ABSTRACT
Gender roles, narrative, voice, sound, the range and character of what and how opera is to signify were all reconfigured; indeed, absolutely everything- in the aesthetic, social, cultural and acoustic spheres was transformed. This metamorphosis also brought considerable changes to the woman depicted on stage, her voice, her words and her death. Even though the nineteenth century was a golden age for opera, one rarely finds, as one does in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, explicit manifestations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth is present, however, but covertly; it resides in allusion, analogy and disguise. Women in opera are fated to die like Eurydice, but their death songs represent the height of expression and thus can be viewed as an act whereby they take the Orphic lament onto themselves. This chapter focuses on how recent works refashion the woman and her voice.
