Christmas Gambols Publicity Statement
Although the literature of 1790s Britain is very well known and extensively studied, and the visual arts are not too far behind, the music remains virtually unknown. Yet far from Britain being “the land without music,” music was everywhere and people responded to it very powerfully (see Wordsworth’s “Power of Music”). Retrospect Opera, a charitable recording company, is now seeking to revive the sound of the 1790s by recording one of Charles Dibdin’s celebrated one-man musical shows, “Christmas Gambols” of 1795. Dibdin (1745-1814) was the greatest singer-songwriter of the British Romantic period, and his one-man shows were a standard part of London’s rich array of musical entertainments from the late 1780s to his retirement in 1809. Many of the songs from these shows enjoyed an exceptionally wide cultural diffusion and, as Oskar Cox Jensen has written, Dibdin “has a claim to have been the most significant cultural figure of the later Georgian period.”
Retrospect Opera relies a great deal on crowd funding to make its recordings possible, and all Romanticists and eighteenth-century scholars are warmly encouraged to support this recording of “Christmas Gambols,” which is guaranteed to transform many people’s understanding of the 1790s. Donations of any size are very welcome, and anyone donating £25 or more will have their name listed on the Retrospect website and receive a copy of the recording (on CD, with a booklet containing the whole text and an introductory essay) upon release. Please visit the Retrospect Opera website for more details of this project and how to support it: http://www.retrospectopera.org.uk/
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