Trattati ottocenteschi e immaginari transculturali del canto d’arte: il caso di John Barnett, ‘father of English Opera’

Research on singing treatises as a source of past performance practices is hampered by the considerable opacity inherent in these objects themselves and in the mechanisms of inculturation of singing. Given these difficulties, I propose in this paper to adopt an emic perspective: this means recognising the treatises primarily as commercial products aimed at amateurs and designed to activate multiple practices, and thus as cultural agents in the multiple processes of constructing meanings and values for opera. With this in mind, and drawing on recent work by Susan Rutherford and Claudio Vellutini on the British context, I analyse a treatise published in 1829 by John Barnett, composer, vocal teacher and acknowledged ‘father of English opera’ in the nineteenth century. I focus in particular on certain passages in which Barnett deviates even conspicuously from the established use of certain vocal terms and concepts. Comparison with other contemporary evidence, including newspaper articles, opera reviews and ‘popular’ music dictionaries, allows us to frame Barnett’s peculiar solutions as the result of multifaceted processes of translation, in-between new practices experienced in the theatre and their theoretical-aesthetic systematisation in the transnational sphere.