Esse, Melina. Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth- Century Italian Opera

The collaborative relationship between composer and female singer in the changing landscape of nineteenth-century opera is the focus of Melina Esse's engaging study, which seeks to present an alternative to the entrenched myth of male operatic authorship.Esse rejects the idea of the "work concept," a system of evaluation solidified in the nineteenth century which based the merits of an artwork-in this case, opera-on its ability to remain fixed within time and resistant to adaptation and variation (11).Esse, instead, argues in favour of a more fluid and osmotic process of creation between composer and performer that takes its cues from the art of improvisation, in vogue in Italy in the eighteenth century and still very much present within its cultural consciousness, as she demonstrates, in the nineteenth.In chapter 1, "History's Muse: The Spectacle of Poetic Improvisation," Esse argues that the dual roles inhabited by a female performer as both muse and creator within the world of opera originated in the practices of improvisation.This artform, in which successful improvvisatrici acquired unprecedented levels of fame and artistic validation as female performers, directly inspired works of literature and opera, including Madame de Stal's wildly popular Corinne, ou L'Italie.Although improvisation legitimated a space for women as creators, it also complicated this space, Esse insists, by conferring on the improvvisatrice two conflicting roles.She was at once an autonomous creator and a storehouse of memory.Spurred by genius to craft verses on the spot, the improvvisatrice was also reliant on the time afforded her by the rhythm and meter of the musical accompaniment into which she often set her verses, to draw upon a mental catalogue of tropes and literary references needed to carry her performance.Both creator and vessel, the improvvisatrice becomes in Esse's study the embodiment of opera's ambivalence toward female creation, a figure who will be evoked time and time again, both directly and indirectly.In her second chapter, "Corinna's Crown: Improvisation and Authority in Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims," Esse examines the collaborative space occupied by performer and composer in her analysis of Rossini's opera, which takes inspiration from Stal's Corinne.Il viaggio a Reims, Esse argues, owed its success not simply to Rossini's composition but to the ornamentation and improvisation worked into each individual performance by the singers themselves.Although it has been

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.