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Karen Henson | Queens College of the City University of New York - Academia.edu

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Karen Henson

Queens College of the City University of New York, Musicology, Faculty Member

Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Music, Faculty Member

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Specializes in nineteenth-century opera, singers and music-theatrical performance, and opera and technology. Author of _Opera Acts_ (Cambridge, 2015) and editor of _Technology and the Diva_ (Cambridge, 2016). Now working on book on early sound reproduction and opera

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Books by Karen Henson

contents, Karen Henson, ed., _Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars t... more In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger-than-life form, as the "diva," and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern -and post-modern -eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

excerpts from _Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Papers by Karen Henson

"Black Opera, Operatic Racism, and an 'Engaged Opera Studies'" (review-essay on Naomi André's _Black Opera_, _Journal of the Royal Musical Association_, 2021)

Naomi André's Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Ov... more Naomi André's Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, André covers a range of subjects, from long-forgotten concert performances, to opera, Broadway and opera film, to contemporary operatic composition and practice. As she does, she moves between the United States and South Africaa striking way of approaching her material and a feature of the book that ought to prove highly influential. Some of the arguments she makes are new, some combine pre-existing thought and research in new ways. The most important moments, though, are when she pauses to describe her experiences or those of another black opera lover or group of black opera lovers. In Chapter 1, for example, André turns to the renowned African American soprano Leontyne Price and her rendering of Aida's outpouring in Act 3 of Verdi's Aida, 'O patria! … quanto mi costi!' ('O my country, how much you cost me!'). This is a moment in the opera that is usually explained in terms of Verdi's preoccupation with father-daughter relationships (it comes at the end of Aida's duet with Amonasro). However, for André, schooled by Price, it has become the expression of something much more urgent: the struggles and only occasional triumphs of living as an African American in America. In Chapter 2, she reminisces about a lecture on early Verdi she gave at a leading conservatoire in South Africa, the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town. She describes being astonished to discover that a section of her audienceprimarily those who were disadvantaged and blackalready knew this repertory, having sung it in choirs in their townships. In Chapter 4, André notes how, in spite of its content, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess continues to attract African American audiences. This, she suggests, is because the opera offers an opportunity to spend an evening in an opera house when almost all onstage (and many in the audience) are black. These are only brief episodes in Black Opera, but they are individually and cumulatively powerful, identifying as they do a black operatic 'we', or what André describes as 'those of us [black listeners and audience members] who have fallen in love with opera' (p. 20).

Verdi versus Victor Maurel on Falstaff: Twelve New Verdi Letters and Other Operatic and Musical Theater Sources

19th-Century Music, 2007

This article introduces twelve new Verdi letters and other operatic and musical theater sources i... more This article introduces twelve new Verdi letters and other operatic and musical theater sources in the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings. The materials hail from the French baritone Victor Maurel (1848-1923), Verdi's first Iago and first Falstaff, and from his second wife, the musical theater librettist and screenwriter Frederique Rosine de Gresac (1866/7-1943). The letters and other sources constitute an important resource for not only nineteenth-century opera and operatic performance but also the early American musical, film studies, the history of women, even the history of celebrity. The Verdi letters concern Maurel's creation of the role of Falstaff and include a intriguing debate about preparing for the role and singing generally.

"Sound Recording and the Operatic Canon: Three 'Drops of the Needle'" (in _The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon_, ed. Cormac Newark and William Weber, Oxford, 2020)

"The Castrato as Theater" (review-essay on Claire van Kampen’s play _Farinelli and the King_, _Opera Quarterly_, 2018)

"Diva et photographie: Massenet, Sibyl Sanderson, et la séduction de l'image" (in _Beyond the Stage: Musical Theatre and Performing Arts between "Fin de siècle" and the "Années folles"_, ed. Michela Niccolai and Giuseppe Montemagno, Bologna, 2017)

"Au début de l'enregistrement sonore (1877-1906): exotisme, opéra et science-fiction" (in _L'altérité en spectacle 1789-1918_, ed. Nathalie Coutelet and Isabelle Moindrot, Rennes, 2015)

"Introduction: Of Modern Operatic Mythologies and Technologies" (in _Technology and the Diva_, ed. Henson, Cambridge, 2016)

"Of Voices, Hearts and Ghosts: Saint-Saëns, 'Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix'" (in "Remaking the Aria," special issue of the _Cambridge Opera Journal_ in honor of Roger Parker, 2016)

contents, Karen Henson, ed., _Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars t... more In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger-than-life form, as the "diva," and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern -and post-modern -eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

excerpts from _Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

"Black Opera, Operatic Racism, and an 'Engaged Opera Studies'" (review-essay on Naomi André's _Black Opera_, _Journal of the Royal Musical Association_, 2021)

Naomi André's Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Ov... more Naomi André's Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, André covers a range of subjects, from long-forgotten concert performances, to opera, Broadway and opera film, to contemporary operatic composition and practice. As she does, she moves between the United States and South Africaa striking way of approaching her material and a feature of the book that ought to prove highly influential. Some of the arguments she makes are new, some combine pre-existing thought and research in new ways. The most important moments, though, are when she pauses to describe her experiences or those of another black opera lover or group of black opera lovers. In Chapter 1, for example, André turns to the renowned African American soprano Leontyne Price and her rendering of Aida's outpouring in Act 3 of Verdi's Aida, 'O patria! … quanto mi costi!' ('O my country, how much you cost me!'). This is a moment in the opera that is usually explained in terms of Verdi's preoccupation with father-daughter relationships (it comes at the end of Aida's duet with Amonasro). However, for André, schooled by Price, it has become the expression of something much more urgent: the struggles and only occasional triumphs of living as an African American in America. In Chapter 2, she reminisces about a lecture on early Verdi she gave at a leading conservatoire in South Africa, the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town. She describes being astonished to discover that a section of her audienceprimarily those who were disadvantaged and blackalready knew this repertory, having sung it in choirs in their townships. In Chapter 4, André notes how, in spite of its content, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess continues to attract African American audiences. This, she suggests, is because the opera offers an opportunity to spend an evening in an opera house when almost all onstage (and many in the audience) are black. These are only brief episodes in Black Opera, but they are individually and cumulatively powerful, identifying as they do a black operatic 'we', or what André describes as 'those of us [black listeners and audience members] who have fallen in love with opera' (p. 20).

Verdi versus Victor Maurel on Falstaff: Twelve New Verdi Letters and Other Operatic and Musical Theater Sources

19th-Century Music, 2007

This article introduces twelve new Verdi letters and other operatic and musical theater sources i... more This article introduces twelve new Verdi letters and other operatic and musical theater sources in the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings. The materials hail from the French baritone Victor Maurel (1848-1923), Verdi's first Iago and first Falstaff, and from his second wife, the musical theater librettist and screenwriter Frederique Rosine de Gresac (1866/7-1943). The letters and other sources constitute an important resource for not only nineteenth-century opera and operatic performance but also the early American musical, film studies, the history of women, even the history of celebrity. The Verdi letters concern Maurel's creation of the role of Falstaff and include a intriguing debate about preparing for the role and singing generally.

"Sound Recording and the Operatic Canon: Three 'Drops of the Needle'" (in _The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon_, ed. Cormac Newark and William Weber, Oxford, 2020)

"The Castrato as Theater" (review-essay on Claire van Kampen’s play _Farinelli and the King_, _Opera Quarterly_, 2018)

"Diva et photographie: Massenet, Sibyl Sanderson, et la séduction de l'image" (in _Beyond the Stage: Musical Theatre and Performing Arts between "Fin de siècle" and the "Années folles"_, ed. Michela Niccolai and Giuseppe Montemagno, Bologna, 2017)

"Au début de l'enregistrement sonore (1877-1906): exotisme, opéra et science-fiction" (in _L'altérité en spectacle 1789-1918_, ed. Nathalie Coutelet and Isabelle Moindrot, Rennes, 2015)

"Introduction: Of Modern Operatic Mythologies and Technologies" (in _Technology and the Diva_, ed. Henson, Cambridge, 2016)

"Of Voices, Hearts and Ghosts: Saint-Saëns, 'Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix'" (in "Remaking the Aria," special issue of the _Cambridge Opera Journal_ in honor of Roger Parker, 2016)