Paris was the operatic centre of Europe for much of the nineteenth century, producing two of the most important – and most heavily exported – operatic genres: opéra comique and grand opéra. Theatres were strictly regulated, and many were heavily subsidised by the French state, despite the frequent changes in regime from monarchy and empire to a democratic republic. The city's relative financial strength and abundance of talented artists provided a situation wherein theatres could take creative risks, cultivate new genres, develop new works and mount lavish productions. Many French opera houses boasted a stable company of performers: singers could devote much of their career to a single stage, thereby developing long-term, intimate relationships with other cultural producers (composers, librettists, musicians, etc.), journalists and the public. The expansive newspaper industry along with the professionalisation of music criticism supported the country's cultural production and its artists, at home and abroad, through lively debate and discourse. From the 1850s, moreover, France stood at the forefront of key technological developments, from photography to the phonograph, which significantly affected the dissemination, circulation and reception of opera and its singers. Nevertheless, by the century's end, Paris slipped from its dominant position as opera became a global phenomenon. The changes to the operatic industry were profound, affecting the constitution of the repertoire, the circulation of works and artists and performance aesthetics and traditions. Parisian theatres faced increasing competition for operas and singers not only from far-flung places, but also from cities within France's borders that sought to challenge the capital's cultural pre-eminence.
The articles in this special issue explore this vibrant period in the history of French operatic culture from the unique perspective of the singer, bringing into focus specific performing contexts of the French stage as well as the changes to the status of performers brought about by internationalisation. Although the subject matter of all seven articles is rooted in France, and most specifically in Paris, each author approaches the geographical field from a distinct perspective, illustrating the myriad experiences singers faced as they sought fame and fortune, both at home and abroad. Despite the variety in this set of articles, a few common themes thread their way through the volume. Sarah Fuchs and Sean Parr, for example, seek to understand how nuances embedded in bodily and vocal gestures could help singers articulate their uniqueness amongst a sea of competitors, while Kimberly White, Jean-Christophe Branger and Katharine Ellis explore the power of singers’ agency and their ability to transform operatic works and the reception of those works both in and outside Paris. Clair Rowden's and Claudio Vellutini's articles peer beyond Paris's borders, illustrating how singers leveraged their international reputations for power over impresarios and others. Together, these seven articles accomplish a common goal: to deepen our understanding of how singers helped shape an operatic city, and how in turn, an operatic city shaped the lives and careers of individual performers.
Singers used their bodies as much as their voices as means of articulating creative authority on the stage. Sarah Fuchs explores the fin-de-siècle fascination with classical antiquity and neoclassical modes of movement through Jeanne Hatto's filmed performance of a scene from Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride at the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre in 1900. In the film (which is soundless, but synchronised to a recording), Hatto projects fluid yet sculptural gestures that correspond to her character's shifting emotions. To analyse Hatto's gestural aesthetic, Fuchs returns to eighteenth-century theories of the body and Gluck's opera reforms, tracing their influence on the theories of nineteenth-century pedagogue François Delsarte and on the performing traditions established by important female singers from Pauline Viardot to Claire Croiza.
Sean Parr shares Fuchs's interest in exploring French performance practice and tracing pedagogical traditions, but his article turns towards issues of tenorial singing on the French stage. Despite the revolution in the 1830s and 1840s in tenor vocal practice, which carried the chest voice upwards to produce vigorously loud high notes, soft tenorial sound in the upper register – the illusive, contentious voix mixte – persisted in a few operas composed in the final decades of the century. Parr identifies several of these late-century exceptions to tenor trumpeting, many of which were written for one tenor in particular, Jean-Alexandre Talazac, to examine the shifting attitudes towards voix mixte. Although descriptions of voix mixte in reviews and vocal treatises remain enigmatic, making it difficult to define precisely its technical or physiological characteristics, Parr argues that renewed application of the vocal practice could open fascinating aesthetic and hermeneutic possibilities for the exploration of vulnerability, sensuality and masculinity in twenty-first-century productions of French opera.
Parr's devotion to recapturing the power and nuance of elusive voices is a theme that shapes Kimberly White's article as well. Shifting focus from the stage to the page, White explores the authorial voices of two prominent tenors in their published life writings. With careers that ended well before the sound recording era, Gilbert-Louis Duprez and Gustave Roger instead took to the pen to record their artistic contributions for posterity. And yet their published memoirs disappointed contemporary critics: the texts, which remained stubbornly silent on certain high-profile artistic achievements and creative collaborations, produced a fairly different – at times mundane – picture of the tenors’ careers and accomplishments. White reads the autobiographical texts as performative acts and asks what opera history might look like if scholars took the tenors at their word.
Although Duprez and Roger provide few details about their working relationships with certain composers, examining these creative collaborations represents a critically important endeavour for opera scholars dedicated to understanding the often difficult-to-trace influences that singers exerted over the genre. Jean-Christophe Branger contributes to this conversation in his exploration of the relationship between Massenet and the contralto Lucy Arbell, his final muse. During a period when singers were witnessing the loss of their status as co-creators, Massenet continued to cultivate partnerships with his performers. Arbell differed from Massenet's earlier muses in that she excelled more as a tragédienne than as a vocalist, and her public reception was quite ambivalent: Massenet's contemporaries found puzzling his affection for a singer with seemingly limited vocal means. Branger contextualises Massenet's exploration of spoken declamation in his operas and his song cycle, Expressions lyriques, by following the intimate and partly concealed traces of Arbell's artistic and emotional influence.
While the first four articles in this volume are situated geographically and aesthetically in Paris, the final three branch outward to settings where ties to the capital remain thick, yet tenuous in significant ways. Katharine Ellis foregrounds this occasionally uneasy relationship in her exploration of Louise Janssen, the Danish singer who became an idolised Wagnerian star in Lyon, France. Although Janssen's career was international in scope – bringing her to Paris, Monte-Carlo, London and cities throughout the United States – her fame and influence were grounded in the seventeen years she spent as a member of the Lyon company at the Grand-Théâtre. While there, she played a central part in establishing Lyon as the pre-eminent centre of Wagnerism in France, performing the roles of Eva in the first French production of Meistersinger, as well as Elsa, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, among others. Drawing on a rich array of archival and press materials, Ellis evaluates how Janssen's combined agency and mythification ultimately allowed her to effect a double French naturalisation – her own, and that of Wagner in France.
The main protagonists in Clair Rowden's article embraced a similarly cosmopolitan approach to their careers, displaying the range of choices singers could make to remain local or to go global. Focusing on a rather confined time period – the years between 1867 and 1870 – Rowden teases out the complex relationship between Swedish-born Christine Nilsson and the decidedly French Caroline Miolan Carvalho while they overlapped in the most important opera houses in Paris. Rowden's analysis of their careers, replete with fascinating comparisons between the two singers, raises a set of critical questions about the nature of rivalry and, more importantly, the ways in which nineteenth-century spectators contemplated the differences between these two talents. Through the examples of these performers, Rowden's article seeks to explore the larger issue of what local and international singers represented to the public, and to evaluate how their nativeness or foreignness influenced their reception.
If in Rowden's article the question of how much agency singers were able to exert over their career remains central, Claudio Vellutini, in the final article, expands even further on the issue of a prima donna's control over her reputation and livelihood. Focusing on the international career of Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani, one of the most prominent singers at the Théâtre-Italien in the 1830s and 1840s, Vellutini presents a complex picture of how this singer was able to leverage her knowledge of one market (Paris) against another (Vienna) to further her interests and her career. Drawing on a treasure trove of hitherto unexamined letters from Tacchinardi-Persiani to Carlo Balocchino, impresario of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, this article illustrates how she was able to tap into her direct knowledge of cosmopolitan business networks to broker high fees and to establish performance schedules and roles that best suited her interest and reputation. Although the focus shifts from the French stage to another European capital, Paris nevertheless looms large, revealing the extent to which success in the French capital could influence a singer's career and reception abroad. Vellutini's article therefore provides an intriguing glimpse into what Paris meant for singers, impresarios and the public elsewhere in Europe.
Taken together, these seven articles help expand the growing conversation surrounding artists’ authority, agency and presence, a discussion that has become a central component of opera studies over the past two decades. The special issue particularly foregrounds the social and economic aspects of operatic culture by contextualising the various networks and relationships that structure the industry, and by exploring the transformative power of singers’ relationships to other singers, composers, audiences, theatres and cities. Moreover, with their focus on one geographical area, whether examined from within or outside the country's borders, our authors succeed in collectively revealing new insights about opera on the French stage and the singers who negotiated its complexities.
