Great Singers, First Series

Opera audiences in Handel's London could turn a singer's arrival into a public contest. George T. Ferris opens these biographical sketches with Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, whose rivalry drew fashionable spectators into competing camps. The collection follows major singers from Bordoni to Henrietta Sontag, with chapters on Catarina Gabrielli, Sophie Arnould, Elizabeth Billington, Angelica Catalani and Giuditta Pasta.

Ferris brings together accounts by music historians, critics and people who heard these performers, linking careers to the theatres, courts and concert halls where reputations were made. Alongside descriptions of voices and stage presence are marriages, professional rivalries and arguments over taste. An account of Madame Mara at Handel celebrations and an Oxford festival shows how expectations of behaviour could shape an audience's response. Readers interested in opera history can find both portraits of individual artists and glimpses of the social world around their performances.