Last night was my high school class reunion. What a great event! So many people are doing so well, and warmth and good cheer abounded. I'm so glad I was home to go to it.
With the exception of those few hours of visiting and Thanksgiving Day, I'm working away on a paper for my 19th Century Opera Singers class. Definitely up to my ears in 19th century newspaper articles, reviews of singers, biographies of singers, books on the context of the time in terms of opera history, class ambivalence (desire to advance to the upper crust but antipathy for the aristocratic "snobbery"), gender roles (women rarely worked outside the home. The stage was one of the few career paths open to them), and religious aversion to "those immoral theater people".
My favorite quote so far? From Clara Louise Kellogg's Memoirs of an American Prima Donna:
"Tenors are queer creatures. Most of them have their eccentricities and the soprano is lucky if these are innocuous peculiarities. I used to find it in my heart, for instance, to wish that they did not have such queer theories as to what sort of food was good for the voice. Many of them affected garlic. Stigelli usually exhaled an aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it strengthened his voice. Brignoli had been long enough in this country to become partly Americanised, so he never smelled of anything in particular."
What do you think: should I try the cheese, the garlic, or the beer before I sing in the Messiah next week?
~Hope
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment