Best remembered for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting a traditional account of Rossini's life and works, Benjamin Walton traces instead the shifting patterns of Rossinian criticism from before the composer's arrival in Paris to the end of the 1820s, outlining a type of musical history that uses immersion in a narrow time period as a way to reconceive...

This innovative book will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural, musical and scientific history of the nineteenth century - from undergraduates to professional researchers. Chapters explore topics such as hypnosis, vocal physiology, stage machinery, histories of listening and the interaction of opera with nineteenth-century scientific theories.