Galloping to the Crimea on old tunes: Music and militarism on the equestrian stages of Paris and London

Abstract

The Crimean War (1853–1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media in quasi-‘real time’. Thanks to the electric telegraph, war reports reached audiences at a breakneck speed, while war journalism and photography promised more ‘accurate’ accounts. Competing to profit from this conflict, popular theatres promised the most up-to-date, spectacular war-themed pieces. This article focuses on equestrian theatricalizations of the Crimean War in Paris and London. Yet rather than examine their spectacular visual dimensions, I explore their musical accompaniments. Their scores served to create continuity with older wars and reassurance by integrating familiar ‘old tunes’ thus counterbalancing the anxieties that came with misinformation or ‘objective’ but emotionally distant reports. The inclusion of time-honoured national anthems and well-known songs helped map past encounters with war, such as the Napoleonic conflicts, onto the present. Music thus became crucial to the ‘making of modern wartime’, a development predicated on collapsing the temporal and geographic boundaries between wartime experiences. Moreover, the propagandistic messages embedded within this music and its associated performance practices forged a more orderly and respectable image of military conflicts. Examining these ‘old tunes’ demonstrates that the ears were just as important as the eyes for propagating contemporary ideologies of militarism. Hence, this article advocates for a solid audio-visual examination of the emergent war-as-mass-entertainment culture in re-imaginations of the Crimean War in London and Paris.