Famous Singers of To-Day and Yesterday

Before recordings, before global fame, there were singers who could halt a carriage on a Paris street with a single note. Henry Charles Lahee's 1898 portrait gallery captures the birth of opera's golden age through the performers who defined it: Italian divas who launched a thousand scandals, English sopranos who battled in print as fiercely as they sang on stage, and the legendary castrati whose impossible voices once ruled European courts. This is gossip column history at its finest: Lahee recreates the rivalries that sold out theaters, the royal patronage that made careers, and the technical innovations that transformed singing from court entertainment into dramatic art. The book pulses with the personalities who turned opera from Italian novelty into the dominant art form of the 19th century. For anyone curious about where vocal music came from, these are the ancestors of every opera star who ever lived.