The backgrounds of opera singers have received little systematic study and this article attempts to help redress this situation through analysis of a collective biography of 344 British and Irish-born performers active in the century from 1850. It argues that certain areas, notably London and Wales, made a particularly significant contribution to the operatic profession and notes that certain other patterns of regional under- and over-production are discernible. While singers from a broadly defined middle class were numerically dominant within this sample, this study stresses the unexpectedly strong contribution from those born into the lower-middle and working classes. Such performers were able to build on skills honed in the amateur musical sphere partly as a result of an expanding state-funded higher education system, but also due to an extraordinary variety of forms of patronage. The ‘popular’ social tone of singers, however, is shown to have done little to challenge perceptions of opera as an elitist cultural form.

中文翻译：

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到达歌剧舞台：英国和爱尔兰歌剧歌手的地理和社会起源，c.1850–c.1960

歌剧歌手的背景很少得到系统的研究，本文试图通过分析自 1850 年起活跃于本世纪的 344 名英国和爱尔兰出生的表演者的集体传记来帮助纠正这种情况。它认为某些地区，尤其是伦敦和威尔士，对歌剧专业做出了特别重要的贡献，并指出某些其他地区生产不足和过度生产的模式是可辨别的。虽然来自广泛定义的中产阶级的歌手在这个样本中占主导地位，但这项研究强调了出乎意料的来自下层中产阶级和工人阶级的歌手的巨大贡献。这些表演者能够在业余音乐领域磨练出技能，部分原因是国家资助的高等教育系统不断扩大，但也归功于各种各样的赞助形式。然而，歌手的“流行”社交语气几乎没有挑战将歌剧视为精英文化形式的看法。