The 2014 Glyndebourne production of Der Rosenkavalier sparked controversy,1 when a number of notorious British critics lambasted the visual appearance of the young mezzo-soprano interpreting Octavian, Irish rising star Tara Erraught (b.1986). The remarks mainly addressed her physique, which the critics claimed detracted from the sensual flair of the extremely luscious mise en scène. Writing in The Financial Times, Andrew Clark referred to her as ‘a chubby bundle of puppy fat’; Andrew Clements described her as ‘stocky’ in The Guardian and Rupert Christiansen as ‘dumpy’ in The Telegraph; Michael Church jibed that Erraught’s Octavian had ‘the demeanour of a scullery maid’ in The Independent; and Richard Morrison called her ‘unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing’ in The Times.2 The backlash that followed this plethora of comments forced the artistic and academic world to look at the operatic scene with disenchanted eyes, questioning the working conditions of women performers in a realm where ‘fat-shaming’ and sexism could still be applied with such nonchalance.3 After all, this was unfortunately not a first. In 2004, soprano star Deborah Voigt (b.1960) was fired from a Royal Opera House production of Ariadne auf Naxos because of her weight, which apparently hindered the production’s envisaged embodiment of Ariadne.4 Rather than seizing the opportunity to become a fierce voice of dissent against the evil affecting the business, Voigt came back to the scenes after the formidable weight loss of over 9.6 stone (135 pounds), thereby reacquiring in full her diva status, yet submitting to the ‘rules of engagement’ of the operatic market. In 2018, the #MeToo movement turned the heat of the debate on the even more appalling issue of sexual harassment in the opera business.5
These ordeals are eloquent testimonies to the often-unspoken struggle that female performers inhabiting the world of opera and classical music more broadly face, and share with women facing sexist behaviours in other work environments. Evidently, twenty-first-century female performers populate the classical and recording industry in ways and with a ‘weight’ that was unimaginable only a hundred years ago. Yet, the business is probably still not mature enough to allow the integration of women into the classical music industry without presenting a number of ominous resistances. It is on the intrinsic contradictions characterising the work and lives of female soloists in the twenty-first century that this chapter turns the spotlight, addressing the evolving career opportunities acquired by women performers, and observing the ingrained mechanisms governing notions of identity, reception, sexualisation, and marketing in the classical music business.
Evolving Opportunities and Strenuous Resistances
An increasing number of female classical music practitioners – both instrumentalists and singers – are now the face of recording labels and managing agencies. These advancements were made possible in the twentieth century thanks to a slow, yet progressive, assertion of women’s rights, which mirrored in music what was happening at a societal level. The post-1968 cultural revolution was followed by a surge of feminist ideology in music and music studies, and the female soloist began to acquire greater territory in the live concert and recording industry. Although this trend reveals an improvement in terms of opportunities, it is far from representing a radical revolution within the classical music industry as a whole. In fact, the increase of female performers starring as soloists in prestigious concert seasons is not matched by a concurrent growth in the numbers of female instrumentalists within European and American orchestras, where the number of women is still very limited, and the resistance they face during the recruitment process as orchestral players and as board members is still apparent.6 It should be noted, though, that instrumentalists and singers have always experienced quite different public statuses. The status of the star solo singer has been recognised since the development of monody in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the cultural burden born by singers is exemplified through the negative (and gendered) connotations associated with the very terms diva and primadonna.
As music criticism developed throughout the nineteenth century, accounts tended to focus upon female musicians’ private and public appearance, rather than their musicianship. Musical professionalism often related to a specific social standing, as an opportunity only reserved to lower middle-class women belonging to musical lineage.7 This was exacerbated by the essentially patriarchal culture of Romantic aesthetics, and its male-dominated bourgeois social structure, which often relegated female performers to the salon, where women – specifically wives – were admitted and ‘tolerated’, but annihilated in their aspirations to reach the public eye. An often-cited exception is Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896), one of the most accomplished and popular concert pianists of the nineteenth century. Lesser known names, such as the violinists Camilla Urso (1842–1902) and Wilma Norman-Neruda (1838–1911), were hired by orchestras to play as guest soloists, although their engagements often depended on their willingness to appear in very distinctive attires.8
In general, throughout the twentieth century, the societal changes demanded by women in everyday life and in the workplace determined a progressive shift in the way musical education and professionalism evolved. Not without resistance, female performers were able to access a wider range of instruments that were traditionally considered inappropriate for women to play (including woodwind, brass, percussion, and the larger strings). More women could enter music education up to conservatoire and university level, while the work of female composers and educators such as Nadia Boulanger in France, Ruth Crawford Seeger in the United States, and Elisabeth Lutyens in Britain left an indelible mark. The way soloists began to access greater work in British, German, and French music societies and orchestras also became a sign of the changing times. This was partly due to the opportunities created by all-female consorts and orchestras in the early twentieth century, often in response to gender discrimination.9 (See Chapter 5 ‘On the Podium: Women Conductors’ for a discussion of women’s orchestras in the earlier twentieth century.) Most importantly, and as time progressed, female instrumentalists became able to enter the professional market and compete with men on a more equal basis. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the shift in recognition of women musicians was the birth of academic studies related to the female presence in music history, which originated in the wake of women’s studies between the 1960s and 1970s, and critically developed in the 1980s and 1990s through the word of such scholars as Marcia J. Citron, Suzanne Cusick, Susan McClary, Judith Tick, and Jane Bowers (as discussed further in the Preface of the current volume).10 Although still predominantly dominated by women scholars, the field has impacted on the conventional historical narrative underpinning the canon and has significantly paved the way to introducing a gender discourse in music. Pursuing the feminist perspective, the field has recently branched out to performers and performance studies: it is from this newly forged critical angle that this study stems.
A Question of Identity
My observations of the performance image of female soloists commence from an overview of different understandings of a performer’s identity, drawing on a synthesis of some of the definitions attempted by musical performance and philosophy studies. I start with Philip Auslander’s assertion that ‘what musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae’.11 To define the transitional ‘entity that mediates between musicians and the act of performance’, Auslander borrows the concept of personage from theatre studies.12 According to this concept, musicians embody a version of themselves fashioned to the aim of performing in precise conditions, inscribed within the ‘frame’, that is the main structure, of a musical event.13 Performance as a ‘form of self-presentation’ entails that, while some presentations may reach the viewer as a direct prolongation of one’s personality, others may be more laborious or even the result of multi-agential constructions.14 This self-shaping act concurs with ‘the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during her performance’ to recreate the performer’s front.15 The front manifests the specifics of each performer – not only their techniques and artistry, but their own appearance and physicality – in ways that veer from the conventional conceptions of performance as the projection of a composer’s work. From this performer-centred standpoint, musical performances are de facto social interactions, apt to establish communication codes; not only amongst musical collaborators, but also between performers and receivers. For Cusick, the receiving act of the audience is as ‘performative’ as the musicians’ execution; therefore, ‘all performances are ensemble pieces’, entailing both the presence of audience and performers at a live event, but also their absence in the case of a remote performance experienced through recording.16 The performer’s identity, therefore, is a complex negotiation saturated with all the elements that concur to construct the ‘social realm’, where such identity is projected and where the spectator-consumer plays an active part as the receiver of this sophisticated communication act. Focusing particularly on the star status of pop performers, Jane Davidson similarly posits the identity of the performer as a multilayered entity, composed by multiple personae: the character of the person performing and asserting their iconic roles through their annexed stage etiquette. Finally, the more-or-less known subjective features of their off-stage personality, now, more than ever, widely spread through the interactivity allowed by social media, which allows an unprecedented proximity to one’s favourite star.17
Voyeurism and Gaze
The voyeuristic insight into the private life of stage personae allowed by current forms of communications inform the audience’s expectations to an even greater extent, even when the performer is not complicit in this mechanism through their online presence. These tensions are not limited to musicianship only; for instance, performers are, likewise, scrutinised for their looks, which is an issue for both female and male performers. However, women are generally more subjected to criticism related to their looks and private lives (especially when they also happen to be mothers and/or wives). On some occasions, even personal choices become targets for negative judgement. For instance, Erraught was not the only performer in the (now notorious) 2014 Glyndebourne production of Der Rosenkavalier who was attacked in the press. In addition to ridiculing Erraught’s physique, Christiansen was also scathing in his judgement of Kate Royal’s (b.1979) performance as Marschallin, describing her as ‘short of her best and stressed by motherhood’.18
The body-centred mechanisms of musical performance agree with the concept of ‘impersonation’, which underpins both the agency of the performer and of the consumer.19 John Rink centres the performer’s and listener’s corporeality as another foundational element of performance: ‘Performers and listeners humanise music – impersonate music – by projecting themselves onto it and imagining themselves in it. That is not only why we make “the music”: we are playing or listening to what we want it to be, but also why we have the potential to “become” the music as we interact with it.’20 The desire mechanisms triggered by the immersive power of music as performed are channelled in an encompassing projection of the spectator’s self into the idolisation of the source of that experience, the performer’s body. As Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson have commented, ‘Voyeurism renders desire as a purely visual activity … [The voyeur’s] invisibility produces the visibility of the objects of his gaze.’21 In twenty-first-century classical music performance consumerism, the paradox is that the visual surpasses the aural. In film studies, Laura Mulvey dissects the reception act of mainstream film spectatorship through psychoanalytical lenses determining that the conventions conveying pleasure are the result of a sexual tension produced by the active male gaze.22 The ensuing power dynamics determine the objectification of women’s bodies, their dismembering or fetishism into sexual representations fashioned to satisfy the male spectator. This encompassing theory is applied to the wide range of representations of women in performance, where their image is seemingly shaped to satisfy the male receiver. At the same time, by virtue of the mechanisms leading to the reflexive mechanism of impersonation, ‘women become erotic objects for spectators within the auditorium, where they become objects of sexual interest and narcissistic pleasure for the spectator’s identification with other people’.23 Mulvey’s reading fully applies to the subtle marketing conventions of the current classical music scenario, where female performers’ appearances are meticulously packaged to meet the cultural canon of beauty and youth as foundational factors of success.
This type of representation of women in the arts and media is certainly not new to the twenty-first century. The notion of female musicianship as a bodily expression has existed in Western culture since at least the Renaissance. The association of body-musicianship has mainly been conferred on vocalists, with the notion of the voice as a prolongation of the body; however, female instrumentalists were not exempted from this kind of scrutiny, as iconography produced since the Middle Ages records. Throughout the centuries, with the exception of the ‘paradox of the fat lady’ for opera singers, the expectation that women musicians should project both a desirable look and a desirable sound perpetrated itself consistently; starting from the mid-twentieth century, these demands also eventually impacted heavily on the operatic world.24 These trends were exacerbated by the emergence of the rock-and-roll scene in the 1950s, and of the pop music video industry in the 1980s and 1990s, which normalised the predominance of the visual over the aural in the leading marketing strategies of female performers and girls bands. (See Part II, ‘Women in Popular Music’, for a discussion of women’s experiences in the popular music industry.) The images of women performers – often heavily sexualised both in song and appearance – were adapted to the expectations of younger audiences, who projected onto their favourite stars their own perspectives and desires. By the turn of the twenty-first century, art music was following the same trend, beginning to borrow marketing models from the competing pop industry, and thereby to promote the sexualised image of female performers. While, in most cases, their male counterparts were still portrayed in tuxedos and bow ties, marketing campaigns for women soloists, chamber music ensemble members, and opera stars began to buy into the advertising establishment that dictated that women should be garbed in revealing attire and adopt (sexually) provocative poses.
Contemporary Soloists in a Mediatised Culture
Over the past few decades, women have forged careers performing instruments which were deemed unsuitable for them until the mid-twentieth century. This is the case, for instance, of trumpeter Alison Balsom (b.1978), who has been awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) and two honorary doctorate degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Leicester. Balsom’s recollection of her beginnings as a brass player flags exactly the type of gender bias surrounding the choice of a musical instrument on behalf of children and parents.25 She has been vocal in denouncing gendered ideas about brass instruments not being appropriate for women and girls: ‘I come from a family with no gender bias. I wanted to play the trumpet brilliantly and they encouraged me. It never occurred to me that other people found a female doing this surprising. So I’m aware of my novelty value: a blonde girl playing the trumpet. But a modern woman doesn’t have to conform.’26 Balsom blasts gender inequality in the classical music industry; she divides her time between a top-rank performance career and her work as an advocate for the rights of women working in the arts.27
Activism is a common trait of several leading women soloists, who are aware of being perceived as role models. This is also the case of percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie (b.1965, see Figure 6.1), who defines herself as ‘the first percussionist to pursue a career as virtuoso soloist’.28 Her story is, in fact, unique, not only because of her capacity to build a career in a male-dominated environment, but also because she did so in spite of her profound deafness since the age of eight. Glennie experiences parameters such as pitch and frequency through vibration and an embodied cognition of tones and volumes. Drawing inspiration from her own life experiences, she pursues a busy schedule of activities, working as a speaker, consultant, performer, and composer aiming to teach the world ‘how to really listen’.29 On this, she believes: ‘When we listen to music, we assume that it’s all been fed through here (points to ears). This is how we experience music. Of course, it’s not. We experience thunder, thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. Listen, listen, listen. Now, what can we do with thunder?’30 She also strives to create new opportunities to access music for the hearing-impaired. As her online platform shows, the percussionist fully capitalises on her multitalented, yet accessible, persona to recruit and inspire her followers; from giving inspirational talks, to musical collaborations and performances, through selling her handmade jewellery, Glennie adapts swiftly to different modes of communication.
Figure 6.1 Dame Evelyn Glennie.
Two multifaceted talents of extremely different natures, Balsom and Glennie shape their personae as being very approachable and laid back. While Balsom cultivates the more classical appearance of a virtuosa recording artist for Warner House, Glennie maintains a more relaxed style consistent with her numerous collaborations, spanning classical, contemporary, pop, jazz, and rock repertoires. In both cases, their slick physical appearance, exuding elegance and rigour – although not likely to have been detrimental to their rise to success – is not a key factor in the marketing strategies that construct their personae. This is not the case for many other artists (and their managing teams) that bring physical appearance centre stage.
Within the capitalistic frame of the classical music industry, the survival of an emerging artist’s star depends on their capacity to enlarge their fan bases by appealing to the language of mass consumerism. Opera singers have always been on the front line in these strategies. Mainly because of their inherent reliance on embodiment, they are more susceptible to buying into the idea that they must look as desirable as their voices sound. In the twenty-first century, there are numerous singers who engineer their public personae in ways that bring the fashion and cinematic industry close to the operatic world. This, perhaps, is in line with the example set by an iconic star who reached the status of a timeless idol, Maria Callas (1923–77). The cultural impact of Callas’s persona is undoubtedly still alive in the twenty-first century, although her submitting to the burgeoning beauty canons of the contemporary fashion world by losing 5.7 stone (eighty pounds) between 1951 and 1953 inaugurated a trend amongst opera singers that subverted once and for all the caricatured stereotype of the fat soprano.31 Callas’s popularity relied on the alchemy of her voice and stage presence, which conferred on her a status of quasi-divinity. Nevertheless, she often paid a dear price in terms of privacy.
Nowadays the immediacy of social media facilitates an artist’s negotiation between their private and public persona through the sharing of official and less-official accounts of their daily experiences on their platforms. The ultimate aim is to sell a pretended affinity with the audience member, thus, expanding the immersive mechanism of ‘impersonation’ to the private sphere. If the reward for complying with this trend is for classical performers to reach out of the traditionally secluded walls of art music and dive into the mass-media scene, the cost is that of succumbing to a rhetoric that encompasses many other aspects of the performance persona. This is the case, for instance, of piano sensation Yuja Wang (b.1987), who cultivates a highly sexualised image, through meticulous attention to fashions that capitalise on her petite body through revealing outfits, which are always complemented by high heels. One of the current faces of the Decca label, she fully invests in the visual construction of her performance persona to the point of identifying her music with her own style. ‘If the music is beautiful and sensual, why not dress to fit? It’s about power and persuasion. Perhaps it’s a little sadomasochistic of me. But if I’m going to get naked with my music, I may as well be comfortable while I’m at it.’32 Wang’s metaphorical language is deliberately provocative and highly sexualised, perfectly tickling the consumerist mechanisms of desire. If music shows its seductive potential, so does the performer that embodies it without fearing to expose her corporeality. Her words could indeed be a clever factor of her marketing strategy; however, if this statement maintains some degree of authenticity, it would raise questions about the sense of self that the musician conveys by identifying her musical persona with her attire. By investing her sexualised image with an iconoclast attitude towards the stiff conventions of concert apparel, Wang entices a new generation of young classical performers to feel entitled to capitalise on their looks as well as on their artistry. Thanks to diligent use of the appropriate social-media platforms, where she promotes luxury brands and fashion firms, Wang reaches an idol status that takes her image well beyond the classical music scene; her looks are shared and promoted by the fashion firms she (or her marketing team) chooses for her recitals around the world.33
Many crossover artists fully invest in pop music marketing models, which inform the fashioning of both their image and their musical projects. This is certainly the case with violin prodigy Vanessa Mae (b.1978) and singer Katherine Jenkins (b.1980), who, besides careers as classical concert soloists, promote musical collaborations with pop and rock recording artists, while maintaining their respective popular images though high-level public engagement. While Jenkins cultivates her girl-next-door allure, featuring in television shows and bringing centre stage details of her private life through a clever use of press and social media, Mae’s fierce display of her body promotes an over-the-top persona, while her multifarious talents and ability to switch smoothly from genre to genre throws critics into disarray. Engaged in a number of activities running parallel with their performance and recording careers – Jenkins is an Ambassador for Macmillan Cancer Society and well known for her performances for the British Forces Foundation; Mae is an Olympic skier and an actress – both artists have a large fan base, ranging from classical music aficionados to rock and pop listeners, and from television viewers to sports fans. Combining undisputed musical talent with their protean performance personae, their popularity matches their exposure to media to the point where even negative remarks further their popularity. In 2008, for instance, opera star Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (b.1944) attacked ‘popera’ stars. She diminished Jenkins and other artists’ works, prophesying their inevitable artistic demise. Jenkins replied to her criticism, defining herself as being from a ‘normal background’ and as an advocate for the accessibility of classical music, as opposed to a conservative elite preoccupied with their own survival. ‘I think that it’s just obvious now that people really like that kind of music [crossover]. I think that it’s become its own thing. It shows in the number of sales and I don’t think people can ignore that.’34 In this dynamic, ‘sales’ and the appreciation of ‘the people’ seem to determine the value of a musical endeavour.
Interestingly enough, it is difficult to find reports of Mae’s work that do not make reference to her appearance. For instance, the criticism which her eclectic repertoire has attracted also addresses the way she uses her body in performance, almost as if her relaxed appearance necessarily equals a lack of musical identity. As Adam Sweeting has commented:
It isn’t certain whether Vanessa Mae can succeed in pop, however. She looks the part, since her face and figure make her automatic pin-up fodder. She skipped out on stage wearing a sleeveless, backless sparkly top and hip-hugging pants, which the various lumps of electronic equipment dangling from her belt threatened to pull down at any moment. But it is difficult to take much of her material seriously.35
I would not be sure that a critic would refer to a man’s work with similar vocabulary, yet this is the rhetoric used to describe Mae, who, needless to say, perhaps embraces it as an aid to further her fame. Certainly, a notable difference from the past is the following: if, once, a negative review or an inopportune digging into personal lives could break a career, nowadays, in the multifarious world of digital communication, negative critiques not only produce major visibility, but also then with the passing of time, become negligible pieces of information, easily overtaken by the frightening amount of material that keeps building up from different sources and media. The rapidity with which this information is absorbed by the media and thrown to the general public highlights new ways to generate popular content and to steer the fan bases for many of these artists. Most importantly, these mechanisms also determine new ways to conceive of popularity as a whole, not only as the fruit of successful mediation between artistic achievements and communication skills, but as the patchy result of good and bad responses to the performer’s public personae, whereby negative remarks and personal attacks assume almost the same strategic importance as a positive reception. At any rate, the body of the performer remains the first and foremost element that is subjected to scrutiny, and torn apart on occasion.
In an ideal society that cherishes gender equality as an accomplished objective, the images of talented artists such as Wang, Jenkins, and Mae should be testimony to their empowerment and, even more so, to their freedom to fashion their image according to their personal taste; ultimately, the way they dress, move or age should be a negligible detail in the eyes of the general public and press. However, the harsh reality is that our society has failed to achieve equality and is currently even experiencing a regression in terms of civil rights. For this reason, the fear remains legitimate that the model represented by these artists might be absorbed into the consumeristic mechanisms of reification and mass-commercialisation of the female image that are so embedded in the current star system.
Conclusions
The number of women soloists with prominent roles in the classical music business has multiplied. From the 2000s on, leading female artists have become the faces of an increasing number of record labels; this has included historical brands such as Decca, Sony Classics, EMI, and Warner Classics, which have set an example for burgeoning independent labels. This is, perhaps, a consequence of the new marketing strategies adopted by classical labels, which, following the example of pop music labels, relinquished the paradigm of the white male master to begin to foster the work of younger women classical performers and attract minorities and younger audiences. This new generation of performers relies on the fashioning of their public image, communicated via a consistent online presence, through which they appeal to a large fan base. They often engage with parallel activities alongside their musical careers to voice their multiple talents and world views, and many espouse charitable causes.
These performers’ public personae are often packaged according to marketing conventions that capitalise not only on their musical abilities, orientations, and collaborations, but also on their appearance; in many cases, putting this, rather than their sound, under the spotlight. The issue of the performer’s identity is at stake here. Performance as the projection of a musician’s persona within a social realm entails the interaction of multiple agencies, not least that of the spectator-consumer, who impose their desires onto the performer and her body, triggering an ‘impersonating’ act. What we witness is the construction of the performer’s marketed identity through the active male gaze, which inscribes the work and life of these musicians within a patriarchal power dynamic. In short, if the twenty-first-century music industry sees women taking centre stage, its main structure and the rhetoric which derives from that structure still respond to an old-fashioned capitalistic scheme, which manufactures the performer’s images in ways that consolidate not only the male gaze but, especially, the male voice. This pervading filter often emerges through the sexist remarks of press and critics, or the statistics for the number of women hired in orchestras or present in the higher ranks of music establishments or within academia or the conservatoires. Ultimately, the male status quo remains unchallenged, despite an apparent acquiescence to female talent. In light of the luminous examples of some of the performers discussed in this chapter, if we still have to live with the presence of women soloists in the music industry as a concession, something is wrong with the classical music ‘social realm’ in ways that do not differ from many other work contexts.
