The Rival Sirens

Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage

Suzanne Aspden (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

308 Seiten

2013
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-107-03337-5 (ISBN)

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This new approach to the operas of Handel examines the vital and intertwined roles of singers, audiences and local cultural context in creating eighteenth-century opera. It emphasises cultural context and aspects of performance, offering a range of interpretative tools not previously exploited in studies of the century's opera before Mozart.

The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women, Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers, as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth century.

Suzanne Aspden is a lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford. As a leading Handel scholar, she has made numerous appearances on BBC Radio and Television and has been the co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal since 2009. Her research interests include opera and identity politics in music, and she has been awarded a number of fellowships in the US, UK and India. She has published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Music Association and the Cambridge Opera Journal and is co-editor, with Michael Burden, of a forthcoming book on Cavalli's Erismena.

Introduction; 1. The character of the actress; 2. 'Heroick virtue' in Rodelinda and Astianatte; 3. Identification and illusion in Alessandro and Admeto; 4. Balancing power in Riccardo Primo; 5. Senesino and the crisis of heroic masculinity; 6. The ornamental voice.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	18.4.2013
Reihe/Serie	Cambridge Studies in Opera
Zusatzinfo	54 Printed music items; 9 Halftones, unspecified; 9 Halftones, black and white
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	170 x 244 mm
Gewicht	690 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre
ISBN-10	1-107-03337-3 / 1107033373
ISBN-13	978-1-107-03337-5 / 9781107033375
Zustand	Neuware