The Nicholson Center for British Studies
Schaffner Visiting Professor Lecture  

Roger Parker   

Emeritus Professor of Music  

Kings College London  

Painting (and Sounding) the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis

Introduction by James Chandler 

Wednesday, April 12th  

5:00pm  

 In 1849, the painter Charles Robert Leslie gave a lecture at the Royal Academy during which he discussed a recurrent problem with one of the most popular public spectacles in early nineteenth-century London. “I would ask whether others have not felt what has always occurred to me in looking at a Panorama,—that exactly in the degree in which the eye is deceived the stillness of the figures and the silence of the place produces a strange and somewhat unpleasant effect, and the more so if the subject places us in the city. We want the hum of population, and the din of carriages”. His complaint was common: as the modern metropolis increasingly became the subject of pictorial representation, and as these representations became ever larger and ever more concerned with realism, the more often were heard complaints about the inevitable silence that surrounded them. Impresarios were, as ever, quick to respond. It was relatively easy to provide sound effects for scenes of natural splendour (wind and thunder could be supplied on demand), and grand religious scenes had their own repertoire: in 1835 a depiction of the interior of Florence’s Santa Croce was accompanied by a organ rendering (perhaps mechanical) of a Haydn Mass. But what of the ultimate self-representation, what of London-based panoramas of the great city itself? In some cases, at least, it seems as though a curious reversal took place: vast pictorial representations of the city remained immersed in comparative silence; and because of this, and in spite of lamentation, they offered an alternative existence, one in which the gazing public could dream an urban dream increasingly denied them in the noisy streets.  

Roger Parker is Professor Emeritus at King’s College London. He studied at the University of London, first at Goldsmiths College, then at King’s. In 1982 he moved to Cornell University, where he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor. In 1994 he returned to England to become a Lecturer in Music (later Professor) and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 1999 he became Professor of Music at Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of St John’s College and (in 2005-6) Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities. In 2002 he was Visiting Ernest Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; in 2007 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. From 2006 to 2010 he delivered four series of free public lectures as Professor of Music at Gresham College. He is General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the Donizetti critical edition, published by Ricordi. His book books include Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio (University of California Press, 2006), and A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (Penguin, UK, and Norton, US, 2012), written jointly with Carolyn Abbate. He is now working on a book about music in London in the 1830s.  

This lecture is free and open to the public.  

This lecture was organized by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, with support from the Sara H. Schaffner Visiting Professorship fund (Provost’s Office).

 Image: Detail from Bird’s Eye View from Staircase & Upper Part of the Pavilion in the Colosseum, Regent’s Park (1829), a colored aquatint by Rudolph Ackermann.