Hilary Poriss

Hilary Poriss is a music historian whose scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century Italian and French opera, performance practice, and diva culture. She is professor and chair of music at Northeastern University and earned graduate degrees in music history from the University of Chicago. Oxford University Press published Changing the Score in 2009 as part of AMS Studies in Music. Subtitled Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance, the book examines the once-common practice of singers inserting or substituting arias during Italian opera performances. Poriss traces how prima donnas asserted interpretive authority even as the modern ideal of fidelity to a composer's fixed work gained force. Case studies address figures including Carolina Ungher and Maria Malibran, as well as the lesson scene in The Barber of Seville. Her wider bibliography includes books on Rossini and coedited studies of the prima donna. Changing the Score established the central questions that connect that work: who controls operatic meaning, and how performance choices become historical evidence.