Tell me, what is a larynx that no longer serves its purpose?
What is a singer, who can no longer sing?
Edouard MonnaisFootnote 1The final performance
Monday, 4 December 1848: Saw Othello at the Opéra again, by Mme Delagrange and Duprez. Today, in the duet with Iago, Duprez electrified us all. What courage! What great soul! What a raging old lion! How he hurls his innards at the public! Because those are no longer notes that we hear; it's like a chest exploding, crushed under an elephant's foot; that's his blood, his life that he thrusts from his body to wrest from the public one of those bravos with which the Romans granted a dying gladiator.
This gave me the impression of a painting of Spanish torture, terrifying and sublime… I do say sublime, for despite the irregularities of a voice eroded by passion more than time, style and his good schooling do not disappear, and he finds in his very deficiencies the means to sustain purity. When this man passes away, I doubt that the world will hear another like him.Footnote 2
In 1848, Gilbert-Louis Duprez was forty-two years old; he was a year away from retiring from the public stage and officially ending his almost twenty-five-year career. Gustave-Hippolyte Roger's precisely dated diary entry paints a visceral image of the tenor in full-blown vocal decline: a crushed torso, blood, guts, almost as if his shredded voice had been digested by his body. The tenor pours forth the remnants to the public – artfully, but desperately. With a reference to paintings of Spanish torture, the tableau is terrifyingly vibrant – noisy – despite its silence. (Was anyone else listening to Duprez's swansong with the same enthralled attention as Roger? Or could Roger's reference to the ‘Romans’ suggest those bravos erupted only from the Opéra's claque?)
Roger's diary entry traces a well-worn path from vocal decline directly to the singer's mortality: yet another voice lost to the ravages of time. But this was not exactly the case. Duprez also wrote about this period in his career, albeit with a different ending:
There were several reasons that prompted me to retire from the theatre. Although still young and vigorous, I felt the freshness and flexibility of the resources that I had possessed during twenty years begin to weaken; of the qualities of my youth, all that remained was an even greater power, perhaps; but the organ was more limited, heavier, less brilliant, which convinced me that the moment had come for the dramatic singer to cede his place to the maestro, to the composer ; because I always believed I deserved these titles, and an irresistible penchant led me toward composition.Footnote 3
Duprez's description tallies his vocal deficits and the disappointments of a singer cheated by a prematurely aged voice. By the time he was writing in the 1870s, the bitterness of this defeat had been somewhat, although not completely, softened by time (he quips that, despite twelve years of service at the Paris Opéra, his departure was ‘not even noticed’).Footnote 4 Duprez found solace by taking up other roles and channelling his voice through the pen. His compulsion for writing during the last decades of his life – operas, books of poetry, a vocal treatise in verse and his memoirs – reveals an intense desire for permanence, a record, something concrete.Footnote 5 Duprez's impulse did not go unnoticed. In Théophile Silvestre's biographical portrait of Duprez from 1873, the tenor exclaims: ‘Ah! if God had given me, instead of fugitive notes and sounds, a paintbrush or chisel, I could have made something great and durable! … But I am only a poor musician.’Footnote 6 The singer was certainly not the first, nor was he alone in lamenting the ephemerality of his art. In 1770, Carlo Broschi, the great Farinelli, referring to Padre Martini music history writings, desponded: ‘What he is doing will last, but the little that I have done is already gone and forgotten.’Footnote 7
Attesting to the pressure to leave a trace, a document for the undocumentable, two examples of singers’ memoirs in France appeared in print in 1880: Gustave Roger's Carnet d'un ténor and Gilbert Duprez's Souvenirs d'un chanteur.Footnote 8 Although the origins of the modern autobiography can be traced to 1750, musicians and actors did not take up the genre in great numbers until the last few decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 Two of the most important composer autobiographies were penned around mid-century: Hector Berlioz's Mémoires were written in 1848, published in serial form in the late 1850s (in part, with modifications), and finally published posthumously in their entirety in 1870;Footnote 10 beyond France's borders, Richard Wagner began dictating Mein Leben to Cosima in 1865, although his autobiography would not be printed publicly until 1911.Footnote 11 By the 1870s, autobiographies by actors, impresarios and composers were burgeoning, but the contributions of opera singers remained limited until the early decades of the twentieth century, at which time the popular memoir had become, according to Viv Gardner, ‘not only a commonplace but a necessary adjunct to the role of theatre in society’.Footnote 12 By the turn of the century, only three autobiographies by opera singers in France had been published (those by Duprez and Roger, together with Marie Sasse's Souvenirs d'une artiste, 1902);Footnote 13 two further autobiographies remained unfinished and unpublished (Pauline Viardot, Souvenirs, c.1879–1884;Footnote 14 and Delphine Ugalde, Mémoires, c.1884–1906);Footnote 15 and another was at the very edges of the autobiographical genre (Victor Maurel, Dix ans de carrière, 1897).Footnote 16 If we include English-language autobiographies published in London and America prior to 1900, the number grows to a dozen or so, with the vast majority being published in the final two decades of the century.Footnote 17
The move towards autobiography seems inevitable, given the flourishing of biographical literature on singers, composers, actors and musicians in various forms, from biographical dictionaries and serial publications to biographical articles in the speciality music and theatre press. Singers on the popular stages, particularly the café-concert, began exploiting the autobiographical genre in the 1860s for publicity purposes, starting with the publication of Thérésa's memoirs in 1865.Footnote 18 Written just as her career was taking off (rather than at its end), her memoirs were part of an elaborate media campaign during a period satirically characterised as ‘la Thérésamanie’. Not only were her memoirs additionally published in serial form, but they were also ghost-written by three journalists: Ernest Blum, Albert Wolff and Henri Rochefort, at least one of whom admitted to inventing much of its contents.Footnote 19
But autobiography also offered the author distinct advantages apart from its commercial value, particularly for the singer seeking to defy the ephemerality of her art. Autobiography theorist Philippe Lejeune suggests that the genre lends social value to one's individual experience. What is more, it allows the author to find permanence despite the march of time: ‘the individual does not seek to establish his contingency, but his necessity, in assuming and remodelling his past’.Footnote 20 And yet the notion of etching the self into permanence through autobiographical writing is a fallacy. The relationship between the individual and autobiographical self is not one of identity, but rather one of creation and performance: life narrators are making history, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson tell us.Footnote 21 Life writing not only reproduces the fiction of the autonomous, pre-existent self, but also exposes it. Drawing on Judith Butler's theories of performativity, Smith theorises autobiographical storytelling as ‘a performative occasion’ which produces the self; in other words, the self (thought to exist always already, prior to autobiography) is in fact an effect of the lexical act. The self is performed and refashioned through a series of inclusions and exclusions of certain identity contents and the adoption and suppression of autobiographical voices.Footnote 22 Sounding and silencing, presence and absence; Smith notably insists that autobiography arises from amnesia: ‘The very sense of self as identity derives paradoxically from the loss to consciousness of fragments of experiential history.’Footnote 23 We invent the concept of identity to hide our ‘estrangement’ from lived events, which are narrated as they slip into the cracks of memory. The amnesiac gaps disrupt the coherence of the autobiographical subject, inserting silence where there should be sound, and misremembered details and jumbled chronology into the historical record.
Interpreting autobiographical writing as a performative act is not entirely new, although the theoretical constructs have changed significantly. In his 1880 review of Roger's Carnet, journalist Henry Fouquier (1838–1901) writes:
The common vice of almost all books of this kind is how the actor writes to perform one last time, to appear before the public, and seems to enact some kind of obstinacy or resentment to justify the idea that nothing remains of actors after their life and model.Footnote 24
The actor as author thus exposes the performative nature of autobiographical writing and its inherent fictions. Although seen in negative terms, Fouquier's comment perceptively links autobiographical performance to the ephemerality of the performer and his art and, in doing so, identifies the primary tension within the documents; that is, even as the words on the page produce a sense of permanence, this happens only through displacement – a performance of absence, the substitution of narrative for a visual, sounding art form. At the same time, reading Duprez and Roger's memoirs as performance of absence provides a useful framework for examining how the tenors negotiated the genre's limitations – and possibilities – by referring (or not) to their voices and performing art, as well as the ways in which the narrative shaped their activities and legacies to remake theatre history. How does a singer evoke his own vocal art in an unsounding medium? And how do historians approach these documents that remain stubbornly silent on certain artistic issues?
In the end, what is a sound?
It is strangely fitting that two of the earliest singer memoirs in France should be penned by tenors, a voice type that took on extraordinary proportions during the nineteenth century (in terms of both volume and importance) and, as Karen Henson reminds us, that came to be considered as sheer vocalism – purely a voice.Footnote 25 What is more, they were written by tenors whose careers overlapped in the 1840s, and who were both associated at one time with the role of Jean de Leyde in Meyerbeer's Le Prophète in 1849. Initially destined for Duprez and written with him in mind, the role was given to Roger and adapted to his vocal capabilities when it became clear that the older tenor's voice was in its twilight.Footnote 26
Duprez's enduring celebrity with the upward extension of his chest voice and the concomitant revolution in tenor technique has concentrated attention (perhaps unduly) on a single aspect of his vocal technique to the detriment of his wide-ranging contributions to vocal pedagogy in particular and to the musical community more generally. With an active stage career from 1825 to 1849, when he officially retired from the Paris Opéra to devote himself to pedagogy and composition, he was one of the most celebrated French singers of his time. The formal organisation of his memoirs reflects his weighty artistic legacy and lengthy career. Published when Duprez was in his mid-seventies, Souvenirs d'un chanteur is a measured history of his whole career that traces the arc of his success – the traditional and most valued autobiographical form.Footnote 27 The memoirs begin with what Lejeune has coined ‘the autobiographical pact’: a kind of a contract between the author and his audience, often manifest as an apology responding to the anticipated objections of an imagined reader.Footnote 28 Duprez states that he finally ceded to various pleas to write his memoirs, partly out of his own desire to collect and organise his memories, partly in hope that the anecdotes relating to other famous figures might be of interest to his readers.Footnote 29
Although as an autobiographical pact it is rather formulaic, the concept of the singer as intermediary revealing the power of art to individuals becomes a recurring motif throughout his text. That said, besides a few brief passages analysing the vocal style of his contemporaries (Giuditta Pasta and Adolphe Nourrit among others), Duprez is remarkably vague about voices. Anecdotes about Alexandre-Étienne Choron, director of the École royale et spéciale de chant, occupy much of his discussion about his training, and most direct references to his voice are fleeting: his exceptional treble voice and his narrow escape from castration, his skill in florid vocalisation as a tenorino in the 1820s, or how he redeemed himself after a resounding couac in performance.Footnote 30 A rare detailed passage analyses the voice of his predecessor, Adolphe Nourrit (1802–1839), who retired from the Opéra soon after the news of Duprez's appointment was made public and committed suicide in Naples two years later.Footnote 31 Duprez differentiates Nourrit's production of ‘slightly guttural’ voix blanche from his own vocal production as well as their approach to recitative: Nourrit merely delivered the text, treating recitative as a bridge from one number to the next, whereas Duprez felt it was the foundation for the action.Footnote 32 At his debut in 1837 and throughout his career, Duprez's full-voiced, dramatic approach to declamation was one of his most significant reforms, and appreciated far more than his ringing chest notes.Footnote 33
Remarkably, Duprez's acquisition of the technique that brought such a noisy revolution was, according to his memoirs, the result of a spontaneous, but silent, reaction to and intimate understanding of a masterwork. Duprez recounts his first perusal of Guillaume Tell’s score in preparation for the 1831 Italian premiere in Lucca: a mute reading, as he always did with new roles, allowing the music and the opera's action to play out in his imagination and inscribe themselves within him.Footnote 34 His mode of preparation was not exceptional: score-reading is usually silent, and actual sounds the product of imagined sounds. Duprez's imagined sounds, however, had a visceral effect on him. Upon reaching Arnold's famous cabaletta, ‘Suivez-moi’, from the Act IV aria ‘Asile héréditaire’, Duprez was struck by their power and the task ahead of him: ‘I understood it instantly: these male accents, these sublime cries, performed with mediocre means were but a missed effect, almost ridiculous. Rising to the height of this energetic creation required the concentration of all the will and the moral and physical force of … the interpreter.’Footnote 35 This, Duprez declares, is how he discovered the ut de poitrine.Footnote 36 The epiphany was not aural, but physical, an embodied reaction to the emotional tension in the scene.
Duprez's following comment, however, downplays the importance of the sound in itself: ‘That is how I found this ut de poitrine that gave me, in Paris, so much success, perhaps too much; because, in the end, what is a sound, other than means to express a thought? What is a note without the sentiment that colours and animates it?’Footnote 37 Here and throughout his Souvenirs Duprez prefers to connect his increased vocal power to his embodiment of an opera's passionate sentiments. In this way, Duprez presents himself, to borrow the vocabulary from his 1846 vocal method, as ‘an expressive singer’ (le chanteur d'expression), who uses the full tonal possibilities of his voice to develop characterisation and communicate, ‘through the text, human passions and feelings’.Footnote 38 Could this be Duprez's response to the legion of writers and critics over the century who accused him of destroying subsequent generations of tenor voices?Footnote 39 A way of distancing himself from the ‘pathological’ interpretations of his vocal technique, or from the critical dismissals of his performance style as mere sensationalism? Duprez's production of particular sounds mattered less than the feelings that produced them and the palpable sensitivity of the artist, to the extent that, in his memoirs, the voice becomes outwardly silenced and internally sung.
The character in flesh
Gustave Roger could not have differed more from his predecessor when he succeeded him as first tenor at the Opéra in 1849. In contrast to Duprez's modest working-class background, Roger was the son of a notary, grandson of a count and nephew of a baron. He received an exceptional education and, once he convinced his tutor that he would never be a notary, embarked on a career beginning at the Opéra-Comique in light tenor roles.Footnote 40 His Carnet d'un ténor, likewise, takes a different form: diary entries begin in 1847 and trail off in 1861, and represent a relatively narrow slice of his otherwise long career, which began with his debut in 1838 at the Opéra-Comique, was followed by thirty years of professional opera singing, and ended with a decade of vocal instruction at the Paris Conservatoire. However, the middle decades of the century were certainly some of his most successful as the tenor created the title role of Meyerbeer's Le Prophète in 1849 and took over the weightiest roles of the grand opéra repertoire.
The first few entries show Roger struggling in his position as lead tenor at the Opéra-Comique, feeling unappreciated by director Alexandre Basset and profoundly dissatisfied with the genre of opéra comique : ‘my education and my instincts carry me towards the great, and I have fallen in a genre that has but a small place in literature and none at all in poetry’.Footnote 41 His turn towards grand opéra took a small detour through Italian opera with two tours to London and the British Isles, the second of which had the tenor singing opposite Jenny Lind, before he was hired as lead tenor at the Paris Opéra. Although Roger was formally offered the role of Jean de Leyde in 1847,Footnote 42 the first mention of Le Prophète occurs only in 1848 and is remarkably casual: Roger attends Pauline Viardot's performance as Romeo in the first act of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi at Covent Garden and expresses his uncertainty regarding Meyerbeer's choice of Viardot as Fidès.Footnote 43 There is almost no mention of rehearsals and performances of the opera, Roger resuming his diary only in the months following the premiere.
The gaps in the chronology and in the historical and personal narrative are effects of the diary's form, as the entries were often concentrated within short periods with long gaps in between. Indeed, Roger's Carnet fits somewhat awkwardly into the generic category of autobiography.Footnote 44 In its published form, his diary is preceded by two prefaces, which help to fill in the gaps: the first, by Philippe Gille, introduces Roger in a series of anecdotes; the second, by Charles Chincholle, sketches the singer's biography.Footnote 45 However, there are several indications that Roger might have written the document with the intention of making it public. This impression arises in part from the genre itself. Viv Gardner remarks that the diary is ‘an ambiguous document’ because the author is also a reader, who shapes the diary, ‘consciously or unconsciously, for reading’; what is more, the diary's ambiguity is compounded when it is published during the writer's lifetime.Footnote 46 Although it is a much more personal account than Duprez's memoirs, Roger's diary clearly avoids intimate details. Its focus on travel and touring is a kind of self-censorship: it centres on people outside of his Parisian circle and remains silent on his contract disputes at the Opéra during the 1850s. What is more, Roger writes about his family history and early childhood memories in two long entries, as if he were consciously preparing his memoirs for a public audience.Footnote 47 Most important, Roger published excerpts from his diary in 1872 and again in 1875 in the Parisian daily Le Figaro. Comparison between these excerpts and the published version of 1880 reveals minor to moderate revisions: the document is not exactly the daily, intimate impressions of an artist as he wrote them and as Gille declares in the book's preface.Footnote 48 The final entry, dated 28 September 1878, is the tenor's consent to open the diary to the public, although it was ultimately published posthumously.
The diary form nevertheless provides us with Roger's ‘in-the-moment’ – rather than retrospective – reflections on his relationship to art, his artistic choices and his colleagues. Voice is a rather mundane affair in Roger's diary; he rarely makes any reference to it, besides the quotidian struggles or successes of his uppermost notes in chest voice. A tenor known for his charming, smooth tone and use of voix mixte, Roger initially cultivated a vocal style that still maintained a foothold at the Opéra-Comique, but was rapidly being replaced by the voix sombrée promoted by Duprez: Roger began darkening his tone and employing chest voice for high notes in the 1840s.Footnote 49 Although he was one of Paris's favourite singers and widely praised at the Opéra-Comique, Roger's position at the Opéra was sometimes contested.Footnote 50 He lacked his predecessor's power and stamina, and, as with most tenors of the period, the weight of the repertoire and the size of the theatre quickly took their toll on his voice.
His acting skills, however, were widely appreciated, and this influenced Meyerbeer's decision to select Roger for his much-anticipated Le Prophète.Footnote 51 Thus, although fairly silent on vocal issues, Roger's diary reflects on acting: he locates the crux of his artistic identity clearly in his sensitive and intelligent engagement with the characters he portrays. He also defines his artistic practice with reference to his colleagues, both differentiating and inscribing himself within the history of performing traditions. He criticises Jean-Baptiste Chollet (1798–1892), an opéra-comique tenor, for never having felt a single emotion he had to perform, and declares adamantly: ‘one thing that I am certain about is that, on stage, I am the character in flesh, feeling what he must make others feel, whereas Chollet is but an actor filling a role’.Footnote 52 Roger feels that his subordinate position in relation to the composer in fact enables his entry into the imaginative realm of the work. He asserts (with some pride) that he is perhaps the only singer who does not sacrifice the composer to his voice, but instead ‘thinks with the author’ to give the work ‘a second life’.Footnote 53 A year later, having accompanied Jenny Lind on tour throughout the British Isles, Roger reconsiders his complete absorption and emotional identification with the role: he admires how the Swedish soprano trembles with dramatic passion yet never to the extent where the emotion might affect her vocal control.Footnote 54 Roger reveals himself as a consummate artist with his ability to master the most subtle gestures and facial expressions that had profound dramatic consequences. In a rare passage on Le Prophète, he describes how he and Viardot worked out their interpretation of the scene in Act IV wherein Jean must convince Fidès, who has just publicly recognised the prophet as her son, to deny their filiation. Reproaching other tenors for using an obvious gesture – a kiss – to soften Fidès's resolve, Roger insists instead that the conversion requires only a fleeting look of tenderness to his mother, with eyes moistened with tears, and she (Viardot) would fall to her knees, vanquished.Footnote 55 Much later in his diary, he describes his performance of Schubert's Erlkönig, without a single gesture, representing the three characters solely through the direction of his gaze, revealing intellectual distance and an extreme sobriety of gesture, and performing – for his public and for his readers – both complete embodiment of the character and perfect control of vocal and acting technique.Footnote 56
More than a throat
In 1881, music critic and opera historian Adolphe Jullien (1845–1932) voiced sharp criticism of the newly published memoirs of Duprez and Roger:
It's still the artistic history of an era as perceived by a singer, from his sole point of view and as an exclusively personal exercise. … One cannot trust these actors’ memoirs, which are most often backstage gossip, a string of anecdotes meant to amuse the reader and distorted … in service of the honour and profit of the narrator.Footnote 57
Duprez's and Roger's memoirs attracted a fair amount of attention in the speciality journals and daily press. The critical reactions to these documents reveal a different set of expectations from the average reader, and certainly a different agenda from the publishers of such works who sought to attract a wide readership by ensuring that the books covered sufficiently enticing subjects. Some of the critics denounced the personal focus in these texts that shifted attention away from discussion of the artworks the singers created and performed. Henry Fouquier echoed Jullien's criticisms, complaining how actors catalogued their successes and failures, but rarely engaged in any analysis; he lamented the scarcity of information about their collaboration with the authors, including their own contributions to the performance texts.Footnote 58 Fouquier and Jullien singled out the tenors’ evasiveness on what were considered their most significant achievements (which also reveals the critics’ priorities and interest in the great masterworks of the past): Duprez's technical revolution in Guillaume Tell and Roger's lead role in Le Prophète. Jullien reprimanded Duprez for spending more time describing the platform shoes he wore during his Opéra debut, an event the critic claimed was ‘the summit of his career’.Footnote 59 Fouquier lamented how Roger did not provide a single passage on his experience working with Meyerbeer, the lessons he received, or the great composer's comments on his role.Footnote 60
The critics were especially aggravated by the memoirs’ banality. Rather than providing hitherto unknown details on their career highlights and collaborations, the tenors – in different ways – instead focus on the moments in between, prior to, or after; at times the narration giving way to enumeration of rehearsals, concert performances, dinners with colleagues and their tours abroad, with their successes and failures measured by applause and curtain calls. This apparent triviality has affected the reception of autobiographies written by theatre performers and the evaluation of their worth within literary and musicological scholarship. Philippe Lejeune claims these writings are generally disappointing because they focus on the author's profession and are more concerned with describing his engagement with his milieu than with the development of his artistic personality.Footnote 61 Theatre historian Thomas Postlewait partly concurs, arguing that while autobiographies provide critical historical evidence of cultural practices and information on professional life, the genre – particularly its factual veracity (or lack thereof) – nevertheless poses many challenges for the historian.Footnote 62
Although Duprez and Roger approached the genre in strikingly different ways, they both apparently failed to provide the information sought by the critics. But perhaps this was the point. The tenors perform different roles in their writings from what critics and historians expected; these performances highlight absences in the standard biographies of these two singers and might be more productively interpreted as their attempt to reconstruct their public images and artistic identities in different ways. Consider, once again, Duprez's account of the 1831 premiere of Guillaume Tell. He did not, as the critics imply, deprive his readers of intimate revelations about his vocal revolution. Rather, he connects his vocal achievement to his artistic sensibility, thereby reconfiguring this moment not as extraordinary in itself, but rather as one of many moments in the life of an extraordinary artist. Hence, the anecdote of the 1831 Lucca premiere finished, Duprez shifts gears abruptly:
The success that we obtained with Guillaume Tell was tremendous, and I felt a kind of intimate satisfaction that allowed me to recover a taste for peaceful distractions long forgotten. I rediscovered an intense love of line fishing, which I have not abandoned since, without prejudice to other forms of fishing.Footnote 63
This slip into the utterly mundane troubles our understanding of the extraordinariness of the previous events, or at least it muddles the boundary between them. For Duprez, however, his passion for line fishing is anything but trivial: this, too, was a significant moment in his life, as it allowed him to rediscover a treasured leisure activity. Although such disquieting juxtapositions of (ordinary) life and (extraordinary) art could be the by-products of autobiographical amnesia, I feel it points in productive ways to the ‘unremarkable’, as Philip Bohlman has applied the term, in music history and in musical lives.Footnote 64 Duprez's narrative downplays the importance of certain key artistic contributions and inflates that of others. Most important, it reminds readers of those moments in between, anchoring the artist's life and identity to more than just a few fixed points: it allows the author to redraw the map of his life and career.
The proportions of Duprez's memoirs are revealing: a full third focuses on his activities after his retirement from the stage in 1849. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate his intimate understanding of and relationship to art, and his identity not just as a singer, but also as a pedagogue and composer. His ability to recognise great art and thereby rescue works from oblivion becomes a recurring motif: examples include his participation in the Florence premiere of Donizetti's Anna Bolena in 1832, which finally assured the opera's success; his debut in Guillaume Tell that reinstated the work in its entirety in the Opéra's repertoire; and later, his students’ performance of excerpts of Le nozze di Figaro at his private concert hall, which, Duprez claims, convinced director Léon Carvalho to mount Mozart's opera at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1858.Footnote 65
Duprez's reputation meant that he hardly needed to defend his artistic merit, and yet he felt it necessary to justify his worth as pedagogue and composer. He might have been using the memoirs as a means to advertise his teaching and his compositional practices, but not in an active sense. At the time of his memoirs’ publication, Duprez had already relinquished his teaching in Paris and was living out his retirement in Neuilly, and so the emphasis on his work as pedagogue and composer might rather have been calculated to redress the lack of coverage these two roles received in the biographical literature.Footnote 66 In his autobiography, there are one hundred pages detailing his success as a pedagogue, his founding of a private school of singing, his promotion of the works of young composers and his assistance in launching the careers of young singers. After teaching at the Paris Conservatoire from 1842 to 1850, where he trained several singers who eventually pursued professional careers, Duprez purchased a building on rue Rochechouart in Paris for his new École spéciale de chant, which he directed from 1853 (the school was later run by his son, Léon Duprez).Footnote 67 He built an adjacent concert hall seating about 300 people where he held weekly Friday concerts and staged performances, featuring his students and the works of young composers as well as his own pieces.Footnote 68
Duprez's difficulties in establishing himself as an opera composer fill many of the final pages. He wrote and produced (on public and private stages) close to ten works, from one-act opérettes to operas and oratorios, mainly in the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote 69 His memoirs also turn to settling scores: against the critic Pier-Angelo Fiorentino in particular for his negative reviews of Duprez's opera Joanita, which had a short run at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1851, and La Lettre au bon Dieu at the Opéra-Comique in 1853, but more generally to music critics for their prejudice against singers as composers.Footnote 70 (His claim, however, that he was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1865 for his work as a composer, appears to be false: the medal was awarded to Duprez the pedagogue.Footnote 71) After a rather lengthy passage on the fiasco of his Jeanne d'Arc in 1865, his memoirs turn to other topics and events. Although he makes some reference to his penchant for writing, his continued bids for composerly recognition go unmentioned. However, as late as 1877, the press received a strange request to attend a performance at the Salle Pierre Petit that featured a newly discovered, posthumous work, La pazza della regina, allegedly written by maestro Carlo Soresi, a student of Donizetti. Duprez's students performed the opera, which was not in Italian but French. It did not take the public long to discover the identity of the real author, hiding behind the pseudonym.Footnote 72 As desperate as Duprez's efforts might seem, they reveal a singer endeavouring to convince a late nineteenth-century public of the vital traces he left in the works he sang, and his potential for continued contributions to the music community:
There is no work that I performed that has not retained the tradition that I placed there, the imprint of my personality; that is certainly proof that there is something within me that was greater than the tenor, than a throat. Besides that, I studied music from my childhood; thus, I know how to compose. I have imagination, ideas; so, I am a composer, and if the throat, if the tenor is tired, the composer, the musician is still ripe with vigour and strength. That is how I responded to numerous people who, with the best of intentions, were surprised that I continued to write for the theatre after my first setbacks.Footnote 73
An artist, reborn
Roger's reshaping of his career is much more extreme, in large part owing to the diary form and limited temporal boundaries of his memoirs. For a singer known primarily as the principal tenor in two Parisian lyric theatres, readers gain very little knowledge of his Parisian career from his Carnet. For Roger, his work and life in Paris are too mundane, too familiar, to motivate him to write. His journal transforms unabashedly into a travel diary with his trips to the British Isles in the late 1840s. Roger escapes the monotony of his contractual obligations at the Opéra (his responsibilities already inducing ennui by 1849) by focusing on the exoticism and escapism of foreign travel and showcasing his extraordinary success and reputation formed during his seven tours to German-speaking lands in the 1850s. The diary and travelogue form reflect his social class and privileged upbringing and permit Roger to demonstrate his education and intelligence through his astute observations about his contemporaries, his gracious manners, his ability to adapt to various performance situations (particularly linguistic, having learned his repertoire in German), and his participation in aristocratic circles.Footnote 74 Despite his star status in the French capital, Roger implies that artists do not enjoy the same position offstage as they do onstage: ‘once the curtain falls, the emotion ends, the artist no longer exists’.Footnote 75 The intensity of the tours – this ‘agitated life, these large halls, the new public each day, the singer's struggles with new scores’ – provides the tenor with inspiration as well as a more intimate and gratifying form of public recognition.Footnote 76 Whereas in Paris, when he is between tours, his entries betray frustration about his lukewarm reception and contested place in a repertoire considered beyond his vocal capabilities, when he is abroad Roger's artistry is warmly appreciated and celebrated. After a performance (in German) of Boieldieu's La Dame blanche, Roger writes: ‘The king, the prince of Prussia, the king of Württemberg, and the duke of Darmstadt came down to the theatre to compliment me. There was also the duchess of Leuchtenberg … and even the queen of Prussia.’Footnote 77
Roger's intimate connections with the aristocracy and the elite musical community, including frequent visits to Meyerbeer's home, are continually emphasised in long anecdotes about sumptuous meals and soirées; his experiences are a far cry from Duprez's account of his labour as a singer in Italy in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Roger thus establishes stark divisions in his text, between Paris and his travels abroad, between art as labour and art as leisure, between bourgeois and aristocratic publics, with the tenor obviously siding with the latter half of the binaries. His release from the French capital is almost always marked by a sigh of relief: ‘In leaving Paris, I am reborn, I become an artist again from the contract worker I had been. I am my own master. I am expected, I am wanted there where the train takes me.’Footnote 78 What the critics found utterly mundane in his memoirs – the minute details of his reception on tour, the ovations, his intimacy with the aristocracy and royalty (which inspired Charles Monselet to parody) – permits the tenor to establish his distinctive artistic identity and an alternative history of his professional career.Footnote 79 Roger clearly values his privileged position and connection with an aristocratic public who do not set a price on his artistic talent, and whose regular, devoted following (both as members of the audience and as hosts of salons and soirées) permits a relationship between singer and public that eludes him in commercial environments such as Paris. In his letter to Fiorentino in 1852, he writes warmly of the cultural environment in Berlin, saying ‘Here, more art and less commerce, and certainly no lawsuits, but rather a welcoming and enlightened court, a public thirsty for art's emotions and without taking sides in advance.’Footnote 80
The text cuts off rather abruptly after his 1858 tour, followed by short, fragmented entries and, finally, silence, which together mark the trauma of losing his right arm in a hunting accident in 1859 and his bitter career disappointments despite his mastery of a mechanical arm. Although he continued to sing in Paris (he briefly returned to the Opéra-Comique) and throughout Germany, the French provinces and even as far as St Petersburg, until his retirement from the stage in 1867, Roger's diary ends in 1861. His autobiographical amnesia, this traumatic gap in his diary until his final entry in 1878, was hardly accidental. His silence makes it hard to imagine the final two decades of his life as anything but dark and disappointing. The gentleman singer, once particularly appreciated for his good looks and sensitive use of gesture, was henceforth perceived as somehow grotesque. According to one critic, the public could not look past his mechanical arm,
the lorgnettes were all fixated … on the mechanical masterpiece that the unlucky one used to gesture. Roger's false arm rose, fell; but it resembled the mimicking of a sinister marionette, tethered by strings. We could no longer maintain any illusion; we suffered, we wanted to shout: Enough!Footnote 81
Roger was accepted as professeur de chant at the Conservatoire in 1868, although his contemporaries claimed he did not excel as a pedagogue. The artist died poor, leaving his widow, Fanny, with little besides his once-celebrated and respected name.Footnote 82 Because only snippets of his foreign tours made their way into the Parisian press (sometimes by way of clippings the tenor sent to Fiorentino), Roger's diary was the only significant testament to his career outside the French capital.Footnote 83 Its publication was undoubtedly the tenor's vindication of the past: ‘I love Art with passion; it was the cult of my life’, he wrote in the Carnet ’s final passage.Footnote 84 All the same, its potential to generate revenue for his impoverished family was certainly a strong motivation for its public distribution. The tenor's Carnet quickly found an avid readership, going through five editions within six months of its initial publication: Roger's posthumous triumph.
In praise of silence
What is most dreadful when we read these famous singers’ memoirs is to realise the extent to which these men – who are absolutely essential to composers in order to translate their thoughts – have such little foresight of great things, and how audacious their ignorance of them is, as they long only for immediate and personal success.Footnote 85
Years later, the critical response had not changed from Jullien's lengthy tirade published in 1881. In 1910 Arthur Pougin derided the autobiographers for neglecting to provide a history of the theatre and the works performed during the authors' era.Footnote 86 Critics expressed their anxiety about losing the information about operatic practices from previous generations, as the singers famous in the first half of the century fell silent and passed away. The absence of these voices was particularly poignant on the eve of the sound recording era. In 1880, recording technology was still in its infancy; the vestiges of singers’ voices remained confined to the memories of those who had heard them and to the written record. But what appears to be the critics’ fundamental misunderstanding of the autobiographical genre, that is, their criticism of the tenors’ primary focus on themselves rather than the artwork, is in fact symptomatic of late nineteenth-century attitudes towards singers. Many factors contributed to a shift in favour of the composer and the work, including (among others) changes in compositional style and practice, narrowing of the operatic repertory and commercial changes in the management of theatres.Footnote 87 Although singers lost nothing of their celebrity status, they became increasingly regarded as mere interpreters who translated the composer's etchings into embodied sound. The critics thus impatiently wait (in vain, in this case) for the singer to make himself properly translucent to get a better glimpse of the music and the milieu in which he worked.
The critics’ reaction perhaps also betrays frustration with the biographical industry more generally in the wake of increased interest in historiography. According to Ann Jefferson, the practice of writing collective biographies in France in the early nineteenth century was keenly bound up with the concern for writing history and creating cultural monuments; by the Second Empire, however, biography became a phenomenon of spectacle, celebrity and mass culture.Footnote 88 The fallout after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 provoked a particularly intense resurgence of interest in the nation's history and cultural treasures. Journalist and critic Paul d'Estrée even suggested the burgeoning field of autobiographical writing was a reaction to the event, as individuals sought to write their own histories.Footnote 89 The critics and historians who turned to these writings to construct their national histories of cultural monuments found themselves faced with two obstacles: the singer's imposing presence as significant cultural actor, and the uncomfortable awareness of musical practice as sometimes rather banal.
Yet the mundane matters so derided by the critics might usefully inform our reading of autobiographical writings by singers, and our approach to the study of historical performers whose art has left us with a collection of noisy absences. Increased attention to the mundane, to those passages between highlights, provides a different kind of history, a different sense of their careers and the ways singers as individuals and as a class influenced musical culture. Duprez thus reveals the imposing pedagogical presence of one of the most important tenors of the nineteenth century and how young students were launched onto the stage; he informs us about his school for training singers and the stereotypes singers faced regarding their relationship to composition. Roger describes the performing contexts of singers on tour, the circulation of operas and their performance conditions, including their translation and adaptation, which play a significant role in the formation of operatic canons; his memoirs demonstrate the influence of a singer's class on his reception and his mobility, and contemporary attitudes towards performers and disability. Most important, however, is how the tenors reconstructed their artistic identities beyond the voice, locating their most profound contributions in their exchanges and actions within the musical community.
Reading these autobiographies should extend beyond the practice of what theatre historian Jacky Bratton terms ‘factual trawling’, as many current and past historians have treated such sources that do not meet their expectations regarding content or factual authenticity. Factual trawling, or the selection of certain facts and events from an autobiography and carefully corroborating the evidence with other sources, is essentially a re-telling of the subject's story. Bratton, through feminist theorists such as Jane Marcus, argues that this re-telling produces a kind of displacement of the author to object, as the original teller becomes the told.Footnote 90 Historian Maggie Gale thus suggests that the reading of theatre autobiographies should involve a ‘collaborative/interpretative approach spanning our own expectations, the expectations of the original readers, the intentions of the author, and an understanding of the cultural context from which the writing derived’.Footnote 91 Bratton goes even further, arguing that autobiographies are a kind of historiography, producing an alternative history of the theatre through its actors, not as objects, but rather as those who ‘do’.Footnote 92 In particular, the telling of anecdotes, which are the building blocks of the theatre memoir, can be more productively viewed as ‘a process of identity-formation that extends beyond individuals to the group or community to which they belong’;Footnote 93 in other words, a means of situating the performer within a community, within a set of performance traditions, and within theatre history. Read in these ways, Duprez's memoirs reveal the neglected history of singers as integral cultural actors offstage, receiving and transmitting their artistic knowledge through myriad forms of cultural exchange. Roger's diary brims with nostalgia for an idealised period of court and royal theatres where performers were the servants of the aristocracy, revealing the struggles many singers faced regarding their relationship with and connection to the public within an increasingly commercial industry.
Spoken for by others in reviews, biographies and theatre histories, and unable to record their operatic voices, singers survived, to borrow a phrase from Mary Ann Smart, in ventriloquistic detritus for much of the century.Footnote 94 The moment singers took up the pen is telling, as it coincides with their dislodgment in the operatic marketplace from creator and collaborator to interpreter. The tenors’ memoirs demonstrate a strong preoccupation with revising their public images and the histories that had been written about them. They define their place within their milieu and construct their artistic identity through their actions and relationships. Through the quotidian complications of professional careers, through their performance of absence, they mark their presence.
