Poriss's history of adaptation, revision, and repurposing is a tale even more madcap than the opera's original plot. In her signature witty prose she excels, and exults, in recounting the glorious messiness of what happens when audiences and performers love an opera enough to keep reinventing it. Delightful.
Hilary Poriss is Professor of Music in the Department of Music and the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of 19th-century Italian and French opera, performance practice, diva culture, and the aesthetics of 19th-century musical culture. She is the author of Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford, 2009), and co-editor of Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2010) and The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2012). Her articles and reviews have been published in 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Verdi Forum, Journal of British Studies, Music & Letters, and other musicological books and journals.