Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The tale of the onstage fight between prima donnas Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni is notorious, appearing in music histories to this day, but it is a fiction. Starting from this misunderstanding, The Rival Sirens suggests that the rivalry fostered between the singers in 1720s London was in large part a social construction, one conditioned by local theatrical context and audience expectations, and heightened by manipulations of plot and music. This book offers readings of operas by Handel and Bononcini as performance events, inflected by the audience's perceptions of singer persona and contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts. Through examining the case of these two women, Suzanne Aspden demonstrates that the personae of star performers, as well as their voices, were of crucial importance in determining the shape of an opera during the early part of the eighteenth century.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 The character of the actress
• 2 'Heroick virtue' in Rodelinda and Astianatte
• 3 Identification and illusion in Alessandro and Admeto
• 4 Balancing power in Riccardo Primo
• 5 Senesino and the crisis of heroic masculinity
• 6 The ornamental voice

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Aspden (music, Univ. of Oxford, UK) uses the largely fictitious rivalry between opera divas Francesca Cuzzoni (1696-1778) and Faustina Bordoni (1697-1781) as the departure point for investigating identity and concepts of self in 18th-century theater and opera seria. The rivalry--for the most part a construct of the public, the press, and the theater establishment--had far-reaching implications because it shaped the music and plot in a number of Handel operas in which both singers appeared. Published as part of the "Cambridge Studies in Opera" series, the book focuses not on the music or even the women themselves but on the socio-psychological aspects of the genre. Aspden mines the familiar story of the women's rivalry not so much for historical or musicological insight but in an attempt to understand performer, personal identity, and gender and the impact these had on operatic development and communication of the period. Dense and turgid in style and vocabulary, the book will be of interest chiefly to specialists in cultural studies and social science; it will most likely be beyond the ken of the casual or even sophisticated opera enthusiast. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. S. C. Champagne Oberlin College Conservatory of Music