Margaret Butler
UW–Madison resident fellow (2024–2025)
Professor, Musicology Area, Mead Witter School of Music, UW–Madison
Constructing the Diva: Celebrity Culture and Women on the Italian Opera Stage, 1750–1790
Opera audiences have always loved women singers. But what did celebrity mean to eighteenth-century listeners and performers? How did women singers in Italian opera at this time craft their images, construct their careers, interact with institutions that supported and commodified them, and become linked in the minds of contemporaries to past and future communities of female performers? How can celebrity studies nuance our view of eighteenth-century opera and what does it contribute to opera’s historiography? Women operatic celebrities wielded unprecedented power over their publics during the period in which celebrity as a construct took shape in the minds of audiences and critics alike. Yet we still have a hazy view of women singers as a community in a volatile moment during opera’s development the second half of the eighteenth century, just prior to the era of the great bel-canto divas of the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti—household names in opera history. This seminar, presenting portions of work related to my book in progress on this topic, explores some of these issues, demonstrating the importance of new work on celebrity for opera studies.
Margaret Butler is a professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her publications include Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform; chapters in Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House and The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music; and articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music, Music in Art, and Fontes Artis Musicae (Vladimir Fédorov Award, 2021). Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Musicological Society, the Newberry Library, and the Delmas Foundation for Venetian Research, and WoVen (Women, Opera, and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice), an international, collaborative project funded through the Norwegian Research Council (https://www.ntnu.edu/music/woven). Her monograph in progress examines the late eighteenth-century prima donna in opera seria and celebrity culture.
*Events currently open only to 2024-25 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*