Bianca Castafiore

Bianca Castafiore
Bianca Castafiore, by Hergé
Publication information
Publisher	Casterman (Belgium)
First appearance	King Ottokar's Sceptre (1939)
Created by	Hergé
In-story information
Partnerships	Igor Wagner (pianist)
Supporting character of	Tintin
Abilities	a prodigious singing voice

Bianca Castafiore, the "Milanese Nightingale", is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé. Her forename means "white" (feminine) in Italian, and her surname is Italian for "chaste flower".

Character history

The comical Italian opera diva first appears in King Ottokar's Sceptre, and is also in The Seven Crystal Balls, The Calculus Affair, The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin and the Picaros, The Red Sea Sharks, and would have appeared in the unfinished Tintin and Alph-Art. She is played on radio in Tintin in Tibet, Captain Haddock imagines her singing in Flight 714. Although apparently one of the leading opera singers of her generation, the only thing that Castafiore is ever heard to sing are a few lines of her "signature aria", the Jewel Song, l'air des bijoux, from Faust, always at ear-splitting volume (and violent force - certainly enough to part the Captain's hair, and a breeze enough to blow back a curtain in an opera box - 'She's in fine voice tonight.').

When on tour, she usually travels with her piano accompanist, Igor Wagner, and her maid, Irma.

At odds with her reputation as a leading opera singer, in The Seven Crystal Balls, she is appearing third on the bill of a variety show, along with a knife thrower, a magician and a clairvoyant. She is depicted as a preening, melodramatic diva, although she has a kind heart. In The Calculus Affair, for example, she provides a diversion to distract the sinister Colonel Sponsz so that Tintin and Captain Haddock can escape and rescue their friend Calculus. A recurring comic trope in the series is Haddock's aversion to Castafiore, who can never remember his name (addressing him variously as Hammock, Paddock, Padlock, Hemlock, Hassock, Havoc, Maggot, and Bootblack, among other names). Ironically, gossip journalists reported a romance and engagement between Castafiore and Haddock in The Castafiore Emerald, complete with Castafiore showing a disgruntled Haddock the flowers in his own garden. This quite chagrined the captain, but not the diva, who was quite used to such inventions from the tabloids. Her visit to Haddock was correctly predicted by a Gypsy fortuneteller. Thus, ancient mysticism is proven far more accurate than the modern news media.

Bianca was once falsely imprisoned by the South American dictator General Tapioca and General Sponsz in order to lure Calculus, Haddock and Tintin to San Theodoros where they prepare a deadly trap for them and Tapioca's rival, General Alcazar. Their ruse backfired, not least because Bianca expresses her contempt of her show trial and her life sentence with her trademark ear-splitting rendition of the Jewel Song. The court has to be cleared. In prison, Bianca makes her jailers suffer even more by throwing her pasta over their heads because they do not cook it al dente.

Character background and influences

The "Bianca Castafioreplein", a tiny square along Verversstraat in Amsterdam named for the fictional opera singer Bianca Castafiore, a character in the comic books The Adventures of Tintin.

Unsurprisingly, opera was one of Hergé's pet hates. Helsingin Sanomat suggested in October 2008 that Castafiore was modelled after Aino Ackté, a Finnish soprano. It is also curious that though la Castafiore is obviously Italian, her pet aria is from a French opera (Faust was composed by Charles Gounod) rather than the Verdi, Puccini, or Donizetti one would expect from a star of the La Scala.

Bianca Castafiore is to be portrayed by Kim Stengel in the upcoming motion-capture film The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn which merges plots from several books.

• The asteroid 1683 Castafiore, discovered in 1950, is named after the character.

See also

• List of The Adventures of Tintin characters

References