Technology and the Diva

Karen Henson is Associate Professor at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. She trained at the University of Oxford and in Paris, and her work has been supported by fellowships and awards from The British Academy, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Henson's research focuses on nineteenth-century opera, singers and opera performance, and opera and technology. She is the author of Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2015). She is currently working on a book about opera and early sound recording.

'Is a 'diva' a coddled megastar, or an archetype of female power? Is 'technology' a euphemism for the modern world's threat to artistic tradition, or a synonym for craft and innovation? The essays in this book will leave opera-lovers questioning their assumptions - and turning the page to read more.' Anne Midgette, classical music critic, The Washington Post

• A chronology Hannah Clancy, David Gutkin and Lucie Vágnerová; Introduction: of modern operatic mythologies and technologies Karen Henson; 1. Mythologies of the diva in nineteenth-century French theater Isabelle Moindrot; 2. Coloratura and technology in the mid nineteenth-century mad scene Sean M. Parr; 3. Photographic diva: Massenet's relationship with the soprano Sibyl Sanderson Karen Henson; 4. 'Pretending to be wicked': divas, technology, and the consumption of Bizet's Carmen Susan Rutherford; 5. The silent diva: Farrar's Carmen Melina Esse; 6. The domestic diva: toward an operatic history of the telephone Lydia Goehr; 7. The absent diva: notes toward a life of Cathy Berberian Arman Schwartz; 8. The televisual apotheosis of the diva in István Szabó's Meeting Venus Heather Hadlock; 9. Diva poses by Anna Netrebko: on the perception of the extraordinary in the twenty-first century Clemens Risi; Afterword: opera, media, technicity Jonathan Sterne.