Performance and Identity on London's Operatic Stage: The 'Rival Queens', Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni

女歌手之间的竞争故事在流行的歌剧观念中具有高度的象征意义。在这项研究中，我的目的是通过考察这些传奇中最重要的竞争--在17世纪20年代亨德尔管理伦敦期间，弗朗西丝卡·库佐尼和福斯蒂娜·博尔多尼之间的竞争--来展示这些故事对我们对歌剧的批判性理解所具有的意义。我转向这些女性，与其说是为了创造一种新的传记叙事，不如说是为了重新评估旧人的工程设计：围绕她们遭遇的报道的喧嚣掩盖了这些女性自己声音的奇怪缺失，这表明(或许)这种竞争可能与其说是她们的创造，不如说是其他人的制造。这项研究将通过对18世纪歌剧中帮助形成歌手身份的过程的欣赏，来评价女性竞争的主题。在1726-1728年间为“对手歌手”准备的歌剧中，平等和差异的棘手问题尤为紧迫，我们尤其可以追溯到这种担忧。我将探索为这两个女人写的音乐、歌词、讽刺和更清醒的历史，以展示这些作品实际上是如何创造她们的。因此，Giovanni Bononcini的《Astianatte》和G.F.Handel的《Admeto》、《Riccardo Primo》和《Siroe》等作品将被用来阐明创造表演者身份的复杂的、共同的过程--这个过程有望反过来对歌剧体验和体裁本身的性质有新的了解。在导论一章之后，分析了18世纪早期舞台上的表演的性质，以及它在个人身份方面给女性带来的特殊问题，一系列关于个人作品的研究将呈现博多尼-库佐尼竞争的不同面貌。乔瓦尼·博农奇尼(Giovanni Bononcini)的歌剧《阿斯蒂安纳特》(Astianatte_(1727))中有一章将展示歌剧管理层如何通过将女性角色两极分化为人们熟悉的好/坏女性二分法来操纵女性的对立。接下来的一章，关于亨德尔的《阿德梅托》，将考虑女性身份的可塑性，展示这部作品的伪装、舞台和音乐设计向当代观众展示了如何将对立转化为平等(然后又回来)。这种变化无常，在我们看来可能是矛盾的，因为18世纪的观众会确认女性变化无常的最重要的信念。第四章将采取更实际的倾向，认为亨德尔的《里卡多·普里莫》在1727年11月首演之前所做的重大改变是为了缓解歌手和他们的派系之间的紧张关系，使平等的概念更容易被接受。在考虑了女性明显的竞争之后，在第五章，我将转向她们的男主角，卡斯特拉托·塞内西诺，来询问歌剧对女性的强调如何影响了他的角色。在韩德尔的《西罗》中，我们将看到塞内西诺的困境被戏剧化，表明他作为女性之间竞争的焦点的地位，使他更常见的英雄角色化为乌有，使他沦为爱情对象。最后，结论将转向女性最为人所知的特征，她们的装饰能力，询问对装饰的关注可能会告诉我们什么，不仅关于女性的声音，而且关于她们在18世纪社会中被感知的方式。

Stories of female singer rivalry assume highly symbolic status in the popular conception of opera. In this study I aim to show the significance such stories can hold for our critical understanding of opera through an examination of perhaps the most important of these legendary rivalries -- that stirred up in 1720s London during Handel's management, between Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. In turning to these women, I am seeking not so much to create a new biographical narrative as to re-evaluate the engineering of the old: the clamour of report surrounding their encounter masks the curious absence of the women's own voices, suggesting (perhaps) that the rivalry may have been less their creation than the manufacture of others. This study's appraisal of the topos of female rivalry will emerge through an appreciation of the processes that helped to form singer identity in eighteenth-century opera. In the operas prepared for the 'rival singers' during the period 1726-1728, where the thorny issues of equality and difference were particularly pressing, we can especially trace such concerns. I will explore the music, libretti, satires and more sober histories written for and about these two women to show how these works, in effect, created them. Thus Giovanni Bononcini's _Astianatte_, and G.F. Handel's _Admeto_, _Riccardo Primo_ and _Siroe_, among other works, will be used to elucidate the complex, corporate process of creating performer identity -- a process which, it is hoped, will in turn shed new light on the nature of the operatic experience and of the genre itself.Following an introductory chapter, contextualising the nature of performance on the early eighteenth-century stage, and the particular problems it presented for women in terms of personal identity, a series of studies of individual works will present different facets of the Bordoni-Cuzzoni rivalry. A chapter on Giovanni Bononcini's _Astianatte_ (1727), the opera in which the women reputedly came to blows, will show how the opera management manipulated the women's antagonism by polarising their characters into the familiar good/bad woman dichotomy. The following chapter, on Handel's _Admeto_, will consider the malleable nature of the women's identities, demonstrating that this work's play with disguise, staging, and musical design showed the contemporary audience how opposition could be turned into equivalence (and back again). Such changeability, which might to us seem contradictory, for an eighteenth-century audience would have confirmed an overarching belief in the mutability of women. The fourth chapter will take a more practical bent, arguing that substantial changes made to Handel's _Riccardo Primo_ before its premiere in November 1727 were designed to alleviate tensions between the singers and their factions, rendering the concept of equality more palatable. Having considered the articulation of the women's apparent rivalry, in the fifth chapter I will turn to their male lead, the castrato Senesino, to ask how the operas' emphasis on the women affected his role. In Handel's _Siroe_, we will see a dramatisation of Senesino's plight, showing that his status as the focus of competition between the women nullified his more usual heroic role, reducing him to the status of love interest. Finally, the conclusion will turn to the feature for which the women were best known, their powers of ornamentation, to ask what the focus on embellishment might tell us not only about the women's voices, but about the way they themselves were perceived in eighteenth-century society.