Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British

In Britain today, opera is routinely called elitist. But things were not always so. Examining shifting cultural attitudes over the century from 1920 to 2020, Someone Else’s Music reveals a hidden history of popular opera-going in Britain, which defies the opera-elitism stereotype. At the same time, the book traces how, when, and why that stereotype arose. It uses opera as a lens through which to examine the broader history of changing cultural values in the UK, from 1920s Reithian ideals about art’s civilising qualities to contemporary culture wars. The controversies opera has prompted over the last century reveal a great deal about national identity -- who Britons think they are and who they want to be.

The book ranges widely across topics including education, public broadcasting, arts policy, and attitudes towards subsidy, and traces opera’s surprisingly close relationship with popular culture. We meet a diverse cast of characters, including working-class East-End opera fans, opera-singing Welsh miners, soldiers discovering opera in wartime Italy, and holidaymakers watching it at Butlin’s. The book is as much about the secretary camping out in the queue for gallery tickets as it is about the duchess in the stalls.

But at what point did people start calling opera elitist and why? Analysing lasting stereotypes around opera, Wilson reveals them to be politically motivated, founded in deep-seated British anxieties about class, education, and national identity. Someone Else’s Music is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the debates we are having today about arts funding, accessibility and who opera is ’for’. It reveals that opera used to be for everyone - and shows us how it could be again.

Professor Alexandra Wilson is a musicologist and cultural historian. After holding two Oxford Junior Research Fellowships, she taught at Oxford Brookes University for nineteen years, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History. She is currently Researcher in Residence at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She has previously published The Puccini Problem (2007), Opera in the Jazz Age (2019), Puccini’s La bohème (2021) and Puccini in Context (2023). She writes and broadcasts widely about cultural matters and works regularly with the UK’s leading opera companies.