The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss

First text on the prima donna to focus more on the actual performers than the characters they portrayed
Features Contributors at the forefront of women's and gender issues in Opera Studies
Explores how prima donne influenced compositional practices, musical and dramatic interpretation, and opera house management

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss

Description

Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narratives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. And for contemporary audiences, many of these characters - and the celebrated women who played them - still define opera at its finest and most searingly affective, even if storylines leave them swooning and faded by the end of the drama. The presence and representation of women in opera has been addressed in a range of recent studies that offer valuable insights into the operatic stage as cultural space, focusing a critical lens at the text and the position and signification of female characters. Moving that lens onto the historical, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century sheds light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled "doomed women" onstage before an audience.
Editors Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss lead a cast of renowned contributors in an impressive display of current approaches to the lives, careers, and performances of female opera singers. Essential theoretical perspectives reflect several broad themes woven through the volume-cultures of celebrity surrounding the female singer; the emergence of the quasi-mythical figure of the diva; explorations of the intricate and sundry arts associated with the prima donna, and with her representation in other media; and the diversity and complexity of contemporary responses to her. The prima donna influenced compositional practices, determined musical and dramatic interpretation, and affected management decisions about the running of the opera house, content of the season, and employment of other artists - a clear demonstration that her position as "first woman" extended well beyond the boards of the operatic stage itself.
The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is an important addition to the collections of students and researchers in opera studies, nineteenth-century music, performance and gender/sexuality studies, and cultural studies, as well as to the shelves of opera singers and enthusiasts.

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss

Introduction
Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss
PART ONE: PROMOTION AND IMAGE-MAKING
Chapter 1. Divas and Sonnets: Poetry for Female Singers in Teatri arti e letteratura
Francesco Izzo
Chapter 2. Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid-Victorian London
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Chapter 3. Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism
Hilary Poriss
Chapter 4. Staging Scandal with Salome and Elektra
Joy H. Calico
Chapter 5. Screening the Diva
Mary Simonson
Chapter 6. The Prima Donna's Art of Politics
James R. Currie
INTERLUDE 1: The Prima Donna Creates
Julian Rushton
PART TWO: FANTASY AND REPRESENTATION
Chapter 7. Gautier's "Diva": The First French Use of the Word
James Q. Davies
Chapter 8. Artistic Experiment and the Reevaluation of the Prima Donna in George Moore's Evelyn Innes
Grace Kehler
Chapter 9. Ars moriendi: Reflections on the Death of Mimi
Helen Greenwald
Chapter 10. Lakmé's Echoing Jewels
Gurminder Kaur Bhogal
INTERLUDE 2: Breath's End: Opera and Mortality
Terry Castle
PART THREE: CULTURES OF CELEBRITY
Chapter 11. "Attitudes with a Shawl": Performance, Femininity, and Spectatorship at the Italian Opera in Early Nineteenth-Century London
Rachel Cowgill
Chapter 12. From Diva to Drama Queen
Tracy C. Davis
Chapter 13. The Prima Donna as Opera Impresario: Emma Carelli and the Teatro Costanzi, 1911-1926
Susan Rutherford
Chapter 14. "In Imitation of My Negro Mammy": Alma Gluck and the American Prima Donna
Susan C. Cook
Chapter 15. "The Finest Voice of the Century": Clara Butt and Other Concert-Hall and Drawing-Room Singers of Fin-de-siècle Britain
Sophie Fuller
Chapter 16. Galli-Curci Comes to Town: The Prima Donna's Presence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Alexandra Wilson
Index

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss

Author Information

Edited by Rachel Cowgill, Professor in the School of Music, Cardiff University, and Hilary Poriss, Associate Professor of Music, Northeastern University

Rachel Cowgill is Professor in the School of Music at Cardiff University. She is co-editor (with Julian Rushton) of Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music (Ashgate, 2006) and co-editor (with Peter Holman) of the series Music in Britain, 1600-1900 (Boydell and Brewer). Hilary Poriss is Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University and author of Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (OUP, 2009).

Contributors:

Gurminder Kaur Bhogal is Assistant Professor of Music at Wellesley College.
Joy H. Calico is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses on music since 1800 and on opera.
Terry Castle teaches at Stanford University, where she is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities.
Susan C. Cook is Professor of Music and the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Rachel Cowgill is Professor in the School of Music at Cardiff University.
James Currie is Assistant Professor of Music History in the Department of Music at the University of Buffalo (State University of New York).
James Q. Davies is an Assistant Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley.
Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of the Performing Arts at Northwestern University.
Sophie Fuller is a freelance musicologist.
Helen Greenwald has taught at the New England Conservatory since 1991 and was Visiting Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, winter-spring 2008.
Francesco Izzo is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton, and has also taught at New York University, East Carolina University, and the University of Chicago.
Grace Kehler is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada).
Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a Research Fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at The University of Iowa, where she is also Director of the Institute for Italian Opera Studies and Associate Professor.
Hilary Poriss is Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University. University, Boston.
Julian Rushton retired from the West Riding Chair of Music at the University of Leeds in 2002.
Susan Rutherford is Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, University of Manchester.
Mary Simonson teaches at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and completed her doctorate at the University of Virginia in 2007.
Alexandra Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Oxford Brookes University.

The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss

Reviews and Awards

"The essays offer a rich variety of approaches to the prima donna, and the quality of scholarship and writing is high. Together they reveal the contradictory views of the prima donna in different times and places, the ideologies of gender that shaped perception, and the challenges these singers presented to traditional male/female power dynamics." - Sarah Hibberd, Studies in Theatre and Performance

"this volume makes a unique contribution to the literature ... Highly recommended" - R. Pitts, CHOICE