Victorian Vocalists is a masterful and entertaining collection of 100 biographies of mid- to late-19th-century singers and stars. Kurt Ganzl paints a vivid picture of the Victorian operatic and concert world, revealing the backgrounds, journeys, successes, failures and misdemeanours of these singers. This volume is not only an outstanding reference work for anyone interested in vocalists of the era, but also a compelling, meticulously researched picture of life in the vast shark tank that was Victorian music.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A colourful biography of William B. Gill, a famous musical-comedy playwright and comedy performer of the late 19th century who is now mostly forgotten, but who changed the course of American musical theater. Gill began his career as a comedic actor in the coalfields of Australia, then performed in India and England before finally going to the United States, and achieving fame as one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

This inaugural volume in the new Forgotten Stars of the Musical Theatre series sets Lydia Thompson, queen of burlesque, under the spotlight. Outlandish tales of Lydia's touring burlesque company, the British Blondes, and such lurid episodes as her horsewhipping of a Chicago editor, a romance with a Russian Grand Duke, and her lesbian attacker have left her with a reputation as a bawdy burlesquer, but Kurt Gänzl argues that she was nothing of the kind. Through this biography, the reader will learn the whole and hitherto untold story of this multi-dimensional musical-theatre star.

Victorian Vocalists is a masterful and entertaining collection of 100 biographies of mid- to late-19th-century singers and stars. Kurt Ganzl paints a vivid picture of the Victorian operatic and concert world, revealing the backgrounds, journeys, successes, failures and misdemeanours of these singers. This volume is not only an outstanding reference work for anyone interested in vocalists of the era, but also a compelling, meticulously researched picture of life in the vast shark tank that was Victorian music.

'Borel was the sun,' said Theophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.