The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage by Suzanne Aspden (review)

Suzanne Aspden executes a scholarly tour de force in this monograph, opening Handel’s operas to compelling new critical readings. Critical theory comes late to Handel scholarship, which has typically consisted of source studies, with some agreeable contextualization, within which Handel’s operatic characters are measured against nineteenth-century counterparts. Rattling the cage, Aspden knits together primary sources with critical arguments—based above all on scholarship about the eighteenth-century London stage—to reshape our understanding of Handel’s operas. She focuses on the sopranos Cuzzoni and Faustina to ask: how did the opera seria of Handel and his peers construct identity and gender? How might spectators have apprehended a prima donna’s performance, and how might a prima donna have channelled spectator response? Although sometimes dauntingly dense, Aspden’s appraisals are fascinating, clearly communicated, and nearly always well-founded.

Beginning with a treatise by castrato and teacher Pier Francesco Tosi (1723), as Aspden explains, period writers typically twinned Faustina and Cuzzoni, regarding them as complementary halves of a longed-for but never realized aesthetic whole. Cuzzoni stood for a ‘pathetic’ style, linked to earlier operatic traditions; Faustina represented a new virtuosity, labelled moda Faustinare, which aspirants such as the castrato Farinelli eagerly took up. The pairing in London of Cuzzoni with Faustina was adumbrated by productions they led together in Venice. Paired, the sopranos signified not just a pleasing whole, but also a model of idealized femininity, in which passivity counterbalanced excess.

Imported to London, this trope transformed into a satirical fiction—still erroneously cited by scholars as fact—that Cuzzoni and Faustina were jealous rivals. Before Faustina’s arrival in March 1726, Cuzzoni had represented a spectrum of appropriately ‘female’ affects, exemplified by the richly textured title role of Rodelinda. Once Faustina had been engaged, however, theatre personnel mounted productions—Handel’s Alessandro and Admeto, Ariosti’s Lucio Vero, Bononcini’s Astianatte—that either explicitly staged rivalry or implied temperaments and artistry whose contrasts, to be appreciated, needed to be displayed side by side. Cuzzoni was squeezed into dramatis personae whose attitudes (constancy, quiescence, virtue in distress) were meant to counterpoise Faustina’s volatile, active, noble, possibly unruly characters. Cuzzoni’s music also changed, to make each soprano’s numbers form a counterfoil to those of her ‘rival’. The stage personae that the prima donnas embodied were underwritten by fears of female empowerment and imaginatively extended by invidious contemporary satire.

Aspden adds significantly to scholarship by highlighting how musical ‘points’, that is, parenthetical moments of arrested action, were deployed in anticipation of London audiences’ tendency to elide the dramatis persona with the off-stage persona. She outlines how both actresses and dramatis personae were constructed—the former by commentators, the latter by playwrights—to animate received notions of femininity. She draws particularly on Lisa Freeman’s Character’s Theater (Philadelphia, 2002), in which Freeman characterizes early eighteenth-century identity as an ‘unstable product of staged contests between interpretable surfaces’ (p. 27). In this pre-Romantic, pre-novel era, Freeman argues, audience members modelled their intrinsic sense of self according to extrinsic stage ‘characters’, in part because social conduct was itself a theatre.

To the theories of Freeman and others Aspden marries meticulous ‘positivist’ musicology. She drills through the layers of each opera’s earlier productions to show how London theatre personnel modified the works to suit local spectators’ specific modes of self-construction of, and anxious fascination with, empowered female performers. For instance, analysing Bononcini’s Astianatte, Aspden collates Racine’s 1667 adaptation of Euripides, Salvi’s 1701 libretto, and Bononcini’s setting of it. She identifies ‘points’ such as ‘Deh! Lascia o core di sospare’, where Cuzzoni through her limpid cantilena enacted ‘directionless pathos’ (p. 106). Aspden notes also where Bononcini wrote music that parted company with word sense to let Faustina perform in the moda Faustinare. Her reading of...