This book is a collection of essays on nineteenth-century musical life in Britain, which engage in different ways with the three themes named in the title: Europe, Empire and Spectacle. There are seventeen essays here, grouped according to the three themes – though, as the editors remark in the Introduction, ‘the … three series [are] less discrete … than they may first appear.' The essays often seem to be overlapping and debating with each other and with all three of the themes in fascinating and unexpected ways. They include essays on such disparate subjects as Mozart reception, Liszt's inheritance, the music used in the Coronation of 1902, the ‘Scottishness' of Hamish MacCunn, Henry Irving's use of incidental music, and ‘Blackface Ministrels,' by writers including Duncan Barker, Stephen Cockett, Meirion Hughes, Jennifer Oates, Derek Scott, Bennett Zon and others. Amongst this array of critics and subjects, however, the book's fragments add up as a whole to a fascinating picture of musical life in nineteenth-century Britain.

This picture is built up in a series of detailed case studies; each chapter represents a glimpse into one corner of the British musical context. These glimpses are important in themselves: they provide new insights into (for example) Handel reception, the Bach revival in Victorian Britain, and Henry Hugo Pierson's Shakespearean tone poems. They also provide a depth of scholarship and research, musical examples and references, which will be of immense value to others working in these specific fields. Above and beyond all this, however, most of the essays would be of interest to wider readers – people who are interested in the cultural context in general. Most of the essays gesture towards or broaden out to highlight more general inferences about the cultural context – so the essay on ‘Opera in Mid-Victorian Dublin' by Paul Rodmell is not only about its ostensible subject, but also the changing nature of theatre audiences in the nineteenth century; and Stephen Cockett's essay on ‘Henry Irving's Use of the Musical Score in his Production of The Bells is also concerned with the conventions of acting and music in the nineteenth century. By implication, essays like these also encourage us to reflect on our theatrical and cultural conventions, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Rodmell's and Cockett's are two of the highlights in the collection. Rodmell's description of the behaviour of audiences in the upper gallery, both inside and outside Dublin's Theatre Royal, provides an unexpected moment of comedy in the book; and Cockett's essay is accompanied by a compact disc of the incidental music, which is cued against the commentary in the text. This is a marvellous idea, which helps make the text come alive in a pleasurable way. Indeed, the book as a whole never forgets its duty to entertain – through well-written prose and lightly-worn scholarship – as well as inform.

Jonathan Taylor (De Montfort University)

More details are available at the Ashgate Press website.