The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, and: Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918 by Paul Rodmell (review)

It is hard to imagine more dissimilar books on such closely related topics than these two volumes. The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is a collection of essays rich in its variety of scholarly and critical voices. It focuses broadly on both large conceptual issues and on defining the concept of the prima donna, and narrowly on individuals, documenting historical women starring in or managing opera and theater companies during the one hundred fifty years of its long nineteenth century. In contrast, Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918 is a meticulously researched monograph full of facts and excerpted documents, chronicling the creation and production of operas written or performed in Great Britain during a tightly delimited period of forty-three years. Paul Rodmell’s book (published in Ashgate’s Music in 19th-Century Britain series, which has brought out many key volumes in the field) is a significant contribution to British opera history for specialists. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss’s collection is more wide-ranging theoretically, temporally, and geographically, covering the United Kingdom, the European Continent, and the United States. It is a tempting exaggeration to say that it has something for everyone, but it certainly has something for a sizable constituency of the Victorian Studies readership.

Rather than moving chronologically, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is divided into three thematic sections: “Promotion and Image-Making,” “Fantasy and Representation,” and “Cultures of Celebrity.” Two interludes by eminent scholars are meant to provide transition between sections, but that scheme disappoints as the ruminating pieces “on time” provide little to weave the segments together (xliii). The first section’s six case studies delve into the historical nitty-gritty of “what it means to build a career in the opera house during the long nineteenth-century,” considering the use of the press and other media to manipulate public image and interpret the significance of the prima donna for the public (xxxv). Works by Théophile Guatier, George Moore, Giacomo Puccini, and Léo Delibes feature in the second section, in which four essays examine particular literary or operatic representations of prima donnas, often fictionalized portraits of historical women artists. These essays suggest in aggregate that women performers’ artistry was increasingly depicted as the result of inherent genius as the century wore on. Six essays in the final section investigate how individual women “negotiated their own celebrity,” using biography to explore not only the quotidian aspects of maintaining a career, but also the theoretical concerns that are invoked by keeping up an embodiment of what Joseph Roach calls the “It-Effect” (xl). The essays are uneven in execution, but all are either usefully informative or thought-provoking. I will discuss nearly half of them here.

Periodical researchers will particularly value “Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid-Victorian London.” Here Roberta Montemorra Marvin investigates striking visual images in Illustrated London News. The main thrust of her interpretation of these engravings, which “brought to the fore familiar bourgeois virtues and values in portraying the prima donnas for their Victorian readership,” is to point out the way in which the periodical worked to rescue the opera singers from a perception of improper behavior through iconography rather than a verbal depiction of music or acting (36). Marvin makes clear that how the singer looked mattered as much as how she sounded in displaying her “moral purity and respectability” (25). Similarly, Poriss’s contribution to the volume, “Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism,” details the philanthropic activities of opera’s leading women as a method...