Verdi’s Exceptional Women: Giuseppina Strepponi and Teresa Stolz (eBook)

This investigation offers new perspectives on Giuseppe Verdi s attitudes to women and the functions which they fulfilled for him. The book explores Verdi s professional and personal relationship with women who were exceptional within the traditional socio-sexual structure of patria potesta, in the context of women s changing status in nineteenth-century Italian society. It focusses on two women; the singers Giuseppina Strepponi, who supported and enhanced Verdi s creativity at the beginning of his professional life and Teresa Stolz, who sustained his sense of self-worth at its end. Each was an essential emotional benefactor without whom Verdi s career would not have been the same. The subject of the Strepponi-Verdi marriage and the impact of Strepponi s past deserve further detailed and nuanced discussion. This book demonstrates Verdi s shifting power-balance with Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. The negative stereotypes concerning operatic divas do not withstand scrutiny when applied either to Strepponi or to Stolz. This book presents a revisionist appraisal of Stolz through close examination of her letters. Revealing Stolz s value to Verdi, they also provide contemporary operatic criticism and behind-the-scenes comment, some excerpts of which are published here in English for the first time.