Biography

Eleonora Di Cintio received her PhD in History and Analysis of Musical Cultures at Sapienza University of Rome in 2018. She was Postdoctoral Fellow at the German Institute of Rome (2019) and Research Fellow at Sapienza (2021-2023). Her studies concern Italian Opera, mainly of the late 18th and 19th centuries, a topic that she approaches both as a philological and as a cultural object. Her publications include critical editions of operas by Pergolesi, Rossini and Donizetti and essays about the relationships between opera and politics in Neapolitan and Milanese contexts during the Restoration.

Project Summary

In 1841 Henri Vernoi de Saint-Georges wrote a libretto, La reine de Chypre, that had a huge impact on West European stages in the following decade. His protagonist was Caterina Corner (1454-1510), the noblewoman who in 1468 married the King of Cyprus, Jean II Lusignan, by order of the Republic of Venice. Corner was a widow shortly after and was forced to cede her reign to the Serenissima (1489), but this was not the destiny she had in Saint-Georges’s version: there, the Queen of Cyprus, together with her people, resists the Republic, defending the political independence of her reign. Far from the real history, Saint-Georges’s drama and the many works that were derived from it, both operatic and choreographic, in the 1840s, have been perceived as revolutionary manifestos by musicological critics. However, this reading does not explain why these works were staged in some of the most reactionary cities of Europe – Munich, Vienna, Naples – where, what is more, they were often dedicated to the queens then in office. Instead of seeing them as revolutionary expressions, this research would like to investigate whether and how the works derived from Saint Georges’s play, as well as others of the same period centred on Renaissance queens, could convey an idea of female sovereignty that was consistent with the politics of the established powers, all this during the years of construction of the European national states.