In Rossini’s opera about her, Queen Semiramide of Assyria walks onstage right into a problem: The aristocratic politician who helped her poison her husband and usurp his throne wants her to fulfill her end of the bargain and nominate him to rule the nation. Payment due! (more…)
Category: Women’s History
Spanish Opera Singer Maria Malibran
Maria Malibran entered the world in 1808 with an uncommonly interesting backstory and set of genes. Her father, the famous tenor Manuel Garcia, was probably half-Romany; her Spanish mother was a more minor opera singer. Garcia was a spectacular singer, a brilliant teacher, and a manic brute. Determined to make his daughter into one of the planet’s most brilliant vocalists, he battered and terrorized her regularly in service to this aim. Did she start life with a miraculous voice? She had one by the time she made her debut at a London concert at 16, just old enough to be a sophomore in a postmodern American high school. By that time, she already had a range from E below middle C to high C. At 17, she made her operatic debut as Rosina in The Barber of Seville to great acclaim. (more…)
Meet Nell Gwyn One Of History’s Most Famous Mistresses
Nell Gwynn was born Eleanor Gwynn in 1650, in London and lived a meteoric thirty-seven years. Her mother ran a brothel, where young Nell tended bar until she was fourteen. Then she began selling oranges at the Drury Lane Theatre. Influential attention began before long; the leading actor there, Charles Hart, took the impish nymphet as his mistress and arranged for her to appear as an actress. She probably made her debut at 15. Despite illiteracy, she developed her talents as a thespian, singer, and dancer; she became the theatre’s leading comedienne and fulfilled that role to high acclaim until 1669. During this interval, she also enjoyed a liaison with the sixth earl of Dorset. (more…)
Marie Duplessis The Lady of the Camellias
Marie Duplessis (1824–1847) led a meteoric life. The girl who grew up to inspire The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas and Verdi’s La Traviata began life as no lady, with no camellias and little else. We know that her original name was Alphonsine Plessis and that she was born into an impoverished, violent household in Normandy. (more…)
Delacroix’s portrait of George Sand and her most famous lover, Frederic Chopin
Delacroix’s portrait of George Sand and her most famous lover, Frederic Chopin, shows her sensual grace and the sensual tenderness between the two. Sand, born Aurore Dupin in 1804, helped put the free in freethinker. Daughter of an aristocrat and a proletarian Parisienne, Aurore was raised by her aristocratic grandmother, a well-meaning despot, at the family estate, Nohant. Aurore inherited two sets of irreconcilable rules, discarded both, and stepped into male privilege—and trousers. (more…)
One of the greatest Shady Ladies of art, Madame X
On every Shady Ladies tour of the Metropolitan Museum, at least one person tells me that John Singer Sargent’s Madame X is their favorite painting. And you can easily see why. It’s an arresting image, ambiguous and mysterious, and it creates for the viewer an image of a dramatic and complex woman. There are strange contradictions in it. For instance, the woman’s body is turned toward the viewer, but her face is turned—almost wrenched—to the side. Her skin is astonishingly white, her profile exaggeratedly aquiline, yet her hands are stubby and red, and her ear is inelegant and red as well—and very noticeable. And there are things that are hard to figure out: could her skin really be so extremely pale, or are her face, neck, shoulders, chest, and arms all thickly made up? (more…)
Shady Ladies Tour, an intro
People often ask how I went from doing gay secrets tours to shady ladies. How did a gay historian get interested in the history of female prostitution? First of all, a gay historian works on the history of sexuality, so the history of heterosexuality is not very far away from his topic, intellectually speaking. But it has much more to do with my tours of the Metropolitan Museum. (more…)