Abstract:
A ‘diva’, from the Italian for a ‘goddess’, is a feminine, otherworldly being. But what role does the racialized, Black, other play in the conception of the diva? While in contemporary culture, ‘diva’ is often used to denigrate or elevate Black celebrity women, historical diva studies continue to be a history of white celebrity. In this paper, I begin to address this oversight by shining a light on the Afro-Italian opera star Vittoria Tesi (1701–1775), considered the first prominent singer of colour in the West and the first contralto diva.
Against the backdrop of pre-unification Italy, I explore Tesi’s unprecedented otherworldly divadom. I consider her performative agency in playing with gender, race, and class through cosmetics, costuming, her broad vocal range, and diversity of role creations. While she frequently gender-reversed roles with her counterpart––the castrato Farinelli––such as in Hasse’s Antonio e Cleopatra (1725), only Farinelli is celebrated today. Examining how Tesi’s rival, Anna Bagnolesi, acquired the epithet ‘White Tesi’, I demonstrate how Tesi helped define not only Black divadom, but divadom itself.
I challenge scholarly tendencies to locate Black divadom as originating in nineteenth-century America, by tracing it back to where the cult of the diva originated, in eighteenth-century Italy. Recovering this first wave of Black divadom helps us understand how the intersecting notions of race, gender, and class took shape in eighteenth-century Italy, and how they have impacted and shaped Western celebrity and performance culture that continue to other Black femininity as inherently eroticized and exoticized.
Bio:
Emmanuela Wroth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. She is a socio-cultural historian, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music theatre history and celebrity, through the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Her current project, “Diasporic Divas: Racialized and Gendered Celebrity in Western Europe, 1715–1925”, recovers the overlooked careers of black women performers. She has recently won awards both from the Transnational Opera Studies Conference and the Theatre and Performance Research Association. Her first book, “Courting Celebrity: Creating the Courtesan on the Popular Parisian Stage and Beyond, 1831–1859”, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Emmanuela regularly disseminates her work publicly: she was a 2025 finalist for the BBC New Generation Thinkers scheme, she recently organized a public lecture-recital in celebration of Black History Month, and her new research is due to feature on several podcasts including “Holding Up the Ladder” and EC2.