In Alexander Chee’s novel The Queen of the Night, an ostensibly Parisian diva, Lilliet Berne, is approached at a party by a young writer, who describes an opera for which he has written the libretto and a mysterious composer has supplied the music. The librettist offers Lilliet the leading role. The opera’s swashbuckling adventure and rapid reversals of fortune are characteristic less of the novel’s late nineteenth-century setting than of the operas comiques of decades earlier. If the opera plot stretches the bounds of historical plausibility, though, what matters to our diva is that the story is not fictional enough: it is her own secret biography, conveyed by an unknown hand. For Lilliet, the unknown opera is a terrifying development, no less than a revelation that she no longer can contain the chaos of her past. In the opera, she would be playing her own history, but only as envisioned by the writer and the unknown composer.Footnote 1
Lilliet’s helplessness in the face of this composer reflects the diminishing power often accorded to singers at the end of the nineteenth century. While earlier singers had been musical personalities, those of the later nineteenth century are often described as celebrities without creative powers of their own. By this reading, voices like that of Lilliet were not so much the result of intellectual cultivation as an accident of nature, alive only in music created by others. Invoking Lydia Goehr and Susan Rutherford in the introduction to her monograph, Karen Henson writes that during the final third of the nineteenth century singers moved from ‘freedom to subservience, creativity to interpretation’. Once firmly at the top of opera’s hierarchy, they had abruptly lost their status as co-authors, now reduced to being ‘intermediaries, executants, faithful (or disloyal) interpreters’ (3).Footnote 2 Roles were written for their particular talents more rarely, and insertion arias dwindled. While Lilliet’s life is operatic, even as she embodies herself onstage she no longer controls her own story. Yet, as Henson would remind us, where would her story be without her own enacting of it? Alla cantata ancor manca la diva.
Opera has often been analysed as a series of such binarised struggles: music versus words, music versus drama, singing versus acting, sound versus vision, frivolous singer versus serious composer, text versus act, director versus score, Verdi versus Wagner. For an earlier generation, excessive attention paid to an opera’s visual attractiveness could represent a threat to the primacy of a score, a warning sign that an opera is popular for the wrong reasons.Footnote 3 While scholars have lately paid much greater attention both to the performative aspects of opera and to its performers, meanwhile, this interest often has been confined to the same repertories privileged by a previous generation of scholars.Footnote 4
While their tactics are different, both Henson and Campana move the focus from the written score to the stage, studying a late nineteenth-century repertory that has frequently been tainted with a sort of moral suspicion.Footnote 5 Both Henson and Campana deal with particular singers, particular theatres and particular audiences, yet their work remains interpretative rather than documentary. Henson’s focus is primarily on the cast; Alessandra Campana’s study instead addresses the stage–audience relationship directly. It remains a truism to say that Puccini is manipulative, or, as when Campana quotes Jerry Fodor, that he makes his audiences ‘complicit in something not entirely nice’ (144). Yet Campana’s interest lies primarily in the nature of this complicity, not in rendering further moral – or corresponding aesthetic – judgement, and her analyses are consistently nuanced and insightful.
Campana’s readings are also historicised: by the later decades of the century, she argues, opera had crystallised as a work-concept (though unlike Henson she does not use this term) through the authority of publishers, and particularly through the use of staging manuals. Such manuals exerted (or attempted to exert) painstaking control over the visual elements of each performance, making the operatic event a reproducible commodity.Footnote 6 Campana’s main texts, then, are ‘works’ comprising the score and staging manual, and she is interested in the way these documents sought to control the experiences of their spectators. (Singers rarely figure in detail.) Most importantly, she says, this control became the subject of opera itself. The operas she considers – Boito’s Mefistofele, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Otello, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and Mascagni’s score for the silent film Rapsodia satanica – at various points become meditations on looking and seeing.
For Campana, whose methods often borrow from film studies, this is a repertory that therefore anticipates the ‘scopic regimes’ more commonly located in the twentieth century. Yet one might add that this meta-spectatorship is hardly exclusive to any particular time period. Take Campana’s account of the prologue of Simon Boccanegra, in which Paolo’s narration of a ghost haunting the Fieschi palace is suddenly brought to life by a lamp visible in the palace’s windows. Campana’s description gives a taste of her methodological vocabulary: ‘the racconto then quite extraordinarily manages to suture the time-space of the narrative to the time-space of the performed present, of the staged reality. All this thanks to the ability of words uttered on a stage to stir up the spectators’ affective investment’ (54). Reading this, it is difficult not to be reminded of an older example, by Mozart: Paolo is the Count, the light is the hidden Cherubino, and we are in Act I of The Marriage of Figaro. In Carolyn Abbate’s well-known analysis:
the coincidence of narrating and enactment [when Cherubino is revealed] has, in fact, created a reflexive moment of peculiar force, for the Count’s act of narrating seems to engender the disaster of which it tells. That is, beyond reporting events past, the narration conjures up its own content.Footnote 7
While Campana more closely foregrounds the visual and the opera’s grip on its audience – the focus of the larger argument of her chapter – the ‘reflexive moment of peculiar force’ that allows both narrations to bend operatic reality to their will is similar. On these grounds, Campana’s chosen repertoire does not necessarily seem unique.
What distinguishes Campana’s repertoire, and her study more broadly, is the nature of her sources, which allow her to discuss aspects of staging with much greater specificity than is possible for earlier repertories – and many later ones too. Her conception of the operatic work is much more grounded in the historical circumstances of production and reception than Abbate’s. In Campana’s words:
As intermediaries between the author(s) and subsequent performances, these manuals allow opera to approximate an autonomous product, a reproducible commodity. Thus on the one hand they supplement the opera texts with a guide for reenactment that is validated by the composer and by the rest of the creative team … [while] on the other hand, the manuals supposedly allow for these opera texts to become independent of the author(s), to travel on their own while still carrying the composer’s imprint. (3–4)
As suggested by her use of the qualifier ‘supposedly’, Campana is interested in the staging manual as a mediatisation of performance rather than in its practical realisation on any particular evening, sidestepping some of the more material aspects of staging history as well as much of its ephemerality.Footnote 8 While she occasionally invokes the voices of critics, this is the rare study of staging in which reviews are not a principal source. Similarly, the authority conferred by these publications concerns her more than the hand any composer or librettist had in their compilation. Refreshingly, the composer is no longer the primary creative agent.
Campana’s prose tends towards the dense and it sometimes makes for slow reading, and by the end of any chapter, the assiduous reader may find herself surrounded by multiple scores, any staging manual that happens to be available, a novel or two and a few volumes of Lacan or Rancière.Footnote 9 The effort, though, is rewarding if unpredictable, even if her arguments can on occasion tend towards a sort of bricolage. And in a short postlude, she argues for the usefulness of exactly such an approach, stating that her book ‘relies on a certain multifariousness, whereby each chapter sketches the broad and always potentially broader and mutating contours of what might be entailed in the relation between the performative instances of an opera and its public’ (192). In this Campana has undoubtedly succeeded.
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Karen Henson’s study also displaces the composer, but in a less radical fashion. Her focus rests squarely on singers: their intentions, training, interests and priorities. By consequence, her book is fundamentally a study of personalities. She dubs her Paris-centric cast the ‘physiognomic generation’, denoting performers who were better known as actors than for their singing. Henson’s performers – her primary subjects are baritone Victor Maurel, mezzo Célestine Galli-Marié, soprano Sibyl Sanderson, and tenor Jean de Reszke – go to the theatre, emulate actors, design costumes, develop painting careers(!), pose endlessly for photographers, create major roles and write their memoirs. What does not seem to attract their attention, Henson writes, is vocal technique. While all were accomplished singers – and Henson attempts through a variety of means to discover what their techniques and vocal qualities actually were – she contends early on that the voices themselves, despite their owners’ fame, were ‘naturally unimpressive’ (4). (This is not a group, in other words, in which Lilliet Berne would necessarily feel at home.)
Henson’s singers follow in the footsteps of giants like Patti, Malibran, Pasta and Viardot, and few of them rival their predecessors in current fame.Footnote 10 Why these singers nevertheless matter, however, is allowed to remain unclear. Beyond some brief general remarks on urbanisation and theatrical technology, Henson never squarely addresses the matter of why this generation who specialised in ‘not singing’ came into being, nor the wider ramifications of ‘not singing’ for the larger operatic event. Indeed, she occasionally seems ambivalent about her own subjects, considering them interesting but somehow peripheral to the history of opera writ large. Describing Wagner’s ideals for a singer, she writes that he advocated ‘the simple, faithful, unadorned execution of a role (and score and work)’ (14), a wording that locates the meaning of the work as external to its performance. Her writing is personable and relaxed, but her arguments are often hedged by tentative suggestions and rhetorical questions, giving the book something of a provisional tone.
Most of Henson’s chapters are structured roughly chronologically, offering a Bildungsroman of each singer’s career. Her leading players are rounded out by an epilogue naming a ‘supporting cast’, who receive biographical sketches that place them in the context of the more substantive chapters but do not contribute significantly to its argument.Footnote 11 Henson’s analysis occasionally recalls Richard Dyer’s theory of ‘star texts’ and ‘star personas’ of the classic Hollywood era, in which actors’ tightly managed public images contributed to the meaning of their films.Footnote 12 Yet Henson’s priority is less what the singer’s unique image contributes to any particular performance (the star text), than the singer’s public image (the star persona). For Henson, the importance of singers lies in their function as muses to composers, and as idols to everyone else. In all, this means that the actual moment of operatic performance, elusive at the best of times, recedes even further, and she only occasionally considers the implications of their performances at length. Most of her readings seem intended primarily to get the singer along to his or her next career stage. (It does not help that her musical examples, while numerous and extended, mostly illustrate general points.)
Henson sometimes seems to assess her cast’s importance based on the extent they left traces on musical scores: Célestine Galli-Marié is celebrated for her influence on Bizet, leading to the composition of Carmen’s Habanera (51), and Massenet’s ‘old-fashioned’ impulses are measured by his willingness to alter Manon to suit the talents of a succession of young and pretty sopranos (92). Henson’s most rewarding chapter, on Jean de Reszke, by contrast, is the one for which this tactic is largely unavailable. Reszke was primarily known for singing music written for others in a new way, a friction that stimulates Henson’s most detailed and extensive analysis. For Henson, Reszke’s ‘international’ style of Wagnerian tenordom also constituted an extension of the ‘physiognomic’ impulses of her other subjects. She follows Reszke through a dizzying sequence of vocal transformations ending with Wagner, highlighting the different shapes Reszke’s career took in Paris, London, and finally New York. Ultimately, Henson argues that his characteristic attention to declamation and to a cosmopolitan, de-regionalised vocal technique showed that ‘a kind of opera that thirty to fifty years after its first appearance was still thought forbidding and even unperformable could in fact be part of the operatic mainstream’ (153).
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A single event, related in both of the studies under consideration here, may serve to illustrate these authors’ very different priorities and methods. In December 1886, a few months before the premiere of Verdi’s Otello in Milan, Giulio Ricordi took the opera’s cast to see the play by Shakespeare. Both authors note this event: Campana in her chapter on Otello and Henson writing about Victor Maurel, the first Jago. By all accounts neither Verdi nor Boito enjoyed the play very much, finding the modern, almost naturalistic actor Giovanni Emanuel ‘cold, monotonous [and] unsympathetic’ in the title role (Boito’s words, quoted in Henson, 25).
Henson’s chapter traces the career of Maurel, a singer who famously premiered many of Verdi’s late baritone roles (including Falstaff), and acted with more restraint and fluidity than Romantic predecessors such as Jean-Baptiste Faure. Studying his performances as Amonasro and Thomas’s Hamlet largely through their reception, Henson shows that Maurel favoured clarity of declamation over lyricism; this leads her to venture that ‘it is hard not to speculate about the fact that Verdi, too, compositionally, was about to develop a more restrained and “de-lyricised” vocal style’ (46). More adventurously, she goes onto suggest that Maurel’s artistry may have had a hand in prompting Verdi to begin writing operas again.
Henson repeatedly describes Maurel as ‘forward-looking’ for his interest in theatrical acting techniques (as usual, music is doomed to lag behind). Verdi, in contrast, is deemed ‘backward-looking’, hence his dislike of Emanuel’s Moor. That Boito cannot in any respect be called backward-looking and yet also found Emanuel not to his taste therefore remains something of a puzzle. The discussion forms part of a speculative section concerning Verdi’s feelings about performance and staging late in life, one that suggests that he ‘was more sympathetic to contemporary trends in theatre and acting than his semi-public discourse, including his written exchanges with Maurel, might imply’ (26). The nature of these trends remains somewhat vague.
Campana’s argument, by contrast, is more expansive, and, typically, veers in several unexpected but suggestive directions. She begins by juxtaposing Emanuel with the ‘two giants’ to whom Verdi had compared him, actors Rossi and Salvini. In contrast to Emanuel, Rossi and Salvini’s acting style ‘centered … on the expression of strong and violent emotions’ (107). Without the telos or implied value judgement of Henson’s forward/backward binary, Campana argues that Otello, as evidenced by its staging manual, was explicitly meant to be interpreted along the lines of Salvini and Rossi, older actors ‘who, by December 1887 were already becoming passé’ (108). Using William Archer’s 1888 study of acting, Masks or Faces, Campana describes two schools of actors: the emotionalists (Salvini and Rossi) and the detached, intellectualised anti-emotionalists (represented here by Emanuel). But Campana extends this opposition into the text of Otello itself: honest Otello is an emotionalist, every feeling on display, while Jago is a chilly, calculating ‘anti-emotionalist’ in the style of Emanuel. This is ironic: Verdi might have disliked Emanuel, but Jago wins. Or, as Campana characteristically puts it, ‘the story of entrapment into Jago’s poisonous fantasy comes packaged in a hypertrophic apparatus that ensures the reality effect of that fantasy’. The very illusion of opera is what defeats Otello (136).
So far, the two authors have covered many of the same issues in very different ways. Campana, however, is not yet done. Her analysis spins off into a new section on race, the victimisation of Otello, and the then-state of the Italian army in Ethiopia. (Henson also addresses race in the same chapter, in relation to Maurel’s performance as Amonasro, which she argues was more racialised than his predecessors’.) This leads Campana to an experimental short story by Boito, L’alfiere nero, which explores racial conflict with much more ambiguous sympathies. Her final section addresses the very end of the opera, in which she argues that the score’s recapitulation of Otello’s bacio motive provides a kind of closure that Jago’s sneaky, almost inconspicuous exit does not.
One could go even further, by turning to another voice, not included by Campana and mentioned only in passing by Henson: that of Francesco Tamagno himself, the original Otello. In 1904, he recorded Otello’s ‘Niun mi tema’, leading to that recapitulation and the end of the opera.Footnote 13 The sound is distant, the accompaniment a piano, and Tamagno was elderly at the time. Yet both the vocal acting of Henson and the emotionalism described by Campana are on vivid display. As has been noted by Sarah Fuchs Sampson, Tamagno takes considerable license, replacing the score’s ‘un altro bacio’ with ‘ancora un bacio’. What is more, instead of the score’s marked morendo, Tamagno stretches the tempo on the descending scale, not in a decrescendo but a luxuriant mezzoforte, adding a breath before the final ‘bacio’. Then, where Verdi’s score breaks off mid-phrase and specifies only ‘(muore)’, he lets out a pitched death rattle, giving the final fragmentary phrase a new cadence and supplying a loud sigh that indicates the collapse.Footnote 14 The impending era of recordings, in fact, is a ghostly, almost unacknowledged presence in both Henson’s and Campana’s accounts, despite the fact that some of Henson’s singers – and all their immediate successors – would regularly be heard on record scarcely a decade later.
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Near the start of her book, Henson identifies what she calls ‘anti-performance posturing’, which she describes as a ‘tendency among late nineteenth-century composers to distance themselves from singers and the very idea of performance’ (20). Her use of ‘posturing’ is an indication of a very reasonable scepticism, as these same composers exerted unusually detailed control over the performance of their operas, including these operas’ visual aspects. Scores more readily appear autonomous while performance is messy, entangled with the market and fleeting. Henson frequently questions this binary of score and performance, and Campana, by considering opera texts as inclusive of visual elements, dismantles it.
While their receptiveness to the visual in opera helps both authors to do away with old disciplinary biases, however, Campana and Henson find their shared concern ethically fraught, albeit in new ways. The visual requires and commodifies bodies –particularly those of female singers – in a way that a focus on scores can at least appear to dodge. Henson considers some of the nastier implications of visuality in a section entitled ‘Massenet Problems’, in which, through outings in Manon, Thaïs, Esclarmonde and Phryné, curvaceous coloratura Sibyl Sanderson gradually ‘becomes ever more mute and sexualized and is eventually reduced to little more than striptease’ (116). Henson attempts to recover Sanderson’s agency within her photographic and onstage objectification, but can only add that the fluid movement of her arms ‘makes them part of the history of attempts to introduce greater dynamism into the photographic portrait’, and that her representations have ‘a distinctiveness and force’. She asks, ‘are we seeing a singer who was growing in confidence visually?’ The question remains unanswered (120).
Campana’s chapter on Manon Lescaut tackles similar concerns. The opera’s much-discussed musical discontinuities, she argues, are mirrored by a visual variety, one which collapses into nothingness for the notorious Act IV ‘deserts of Louisiana’. This variety allows Manon a series of transformations, ‘but the lack of dramatic justification for such a process results in the consecutive display of static models of being’ (154). Even after a largely motivic analysis that convincingly argues that we both see and hear Manon from Des Grieux’s and Lescaut’s point of view, Campana nonetheless seeks to give back agency to Manon: as she blends in with a succession of radically varied surroundings, the character ‘transforms this figure [of the femme fatale] into a continuous, dizzying movement of subjectification, emancipated from patriarchal confinement’ (170–1).
Campana’s goal, she boldly states in her final sentence, is to ‘re-open the question of the politics of aesthetics’ (193). One wonders if it has ever really been closed, particularly judging by the continuing lively debates surrounding Puccini and this period in general (debates to which both of these books provide compelling points of entry).Footnote 15 Similarly, continual hand-wringing over operatic production suggests that, among audiences, the representation of operatic narrative and the place of visual pleasure remain contested.Footnote 16 The era discussed by Campana and Henson is therefore revealed as the edge of another threshold: that of the near-closure of the operatic canon (an issue Campana partially addresses in her chapter on Simon Boccanegra). As singers become interpreters, the works they interpreted were increasingly by composers no longer present to collaborate. That this coincided with the turn to the sort of mediation described by Campana is no accident. As the operatic world consolidated its power, it also sought the stability of its own past.
