Download or read book The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century written by Rachel Cowgill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narrative of 19th and early 20th century opera. This book shines a light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled doomed women onstage before an audience.