Dr. Charlotte Bentley Interview
Dr. Charlotte Bentley is a lecturer in music at Newcastle University, where her research focuses on operatic mobility in the 19th century. Her book New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859 was published in 2022.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I always loved music as a child, and I learned to play the violin, piano, clarinet and saxophone, so I could join as many local and school music groups as possible. Over the years, I became increasingly interested in the history of the music I was playing and what it meant to the people who wrote and first heard it. It felt natural, then, to go on to study Music at university.
I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge, and it was there I first started to get interested in opera. We had a fantastic course on nineteenth-century vocal music during my first year, as well as one dedicated to eighteenth-century opera, and these really fired up my curiosity. I went on to research opera for my undergraduate theses (one on Offenbach and the other on the early reception of Gounod’s Faust), and I still hadn’t had enough, so I decided to apply for a Masters degree at the University of Nottingham, where I had a wonderful year studying a heady mixture of nineteenth-century opera and early music.