Conference Agenda

During the early days of the Third Republic, Jules Massenet built his career by crafting memorable female characters through his signature blend of eroticism and religion: while Salomé, Esclarmonde, and Thaïs tempted otherwise upstanding men on the operatic stage, sexualized portrayals of Mary Magdalene, Eve, and the Virgin Mary titillated the public’s gaze on the concert stage. Massenet’s critics often gendered this music feminine in their reviews, casting it as “catty,” “seductive,” “insincere,” and “caressing.” Still others transposed this process of ascribing gendered qualities to musical sound from Massenet the composer to Massenet the man, thereby enacting a figurative emasculation. Amidst an embattled republic that was searching for redemption in the face of humiliating military defeat, power in cultural contexts was directly related to the masculinization of the nation and the morality of its citizens. Massenet’s emasculation and his “immoral” female characters were thus well-positioned to endanger the strength and health of the nation itself.

Yet Massenet quickly became the Republic’s—a thoroughly masculinized entity—musical darling. In this paper, I examine the complex interactions and the incongruities between Massenet’s portrayals of female characters, the gendered reception of his music, and his position at the vanguard of the masculinized Republic’s musical image. While scholars including Annegret Fauser and Clair Rowden have examined the interrelation between eroticism, gender, and religion in Massenet’s œuvre, little has been made of how a composer so closely connected with femininity in various forms could simultaneously be fashioned into the masculine Republic’s musical figurehead. I argue that it was Massenet’s transformative portrayal of his female characters—from dangerous seductresses to well-behaved Catholics—that set this process in motion. While this abrupt turn to Catholicism as a guidepost for bourgeois female behavior might have had the potential to dispel otherwise Republican audiences, his newfound traditionalism had quite the opposite effect: it acted as a masculinizing antidote to a reputation that had been tainted by a perceived overabundance of femininity. In the end, Massenet’s engagement with femininity and religion in their idealized forms positioned the nation’s most feminized composer at the forefront of the masculinized nation’s operatic glory.

The Venetian music publisher Luigi Marescalchi printed music in a wide range of genres during the last decades of the eighteenth century. His prints of arias sung by celebrated female singers stand as an unexplored source of celebrity’s material culture at a crucial moment for the concept’s emergence. Marketing these publications through the use of the singers’ names on the cover pages, Mareschalchi foregrounded these women’s achievements, drew attention to their personae, and profited from their successes. Eclipsed by their castrated counterparts in opera seria, late eighteenth-century prime donne embody a facet of opera’s history that is yet to be constructed. In this presentation, I demonstrate the importance of the Marescalchi prints for understanding the surprising turn taken by celebrity’s trajectory in a period in which our view of women in opera seria is hazy at best and in a milieu that helped usher in a new era for the female singer and her authority in Italian opera. The prints, featuring music by leading composers such as Paisiello, Traetta, Anfossi, Majo, and others broaden and expand the context by which we can observe celebrity at work on the Italian stage. Pieces sung by leading prime donne Caterina Gabrielli, Lucrezia Aguiari, Camilla Mattei, Giuseppina Maccherini Ansani and others, especially those from Venetian productions, demonstrate the central role of the female singer in the seria genre’s late-century transformation as it was shaped by Venetian theatrical culture. In the case of Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen, first a singer and then a leading violin virtuosa, Mareschalchi’s print of her vocal music helps us approach questions around the fluidity of a celebrity’s persona and crossover strategies employed by talented women in connecting with diverse musical audiences.

Positioned at the confluence of commodification, commerce, and pleasure, these sources elucidate their respective performance contexts and, by extension, the experiences of the women with whom they were linked in the minds of audiences. In so doing, the Marescalchi prints nuance our understanding of Italian opera and celebrity, helping to link the better-known communities of women singers from earlier in the century with their powerhouse bel canto-era successors.

In its first years of existence—1934 until the outbreak of war in 1940—the Glyndebourne Opera Festival set out to internationalize English opera culture by attracting foreign-born artists and creative staff. During their pre-war tenure at Glyndebourne, the creative duo of conductor Fritz Busch and director Carl Ebert—both recent émigrés from Nazi Germany—pursued a production strategy that privileged ensemble (both in acting and music-making) over individual performance. It was a strategy pursued via close collaboration, lengthy rehearsal periods, and a preference for re-engaging singers from season to season. Central to these early seasons was a small group of non-British-born female singers—Irene Eisinger, Ina Souez, Luise Helletsgruber, and Aulikki Rautawaara.

This paper recovers the activities of these women and explores the significance of their contributions to the early success of the Glyndebourne project. It further examines the reception of their work by British music journalists, musicologists, and musicians, paying particular attention to the ways that critical contentions with their presence on the Glyndebourne stage were framed within larger debates about Glyndebourne as a site, alternately, of national cultural aspirations and of cosmopolitan creative utopia.

I use correspondence and other documents from the festival archive to explore these performers’ activities at Glyndebourne. I also interrogate the critical reception of those activities through analyses of concert reviews and journalistic reflections, utilizing frameworks for contending with mobile and migratory music-making developed by musicologists Brigid Cohen and Florian Scheding. I demonstrate that Glyndebourne’s early success cannot be fully considered without taking seriously the role played by these women. Further, these women and their activities provided a locus in the British imagination for working out issues surrounding the nationalist and internationalist tensions inherent to the nascent Glyndebourne Festival.

This research forms part of a wider project exploring the centrality of the creativity of migrants to a festival understood by many to represent the pinnacle of a particularly English project of music-making. And it represents the first engagement in any depth with the contribution that women made to the success of the early festival.