Before beginning her current career as soprano and librettist, Becca Marriott read English at Oxford. In this lecture, she returns to her roots, using her extensive knowledge of both literature and music to guide us past those “truths universally acknowledged” that we all think we know to explore the story of how art escaped the iron grip of sentimentality.

From Norina, laughing at her overblown romance in Don Pasquale, to Adina and Rosina, heroines blessed (or cursed?) with a healthy dose of realism in a world determined to wallow in its exaggerated emotions, opera seems full of both sentimentality and the reaction against it. Becca will explore how tastes shifted to make this dichotomy possible; from the hyper-emotional romances so beloved of mid-eighteenth century readers to the satirical “romances of manners” that displaced them. Nor was this a solely literary development; in opera, the sentimental Italian grand operas found themselves superseded by the new comic operas that seemed to be directly mocking them. From Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, from Pergolesi to Donizetti, cast Colin Firth aside and join Becca on an exciting Regency ride with a difference to discover the evolution that art itself underwent!