Margaret Butler

Operatic Women: Celebrity Culture and the Seria Stage, 1750–1790

What did celebrity mean to opera audiences who loved the women they heard on the eighteenth-century stage? How did these singers craft their images, construct their careers, interact with institutions that supported and commodified them, and become linked with past and future communities of female performers? My book in progress tackles these questions, deepening our knowledge of opera’s development, of women’s roles in Enlightenment-era society, and of the networks conditioning the experience of an operatic celebrity. Adopting concepts, frames, and methods from celebrity studies, I examine spectacle, reception, production, and style through the lens of the female performer.

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.