Publishings

Susan Rutherford

Verdi’s operas – composed from 1839 to 1893 – portray several female protagonists: women of both war and peace, virgins and courtesans, princesses and slaves, witches and gypsies, mothers and daughters and at the end the lively female quartet of the last opera, Falstaff. Susan Rutherford wonders about what the crisis and dilemmas of these characters meant for the nineteenth-century female audience, especially in a time of unrest in the Italian history. Was opera influenced by society? And was society influenced by opera? Contextualising Verdi’s female roles into the social, cultural and political history of women, the author explores the relation between the audience’s real life and the operatic fiction.

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