Sarah Hibberd: Luigi Lablache and the Puritani Quartet - Channel Crossing in the 1830s

Public Research Seminar:
Professor Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol) (speaker):
Luigi Lablache and the Puritani Quartet: Channel Crossing in the 1830s

My new project examines early nineteenth-century Italian opera through the activities of a quartet of singers who premiered key works – including Bellini’s I puritani (1835) – in Paris and London. The charismatic bass Luigi Lablache will provide a case study for considering the nature of embodied voice and the oepratic culture of the two cities, and will offer a new perspective on the development of Italian opera mid-century. 

Sarah Hibberd is Stanley Hugh Badock Chair in Music at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on opera, theatre and musical culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, notably in Paris. Her publications include French Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009), a wide range of journal articles and book chapters, and the recent co-edited volume Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880 (Cambridge, 2021). She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.