Handel and the Divas

A new exhibition revealing the on and offstage lives of the first great musical divas will open at Handel House on 30 April 2008. Handel and the Divas will explore the careers, rivalries, successes, failures and stories of scandalous behind-the-scenes behaviour which made the first divas the talk of 18th-century London.

The exhibition will concentrate on the female singers who brought Handel’s operas to life, providing a glimpse of a particularly extravagant part of London society, through a collection of objects, portraits and scores gathered from collections in the UK and Europe. Handel and the Divas will also be filled with the key music and performances which unite the characters in the exhibition and which secured the reputation of each featured diva.

Although not coined until the 19th century, the word diva (from the Italian ‘divina’, or ‘divine’) was inspired by the great female opera singers. Originally an entirely complimentary term, the word diva began to inherit notoriety due to the headstrong, arrogant and scandalous behaviour of the performers and is now regularly used to describe the attitudes of the modern prima donna.

The exhibition will feature Handel’s original divas, including, among others, Margherita Durastanti, Francesca Cuzzoni, Faustina Bordoni, Susannah Cibber and Kitty Clive.

The exhibition will reveal tales of opera house riots caused by ‘The Rival Queens’, Cuzzoni and Bordoni, whose always-fractious relationship reached a new low on stage in London, dividing their audience into braying rival factions; the disgraced singer who fled to Dublin after an affair (which became the talk of London) but later gave a show-stopping premiere performance of Handel’s Messiah; and the legend of the singer who Handel threatened to dangle from a window after she refused to sing an aria that he had written for someone else.