This book is concerned not so much with the 'prima donna' as with prime donne: a group of working artists (sometimes famous but more often relativelyunknown and now long forgotten) and the circumstances of their professional lives. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house - the social, cultural and political framing that shaped individual experience, artistic endeavour and audience reception. Rutherford addresses questions such as the multiple discourses on the image of the...

This book is concerned not so much with the 'prima donna' as with prime donne: a group of working artists (sometimes famous but more often relativelyunknown and now long forgotten) and the circumstances of their professional lives. It attempts to locate these singers within a broader history, including not only the specificities of operatic stage practice but the life beyond the opera house - the social, cultural and political framing that shaped individual experience, artistic endeavour and audience reception. Rutherford addresses questions such as the multiple discourses on the image of the...

A delightful story for young children with colourful, appealing, characters and a strong underlying moral message. The Monkey Moose is not happy and sets off on an adventure to find something he thinks he needs. He meets other characters along the way and makes new friends as he pursues his quest. By the time he reaches his destination he finds out that he didn't really need what he set out to find and that he has found something much, much more important.

Verdi's operas - composed between 1839 and 1893 - portray a striking diversity of female protagonists: warrior women and peacemakers, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gypsies, mothers and daughters, erring and idealised wives, and, last of all, a feisty quartet of Tudor townswomen in Verdi's final opera, Falstaff. Yet what meanings did the impassioned crises and dilemmas of these characters hold for the nineteenth-century female spectator, especially during such a turbulent span in the history of the Italian peninsula? How was opera shaped by society - and was...