This collection of 18 essays from the symposium ‘Staging the Feminine: The Arts of the Prima Donna, 1720–1920’ (University of Leeds, 2006) covers a lot of ground, from a time ‘when women achieved their greatest freedom on the operatic stage’ (p. xxxi) up to an age when films and commercial recordings brought prima donnas closer to a new and larger audience. The quotation that opens the collection (p. xxvii) highlights the active role that these women themselves played in shaping their images and careers: ‘This consciousness and earnest will-power to move one's public by the force of one's art is one of the first steps towards being a true prima donna’.Footnote ¹

The essays are penned by an impressive list of contributors (the majority of them women) involved in the fields of feminist theory, gender studies, biographical and historical research, reception studies and the preparation of critical editions. They are presented in three groups: Promotion and Image-Making, Fantasy and Representation, and Cultures of Celebrity. In addition, two short ‘interlude’ essays punctuate the collection. The first, by eminent musicologist Julian Rushton, is a beautiful homage to the creative powers of the prima donna who must continuously recreate each role anew. The second, by Stanford professor Terry Castle, focuses on opera and mortality: ‘There is something macabre about opera. It's a lady-killer’ (p. 207). She refers to Catherine Clément's Opera, or the Undoing of Women,Footnote ² a book that is hauntingly present in many of the essays, and quotes Paul Robinson who takes Clément to task for ignoring the musical dimensions of opera (p. 211), a criticism which might easily apply to the present volume as a whole.

In describing ‘the burgeoning field known today as “prima donna studies”‘, co-editors Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss carefully justify the use of the term ‘prima donna studies’ as opposed to ‘diva studies’ or ‘celebrity studies’. While it is impossible to ignore the negative connotations of the term ‘diva’, often used to describe a ‘spoiled, whimsical, selfish, egoistical, and even sadistic’ female performer (p. xxxiii), ‘prima donna’ is perceived as more neutral. The editors offer instead a more positive definition of ‘these top-billing women’ as ‘an elite group of supremely gifted and highly trained musical and dramatic artists’ (p. xxviii). The collection of essays sets out ‘to explore changing facets of the idea and identity of the prima donna over time, and by so doing add new layers to the history of operatic composition, production and reception’ (p. xxix). Strikingly, achingly missing from this exploration, however, is the art of singing. Admittedly, the voices of singers whose careers predate the late nineteenth century have vanished almost entirely from the historical record. But this was the age of bel canto, of Lucia, Cenerentola, Aïda, Brünnhilde and Elektra, the golden age of the prima donna. Contemporary accounts in the press, memoirs, and studies in performance practice, would allow a closer assessment of the arts of the prima donna.

The first six essays, dealing with ‘promotion and image-making’, make clear that the first art of the prima donna is her ability to create an ideal image of womanhood based on her physical attributes, her respectability, her altruism and her capacity for self-determination. It is an art of risk, according to James R. Currie: ‘Risk, in effect, is one of the primary duties of our roles as citizens of modernity. What is perhaps most magnificent in the musical art of the prima donna when it is successful, then, is that it presents what in politics is a duty, in an aesthetic form whereby it can be experienced as a pleasure’ (p. 113). The risk described here is not the ability to negotiate arias loaded with florid ornamentation, extreme register changes and long sustained musical phrases while expressing emotions and demonstrating skill in acting. It is rather a commercial risk – one that was associated with marketing efforts, involving the use of various publicity tools such as the illustrated press, newspaper articles or silent films, aiming to reach a global audience. The HD broadcasts of live performances we know today seem in direct continuity with these efforts and indeed they continue to focus on non-musical attributes of the performers. The close-up images of beautiful prima donnas on a cinema screen make the public almost unaware that these ‘live performances’ are enhanced by sophisticated recording equipment, ensuring a sound balance that is not necessarily the same as that experienced in the opera house.

In the 1820s, many promotional tools were literary. Francesco Izzo, for example, examines Italian poetry celebrating opera singers: either occasional poetry distributed at a specific performance, often anonymous and without much literary merit, or longer poems published in the printed press. Such poems praised the beauty, nobility and moral virtues of the divas. Izzo quotes a long poem for Giuditta Pasta (pp. 12–13) containing a detailed description of her … hairstyle (!) as a model for other women to follow (an illustration would have been welcome).

In her study of the mid-Victorian era, Roberta Montemorra Marvin stresses the importance of the singer appearing to be a respectable lady, an artist ‘whose intellect and inner goodness shone through the subtle veil of her public artistic persona’ (pp. 36–7). Commenting on images published in the Illustrated London News in the 1840s and 1850s, she deciphers the coded discourse hidden within artists’ portraits and their accompanying texts. References to a performer's beauty, charm, delicacy, genealogy, education and, in the last recourse, altruism, compensate for and justify the prima donna's choice of career, and even her moral transgressions. The performance of altruism and philanthropy became an expectation for women of means when, according to historian F.K. Prochaska ‘charity turned into a branch of fashion in the nineteenth century’ (p. 46). Aiming to present a balanced view of the real motivation behind these charitable deeds, Hilary Poriss underscores the humanity of some of the philanthropic gestures discussed within her essay, ‘Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism’. She also acknowledges the necessity for the artists to accumulate ‘symbolic capital … through noneconomic means (such as charitable acts) that can lead, eventually, to material gain’ (p. 51).

The delicate balancing act of leading a dignified life as a wife and mother while performing sensationalist works as Salome or Elektra was mastered by women exerting an absolute control over their image, explains Joy H. Calico. The first Klytämnestra for example, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, touring the US with her nine children, declared to the press that ‘woman's sphere is in the home’ (p. 74). The first Elektra, Annie Krull, on the contrary, embraced the role and demonstrated that ‘among the indispensable arts of the prima donna is the ability not to dodge scandal, but rather to engage it on one's own terms’ (p. 76).

The presence of singing actresses in silent movies is certainly a proof that the voice was not the defining attribute of their considerable success. Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden confronted danger in film productions of operas, Westerns, murder mysteries, wartime epics and romances, and were mobbed by paparazzi for photo magazines. Admittedly, writes Mary Simonson, these accomplished actresses also brought new depth to their stage performances through their physical style of acting (p. 97).

The second group of essays deals with the mythical, literary, tragic, exotic and powerful figure of the ‘diva’, a term coined in its French usage, according to J.Q. Davies, by poet and novelist Théophile Gautier in his long poem ‘La Diva’ (1837).Footnote ³ Enraptured by the ‘sexual energy’ of the voices of sisters Giulia and Giuditta Grisi together (p. 138), Gautier even celebrated the serene splendour of Giulia merely sitting in her box at the opera. This interesting essay would have benefitted from more rigorous editing and from references to the original French versions of the quotations used.

Grace Kehler introduces us to a fictional diva, Evelyn Innes. As the heroine of George Moore's eponymous novel,Footnote ⁴ Evelyn is transformed ‘from a devout Catholic and dutiful daughter into an internationally acclaimed soprano, specializing in the deeply sensual music of Richard Wagner’ (p. 147). Merging life and art, she embodied in her life all the Wagnerian roles she sang on stage, demonstrating both her immense creativity as an artist and her personal untrustworthiness. The real interest of the novel, says Kehler, lies in its formal innovations, ‘which adapt musical techniques for literary purposes’ (p. 147): leitmotiv becomes a structural element of this musically structured novel.

Helen Greenwald's ‘Ars moriendi: Reflections on the Death of Mimì’ introduces the diva as a tragic figure of mid-nineteenth-century opera, when the deathbed replaced the happy ending on the lyric stages of Europe (p. 173). Much influenced by theatre divas Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse, ‘a vogue for “feminine suffering” ’ (p. 176) invaded the French and English stages. Reflecting on the silent, unnoticed, deeply moving death of Mimì in La Bohème, and comparing it to the surge of energy of Violetta dying with a grand vocal gesture, Greenwald convincingly casts Mimi in ‘the age of Strindberg and Ibsen and the beginning of “modern” theatre’ (pp. 178–9). The new emphasis on the whole, she adds, ‘seems to be realized, perhaps even for the first time on the opera stage, in the scene of Mimi's death’ (p. 179).

Less convincing is Gurminder Kaur Bhogal's assessment of Delibes’ Lakmé challenging the stereotype that ‘the lavish appearance of and intricate music written for exotic women in opera evoke negative characterisations of the non-Western’ (p. 187). While she recognizes that the melismatic, ornate prayer of Lakmé is central to ‘nineteenth-century constructions of the Eastern female mystic’ (p. 187), as was Norma's Casta diva, she still objects to the notion that the ‘Légende sacrée de la fille du Pariah’ was a command performance of seduction, assuming that seduction, in the West, is by nature sinful.

In the last section, ‘Cultures of Celebrity’ the prima donna's voices comes alive in a gallery of portraits drawn from performances in concert halls, in salons and recording studios, on minstrelsy stages and in the impresario's office. ‘In a volume of essays devoted to the arts of the prima donna, can there be a place for such women, many of whom never, or only rarely, appeared on the operatic stage?’ (p. 309) asks Sophie Fuller about Clara Butt, thought by many to be ‘the finest voice of the century’.Footnote ⁵ Thomas Beecham and Adrian Boult praised the remarkable power and range of her voice, though Ms Butt restricted her activity to the concert hall after her marriage. A jealous husband, a deep contralto voice and an impressive 6’ 2’’ frame excluded her from the opera stage but did not prevent her from becoming a ‘beloved national treasure’ (p. 324).

Beautifully written, and richly illustrated, Rachel Cowgill's ‘“Attitudes with a Shawl”: Performance, Femininity, and Spectatorship at the Italian Opera in Early Nineteenth-Century London’ reveals the influence on the opera stage of Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton (1765–1815). Married to the English Ambassador in Naples, Emma created a new form of entertainment for embassy guests, which she called “Attitudes”. Drawing on her experience as a painter's model, she would strike a series of poses portraying characters from Greco-Roman mythology, draping herself in large shawls or veils. Inspired by Lady Hamilton, Italian diva Angelica Catalani introduced this type of tableau vivant in an opera by Sarti in 1808 (p. 220). Bringing this form of artistic posturing into English opera houses, Catalani ‘embodied a version of noble femininity that was strongly attractive to the aristocratic elite’ (p. 239). Their enjoyment was mixed, however. The personal life of Emma, now living in England in a ménage à trois with her husband and Admiral Horatio Nelson, raised troubling questions of propriety for her audience, but in its neo-classical simplicity, this passing fad, with origins in the salon, left a lasting impression on opera staging.

Tracy C. Davis notes that by 1880 the OED attributes the term ‘diva’ not only to operatic singers but also to ‘divas of the drama’ (p. 263). She introduces Elsie Craven and Ellen Terry, aged respectively 11 and 61, as artists who ‘command great technique, evince singular presence (on stage or on film) and have rock-solid fan-bases’ (p. 264) – real divas, as opposed to drama queens.

In ‘The Prima Donna as Opera Impresario’, Susan Rutherford paints a riveting and moving portrait of soprano Emma Carelli, a powerful presence on stage, who challenged conventions in her personal life and served as director of the Teatro Costanzi in Rome from 1911 to 1926. Carelli believed in the educational function of the theatre, and so brought in new international repertoire, prestigious conductors, vocal coaches and stage directors (p. 278). Brutally dismissed when the Mussolini regime acquired the theatre in 1926, she died tragically shortly after.

Susan C. Cook proposes an extraordinary extension of the prima donna into Black Mammy, the faithful slave singing lullabies to white children. Soprano Alma Gluck, who made her debut in 1909 at the Met as Charlotte in Massenet's Werther, abandoned opera shortly after. She recorded an incredibly diversified repertoire for RCA Victor's Red Seal label, from Schoenberg and American contemporary composers to Mammy songs performed using ‘the aesthetics of the opera house’ (p. 299).

The last portrait brings us to ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ with Amelita Galli-Curci who became a gramophone star in 1924, thanks to her good recording voice, but fell victim to her success as a recording star when her sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall disappointed bitterly. This new culture of recording, notes Alexandra Wilson, contributed to a cult of celebrity, which ‘reinforced negative perceptions of the prima donna’ (p. 341).

This volume sheds light on many aspects of the arts of the prima donna that still have uncanny resonance today. Studies of individual performers will bring more specific information on the art of singing, but here is a rare occasion to grasp how our present ‘music industry’ has deep roots in the nineteenth century.