Conference Agenda

The travel diaries of music historian Charles Burney overflow with hyperbole about the musical women whom he met. Ever surprised by talented women who exceeded the normal bounds of “accomplishment” required for polite society, Burney expresses frustration that the English language cannot do justice to their "genius" in composition and performance. When ordinary language fails him, Burney turns to analogies, casting musical women as embodiments of such well-known figures as the classical muses, the angels, or St. Cecilia.

Matthew Head (2013) views Burney’s equation of women with such archetypes as essentially problematic, since, he argues, they render women as flattened caricatures and deny women’s agency. A contrasting theory is that of literary historian Elizabeth Eger (2001), who contends that eighteenth-century women’s portrayal as muses “can be seen as a metonym for women’s involvement in the cul­tural world of their time, conveying at once the centrality and diversity of their public role.” For Eger, the equation of women with well-known archetypes rendered their achievements acceptable to the public.

Building on Eger’s theory, I offer a new reading of cases from eighteenth-century Britain and Europe that show how women themselves adopted famous, socially sanctioned archetypes as models for their own musical personae—in short, how musical women engaged in self-fashioning. I explicate the biographies and musical practices of women such as composer, singer, and keyboardist Marianna Martines, painter and musician Angelica Kauffman, and improviser of sung poetry Corilla to understand the archetypes that they adopted. These include self-association with the classical muses, biblical singers such as Miriam and Deborah, and figures of maternal care like Mary. Musical women also modeled themselves after royals including Empress Maria Theresa and Queen Charlotte of England, who were understood to blend power with piety and maternal love. Adoption of sentimental instruments like the glass armonica and the English guitar allowed women to cast themselves as amateurs, rather than as professionals who paraded their talents before the public in an ostensibly unseemly manner. While men like Burney surely participated in spreading and solidifying these categories, eighteenth-century women themselves shared responsibility for--and benefited from--the practice of self-fashioning.

The 34,000-word journal kept between 1803 and 1805 by Jane Ewbank (1778–1824) is an extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted account of elite society in late Georgian York. The Ewbanks were wealthy druggists and bankers with a handsome property and warehouse on fashionable Castlegate, and Jane was well provided for at her father's death in 1795. Her engagement with music – one of the many themes running through this remarkable document – proves to be entirely in keeping with eighteenth-century ideas about women’s ‘accomplishments’, polite social relations and sensibility. Although we look in vain for excitement over the publication of new work by favoured composers, or the trials and tribulations of getting new repertoire under her fingers, it is clear she was a competent pianist and acquaintances were keen to involve her in private music-making.

Where Jane is most revealing, as this paper shows, is as a proficient observer of others' performances, from the domestic settings of the drawing-room music party to the public arena of the Assembly Room subscription concerts. Her journal has much to tell us about the variety of spaces and milieux in which musical entertainment could be found in late eighteenth-century York, how it formulated aspects of gender and status in those spaces, and their connectedness within the broader circuits and entrepreneurial activities of musicians across the north of England, including the oboist John Erskine (1753–1847) and violinist John White (1779–1831). When brought into dialogue with other 'accomplished' Georgian women, however – including lesbian diarist Anne Lister (1791–1840), whose York circles overlapped with Jane's acquaintances, portraitists Ellen and Rolinda Sharples (1769–1849; 1793–1838), novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817), and the aristocratic female musical consumers whose tastes are enshrined in collections of binders' books surveyed by Jeanice Brooks and others at the University of Southampton – Ewbank emerges as a significant new voice contributing greatly to our understanding of women's experiences of music-making in Georgian Britain. Ewbank’s journal, housed in the National Library of Scotland, is currently the focus of an interdisciplinary project led by Jane Rendall, Rachel Feldberg and Matthew Eddy.

A "diva", from the Italian for a "goddess", is a feminine, otherworldly being. But what role does the racialized, black, Other play in the conception of the diva as otherworldly? While in contemporary culture, "diva" is often used to denigrate or elevate black celebrity women, historical diva studies continue to be a history of white celebrity. In this paper, I begin to address this oversight by shining a light on the Afro-Italian opera star Vittoria Tesi (1701–1775), considered the first prominent singer of colour in the West and the first contralto diva.

Against the backdrop of pre-unification Italy and the Habsburg’s participation in the slave trade, I explore Tesi’s unprecedented social mobility and the otherworldliness of her divadom. Born into servitude in Florence in 1701, Tesi died a wealthy and celebrated figure in the Habsburg’s Vienna palace in 1775––where she dwelled since her retirement in 1754––thanks to her stellar four-decade-long career as one of the leading European singers of her time. I consider her performative agency in playing with gender, race, and class through cosmetics, costuming, her broad vocal range, and diversity of role creations. While she frequently gender-reversed roles with her counterpart––the castrato Farinelli––such as in Hasse’s Antonio e Cleopatra (1725), only Farinelli is celebrated today. Initially making her name through her trouser roles, Tesi later performed divine heroines central to the diva cult, such as the titular role in Gluck’s Ipermestra (1744) and racialized characters like Lisinga in Gluck’s Le cinesi (1754). Examining how Tesi’s rival, Anna Bagnolesi, acquired the epithet ‘White Tesi’, I demonstrate how Tesi helped define not only Black divadom, but divadom itself.

I challenge scholarly tendencies to locate Black divadom as originating in nineteenth-century America, by tracing it back to where the cult of the diva originated, in eighteenth-century Italy. Recovering this first wave of Black divadom helps us understand how the intersecting notions of race, gender, and class took shape in eighteenth-century Italy and across the Austrian monarchy, and how they have impacted and shaped Western celebrity and performance culture that continue to other Black femininity as inherently eroticized and exoticized.