Divine! Egregious! Incomparable! : keywords for celebrity and divas descriptions in post unification Italy’s musical press

The Italian musical press offers a dynamic insight into the performances of the divas who contributed to the success of many operatic works in the patriotic fervour of a newly united Italy post 1861. From Frezzolini to Anastasi-Pozzoni through Stolz, Waldmann or Pasqua, all the greatest interpreters of the time attracted enthusiastic critical acclaim. From the columns of La Perseveranza and Il Teatro Illustrato among others, some critics tried to grapple with the difficulty of describing such magnificent voices; others – in the Gazzetta Musicale di Milano for instance – dwelt on the inevitable comparisons with colleagues of equal repute. Yet other critics, such as in Il Trovatore, seemed to fall for ‘their darling’, as in the case of Romilda Pantaleoni who first appeared as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello and was subsequently elevated by the press to the status of a new Eleonora Duse, idolized after a critical article by Carlo D’Ormeville in the Gazzetta dei Teatri. Critics were then often dominated by their operatic stars, but also ready to bestow their advice directly from the columns of their magazines or engage with singers in imaginary speeches. Can we identify nowadays special keywords in order to describe the concept of ‘celebrity’? Are there special patterns that introduce the meaning of ‘star’? Lucid articles, revealing the true essence of a stunning interpretation, work their way through an inevitable mass of wordy texts, encumbered and obscured by an overly technical and abstract lexicon. The diva is variably ‘unsurpassed’, ‘highest’, ‘egregious’, ‘incomparable’ or ‘divine’, and the text loaded with bizarre or ambiguous expressions, or clichés from which a contemporary would learn little in order to reconstruct a voice or a temperament. In the background, were the watchful figures of the operatic composers, demanding and wary in their choice of the competing protagonists, attentive to follow their fortune and that of their interpreters in the press.