Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, singers famous for their 1720s London rivalry, were not necessarily the warring protagonists history has made them out to be. While opera historians have long acknowledged the role audience factions played in creating the rivalry, the contribution made by the opera company itself has not been considered. Working from the premise that the Royal Academy shaped its operas around this important aspect of its stars' public personae, I focus on Handel's Admeto (1727) to examine both the way opera was structured to take account of the rivalry and the concomitant play with the singers' identities provided in the work. I argue that, in employing the miniature portrait and female disguise as its two central plot devices, and in the theatricality of its music, Admeto explores notions of authenticity and identity, female mutability, and anxiety and disavowal.

It seems fair to say that we are enmeshed in an Age of Reconstruction. Whatever groans the shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ may elicit from musicians and musicologists, the film industry's leap for the bandwagon is proof of the principle that Period Pieces Pay. Of the recent spate of feature films set in the eighteenth century, one in particular has marketed itself through its reconstructive credentials. The technologies that allow us to remodel our bodies, and revive old recordings on compact disc, also allowed the makers of Farinelli, Il Castrato to reach back and breathe new life into the voice of the long-dead castrati.

Joseph Addison's Spectator is perhaps the best-known early eighteenth-century periodical, its title a byword for the period's acute critical sensibility, its pages of enthusiastic enquiry a fitting monument to what we like to call the ‘Age of Reason’. Of the many commentaries on opera included in its pages, Spectator no. 5 (6 March 1711), critiquing the inadequacy of attempts at scenic verisimilitude on London's operatic stage, is justly renowned. Addison's tale of the undesirable (and wholly unmusical) results of releasing quantities of sparrows inside a theatre derives much of its pungency from the consequences of what Addison feels to be an improper juxtaposition of 'shadows and realities': sparrows and castrati alike escape pastoral fantasy to invade more sordid reality, penetrating ‘a lady's bed-chamber’ or perching ‘upon a king's throne’.

No abstract

L. F. Roubiliac carved two full-length statues of Handel, in 1738 and 1762. Although designed for quite different settings—a public pleasure garden and Westminster Abbey—the two sculptures have notable congruencies: both were sited in spaces critical for national self-definition, and both reflected aspects of the composer's public persona. This article explores the delineation of Handel's image in these statues and reproductions of them, and explicates their role in a broader attempt to define the nation through its heroes. Handel's possible involvement in fostering his status as a “British worthy” is suggested both through circumstances of the effigies' production and through his onstage performance, particularly in Alexander's Feast.