Judit Zsovár
The fame of Catherine (Kitty) Clive (1711-85), star actress at English theatre Drury Lane for more than twenty years, was in great part due to her singing. Berta Joncus’s book offers an exhaustive study of Clive’s character and work; her roles and songs; her rise and fall; her feminist ambitions; her public image of chastity and the contrasting reality behind it. It details her collaborations with stage partners like Hannah Pritchard and John Beard as well as actor-manager-playwrights like Colley Cibber, Henry Carrey, James Miller and David Garrick. London’s theatrical life, including the relations between playhouses and Italian opera companies, are pictured, together with the political driving forces behind them. Clive’s seasons are dissected, as are her rivalries with Susannah Cibber and Lavinia Fenton, and scandals like the Drury Lane Actors’ Rebellion (1743-44) and the Green Room gossip (1745-46), both destroyers of Clive’s reputation. In addition, masterly analyses of portraits, in paintings, drawings and porcelain figurines, serve as ‘tangible’ complements to the author’s storytelling, excellently showing the changing nature of Clive’s public persona over time.
In terms of serious songs, apart from Purcell and De Fesch, in the 1730s Clive performed simplified English-language versions of arias from Handel’s Ottone, Poro, Partenope and Alexander’s Feast. Besides contributing a song for Clive’s benefit in 1740, Handel involved her in oratorio performances of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato and Samson as well as the Messiah (1743 revival). After 1750, to retain the public’s attention, Clive gave up serious songs and turned to satire, mocking Italian operas and singers’ accents in Handelian English oratorios, targeting Caterina Galli among others.
The title of the book stresses Clive as a singer of ballads, masques and popular songs, rather than as an actress (of Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden in particular). Emphasising the importance of Clive’s musical vein in her career and success, the introduction holds out the prospect of a vocal portrait contextualised within her plays, theatrical environment and career. In practice, however, the rich theatrical contextualisation tends to shift the focus away from her singing. From a performer’s point-of-view, a summary of her repertoire, and perhaps a separate chapter on her vocal characteristics regarding range, tessitura and their eventual changes, would have been useful, with more musical examples. Her songs and arias could have been discussed more specifically from a vocal musico-technical perspective, rather than largely from a compositional point-of-view. Unfortunately, contemporary accounts say little about Clive’s exact vocal quality, i.e. tone, flexibility, colouring, volume, etc.; and Frances Brooke’s patriotic claim that Clive was ‘infinitely superior’ to major opera star Regina Mingotti (Porpora’s pupil and Faustina’s worthy rival), when caricaturing her performance style, seems to refer to Clive’s imitative acting skills and English diction, rather than her vocal capacities.
On the whole, however, Joncus’s work is a monumental, worthy, many-sided and richly detailed monograph, providing a strong portrait of Clive as a distinguished actress-songster in Handel’s times.
Dr Judit Zsovár is a soprano and musicologist. Her book on Anna Maria Strada is to be published early in 2020 by Peter Lang.