Eunuchs and castrati

Spain has been a fruitful locus for the European imagination for centuries, and it has been most often perceived in black-and-white oppositions -- either as a tyrannical and fanatical force in the early modern period or as an imaginary geography of a ‘Romantic’ Spain in later centuries. However, the image of Spain, its culture and its inhabitants did not evolve inexorably from negative to positive. From the early modern period onwards, it responded to an ambiguous matrix of conflicting Hispanophobic and Hispanophilic representations. Just as in the nineteenth century latent negative stereotypes continued to resurface, even in the Romantic heyday, in the early modern period appreciation for Spain was equally undeniable. When Spain was a political and military superpower, it also enjoyed cultural hegemony with a literary Golden Age producing internationally hailed masterpieces. Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) explores the protracted interest in Spain and its culture, and it exposes the co-existent ambiguity between scorn and fascination that characterizes Western historical perceptions, in particular in Britain and the Low Countries, two geographical spaces with a shared sense of historical connectedness and an overlapping, sometimes complicated, history with Spain.

/pdf/literary-hispanophobia-and-hispanophilia-in-britain-and-the-4iyptsrfno.pdf

Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850)

................................................................................................. 2 List of Figures........................................................................................ 5 List of Tables......................................................................................... 7 Acknowledgements................................................................................ 8 Abbreviations......................................................................................... 9 Introduction........................................................................................... The Mozarts in the Literature..................................................... Contextualising Narrative Patterns.............................................. New Approaches to Mozart in London....................................... 11 13 20 24 I: Sources for the Mozarts in London................................................... Annotating Leopold's Travel Notes............................................. Leopold Mozart's Travel Notes................................................... The Mozarts' Additional Acquaintances..................................... Newspaper Articles....................................................................... Material Culture: Objects, Music, Prints and Books................... 33 37 39 73 78 79 II: Navigating Concert Life in Westminster.......................................... Arriving on the Westminster Concert Scene............................... Networking with the Italian Opera Company............................. Subscription Concerts at Carlisle House..................................... Private Concerts........................................................................... 88 91 107 113 120 III: Science, Technology and Engineering: The Mozarts' Wider Intellectual Interests............................................................................... Leopold's Scientific Instruments.................................................. Encounters with New Technology............................................... Natural Curiosities and the British Museum............................... Wolfgang and Nannerl as a 'Curiosity'........................................ 125 128 138 145 155

The Mozarts in London : exploring the family's professional, social and intellectual networks in 1764-1765

/pdf/theatre-women-and-cultural-diplomacy-in-the-transatlantic-21j7pq0v1e.pdf

Theatre Women and Cultural Diplomacy in the Transatlantic Anglophone World (1752-1807)

Studies of Italian opera in London during the first half of the eighteenth century have focussed on George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). As the most prolific composer of this genre in the English capital, this is unsurprising, but it has meant that other composers, contemporaneously active in this field, have been relatively neglected. This is especially true of the period 1733 – 1737, during which time two Italian opera companies attempted
to co-exist in the city. Leading one of the companies was Handel, with the Neapolitan, Nicola Porpora (1686-1768), recruited to compose the works for the rival opera company, the so-called ‘Opera of the Nobility’.
This study therefore discusses Porpora’s contribution of five operas to the London operatic stage during his three year residency between 1733 and 1736, in opposition to Handel’s company. This has required an investigation into the circumstances surrounding
the formation of the rival opera company, its operation in terms of repertoire and the influence of its librettists on Porpora’s works. Detailed analysis of the music has been undertaken to consider Porpora’s style, establish how he adapted this in London for an English, rather than Italian audience, and determine the efficacy of his communication of
the drama through his music. This thesis is the first large-scale detailed study of Porpora and his operas. Although the primary focus of this work is his London operas, the necessity of providing a context for
these has resulted in a contribution to greater knowledge of Porpora’s overall style. There is
still much work to be done on a full study of all of Porpora’s 44 operas and other compositions. This study also significantly adds to the current knowledge of operatic rivalry in London between 1733 and 1736, for the first time evaluating the fabric and importance of Porpora’s operas within this period.

Nicola Porpora's operas for the 'opera of the nobility' : the poetry and the music

Suzanne Aspden. The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handels Operatic Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xv + 291 pp. $99.00 USD, £65 (hardback). ISBN 9781107033375.Competing actresses have recently been the subject of Felicity Nussbaums Rival Queens (2010), a title that refers to Nathaniel Lee's heroic tragedy Alexander the Great: or The Rival Queens (1677) which was associated with squabbles between actresses. Suzanne Aspden treats the subject of competing opera singers, employing Charles Burney's reference to operatic rivals Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni as "rival sirens." She explores the identities of the two singers through an analysis of the music and libretti written and adapted for them, and she examines the effect of their rivalry on the operas in which they were cast together. The cover illustration, a satirical image of the two women singing with the castrato Senesino, suggests the possibility of three rival sirens, and the castrate's professional relationship with the female duo is discussed in the final chapter. Handel scholars have emphasized the importance of the singer to the creative processes of librettist and composer of the fluid genre of opera seria. The chapters each focus on one or two operas, enabling the works to be understood in the context of London theatrical life. Aspden begins with a focus on the singer as actor, and concludes with a discussion of vocal style as an indicator of identity.Chapter 1 considers the concept of character in early eighteenth-century theatre and opera, noting the emphasis on representative types, the lack of psychological reality, and the merging of actor and stage role in the audience's perception. The different singing styles of Cuzzoni and Bordoni are compared, using musical illustrations to show how their music differed in relation to their operatic roles; Cuzzoni's arias were flowing and mournful, Bordoni's virtuosic. Evidence from previous roles sung by Cuzzoni challenges her stereotyping as the more feminine of the two women, and indicates that the women's personalities were not consistent with their typecasting. An early employment together was in Handel's Alessandro (1726), a libretto associated with female rivalry because of anecdotes about battles between actresses during performances of Lee's play on the same theme. Aspden notes the pairing of actresses as opposites in plays from the late seventeenth century, and suggests that the chaste-passive and the temperamental could be seen as two aspects of the whole female personality.Chapter 2 shows how in Handel's Rodelinda (1725) both roles of the rival women contain aspects of contrasted types of womanhood-unruly and virtuous-while these roles are clearly differentiated in Bononcinis Astianatte ( 1727), which was based on sources used by Racine and on Ambrose Philips' The Distrest Mother (1712). Aspden notes the pressure upon professional singers, as upon actors, to protect their virtuous private images, and quotes from satirical pamphlets which describe a confrontation between the rivals in Astianatte. Cuzzoni played a variety of roles which demonstrated her versatility, before Bordoni's arrival in London. Aspden compares these roles to those of the protagonists in the "she-tragedies" of the time, in which the tensions between the public and private were played out in the role. And as Rodelinda, Cuzzoni is both retiring virtuous widow, and self-confident queen. After Bordoni's arrival, Cuzzoni's roles tended to be more one-dimensional. Aspden finds parallels between the stage and acting techniques of spoken drama and of opera, suggesting that audiences would seek these parallels. She mentions in particular the "point," in which actors froze at climaxes in the drama, and suggests equivalent moments during or after an aria in opera. For example, at the end of Astianatte, Bordoni's character Ermione stands poised with a dagger in a dramatic moment which emphasizes the contrast between good and bad femininity, and which arguably provoked a riot. …

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

Review of Hannah Cowley's A Bold Stroke for a Husband by the Little Bear Theatre Company Directed by Pip Minni- thorpe at the Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds, 1 April, 2011.Hannah Cowley's successful Spanish intrigue comedy A Bold Stroke for a Husband has at last received a full production in the United Kingdom, appropriately in the restored late Geor- gian playhouse, the Theatre Royal Bury St. Edmunds. One of this important female drama- tist's most popular comedies, the play featured as the centerpiece of a conference on women dramatists in the United States in 2005, at Chapman University, California. It also received a rehearsed reading in Bury St. Edmunds as part of the "Restoring the Repertoire" series, and the recent performance by Little Bear Theatre Company marks a long overdue first profes- sional production of a Cowley play in the UK since 1913.The first London performance took place at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on Feb- ruary 25, 1783, with Charles Dibdin's "musical entertainment, "The Quaker, as the afterpiece. A young Mary (Perdita) Robinson and the versatile Isabella Mattocks took the principal female roles. The Whitehall Evening Post recorded that the play was "received by a numerous audience with loud and universal applause" and "promises to become a popular play." The frequent topical allusions found favor with the audience. Cowley's reputation for writing strong female roles was commented upon and the part of Olivia was considered to equal the favorite role of Letitia in the dramatists most successful comedy The Belle's Stratagem (1780). A quarrel between two celebrated actresses over the female roles was noted in the press. Cowley wrote Victoria for Elizabeth Younge and Olivia for the celebrated Frances Abington, Sheridan's first Lady Teazle, but Abington was too unwell to face the probable long run of a Cowley play. Elizabeth Younge wanted the part of Olivia and was not happy to act alongside Frances Abington in a role she perceived as less interesting. One reviewer likened the situ- ation to Aesop's fable of the Lion, Tyger (sic) and Fox, in which Isabella Mattocks "stept in quietly" and stole the prey of the role of Olivia.1 The play soon received performances in Dublin, Bristol, Bath, Gloucester and Germany. A Bold Stroke for a Husband continued to be performed in the nineteenth century in the UK and in the USA, in New York and Chicago. In 1898 the play script was advertised for sale in Reynold's Newspaper as one of a popular series of penny plays for Amateur Societies.Like Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, the title of A Bold Stroke for a Husband indicates that female action is to be at the centre of the play. Alluding in its title to Susanna Centlivre's, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), Cowley's play takes place in Madrid, then an overcrowded city with a reputation for superstition and cruelty.2 Associated also with chivalry and ro- mance, Spain was a setting that allowed greater sexual license, assisted by the veils worn by women in this catholic country, and due also to the reputation of European women for promiscuous behavior. Spain and Portugal were settings used by Aphra Behn and Su- sanna Centlivre, and Cowley set her School for Greybeards in Portugal. Bold Stroke con- cerns the strategy of one woman to regain the love of her straying husband, and of the other to repel unwanted suitors and attract the husband of her choice. The comedy uses plot devices from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew, as well as from two restoration dramatists, Thomas Otway and Thomas D'Urfey. Victoria, the deserted wife, disguises herself as a young man to woo the courtesan, Laura, who has stolen her hus- band's love. This breeches role would have been enjoyed by audiences, as the popularity of actress Dorothy Jordan in various cross- dressed roles indicates. Victoria becomes her husband's successful rival, armed with supe- rior knowledge of how to win a woman's love. Learning that her besotted husband, Don Carlos, has given the courtesan a contract of land which rightfully belongs to Victoria and her children, the wife hatches a scheme to re- trieve the contract. …

A Bold Stroke for a Husband

Regina Mingotti: Diva and Impresario at the King's Theatre Farnham: Ashgate (Royal Musical Association Monographs 22), 2013. 179 pp. $104.95 USD; £60 (hardback). ISBN 9780754669364.Recent monographs on Italian opera in England in the eighteenth century have emphasized the important roles of singer and manager in the creation of opera seria. For instance, Handel scholars have stressed the significance of the singers in the creative process of composer and librettist. Suzanne Aspden's monograph Rival Sirens (2013) focused on the contribution of rival singers Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, and there has been recent work by Kathryn Lowerre on Anastasia Robinson. Light has been shed on the practical processes of managing an opera house in an earlier Royal Musical Association (RMA) monograph by Curtis Price et al., The Impresario's Ten Commandments (1992) which discussed the legal wrangling between manager and agent. Michael Burden has taken as his subject a female singer who also co-managed for a season, and he has combined a compilation of source material with bold interpretation to create a vivid portrait of his subject, shedding further light on management practices and squabbles at the King's Theatre.Regina Mingotti, born Valentini in Naples, was a formidable prima donna and manager who had already sung at a number of European opera houses, had clashed with Bordoni in Dresden, and had sung with Farinelli in Madrid before she arrived in London in 1754. Before joining a travelling company of singers run by Pietro Mingotti, she experienced the early death of her father (an army officer), spent part of her childhood in a convent, and then faced sudden poverty with her mother and sisters. Her arrival in London was announced from the Prince of Orange Coffee House. The immediacy of Michael Burden's biographical introduction whets the reader's appetite for further information about this extraordinary woman.Burden sets the context by explaining how all-sung Italian opera func- tioned in mid eighteenth-century London, when Mingotti first arrived in England. According to Charles Burney, London opera was financially and artistically in decline at this time. The King's Theatre in Haymarket was the venue for Italian opera. When the twenty-one-year patent held by the Royal Academy of Music expired in 1740, yearly licenses were granted by the Lord Chamberlain, thereby discouraging any stability or long-term planning. The opera house was disadvantaged in comparison to the pat- ent theatres by the different licensing systems and reliance upon subscribers. Felice Giardini considered supplementing opera with English plays. Burden outlines the different ways in which the opera house was man- aged. Francesco Vanneschi, sole impresario and primarily a librettist, had to travel to Europe to recruit dancers and singers and had to be astute in his selection of repertory.Burden gives detailed accounts of Mingotti's seasons under the management of Vanneschi. Her performances were praised but her relationship with Vanneschi deteriorated. She disliked his mutilation of Metastasio's texts, and he undermined her and lied about her absences. Hissed at one performance, she had her physician publish evidence of her ill health, and she also published her side of the dispute in two Appeals. Vanneschi's dire financial situation facilitated the take-over of the opera house by Mingotti and Giardini, Orchestral Leader, who possibly fathered her son although Burdens analyses of a satirical engraving and a Hogarth portrait suggest another candidate in Lord Charlemont.Mingotti's management skills were disappointingly lacking when she and Giardini organized the 1756/57 opera season. She alienated potential subscribers by failing to answer letters, the season opened late and the pro- gram was criticized for the preponderance of pasticcio operas. …

Regina Mingotti: Diva and Impresario at the King's Theatre

Reviewed by: Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style of English Singing: Scandalous Lessons by Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland Angela Escott Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland, Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style of English Singing: Scandalous Lessons (New York: Routledge, 2022). Pp. 244; 11 b/w illus. $160 cloth. The eighteenth-century castrato singer Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810) does not enjoy the same fame as fellow castrato Farinelli (1705–1782), who is commemorated in a play and a film. Brianna Robertson-Kirkland's new study of Rauzzini, with its slightly provocative title, goes some way towards remedying this. The focus of her book is unusually not Rauzzini's successful singing career and repertoire, but his teaching and contribution to a new style of singing. Robertson-Kirkland's seven chapters are appropriately framed by a Prelude and Postlude, and she includes two appendices, one itemizing the performances of Rauzzini's most famous pupil, Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace (1765–1817) who was particularly known for her Susanna in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro; and the other containing short biographies of forty-seven of Rauzzini's singing pupils. A map of the book's chapters will be useful as preface to the remarks that follow. Chapter 1 provides an overview of eighteenth-century musical education in England and describes the prominence that Rauzzini enjoyed as a music teacher [End Page 142] who was "both skilled and respectable," a departure from frequent representations of music teachers as unreliable or immoral (15). Chapter 2 tracks the ways that Rauzzini's growing celebrity was entwined with the reputations of his publicly performing students. Chapter 3 suggests the significance of Rauzzini's move to Bath in 1777 for the integration of his roles as director, singer, composer, and teacher that this move enabled. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Rauzzini's training methods and the debates surrounding the English and Italian styles of singing. Chapter 4 defines and contrasts English and Italian styles of singing; Chapter 5 helpfully explains the concepts of solfeggi (tonic sol-fa, as taught today) and the hexachord system, both used in the teaching of singing, and the author charts the development of the diatonic harmony system familiar today. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the scandal of Rauzzini's alleged relationship with Elizabeth Gooch, looking closely at references to Rauzzini in "An Appeal to the Public, on the Conduct of Mrs. Gooch, the Wife of William Gooch, Esq.," published by Gooch, in part to pay off debts. These chapters also discuss novels and plays with plots based on the attraction between music teachers and pupils, such as Fielding's musical farce The Virgin Unmasked (1735) and Thomas Arne's Love in a Village (1762). The book's final chapter, Chapter 7, examines the attraction of the castrato and discusses four women singers who were involved in scandals that were unrelated to music instruction and that seriously affected their reputations. Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style of English Singing opens melodramatically with a death scene: a fictional account of Rauzzini's death recorded in the memoirs of one of the castrato's pupils (Charles Edward Horn, 1786–1849). Although Rauzzini left no record of his own life, two other distinguished pupils have left biographies documenting their experiences of being taught by Rauzzini, Charles Incledon (1763–1826) and Michael Kelly (1762–1826), accomplished students whose skill and success carried forward Rauzzini's legacy as a music teacher. Robertson-Kirkland notes that the first biography of Rauzzini concentrated on his performance and composition.1 She summarizes books that cover the teaching of singing of his era and observes that no institution dedicated to teaching music existed until 1822; before then, instruction in music relied upon individual music "masters." (No reference is made to female teachers; it would be interesting to know when these became accepted.) The relationship between master and student was as important to a pupil's progress as the teaching methods used, and pupil endorsement was important for a teacher's reputation. This Rauzzini received from Incledon and Kelly. Although teaching skills were essential in a music master, his conduct was a significant issue, too, and... 

Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style of English Singing: Scandalous Lessons by Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland (review)

Carla Pestana is Distinguished Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at UCLA. She is the author of The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2017); The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), and other books about the seventeenth-century English Atlantic. Her dissertation advisor, Gary Nash, had Richard Dunn as his TA while an undergraduate at Princeton.The author would like to thank Michael Meranze and Matthijs Tieleman for comments on and conversations about this essay, as well as Trevor Burnard.

Richard Dunn's Atlantic World

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Angela Escott

Author Tools

Chat about Author