience engagement.

Biography

Alexandra Wilson is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford and holds a Research Residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Previously she taught at Oxford Brookes University for nineteen years, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History. Her books include The Puccini Problem, Opera in the Jazz Age, Puccini’s La bohème, and the edited collection Puccini in Context. Her writing about music can also be found in magazines such as BBC Music and Opera, national newspapers, various online platforms, and programme books for all the UK’s major opera companies, and she can often be heard on BBC radio. Professor Wilson won the AMS’s Lewis Lockwood Award, has held a BA Mid-Career Fellowship and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her forthcoming book, on British operatic culture over the last century, is entitled Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (OUP, 2025).