The Image of Musical Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

<p>This thesis contends that the specific example of musical celebrity points to general conclusions about how early celebrity was aided by the promulgation of celebrity images and how musical culture was fundamentally changed as a consequence.</p> <p>We live in a world saturated by images, and it is clear that modern celebrity culture is driven by their dissemination through the fairly recent development (in historical terms) of the internet. Therefore, although the relationship between celebrity and image could be viewed as a modern phenomenon, the study showed that this is not the case. Early musical celebrities were also the product of the convergence of fame and commodity. The development of print technologies resulted in a sudden and prolific spread of images of celebrities, making these images more accessible to the wider public, even when access to their music was limited only to those who could attend live performances.</p> <p>There has been some investigation into the early mechanisms of celebrity by various disciplines, however the difference in this research that it is a systematic study of the significance of the relationship between musical celebrity and image. Using a new multidisciplinary methodology, I analysed a large volume of images and artefacts to explore the connection between celebrity and image, as well as how this relationship changed over time. Whilst not tied to discrete case studies, I explored examples of the way image and celebrity fuelled one another through the lives of Dame Nellie Melba, Jenny Lind, and to a lesser extent Lord Byron, Franz Liszt, and others. These examples were selected as key moments in the codification of the mechanism of image of celebrity. This builds on the existing body of knowledge regarding early celebrity but focusses specifically on musical celebrity.</p>