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This chapter looks at one of the impresario's chief responsibilities, the recruiting and hiring of suitable singers. Impresarios drew on complex networks built up with some of the leading families throughout Italy, including the Medici in Florence and the Marquis Bentivoglio of Ferrara; various agents as well as diplomats in cities such as Rome, Turin, and Vienna were also called into service. During the mid-17th century, singers of many types looked towards opera as a way of earning extra income. Most of the male singers, whether castrati or not, were also active as church or court singers. Many of the leading prima donnas were recruited from Rome with increasingly high salaries. In some cases, the impresarios and singers (such as Anna Renzi) drew up detailed contracts in order to protect both parties. The complex negotiations necessary to recruit the best singers are described in a case study concerning the highest paid singer at the time in Venice, Giulia Masotti.

This chapter considers how English soprano Adelaide Kemble (1815-79) interacted with conceptions of her voice as a means to an array of different ends, revealing her attempt to manage the application of contemporary prima donna mythology to her public and private personae. It suggests that Kemble and her circle seem to have been particularly sensitive to the reputational dangers of the myth of the avaricious prima donna, and that they may have downplayed the unpalatable idea that Kemble’s voice was a means to money by emphasizing other ends it could achieve. Kemble drew on the operatic trope (drawn in her case from the plot of I Puritani) of the voice as a means of memory in her correspondence with an aristocratic family into which she hoped to marry; this notion was complicated later by her sister Fanny, who worried about Adelaide’s sacrifice of financial independence when she married. The chapter continues to propose that conceiving of Kemble’s voice as a means of Romantic transcendence and of contributing to national aspirations for the opera constituted further manipulations of prima donna mythology in order to claim and develop its positive components.

Prima donnas and leading men would definitely go to great lengths in choosing the right insertions for their appearances in opera performances. In spite of the endeavors that Carolina Ungher went through in selecting the cavatina for Elena in Marino Faliero, other opera singers would not normally undertake that complex a decision-making process, and instead would adopt a more direct approach, since they would only choose one aria for a given scene and use that throughout the rest of the performances. Choosing the appropriate arias is associated with trunk arias, as this aria is carried over from town to town. In this chapter, the author clarifies the conception of the trunk aria by introducing a second model that involved a communal element performed by many singers as substitutes and/or interpolations—the “favorite insertion”.

Father George Chambers' masterly treatise ought really to be unnecessary. Hubert Parry, in his Evolution of the Art of Music, has proved conclusively that music obeys the laws of heredity, and that a Beethoven symphony is in the direct line of descent from a primitive folk song. It is perhaps lucky that bat-eyed musicologists have not recognized this, and that it has been necessary for Father George Chambers to write this delightful, learned, and, to my mind, entirely persuasive essay. In their opinion the written word was impeccable and oral tradition fallible. One of the most interesting chapters of this book contains convincing proof that the “Jubilus” is not an ecclesiastical parallel to the coloratura of the prima donna, but has developed out of the wordless melismata of primitive people when their mystical emotions got beyond words.

The question of being a real prima donna seems to be a starting point for much of the critical discussion regarding the Countess Almaviva and her maid, Susanna. The heroines of Le nozze di Figaro pose a special case. In a genre that thrives on catfights and romantic rivalries between women, the Countess and Susanna display a remarkable solidarity, more so than any other two female characters in Mozart's operas. In a sense, the Countess had borrowed her maid's “wardrobe” long before she became the Countess, and the potential for their friendship was established even before they met. This chapter looks back to the origins of the Countess's story, namely Beaumarchais's play Le barbier de Séville (1775) and, subsequently, Giovanni Paisiello's celebrated operatic version, Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782).