Technology and the Diva
Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age

Focuses on the operatic soprano as the diva and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the digital age.

Karen Henson (Edited by)

9781108723336, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 February 2019

244 pages
24.4 x 18.9 x 1.3 cm, 0.48 kg

'What can, what should, technology do for the diva? Can such a starry, extravagant symbol find a place within our imaginings of industrial and post-industrial modernity? This engaging collection of essays, which ranges over two hundred years of opera, offers a fascinating and surprisingly positive answer.' Roger Parker, King's College London

In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

A chronology Hannah Clancy, David Gutkin and Lucie Vágnerová
Introduction: of modern operatic mythologies and technologies Karen Henson
1. Mythologies of the diva in nineteenth-century French theater Isabelle Moindrot
2. Coloratura and technology in the mid nineteenth-century mad scene Sean M. Parr
3. Photographic diva: Massenet's relationship with the soprano Sibyl Sanderson Karen Henson
4. 'Pretending to be wicked': divas, technology, and the consumption of Bizet's Carmen Susan Rutherford
5. The silent diva: Farrar's Carmen Melina Esse
6. The domestic diva: toward an operatic history of the telephone Lydia Goehr
7. The absent diva: notes toward a life of Cathy Berberian Arman Schwartz
8. The televisual apotheosis of the diva in István Szabó's Meeting Venus Heather Hadlock
9. Diva poses by Anna Netrebko: on the perception of the extraordinary in the twenty-first century Clemens Risi
Afterword: opera, media, technicity Jonathan Sterne.

Subject Areas: History of engineering & technology [TBX], Technical design [TBD], Music: styles & genres [AVG], Other performing arts [ASZ], Dance & other performing arts [AS], Theatre: technical & background skills [ANH], The arts: general issues [AB]