'What can, what should, technology do for the diva? Can such a starry, extravagant symbol find a place within our imaginings of industrial and post-industrial modernity? This engaging collection of essays, which ranges over two hundred years of opera, offers a fascinating and surprisingly positive answer.' Roger Parker, King's College London
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.