The Rival Sirens
Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage

The Rival Sirens examines the vital and intertwined roles of singers, audiences and local cultural context in creating eighteenth-century opera.

Suzanne Aspden (Author)

9781108829243, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 June 2020

307 pages, 9 b/w illus. 54 music examples
24 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.76 kg

'This account should appeal to those with an interest in the role of women in the operatic world of the 1720s. The author draws together threads from an impressive range of sources … this is a good read for the sophisticated Handel opera enthusiast.' Ursula Brett, The Consort

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Opera [AVGC9], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]