Benjamin Walton

I received my first degree in Music from Cambridge (1994), my Master’s in Aesthetics and Analysis of Music from the University of Sussex (1995), and a Ph.D. in the History and Literature of Music from the University of California, Berkeley (2000). I came back to England to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford before moving to a lectureship at the University of Bristol. I joined the Faculty at Cambridge in 2006.

My research interests centre on the social and cultural history of music in the nineteenth century. Recent work has focused on musical life in Paris during the 1820s and 1830s, on the reception of Gioachino Rossini, and on the development and effects of the historiographical idea of the ‘Twin Styles’, represented by Rossini and Beethoven, in European music.

My book Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2007. Future projects include an investigation of the idea of Italian opera in German romantic culture, and a large-scale study of the spread of bel canto opera and opera singers to South America in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Publications:

Book
Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Articles and Book Chapters
‘The Professional Dilettante: Ludovic Vitet and Le Globe’, in Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart, Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69-85

‘ “Quelque peu théâtral”: The Operatic Coronation of Charles X’, 19th-Century Music 26/1 (Summer 2002), 3-22

‘Looking for the Revolution in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell’, Cambridge Opera Journal 15/2 (July 2003), 127-51
[Winner of the 2004 Royal Musical Association Jerome Roche Prize ‘for a distinguished article by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career’.]

‘Rossini and France’, in Emanuele Senici, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rossini, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25-36

‘Romantic Opera’, in Michael Ferber, A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 522-37

Introduction to Joseph d’Ortigue, ‘Frantz Liszt’ for Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley, eds., Liszt and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Reviews
‘Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History’, in British Journal of Aesthetics 43/4 (October 2003), 432-35

‘Denise Gallo, Routledge Research Guide to Rossini’ in 19th-Century Music Review 1/1 (May 2004), 165-69

‘Mark Everist, Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828 and John D. Drysdale, Louis Véron and the Finances of the Académie Royale de Musique’, in Cambridge Opera Journal 17/1 (March 2005), 95-104

Dictionary Entries
‘Batton, Désiré-Alexandré’ (revision); ‘Dumas, Alexandre’; ‘Falcon, Cornélie’ (revision); ‘Jouy, Etienne de’; ‘Prudent, Emile’; ‘Saint-Georges, Jules-Henri Vernoy de’; ‘Urhan, Chrétien’; ‘Vitet, Ludovic’, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 2001)

‘Rossini, Gioachino’, (revision of previous entry) New Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Non-academic work
Programme notes for the Royal Opera House, Edinburgh International Festival, Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona, Wexford Festival and Opera Rara; reviews for Opera magazine; contributions to The Real History of Opera, BBC Radio 4.