Celluloid Diva: Staging Leoncavallo'sZazàin the Cinematic Age

Abstract

AbstractGeraldine Farrar's performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo'sZazà(1900) at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar'sZazàin the context of New York's post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar's own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success inZazàpoints to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.