By request, the PhD proposal (sans footnotes)

Project: The experience of Australian female opera singers 1796-1970

Australian women who sang opera professionally in the 19th and 20th centuries found themselves at the meeting point of major political and social changes. Their business was a theatre for the working out of transformations in concepts of culture, female autonomy and national identity. I want to examine how these women tried to fashion a place of personal integrity and expression in professional, public and private spheres in the face of these changes.

Principle areas of focus
1. The status of female performers
The first recorded female opera performers in Australia were convicts such as Mrs Greville and Mrs Parry. When free settlers and visitors sang opera in Sydney and Hobart in the 1830s and ’40s, and Melbourne in the 1850s, they were respected but not respectable. But the adoption of cultural bifurcation in Australia from the middle of the century placed the opera singer on a higher level, and singing slowly changed from a genteel pursuit to a respected profession. Female singers began to be known under their own names instead of their husbands’. With changing ideas of female identity and power, women explored new possibilities of self-expression and realisation through art and work.

2. Negotiating the business
The business of opera was never simple, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became even more complex. To train to a professional standard the singer had to overcome obstacles of location and economics. Even when these were overcome she had to protect her financial and artistic interests, contending with agents, directors, impresarios, patrons, critics, and fellow artists, and the challenges of distance, health and time.

3. Running the business - female impresarios
Adroit women who had achieved a level of success took control of their musical destiny by mounting their own opera companies. From the 1840s through to the 1950s female entrepreneurs played a significant part in operatic performance in Australia. As opera’s status changed from entertainment to high art, women such as Anne Clarke, Fanny Simonsen, Nellie Melba, Gertrude Johnson and Clarice Lorenz competed and cooperated with their male counterparts.

4. Career and/or marriage
Nellie Melba showed that a female performer did not have to be married or virginal to be respected. But while she built her career she had had the shelter of a married name. From the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries the woman’s options in relationships changed. Some singers were able to successfully negotiate the nexus between career and marriage, with a partner either in the business or outside. Some dared to try for a complete family life, while some sought its benefits in less conventional forms.

5. Artists at the cutting edge
Among the many roles they performed for themselves and others, singers saw themselves foremost as artists. From Melba’s time onwards Australian singers began to exert an influence on the roles that were written and the repertoire that was performed. They worked for the development of the industry in Australia, set new standards in skills, and led the way in the establishment of international trends, such as the revival of bel canto and the presentation of contemporary opera.

6. Transnational identity: negotiating a new vision
Australian singers venturing into the wider world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were challenged to redefine their identities. Opera was a transnational artform, and by performing it Australians were participating in an idea of culture which was not local and idiosyncratic but extended beyond national and geographical boundaries. As artists moved from a settler-colonial society to a more cosmopolitan context, they had to assimilate imperial and international factors to the already existing components of blood and geography. They negotiated compromises between the new and the old, finding what they valued, what they had to change, and what they could retain; and they discovered that even in their new conception there were liabilities as well as strengths.

Why is this research important?
Little scholarly research has been done into the experience of Australian singers. Until recent decades the history of opera was the history of the art form, concentrating primarily on the composers and works. The story of business and performance, and the experience of the singers, was subordinate to the process of creating the works. Since the 1980s scholars have examined the business and audience aspects, with notable work on seventeenth- to nineteenth century Italy and England. Works by Rosselli and Rutherford have examined the experience of the singer but from a Eurocentric perspective.

Major monographs on Australian opera emerged in the 1980s as cultural history achieved greater acceptance as a discipline. Alison Gyger and Harold Love laid an important foundation for the study of Australian opera. By necessity they took a chronological approach, recording what was performed where, by whom, and how it was received, but there was little examination of the place of opera within society or the personal experiences of the singers. Some scholarly biographies have appeared, however while these highlight personal experience, they too are limited: they give only a picture of successful, and in some cases unique, individuals, operating in a very restricted milieu.

This study will examine the experience of a broad range of performers in the wider social context, and therefore will be a major step towards a social history of Australian opera.

Sources
The primary sources fall into three general categories:
1. contemporary press articles (news items, reviews, articles, interviews and advertisements);
2. archival material from opera companies (artist files and company records); and
3. artists’ personal papers (correspondence, business papers, ephemera and memoirs).

I will draw on many of the sources I discovered in the research for my MA (Research), but have identified further relevant material in the following archives:

• Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne
• State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
• National Library of Australia, Canberra
• Mitchell Library and State Reference Library, Sydney

I intend to visit a number of overseas archives with significant records relating to specific Australian performers:

• The Royal Opera, Covent Garden
• English National Opera
• Hamburgische Staatsoper
• Bayreuther Festspiele
• Metropolitan Opera, New York
• San Francisco Opera

This is by no means a comprehensive selection, but covers the European and American regions while remaining within my language competencies.