Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession

by John Rosselli

Adelina Patti was the most highly regarded singer in the 19th century. She earned nearly $5000 a night and had her own railway carriage; yet during the same period a minor comic singer would perform for the cost of his food and a pair of shoes to wear on stage. John Rosselli's wide-ranging study introduces all those singers, members of the chorus as well as stars, who have sung Italian opera from 1600 to the twentieth century. Singers are shown slowly emancipating themselves from dependence on great patrons and entering the dangerous freedom of the market. Securely rooted in painstaking scholarship and sprinkled with amusing anecdotes, this is a book to fascinate and inform opera fans at all levels.

Genres: Music

292 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 1992

Reviews

[Annabelle Kern · Rating 2 out of 5]

kinda boring, too historical for me

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read John Rosselli's groundbreaking (and frequently cited) 1988 article "The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550-1850" around 2008 or so, but it took me 6 years to get around to reading his later more expansive book, for which I am now duly ashamed, because it is really wonderful piece of scholarship.

The title of this book I think is a little misleading, as it makes you expect something like a more scholarly version of Henry' Pleasant's 1966 The Great Singers. However, no singer has his or her complete story told in here, only named bits and pieces from many people's stories; this book is a what I'd call a prosopography (although it is not labeled as one.) The story of opera is told as a mass of people who sucked up to patrons, sweated and froze on stage, schlepped their own costumes around Europe, and generally just made a living. He also devotes a good amount of time to the lives of chorus singers, which as far as I know no other book on opera really does.

This book is primarily focused on money, which is great as social history is hard to find in music history, and economic history is even rarer. And by "focused on money" I mean there are several pages charts of pay rates for major singers spanning one hundred years. No attention is paid to the music other than in the ways it was bought and sold, although a decent amount of time is devoted to changes in vocal styles and pedagogy.

There's bits and pieces here and there where the book shows its age - for instance he is stuck on the idea of the castrati being asexual, where now we've moved into a much more nuanced view of their sexuality, but really all in all it has aged remarkably well. The discussions of class and opera singers is bang on and could have been written yesterday, and prosopographical approaches to history are (I am given to understand) coming back into style in academia, making this book, despite being old enough to buy beer, still well worth reading and citing in modern scholarship.

[Felicity Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's long but worth the effort, if you love Italian opera!!