The Castrato's Tale: "Artaxerxes" and the Feminization of Virtuosity

[...]aside from the first war-tom decade of the 19th century, Arne's Artaxerxes, was rarely absent from the English stage in the seven decades after 1762, during which time, Roger Fiske has concluded, "almost every notable person in London must have seen [it] ," and even the commonest Londoner would have been acquainted with its ubiquitous music (306). How did a hybrid Italian-English piece - of "mixed charms" as Hazlitt put it in an anachronistic musical style associated with the exclusive aristocratic domain of the King's Theatre - survive the intense competition and thirst for novelty of the London theatre scene for seventy years? (Examiner 21 July, 1816) The plot of Artaserse - a thinned-out Shakespearean tale of ambition, filial conflict, and divided female loyalty has been described as "an archetype of the opera seria myth" (Smart 32). [...]the generic nature of the Metastasian lyric was symptomatic of the opera seria hierarchy of music over text vocal display was pre-eminent - and also essential to the pasticcio form as it allowed the easy substitution of an aria by one more favored from another opera score. Mozart's Cherubino, in The Marriage of Figaro, is the most famous canonical trace of a gender configuration that dominated opera in the early 19th century, in which, as Heather Hadlock imagines it, "the two leading women's voices . . . create [d] a sonorous realm of love and private feeling besieged or constrained by a male-dominated public sphere.