stimulate discussion among avid Handelians. Appendix 3 is a family tree that is somewhat hard tofollow, since it spans several pages and lacks sub-headings. The appendix entitled ‘An Overview ofFifty Handel Performers, 1959-2009’ is perhaps of limited usefulness. On the other hand, Appendix4 features a wonderful guide to Handel iconography, including the intriguing sub-section‘Imaginary Portraits’.

I have no doubt that Handelians of all stripes will find The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia awelcome addition to their libraries.

Mary Ann ParkerUniversity of Toronto

Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, EnglishRadicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere. By Alex Benchimol. Farnham: Ashgate.2010. 236 p. £55 (h/b). ISBN 978-0-7546-6446-8.

‘The Making of the British Public Sphere’ must have been a tempting main title for a book that seeksto update E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in terms of Habermas. The bookopens with a clear and useful exposition of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. It goes onto propose a synthesis between this and the ‘cultural materialism’ of the 1970s and early 1980s inthe work of Raymond Williams and Richard Johnson and, later, Geoff Eley, who sought to givethe ‘public sphere’ concept some Marxist bite.

The British dimension is provided by two chapters that examine Scottish Whiggism: one on thefirst Edinburgh Review in the 1750s, arising from the moderate party in the Kirk and the SelectSociety, and one on the second and more famous Edinburgh Review, here presented as a ‘project fornational cultural reform’ growing out of the optimism of the 1802 peace interlude (p.117). TheReview’s policy of promoting polite review, discussion and absorption of new ideas is offered as acase study in the development of a public sphere at a time of ideological polarisation, a printedequivalent of the London coffee houses of a century before. Thomas Carlyle found it a usefulrange-finder in one of his early blasts against the age, an episode nicely set out here.

Two further chapters discuss the development of an ‘English radical public sphere’, from theLevellers through Wilkes and Spence to the post-war years. Thus, a call by Wooler in the Black Dwarffor radicals to counter the violence of the authorities at Peterloo with ‘the progress of discussion’ issaid to be ‘resonant with Habermasian notions of communicative praxis’ (p.194). Promising, butthe ‘mass platform’ movement was about a great deal more than establishing ‘discursive space’, andits manifestations beyond the printed word are little noticed. Similarly, we are asked to accept that,however much Cobbett may have talked about rural life and paper money, he was really embarkingon a ‘project of materialist cultural criticism’ (p.195) focused on the ‘antagonistic nature ofcapitalist accumulation’ (p.171-2). It is significant that Benchimol’s authority on Cobbett is A. L.Morton’s People’s History of England (1938) rather than Ian Dyck’s William Cobbett and Rural PopularCulture (1992), a work that renders untenable the claim that Cobbett ‘realize[d] that the future ofRadical reform lay in the new industrial heartlands’ (p.205).

Where primary research and historical context are called for, Benchimol (whose background is inliterature and cultural studies) tends to fall back on the exposition of texts, and not many of themat that. The bibliography, by offering entries for each newspaper column, stretches the list tothirty-four for the whole book: fourteen works by Cobbett (mostly from the Political Register), fivepolemics from The Black Dwarf, ten essays from the Edinburgh Review, a handful of lectures andpamphlets, and a couple of Leveller tracts. This hardly adds up to a ‘public sphere’. Still less does itdemonstrate ‘the making of the British public sphere’, since the specifically British element ismissing for England: Benchimol consistently writes of ‘English plebeian radicalism’ (p.14) and‘English national values’ (p.214). The author’s favoured theoretical explanations hail mainly fromthe age of zombie Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s, when increasingly convoluted attempts weremade to add cultural epicycles to the Marxist model in order to save the phenomenon. (E. P.Thompson himself resisted this project in The Poverty of Theory and at a thunderous debate with

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Johnson at the 1979 Oxford History Workshop, both here overlooked but recently covered in ScottHamilton, The Crisis of Theory (2011).)

Despite these limitations, the book contains elements, particularly the opening discussion ofHabermas, that will make a worthwhile addition to reading lists.

Robert PooleUniversity of Cumbria

The Vienna ‘Don Giovanni’. By Ian Woodfield. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2010. xviii + 214 p.£55 (hb). ISBN 978-1-84383-586-8.

The title, of admirable brevity, reflects the brevity of the book, which consists of 150 closely arguedpages of text and sixty-four pages of appendices, notes, bibliography and index. The title deliversmore and less than it promises. A subtitle might have revealed that Ian Woodfield has written astudy of what early manuscript scores, sets of parts and librettos reveal about how Mozart’s DonGiovanni was altered during the first two decades that followed its first production in Prague inOctober 1787. Many of these changes, but by no means all of them, were made in Vienna during thesecond production, which came to the stage of the Burgtheater in May 1788.

This is primarily a study of sources, rather than of music and drama. Woodfield, professor ofmusic at Queen’s University Belfast, uses these sources to argue expertly and persuasively that DonGiovanni, like most eighteenth-century operas, was subject, with each new production, to constantchanges at the hands of impresarios, singers, music directors and – as long as he lived – thecomposer himself. Even during a single production, such as the one that took place in Vienna in1788, changes occurred that make Woodfield’s title misleading in another respect: he demonstratesthat there was no single Vienna Don Giovanni but several, though whether they were all performedwe do not know. Elsewhere Woodfield refers a little misleadingly to the Prague Don Giovanni and theVienna Don Giovanni as two different operas (p.xiii); putting it more carefully, I imagine he wouldagree that the operas performed in Prague in October 1787 and in Vienna the following May werebut two of many versions of a single opera.

‘The prevailing critical consensus until recently’, writes Woodfield of the Viennese versions, ‘hasbeen that Mozart weakened the dramatic structure of the Prague original in order to accommodatethe wishes of a new cast’ (p.149). He characterises this opinion as a ‘negative view of the process ofrevision’ based on ‘unthinking and anachronistic assumptions’ (p.149), but he does not engage inmuch sustained evaluation of the relative merits of the various versions of Don Giovanni. I agree withWoodfield that we should not assume that the Prague version of 1787 must be the best because it wasthe first, but perhaps it is the best for good musical and dramaturgical reasons. Just because Mozartwas involved in the process of revision does not mean that all the revisions were equally successful.This being the case, I wish Woodfield had subjected the various Viennese versions of Don Giovanni tomore searching musical and dramaturgical scrutiny. The duet ‘Per queste tue manine’ that Mozartwrote for Zerlina and Leporello is rarely performed and little known today. A full discussion of thisnumber and what it contributes to the drama would have been particularly welcome.

Woodfield’s philological analyses make good use of Dexter Edge’s splendid doctoral dissertation‘Mozart’s Viennese Copyists’ (University of Southern California, 2001) but also contribute muchthat is new, especially in the study of patterns of error transmission (copying errors found in somemanuscripts but not in others) and layout (in particular, the number of bars on each page of amanuscript, which copyists tended to replicate exactly). Woodfield’s meticulous tabulation of thesepatterns has allowed him to clarify the relations between early manuscript sources of Don Giovanni,and, in doing so, to shed important new light on the enigmatic early history of one of the greatestoperas of all time.

John A. RiceUniversity of Pittsburgh

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