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Sarah Hibberd

Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

I joined the department in 2003. Before coming to Nottingham I was an editor for The New Grove Dictionary of Music, coordinator of RILM-UK, and taught at the University of Southampton, Royal Holloway (University of London) and the University of Rouen.

Expertise Summary

My research interests focus primarily on nineteenth-century French musical culture, opera, and other forms of music theatre including melodrama, pantomime and ballet. I have published journal articles and book chapters about French and Italian opera and drama, participated in broadcasts on Radio 3, and given pre-performance talks and/or written programme notes for English National Opera, the Royal Opera (Covent Garden) and Glyndebourne. My monograph French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination was published by CUP in 2009, and I have recently edited a volume of essays for Ashgate entitled Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama. Other research interests include the role of music in silent and early sound films. I am a co-editor of Music & Letters, and have been a member of the AHRC peer review college (and panel member 2009, 2010). To hear me talking about my interest in French opera, click here.

Supervision

I am willing to supervise doctoral research into music theatre (including opera, ballet and popular theatre), and French musical culture (especially the nineteenth century), and am particularly interested in ideas about history and historiography; reception; nationalisms; the relations between popular and elite art forms; the interrelation of musical and visual cultures; the interface between theory/history and performance; staging practices; cultural transfer. I am happy to set up co-supervision arrangements with colleagues in other departments where appropriate.

Teaching Summary

Opera, cultural history, French musical culture, romanticism, musicology, music and visual cultures

Research Summary

My research interests focus primarily on nineteenth-century French musical culture, opera, and other forms of music theatre including melodrama, pantomime and ballet. New projects include a book… read more

Recent Publications

  • HIBBERD, S., 2011. ‘Si L’Orchestre seul chantait’: Melodramatic Voices in Chelard’s Macbeth (1827). In: HIBBERD, S., ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate. 85-102
  • HIBBERD, SARAH, ed., 2011. Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2011. Introduction. In: HIBBERD, S., ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate. 1-11
  • 2011. Review of Vincent Giroud, French Opera: A SHort History (Yale, 2010) Music & Letters.

Current Research

My research interests focus primarily on nineteenth-century French musical culture, opera, and other forms of music theatre including melodrama, pantomime and ballet. New projects include a book analysing the cataclysmic denouements of a series of works performed in Paris between 1789 and 1859, in which I theorise the relationship between melodrama, opera and revolution as a specifically French expression of the sublime; and an article that explores the relationship between music and painting through the lense of the diorama and other sorts of spectacularised art displays with musical accompaniment. I am co-editing (with Richard Wrigley) a volume of essays entitled Correspondances: exchanges and tensions between art, theatre and opera in France, c.1750--1850.

Past Research

I have contributed articles on French and Italian opera and drama to the Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association; and chapters to musicological and interdisciplinary publications including the Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge, 2003) and Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer (Chicago, 2009). My article examining sleepwalkers on the Parisian stage for the Cambridge Opera Journal was awarded the 2005 Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association. My monograph French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (CUP, 2009) relates a number of operas (by Auber, Halévy, Niedermeyer and Meyerbeer) written during the July Monarchy to the ways in which the French were thinking about their identity in relation to the (Revolutionary) past. I have recently edited a volume of essays entitled Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Ashgate, 2011), which includes contributions about spoken drama, opera, dance and film.

In July 2006, I co-convened (with Daniel Grimley) the RMA Annual Conference at Nottingham, with the theme of 'Music and Visual Cultures'. As founder-director of the department's Centre for Music on Stage and Screen (MOSS, 2006--10), I organised series of guest lectures and workshops, and an AHRC-funded Research Workshop, Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic (2007-8), which comprised study days, workshops, performances (with the participation of Opera North and the British Silent Film Festival), an interactive website, and an interdisciplinary conference. I am overseeing the continuing RILM-UK project at Nottingham (funded by the Institute of Musical Research), following a period of AHRC funding (2005-8). I have also been involved in a number of cross-disciplinary initiatives (notably with the School of English and the Institute of Film & TV Studies) at Nottingham, and am on the steering commitees of two AHRC-funded Research Networks: Francophone Music Criticism, 1789-1914, and The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain. In March 2010 I co-convened a conference with my colleague in Art History, Prof Richard Wrigley, entitled 'Correspondances: exchanges and tensions between art, theatre and opera in France c.1750-1850' (National Gallery, London, 26-27 March 2010).

  • HIBBERD, S., 2011. ‘Si L’Orchestre seul chantait’: Melodramatic Voices in Chelard’s Macbeth (1827). In: HIBBERD, S., ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate. 85-102
  • HIBBERD, SARAH, ed., 2011. Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2011. Introduction. In: HIBBERD, S., ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama Aldershot: Ashgate. 1-11
  • 2011. Review of Vincent Giroud, French Opera: A SHort History (Yale, 2010) Music & Letters.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2010. 'Dormez donc, mes chers amours': Hérold’s _La Sonnambule_ (1827) and dream phenomena on the Parisian lyric stage [reprint of 2004 article]. In: HUEBNER, STEVEN, ed., National Traditions in Nineteenth-Century Opera: Italy, France, England and the Americas I. Ashgate.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2009. Monsters and the Mob: the Grotesque on the Parisian Stage, 1826-1836. In: LANGFORD, R., ed., Textual Intersections: Literature, History and the Arts in Nineteenth Century Europe Amsterdam: Rodopi. 29-40
  • HIBBERD, S., 2009. Auber’s Gustave III: History as Opera. In: EVERIST, M. and FAUSER, A., eds., Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830-1914 [volume awarded the AMS Ruth A. Solie Award 2010] Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 269-302
  • HIBBERD, S., 2009. Review of En Musique dans le texte: Le Mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg, Jacqueline Waeber Music and Letters.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2009. French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2007. Review of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Mary Ann Smart Music and Letters. 88(1), 370-74
  • HIBBERD, S., 2007. Berlioz's Waterloo? Benvenuto Cellini in London. In: CHARLTON, D. and ELLIS K., eds., The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 66-79
  • HIBBERD, S., 2004. Traditions of Madness: Anna Bolena in Paris In: Il teatro di Donizetti: atti dei convegni delle celebrazioni 1797/1997 - 1848/1998. 257-67
  • HIBBERD, S., 2003. La Muette and her context. In: CHARLTON, D., ed., The Cambridge companion to grand opera Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 149-167
  • HIBBERD, S. and NIELSEN, N., 2003. Music in Melodrama: 'The Ineffable Burden of Expression'? Nineteenth-Century Theatre. 31(1), 30-39
  • HIBBERD, S., 2003. Grand Opera in Britain and the Americas. In: CHARLTON, D., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 403-422
  • CHARLTON, D. and HIBBERD, S., 2003. `My father was a poor Parisian musician': A Memoir (1756) concerning Rameau, Handel's Library and Salle Journal of the Royal Musical Association. VOL 128(PART 2), 161-199
  • HIBBERD, S., 2002. chapters on classical and romantic subjects. In: LATHAM, A., ed., Oxford Companion to Music Oxford.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2002. 'Chronology', 'Institutions', 'Personalia'. In: SAMSON, J., ed., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 621-746
  • HIBBERD, S., 2002. Review of Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle, Marian Smith Current Musicology. 74, 228-236
  • HIBBERD, S., 2001. 'Cette diablerie philosophique': <i>Faust</i> criticism in Paris c.1830. In: PARKER, R. and SMART, M.A., eds., Reading critics reading : opera and ballet criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 Oxford: Oxford University Press. 111-136
  • HIBBERD, S., 2001. Review of Fromental Halevy: Lettres, ed. Marthe Galland Music and Letters. 82(1), 118-120
  • HIBBERD, S., 2001. c.30 new and revised articles on nineteenth-century French composers and musicians.. In: SADIE, STANLEY and TYRRELL, JOHN, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.
  • HIBBERD, S., 2000. Marianne: Mystic or Madwoman? Representations of Jeanne d'Arc on the Parisian Stage in the 1820s Prose Studies. VOL 23(PART 2), 87-98
  • HIBBERD, S., 1999. Review of Correspondance d'Eugene Scribe et de Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber, ed. Herbert Schneider Music and Letters. 80(2), 299-303

Department of Music

The University of Nottingham
Lakeside Arts Centre
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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