Producing Stars in dramma per musica

Stars were perhaps more crucial to dramma per musica than to any other musical enterprise in Italy during the eighteenth century. Yet modern research on eighteenth-century singers generally fails to provide any methodology for how stars were produced, and how they interacted with the works they performed.1 This essay seeks to fill this gap. I will first outline influential twentieth-century theories in musicology on the relationship between the vocalist and the dramma per musica. I will then examine the means by which scholars in other disciplines recognise stars both as historical phenomena and as signifying elements within productions. Finally, I will suggest methods for applying theories about star production to dramma per musica in a manner that fits the historical conditions of this repertory.