BASF Lecture

School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Divided by a common tongue? Hoffmann and De Quincey on a European smash-hit aria with Dr. Miranda Stanyon (University of Melbourne)

Abstract: Little known today, the aria ‘Ombra adorata aspetta’ achieved remarkable popularity in Napoleonic-era Europe. After its appearance in Niccolò Zingarelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1796), it was covered by innumerable artists, remixed, reinterpreted and rehearsed for operas and domestic gatherings, concerts and instrumental arrangements, and reinscribed in prints, singing manuals, private albums, press reports, memoirs, biographies, novel and short story. Intriguingly, the aria subjected to these adaptations was itself a rewrite: an improvement on Zingarelli, composed by the castrato Girolamo Crescentini for his own performances as Romeo. This paper uses ‘Ombra adorata aspetta’ to examine a network of responses to the aria by writers including E. T. A. Hoffmann and Thomas De Quincey. Probing the differences between these Anglo-German texts, and the place of division and distance in ‘Ombra adorata’ itself, I explore the aria’s perhaps surprising affordances as an object of ‘ekphrastic’ enthusiasm and a model of aesthetic experience. 
 
Bio: Miranda Stanyon is a comparatist working across English and German literary cultures of the long eighteenth century. Her publications include Resounding the Sublime (University of Pennsylvania, 2021), the co-edited collection with Sarah Hibberd, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture (CUP, 2020), alongside essays in Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Life, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association and elsewhere. She was a lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and held a JRF at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before joining the University of Melbourne in 2020. Her current project, supported by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, is a study of receptions of the Trojan woman Andromache in the Romantic era.

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BASF Lecture

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