This interdisciplinary conference was organized by Tatiana Korneeva (Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia; Università di Udine) and Britta Kägler (Universität Passau) of the research group Women, Opera and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice (WoVen; principal investigator, Melania Bucciarelli, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitetet). Financial support was provided by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the 2022 Italian National Research Project (PRIN/Progetto di rilevante interesse nazionale) The Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: A Mapping of the Dissemination of the Italian Model of Spectacle in Eighteenth-Century Europe (principal investigator, Piermario Vescovo, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia). The conference systematically explored the intersection of migration and gender in historical opera scholarship, building on recent research about both the transnational mobility of Italian opera (the subject of valuable publications by the organizers and multiple attendees of this conference) and the agency and experience of women relative to eighteenth-century opera. The latter is the central focus of the WoVen project.

The piano nobile of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig headquarters, at the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza overlooking the Grand Canal, provided a scenic backdrop for the first day’s sessions. Korneeva, in her opening remarks, highlighted the themes to be treated during the conference: women who in various guises fostered the mobility of Italian opera; the artistic careers and private lives of female performers at various European courts and theatres; the impact of female performers on operatic performance practice and dramaturgy; and the models of femininity transmitted through the characters represented on stage. All of these contributed to women’s visibility in European literature and society of the eighteenth century.

The morning sessions on the first day of the conference examined the production and circulation of Italian opera from the perspective of women behind the scenes: patrons, collectors, impresarios and female protectors of singers. An interesting thread running through this session’s case studies was the significant impact that family-related concerns – as either a stimulus or a hindrance – had on these women’s propagation of opera and of specific works.

In a panel on women patrons, Bella Brover-Lubovsky (Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance) gave a paper entitled ‘Music Libraries of Russian Princesses and the Consumption of Italian Opera in the Late Eighteenth Century’, which compared the music collections of Duchess Elisaveta Alexeevna, Empress Consort of Russia, and of her niece Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, Hereditary Princess Consort of the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. According to Brover-Lubovsky, the varying types of Italian vocal music in their respective libraries reflect different modes of consuming music, but a common basic function for it: as an emotional outlet that may have somewhat alleviated the oppressiveness of the restrictive life at court for the two consorts, who were married at a young age. In his presentation ‘Female Protectors of Singers in Venetian Opera c. 1720–1760’, Berthold Over (Zentrum für Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung Magdeburg) noted that engaging in the sponsorship of singers as protettrici was, for reasons of economic independence and social propriety and status, more conducive to noble or royal widows, such as Violante Beatrice of Bavaria (the widow of Crown Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici of Tuscany).

Richard Erkens (Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig) and Gianluca Stefani (Università di Firenze) brought to light new documents from their respective archival projects that invited attendees to consider whether the impresarial activities of women with theatrical backgrounds might have been more extensive than previously known. Erkens’s paper, ‘Searching for “Impresaria” or “Direttrice”: Women as Entrepreneurs within “Figurations” of Opera Production’, presented the category-defying cases of the management (and possibly directorial) activities of dancer Teresa Colonna, singer Camilla Mattei and Maria de Rosis Colonnesi, the last of whom seems to have taken on the role of impresaria as part of a family enterprise. Stefani referred to letters with the potential to expand our understanding of the professional and private life of the Venetian Faustina Bordoni, arguably the most internationally famous female singer of the early eighteenth century. These letters suggest multiple instances in the course of her pan-European career when she assumed a managerial role over the companies with which she performed. They also suggest that Bordoni might have had an illegitimate child. That possibility sparked an interesting discussion between the speaker and Bucciarelli, whose own archival work has likewise uncovered innuendo that Bordoni may indeed have become a mother before her marriage to Johann Adolf Hasse, whilst simultaneously throwing into question the degree of Bordoni’s agency in her impresarial-managerial pursuits. There was general agreement that further research is required to tease out the facts of Bordoni’s family life from rumours about her moral character, and to determine the actual nature of her influence on managerial decisions concerning specific opera productions.

Bucciarelli’s own talk about Bordoni on the second day of the conference addressed the ways in which Bordoni’s public and private image was shaped by contemporary issues of gender, marriage and family, and how these contributed to the construction of her celebrity status. This was reflected not only in the (sometimes gossipy) accounts of her contemporaries about her marriage to Hasse, but also in Bordoni’s curation of the roles she sang in her capacity as star and co-impresario of and investor in the 1729 season of Venice’s Teatro di San Cassiano. Bucciarelli also posed the question of Bordoni’s possible curation of the suggestive, bare-breasted portrait by Rosalba Carriera for which the singer sat. This raises further questions about what the two women – painter and subject – wished to convey to the (male?) gaze of the viewer.

Continuing the more performer-centric focus, Daniel Brandenburg (Universität Salzburg) delivered a paper entitled ‘“. . . ove ho ricevuto la grazia di cantare a corte” – vita quotidiana e vita d’arte di un’operista del Settecento’ (‘Where I received the honour of being able to sing at court’: The Private and Professional Lives of an Eighteenth-Century Opera Singer), the title of which quotes from the letters of Marianne Pirker, singer and sometime collaborator with Gluck. In tracing Pirker’s eventful life and career, Brandenburg noted that achieving steady employment as a court singer was a boon to her for familial reasons. Lacking Bordoni’s superstar status, Pirker would not have had the resources to entrust her daughters to a convent and therefore had to care for them herself, which would have been more difficult to manage on the road as part of the Mingotti travelling troupe.

Reinhard Strohm (University of Oxford), the doyen of eighteenth-century opera scholarship, explored the question of women singers’ legal – and figurative – emancipation, including its familial implications, with particular reference to the interesting case of Vivaldi’s long-standing collaborator Anna Girò. After tracing the salient aspects of Girò’s art in both vocal and histrionic terms, Strohm highlighted archival evidence supporting the theory that Girò’s own legal emancipation from her supposed mother, Bartolomea Trevisan, may have been a stratagem to allow her to remain with her older ‘half-sister’ and doting chaperone Paolina, whom Strohm suspects was Girò’s actual mother. The analyses given by Strohm and the aforementioned presenters suggested that women’s agency in the eighteenth century was in large part a function of their ability to negotiate their legal and familial status – a key insight not only for opera studies but also for women’s social history.

Other presentations at the conference addressed the pan-European impact of women on the musical dramaturgy of Italian-language opera. Keeping the focus on opera seria for the afternoon of the first day of the conference, WoVen-affiliated researchers devoted a session to the two women singers who were depicted alongside superstar castratos Farinelli, Bernacchi and Pistocchi at the pinnacle of a famous engraving by Antonio Fedi of the eighteenth century’s ‘Parnasso dei cantanti d’opera’: Vittoria Tesi and Marianna Benti Bulgarelli (also known as la Romanina). The Venetian experience of both singers had an impact (direct, in Tesi’s case) on the development of Italian-language opera in Vienna. Francesca Menchelli-Buttini (Conservatorio Gioachino Rossini di Pesaro) detailed how music from Niccolò Jommelli’s original Venetian version of Merope (1741), with Tesi in the title role, was partially repurposed for the singer’s appearance in the composer’s revised version of the opera for Vienna (1749). The logic of the self-borrowings for this new version was largely built around Tesi’s dramatic and vocal gifts.

In ‘The Through-Composed Accompagnato Finale from Venice to Vienna: The “Romanine” as Transnational Agents of the (Proto-)Reform of Opera Seria’, I (Brad Sisk, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitetet) traced the evolution of the feminocentric tragic ending of the opera Arsace. The text of the opera’s finale was rewritten for a Venetian performance in 1717 starring Benti Bulgarelli, which allowed the famous singer-tragedienne to rail against the elements, Lear-like, in a scene that in all surviving musical settings took the form of a through-composed accompagnato recitative. This revised text and the through-composed tradition associated with it travelled to Vienna in the 1740s, where it was performed by another ‘Romanina’ also famous for her acting prowess, Caterina Aschieri.

On the second day of the conference, Giovanni Polin (Conservatorio Antonio Vivaldi di Alessandria), a contributor to the project Casta Diva: An International Research and Production Digital Platform on Women in Italian Musical Theatre, profiled another singer with a penchant for tragic utterance: the soprano Giovanna Astrua. By examining the music tailored to Astrua, Polin showed how her interpretative range – embracing both declamatory intensity and virtuosic fireworks – influenced the tastes of Frederick II of Prussia and therefore the musical dramaturgy of operas by Carl Heinrich Graun and other composers and librettists at the Berlin court.

In ‘Da Anna Cosimi a Teresa Saporiti: le cantanti dell’opera italiana nella capitale boema’ (From Anna Cosimi to Teresa Saporiti: Italian Opera Singers in the Bohemian Capital), Milada Jonášová (Akademie věd České republiky, Prague) provided an overview of the often female-dominated Italian opera venues in eighteenth-century Prague, from Franz Anton von Sporck’s theatre to the Estates Theatre where Don Giovanni was premiered. Jonášová noted that available resources for Prague productions often precluded the casting of castratos, so it was not uncommon for all treble-range roles in a given opera to be sung by women. In particular, the Denzio troupe, which was predominantly female for much of its tenure at Sporck’s theatre, challenged conventional wisdom that opera seria was virtually synonymous with castrato-centric performance practice.

In ‘Acting as a Woman: Female Marionettes as Agents of Mobility, Costumes and Bodies’, Christine Jeanneret (Københavns Universitet) of the WoVen research group examined the eighteenth-century puppet theatre now held at the Museo Davia Bargellini in Bologna as a source of information about opera costumes. Half of the marionettes appear to depict female characters from opera seria and commedia dell’arte; therefore the costumes worn by the puppets offer rare surviving clues about the decorations, coiffures and accessories that actual women on the eighteenth-century operatic stage might have worn. Meanwhile, Caterina Pagnini (Università di Firenze) focused on the pan-European popularity and influence of the figure of the female dancer. She explored how the techniques, costumes and styles that the itinerant ballerina brought from one local context to another created networks of artistic exchange throughout Europe that ultimately spread across the Atlantic as well.

Network analysis was also a prominent methodological feature of one of three papers devoted to women as agents in the mobility of comic opera: ‘Influencers in the Shadows: Women Singers and the Dissemination of Opera Buffa in Europe’ by Kordula Knaus (Universität Bayreuth). Her central thesis was that network analysis combined with analysis of the score and libretto can help fill in the gaps in our knowledge about which performers took part in which specific performances. Such analysis, for example, allowed Knaus to infer that, in the 1760s, Marianna Bianchi sang in certain comic-opera performances at Braunschweig for which cast lists are lacking.

Gesa zur Nieden (Universität Greifswald), in ‘“La prima donna deve criticar tutto”: Woman Singers of the Stuttgart Court Opera in the Light of Niccolò Jommelli’s La Critica (Ludwigsburg 1766) and Its Subsequent Versions’, analysed the roles of Lesbia, Gioconda and Palmira, written respectively for Maria Masi Giura, Monaca Buonani and Anna Cesari Seemann for the original Ludwigsburg version of Jommelli’s comic work, as well as the transformations these roles and the work itself underwent when they were adapted to other courts and contexts.

Franco Piperno (Università La Sapienza di Roma) threw the spotlight onto metatheatrical comic operas in which female singers played female singers. Piperno held that this satirical locus topicus and its popularity throughout Europe provide valuable information about socio-cultural, economic and gender mores in a variety of contexts. He demonstrated that the female singers in these works, although satirically embodying their own professional category as ‘canterine’, inevitably revert to genre conventions regarding their social and anthropological condition as ‘donne’. In the eighteenth century’s hierarchy of perception, a female singer was considered a woman first and a professional singer second.

As can be seen, the roles and experiences of women as agents of Italian opera’s transnational mobility were treated in the conference not only as musicological but also as theatrical and social phenomena. Integrating the perspectives of specialists from diverse fields into a fruitful dialogue will necessarily yield challenges, although a first step in that direction was made in a panel discussion closing the session on ‘Virtuose in the Context of Musical Dramaturgy’ during the conference’s first day. Joining musicological experts Strohm, Polin and Francesco Giuntini (Università di Pisa) were Vescovo and Marzia Pieri (Università di Siena), two prominent scholars of spoken-word theatre. The wide-ranging discussion touched on socio-ethical issues, the evolving history of taste and style, dramaturgical concessions to the virtuose and female performers’ star status relative to their marginalized status as women. The breadth of these topics and the multiplicity of viewpoints of the discussants were not conducive to drawing cut-and-dried conclusions. Therefore these conversations – and the underlying research – are still very much in progress.