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Henson Karen , Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2015. 279pp.
Campana Alessandra , Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2015. 220pp.
Review Articles
In Alexander Chee's novel The Queen of the Night, an ostensibly Parisian diva, Lilliet Berne, is approached at a party by a young writer, who describes an opera for which he has written the libretto and a mysterious composer has supplied the music. The librettist offers Lilliet the leading role. The opera's swashbuckling adventure and rapid reversals of fortune are characteristic less of the novel's late nineteenth-century setting than of the operas comiques of decades earlier. If the opera plot stretches the bounds of historical plausibility, though, what matters to our diva is that the story is not fictional enough: it is her own secret biography, conveyed by an unknown hand. For Lilliet, the unknown opera is a terrifying development, no less than a revelation that she no longer can contain the chaos of her past. In the opera, she would be playing her own history, but only as envisioned by the writer and the unknown composer.1
Lilliet's helplessness in the face of this composer reflects the diminishing power often accorded to singers at the end of the nineteenth century. While earlier singers had been musical personalities, those of the later nineteenth century are often described as celebrities without creative powers of their own. By this reading, voices like that of Lilliet were not so much the result of intellectual cultivation as an accident of nature, alive only in music created by others. Invoking Lydia Goehr and Susan Rutherford in the introduction to her monograph, Karen Henson writes that during the final third of the nineteenth century singers moved from 'freedom to subservience, creativity to interpretation'. Once firmly at the top of opera's hierarchy, they had abruptly lost their status as co-authors, now reduced to being 'intermediaries, executants, faithful (or disloyal) interpreters' (3).2Roles were written for their particular talents more rarely, and insertion arias dwindled. While Lilliet's life is operatic, even as she embodies herself onstage she no longer controls her own story. Yet, as Henson would...