Reviewed Elsewhere: Susan Rutherford, Verdi, Opera, Women.

Many are the themes and human relationships scrutinized by Susan Rutherford in Verdi, Opera, Women—sisterhood, owing to its lack of operatic treatment, is one of the few that falls outside the project. Rutherford's book was inspired by the award of the biannual "Giuseppe Verdi" International Prize of the Parma Rotary Club and has resulted in an extremely rich survey of sentiments and experiences that formed part of the life of nineteenth-century women (with a focus on Italy). [End Page 184] Rutherford—author of the prize-winning The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930—explores her topic by navigating the space between fictional, representational, and real worlds (23). Hence, as she states, the "women" in her title "refer not only to Verdi's female characters but to the singers who realised them on stage and the spectators who watched and listened in the auditorium" (22). The titles of her seven chapters immediately conjure up the bare bones of contemporary discourses and codes of womanhood. War, Prayer, Romance, Sexuality, Marriage, Death, Laughter: so varied and so encompassing is the framework within which nineteenth-century femininity was negotiated, at least as it resonated on and with Verdi's operatic stage. ...

 

Rutherford eschews any work-centered approach. This is all to her advantage: it allows her greater scope in traversing the changing life-worlds and operatic representations of women throughout Verdi's half century (with flashes backwards and forwards). ...

 

Romance, Sexuality, and Marriage—the three middle chapters—unpack the role of interpersonal relationships in maintaining as well as unsettling the social and political orders. ... Particularly intriguing are Rutherford's comments on the ambiguous function of the idealization of love, which was interpreted differently by early and later feminists: as a means of acknowledging personal liberty, or as an instrument for perpetuating women's subjugation to marriage (99–100). ...

 

Indeed, some of the most touching aspects of the book lie with the wealth of lived experiences Rutherford steals from oblivion: those of Luisa Battistotti Sassi, or Colomba Antonietti Pozzi or Concettina Ramondetta Fileti (not to mention dozens of anonymous compagnes), who fought, and unselfishly so, in the Italian wars of independence (53–56); of Teresa Dolores de las Nieves and Emilia Bianchetti, two singers-turned-nuns who sought solace from the sufferings of earthly love in cloistered life (90–91); or of Ruth Slate, one of many women who struggled to make sense of the agony and death of her dear ones from consumption (188). The list of names and human stories inhabiting Rutherford's pages is both a joy and, occasionally, something that risks undermining the thrust and potential theoretical implications of each chapter. But above all Rutherford's book is a mine of information for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Italian women's history; it could indeed provide the impetus for plenty of future work. ...

 

Femininity in nineteenth-century Italy has been unravelled compellingly by Rutherford. But what about masculinity? What about how the two were negotiated and refracted through each other at the imaginary border of the proscenium arch? There, perhaps, lies another challenge for the historian of opera: women, men, and their messy relationships.

 

Francesca Vella. Opera Quarterly 33, 2 (2017), 184–187.