Abstract

In the late 1920s, Giuditta Pasta enjoyed her first great successes in Italy despite the fact that she presented a rather dated repertoire based chiefly on Mayr's and Rossini's operas. Her success was attributed especially to her stage presence. The article investigates the acting models that this famous singer-actress had to assimilate during the decade in which she lived in Paris and London, demonstrating how, despite an initial resistance, that theatrical and dramatic aesthetic was later received by the Italian melodrama in the following century. An analysis of Donizetti's Anna Bolena (1830) clarifies the importance in terms of sound of the ample pathetic gestures and fragmented speech that Pasta must have learned in Paris when it was dominated by melodrame.