Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity

Abstract

By any measure, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) must be considered the leading singer, if not the leading musician, of the later nineteenth century. Her sizable body of recordings (twenty-eight) makes her a key witness to late nineteenth-century performance style. Her great celebrity also ensured lavish written documentation of her life, including what she did, what people said about her, and sometimes what she said about herself. In this article I bring together these two types of material to consider a central aspect of Patti's life and artistry: her relationship to contemporary notions of femininity. Like all women who entertained before the public, Patti contended with the taint of immorality. I argue that her response to that taint shaped both her overall conduct and her particular vocalism. For while in truth her way of life fundamentally contradicted the reigning ideals of womanhood, Patti projected in her dress, her makeup, her public statements, her published imagery, and, most importantly, her stage characterizations and vocal styling the most perfect manifestation of femininity available: the virginal ingénue. The consistency of this self-performance encourages the identification of a similar persona in her singing, and indeed through close readings of several recordings I expose what I call her “maidenly mode,” a vocal strategy analogous to her other ingenuous representations. If many, like Verdi, found in Patti a “perfect equilibrium between singer and actress,” her example can begin to suggest to us what it meant to sound like an ingénue in late nineteenth-century Europe.

Early Music in an Interdisciplinary Artistic Production: The Project Pluvinel’s Academy

“…It is not surprising that performativity can be confusing and unfocused if maintaining that the genealogy represents one prevalent performativity. Returning to the above journal article survey, some articles are even difficult to place, as their use allows several possible interpretations inherited through citation (see Freitas 2018;Moseley, 2015;Romero, 2019;) or implied meaning, which enables several possible readings, yet are not delineated sufficiently to make the intended terminological use apparent to the reader (Arendell, 2015;Butt, 2018;Flory, 2019;Kennaway, 2015;Mathew, 2018;Morais, 2015;Rindom, 2019;Robin, 2018;Romero, 2019;Saltzstein, 2017;Shelley, 2019;Spohr, 2019;Valiquet, 2019). A more schematic view of how performativity is conceived for the selected articles (see Table 2 below) can help.…”

Integration Strategies of American Voice Singing in Singing and Vocal Teaching Based on Multiscale Feature Fusion

“…In the diversified music world today, it is important to emphasize, inherit, and carry forward the unique art form of American vocal singing. The integration of American vocal singing has injected new vitality into singing and vocal teaching, which helps to cultivate more singing talents who love music and have a high degree of artistic literacy [9][10][11].…”