Jon Mirsalis on Piano. (Royal Tigress). Pina Menichelli was recognized as the female incarnation of the Art Nouveau style, the epitome of perverse charm. She was "the most devilish and modern of all the divas," Eva Vittadello writes in the catalog. "Her beauty was of an aggressive, perverse, disturbing type...(a) cruel, distorted expression that conveys, at one and the same time, unimaginable pleasures and atrocious sufferings." Following her famous star debut Il Fuodo (Fire, 1915), Tigre Reale was a florid showcase for the diva in the story of a Russian countess who is involved in an affair with an Italian diplomat. The jealous husband who sent her previous lover, a revolutionary, to Siberia will attempt to deaden this affair as well, in an all-consuming fire. In Tigre Reale, Angela Dalle Vacche writes, the diva as "alter-ego of a purifying fire (represents) ground zero for women's emancipation to begin."