The Myth of the Diva: Female Opera Singers and Collaborative Performance in Early Eighteenth-Century London.

Abstract

This dissertation explores how female singers transformed the production and reception of theatrical music in London between 1703 and 1720 by collaborating with other performers. I focus on those women who performed during Queen Anne’s reign, when contemporary anxieties over publicly visible women collided with the emergent reality of female celebrity. My study of previously neglected musical and archival sources challenges the dominant image of the female performer as "diva." Instead, I argue that female singers achieved stardom and became essential to the artistic process of opera production through their collaborations with other singers and musicians, actors and actresses, patrons, and composers. Their collaborative performances in English masques, Italian and English operas, public concerts, and benefits shaped their individual careers, as well as the musical and dramatic profiles of London's theatrical works.

Each chapter investigates a different strategy of artistic and social collaboration to show how female singers complicate preconceptions of early celebrity as an individual phenomenon. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of “collaborative celebrity,” and reveals how Italian virtuose in London collaborated within musical networks, establishing and legitimating their careers. Chapter 2 explores the onstage collaborations between professional Italian singers and English actress-singers in the first fully-sung, Italianate operas performed in London (Arsinoe, Rosamond, and The Temple of Love). Chapter 3 challenges the trope of professional rivalry that supports the concept of divahood. Although spectators used the singers’ supposed rivalry to symbolize partisan conflict, Margarita de l’Epine and Catherine Tofts fashioned complementary and collaborative musical personas onstage in pasticcio operas (Thomyris, Love’s Triumph, and Clotilda). Chapter 4 analyzes reconstructions of benefit performances given by opera singers in London. I show how these events were designed to highlight an individual performer amongst and against a group of peers. Chapter 5 addresses the collaboration between singers and composers in the creation of new operas. It explores the creative partnership between Elisabetta Pilotti- Schiavonetti and George Frideric Handel between 1711 and 1715 on Rinaldo, Teseo, and Amadigi di Gaula. Their collaborations on these early operas would later shape Handel’s musico-dramatic approach to the Royal Academy operas performed in the 1720s.