Technology and the Diva

Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age

Karen Henson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780521198066
• eBook ISBN: 9781316760802
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Musical Examples
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A Chronology
• Introduction: Of Modern Operatic Mythologies and Technologies
• 1 Mythologies of the Diva in Nineteenth-Century French Theater
• 2 Coloratura and Technology in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Mad Scene
• 3 Photographic Diva: Massenet’s Relationship with the Soprano Sibyl Sanderson
• 4 “Pretending to Be Wicked”: Divas, Technology, and the Consumption of Bizet’s Carmen
• 5 The Silent Diva: Farrar’s Carmen
• 6 The Domestic Diva: Toward an Operatic History of the Telephone
• 7 The Absent Diva: Notes Toward a Life of Cathy Berberian
• 8 The Televisual Apotheosis of the Diva in István Szabó’s Meeting Venus
• 9 Diva Poses by Anna Netrebko: On the Perception of the Extraordinary in the Twenty-First Century
• Afterword: Opera, Media, Technicity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index