Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera [Hardcover]

Mr. Richard Somerset-Ward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2004

During its first two centuries, opera was dominated by sopranos. There were male sopranos, or castrati, whose supercharged voices (female vocal cords powered by male lungs) were capable of feats of vocalism that are hard to imagine today. And there were female sopranos, or prime donnas, whose long battle for social acceptance and top billing was crowned in the early nineteenth century when the castrati disappeared from the opera stage and left them supreme. Whether they were male or female, these singers were amazing virtuosi, perhaps the greatest singers there have ever been - "angels". Unfortunately, some of them (and often the most famous) were also capable of behaving extremely badly, both on and off stage - "monsters." This book tells their colourful stories. Besides providing fascinating anecdotes about some of those who graced and disgraced the operatic stage, Richard Somerset-Ward tells the story of their greatest glory - the singing tradition they founded and perfected, which we know as bel canto and which is still the backbone of operatic singing today. Rich in musical, social, and cultural lore, Angels and Monsters illuminates a unique and vanished tradition and will be irresistible to opera lovers everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When arresting vocal artistry and colossal egos combine, the result is explosive, shows Somerset-Ward in this history of the original prima donnas: those women—and men—whose angelic soprano voices brought them fame and whose willful caprice earned them monstrous reputations. The author chronicles opera’s rise and eventual decline through its male and female stars, particularly focusing on the Italian bel canto, or "beautiful singing," style that dominated 18th-century opera and continues to inform vocal technique today. A former head of music programming for the BBC, Somerset-Ward has an ear for illustrative anecdotes that help move his story forward. He introduces both famous and obscure sopranos that inspired composers (even as they chafed at their singers’ antics) and dominated early box offices. There is Francesca Cuzzoni, so obnoxiously self-important that an exasperated Handel once threatened to toss her out of a window; Katherine Tofts, who went insane and thought she really was the characters she portrayed; Angelica Catalani, whose contract demanded absolute power in choosing operas, roles and fellow cast members; and Nellie Melba, who was as renowned for her tactlessness as for her ethereal singing. Women sopranos were only part of the equation though; the castrati, those surgically created male sopranos whose dynamic voices were "basically female equipment powered by massively developed male lungs," won the spotlight over their female rivals for two centuries. Tastes, however, changed. Women sopranos ruled the 19th century, just as more dramatic opera forms emerged, displacing bel canto’s vocal pyrotechnics. Both dilettantes and well-read opera fans will find this book worthwhile and entertaining.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the treble voice reigned in opera as castrati sang roles of both genders until women took over the female roles and those originally written for castrati (see Patrick Barbier's World of the Castrati, 1997). With the early-nineteenth-century Italian and French introduction of bel canto singing, in which written melisma replaced the improvised ornamentation of eighteenth-century opera, as in Handel, women's soprano voices became more flexible. The succession of Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, and Wagner wrote music that expressed characters' emotions so strongly that it demanded that singers act. Meanwhile, singing techniques continued changing. Small voices that fit early, small theaters were supplanted by voices cultivated to fill the major nineteenth-century opera houses. Following opera's development in Italy, France, and England, and recurrently citing Italian and French singing schools to provide continuity, Somerset-Ward also includes capsule biographies of many sopranos. The monsters among them seem to be few. Most sopranos may have been prima donnas (or primo uomini) as performers but were angels in private life. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300099681
• ISBN-13: 978-0300099683
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #224,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarship and Scandal, April 15, 2004

By 

G. M. Sinstadt - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera (Hardcover)

Richard Somerset-Ward, a distinguished figure in the arts and the media on both sides of the Atlantic, has followed his History of Opera with a work no less scholarly but now laced with largely unfamiliar anecdote and scandal (NB two entries in the index under Nudity). The angels and monsters of the title are essentially inseparable facets of the same person - angelic of voice, monstrous of temperament. They could indulge their whims and tantrums because, as Somerset-Ward points out, it was they who sold tickets at the box office, not the composers. Sometimes the public were the victims of capricious decisions not to appear when expected or not to sing what had been advertised (or, indeed, what the composer had written). But generally it was the poor impresario who suffered most.

The lay reader may be surprised to find the male soprano given equal prominence in the book's title with his female counterpart but, as the book makes clear, the castrato was a significant influence on this improbable art form for well over two centuries. "Basically female equipment powered by massively developed male lungs," says Somerset-Ward, made for a formidable sound.

Among the many colourful characters who emerge from these pages, the author has a clear admiration for Mathilde Marchesi whose operatic career as a singer was limited to a single public performance. Her contribution has been as a teacher in her own right, and in the way her pupils, become teachers themselves, have passed on her principles to the present day's singers.

Somerset-Ward argues persuasively that the singers who thrived on angelic sounds alone were on the wane by the beginning of the twentieth Century - Nellie Melba, he suggests, was one of the last. Outrageous behaviour will doubtless linger longer. This is a book that can be enjoyed by all who have been caught up by the Dramma per Musica, but perhaps it should be kept away from rising young sopranos in search of role models.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining but not good scholarship by any means, February 27, 2007

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A Reviewer (Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera (Hardcover)

This book has some very interesting anecdotes about singers, which a casual reader would enjoy. However, the author's core argument is not meaningful or compelling, and his research (as others have noted) is severely lacking. His argument, that singers had to behave themselves after Verdi because of decreased focus on beautiful singing in the opera world, has no relationship to other work being done in this area of musicology. Additionally, a skilled writer could have made the argument in a twenty page article.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars bad information, bad grammar, October 28, 2006

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adorian - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera (Hardcover)

This book is a wealth of badly-written misinformation. For starters, the author thinks Clytemnestra is a character in "Salome." He tells us that the important "Macbeth" duet comes after the Sleepwalking Scene. He thinks the big second act showdown duet of the two queens comes in the first act of "Maria Stuarda." He states that the big ballets of French Grand Opera come in the second acts (while in my experience they come in the third or fourth acts). He says opera supertitles were first used in the 1970's; they were first used in 1983. He calls Massenet's mezzo Hérodiade a contralto. On top of that, we have horrible grammar. The author does not understand how to pick the verb after a "neither...nor" construction. He has a problem with "whom." He uses "née" for males. He writes "could have cared less" when he means "could not have cared less." He uses "between" instead of "among" when discussing four singers at the same time. As far as organization, there is so much repetition that it becomes boring. How many times does he have to inform us that a shake is a trill? He loves to repeat explanations of the "Bayreuth bark." It's as if each singer's entry was written independently of the others and then stapled together without rereading previous material to see if something had already been explained. The attempts at humor fall flat. Referring to a choir member in his twenties as "superannuated" works only if you can remember that it might be a boys' choir under discussion. Referring to a long passage as "acres of bars" just doesn't sound right. "Miles of bars" perhaps, but "acres"? As a final insult, the index has been so capriciously compiled that it is virtually unusable; names that seem important on the page do not get indexed. I had such high hopes for this book, but I ended up finishing it only in search of its many mistakes.