nineteenth century

By Robert Crowe

Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), or Giambattista, or even Gianni, as some of his friends seem to have called him, has been my constant companion since 2011. Back when I thought Angus Heriot’s 1956 The Castrati in Opera was a good, reliable source (was I ever so young?), Velluti’s wild life, full of saucy stories of flirtations—and more—with divas both operatic and aristocratic, of narrow escapes from their jealous boyfriends, of improbably witty badinage with emperors, queens, and skeptical policemen of all descriptions, was highly entertaining. But what really piqued my curiosity was his life and all of its collisions with the surrounding world—a stranger in a strange land—dragging all the accoutrements of the eighteenth century with him, deep into the nineteenth. Stared at, gossiped about, closely observed, lied about, mythologized, lionized, “monstered”—all while he was walking the same streets with those who were busily rewriting—and redrawing—his existence. I got to know him first as a newspaper figure, a caricature, but as I dug deeper, I found more and more sources that dug more deeply in the man himself.

By Richard Sherr

My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change? I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? As I searched, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits. The result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century Parisian revue de fin d’année.