Mimomania: Music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera

Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages

  Smart, Mary Ann ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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References (359)

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall in cooperation with Victor Lange, vol. 9 of Goethe's Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 74.
2. As a theater director, Goethe was famous for his exigence and his commitment to reform. Marvin Carlson has described him as a "puppet master" who reduced his actors to "automata of the ideal and the beautiful" (Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theater [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978], 307).
3. The idea came up in a conversation with Cosima, prompted by Richard's fears about the staging of Parsifal (23 September 1878, in Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 1878-1883, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], 2 : 154). For a discussion of this remark in the context of Wagnerian theory
4. see chapter 6.
5. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (1888; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 665.
6. It is not, however, particularly rare in Verdi's operas generally.
7. See David Rosen, introduction to Giuseppe Verdi: Un ballo in maschera, ed. David Rosen and Marinella Pigozzi, Collana di disposizioni sceniche ridotta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrerro (Milan: Ricordi, 2002), 79-81 and 86-88, for a discussion of the prevalence of choreographic entrance music in that opera.
8. Onthe musical signs for Violetta's illness, see Arthur Groos,"T.B. Sheets: Love and Disease in La traviata," Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3 (1995): 233-60;
9. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
10. A suspicion of word painting is too widespread in the musicological literature to require citations, but one recent case is particularly interesting. In the final chapter of his Music and Renaissance Magic ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 229-46), Gary Tomlinson approaches Monteverdi's pictorialisms as a phase that the composer would transcend in maturity.
11. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
12. Abbate, "Opera, or the Envoicing of Women," in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225-58.
13. Le Mercure de France, April 1778, quoted in Marian Smith, "Ballet, Opera, and Staging Practices at the Paris Opéra," in La realizzazione scenica dello spettacolo verdiano, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli and Fabrizio Della Seta (Parma: Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 1996), 279.
14. On the staging manual for La Favorite
15. see Roger Parker, Leonora's Last Act: Essays inVerdian Discourse (Princeton: PrincetonUnversity Press, 1997), 135.
16. Cicero's views on gesture are laid out mainly in his De oratore (c.55 b.c.) and are amplified a few years later in his De partitione oratoria;
17. here De oratore, bk. 3, chap. 59, in Cicero on Oratory and Orators, trans. J. S. Watson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 258.
18. De institutio oratoria, bk. 11, § 88 and 89.
19. Quoted in Macdonald Critchley, The Language of Gesture (London: Edward Arnold, 1939), 96-97;
20. translation modified.
21. The classical belief in the universality of gesture was probably articulated most forcefully (and in the most fanciful terms) by Lucian (a.d. 120), who in his dialogue "On Pantomime" argues that dance has existed in all cultures back to the most ancient times;
22. he also tells of a visitor to Nero's court who saw pantomime performed and asked to take it back to his own country because it would be of such great use in communicating with neighbors who did not speak the same language (H.W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, trans., The Works of Lucian of Samosata [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905]; 2 :238-63).
23. Translated as Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (New York: Garland, 1976);
24. Ripa's representation of Theory is discussed by Barbara Johnson in The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
25. Michael Baxandall has shown that the principles of Cicero and Quintilian were disseminated before the production of the first actual dictionaries of gesture through advice to priests on how to deliver sermons effectively and in gestural lexicons used by monks who had taken a vow of silence (Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 61-65).
26. Conférence de M. Le Brun sur l'expression générale et particulière (Paris: Picart, 1698), reprinted in Charles Le Brun, L'Expression des passions et autres conférences: correspondance (n.p.: Editions Dédale, Maisonneuve, et Larose, 1994).
27. See Roger Savage and Matteo Sansone, "Il corago and the staging of early opera: four chapters from an anonymous treatise circa 1630," Early Music 17, no. 4 (November 1989): 495-511.
28. Il corago counsels that all members of the chorus should execute the same gesture at the same time "because it is a very disorderly thing to see someone move a hand upward and another downward, someone finish a gesture before another has started, and so on" (504). For an overview of codified gesture in relation to opera
29. see Nicholas Solomon, "Signs of the times: a look at late 18th-century gesturing," Early Music 17, no. 4 (November 1989): 551-62.
30. A view of the practical aspects of operatic staging during the period is provided by Antonia Banducci, "Staging a tragédie en musique: A 1748 promptbook for Campra's Tancrède," Early Music 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 181-90.
31. Johann Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik; translated by H. Jensen as Idées sur le geste et l'action théâtrale, 2 vols. (Paris: Barrois l'aîné, 1788-1789).
32. Engel's work also appeared in an English translation by Henry Siddons, as Practical Illustration of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, adapted to the English drama (London: Richard Philips, 1807), and in Italian as Lettere intorno alla mimica, trans. Giovanni Rasori (Milan: Batelli e Fanfani, 1820).
33. Excerpts from Rasori's translation appeared in the October 1818 issue of the influential Milanese jour-nal Il conciliatore. On the reception of Engel, see Luciano Bottoni, "L'ombra allo specchio: Diacronia di una ricezione," in Il sogno del coreodramma: Salvatore Viganò, poeta muto, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Reggio Emila: Mulino, 1984), 126-29.
34. Almost as influential a few decades later was Gilbert Austin's Chironomia, or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (1806), ed. Mary Margaret Robb and Lester Thonsen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966).
35. These sytems of codification are summarized and discussed in Dene Barnett (with the assistance of Jeanette Massy-Westropp), The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of Eighteenth-Century Acting (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987).
36. François Riccoboni, L'Art du théâtre (Paris: C. F. Simon fils, 1750).
37. Engel, Practical Illustration, 36 and 74.
38. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, rev. ed.(1976; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 64.
39. Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: A Practical and Historical Treatise on the Ballet, Dancing, and Pantomime with a complete theory of the art of dancing: intended as well for the instruction of amateurs as the use of professional persons (1828; reprint, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons, n.d.). Blasis was a dancer at the King's Theatre in London and brother of Virginie Blasis, a singer at the Théâtre-Italien.
40. Paris: A. Leroux, 1826.
41. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1876.
42. On the degree to which classical ideas of appropriate gesture and the signification of gesture persisted into the nineteenth century, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
43. Susan Rutherford, "'Unnatural gesticulation' or 'un geste sublime'? Dramatic Performance in Opera," Arcadia 36, no. 2 (2001): 2-21.
44. Quoted in Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds., Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques and Practices of the Great Actors of all times as told in their own words (New York: Crown, n.d.), 214.
45. Albert Aiglun de Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste (Grenoble: H. Falque et F. Perrin, 1900).
46. Alfred Kerr, Der Tag, 8 February 1905, quoted in Henry Marx, "Madeleine: Two Reviews," The Drama Review 22, no. 2 [1978]: 27-31.
47. This question of sincerity and emotional engagement, first broached in Denis Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773/1830), had become newly controversial around 1870.
48. Among the spate of pamphlets arguing one or the other side, the most influential was William Archer, Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London: Longmans, Green, 1888).
49. On the voyeuristic impulse in Charcot
50. see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 147-55.
51. The first of these approaches has been argued by Susan McClary ("Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of the Madwoman," in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, Sexuality [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 80-111);
52. The second is the basis of much feminist performance theory, such as the discussions of the "body artists" Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman, and Angelika Festa by Peggy Phelan and Rebecca Schneider (Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance [London: Routledge, 1993];
53. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance [London: Routledge, 1997]).
54. Laura Mulvey famously accounted for film's objectification of women as enabled by a combination of suture and the framing power of the camera ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other Pleasures [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989], 14-26).
55. The concepts of visual framing and objectification of course go back much further, invented perhaps by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972).
56. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (New York: Random House, 1967), originally published as Der Fall Wagner (1888);
57. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
58. For a classic example of opera criticism based on the competition between voice and objectified body
59. see McClary, "Excess and Frame." For an overview of approaches to the analysis of gender in opera, see my introduction to Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
60. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
61. This formulation of voice-over owes much to Silverman's Acoustic Mirror (see especially the chap. "Body Talk," 42-71).
62. The concept has been separately developed by Michel Chion, who dubs these all-powerful voices emanating from unseen sources "acousmêtres"(Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman [NewYork: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994]).
63. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997).
64. This idea seems to have been developed almost simultaneously by several writers: Diamond's notion of "mimicry" has much in common with Rebecca Schneider's "explosive literality" and Peggy Phelan's preference for "metonymy" over metaphor (see note 34).
65. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142.
66. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 79.
67. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama [1851], trans. William Ashton Ellis (1893; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 57.
68. Wagner, "Reminiscences of Auber," first published in the Musikalische Wochenblatt,November 1871, now in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 5 :37-55.
69. An earlier effort, nominally devoted to the music of Halévy but also commenting extensively on Auber, offers a very similar verdict but makes its point in far more technical, less vividly metaphorical terms ("Halévy and La Reine de Chypre," in Wagner's Prose Works, 8:175-200).
70. 17 April 1878, in Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 1878-1883, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], 2 : 63).
71. Wagner, "Reminiscences," 48.
72. See, for example, Wagner, Opera and Drama, 317-24 and 363-69.
73. Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out that Wagner's criticisms of French opera (as embodied in Meyerbeer) were based in a "concept of drama which is by no means universal. Wagner presupposed the dialogue principle-that is, the notion that the substance of a drama resides in a conflict that is carried out in exchanges of words" (Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 126).
74. Wagner makes this contrast explicit when he compliments Auber for reproducing every contrast of his subject in La Muette de Portici, from the "picturesque" "music-paintings" to "the most admirable theatric Plastique" ("Reminiscences," 40).
75. For an account of this theatrical craze
76. see Sarah Hibberd, "Magnetism, Muteness, Magic: Spectacle and the Parisian Lyric Stage c.1830" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southampton, 1998).
77. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, rev. ed.(1976; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 56-80.
78. The libretto for Carafa's opera was by C. F. J. B. Moreau de Commagny and A. M. Lafortelle;
79. for a survey of official views and reception of the Carafa work
80. see Jane Fulcher, The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25-28.
81. This formulation of opera as composed of "three systems"-verbal, musical, and visual-is Pierluigi Petrobelli's, from his "Music in the Theater (apropos of Aida, Act III)," in Music in the Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 113-26.
82. For example, Anselm Gerhard begins his influential study of the genre with a discussion of the ways grand opéra reflected urban life and the bourgeois self back to spectators in reassuring ways (Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 1-40).
83. On voyeurism at the Opéra, see Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991);
84. Marian Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 69-72.
85. See also Maribeth Clark, "Understanding French grand opéra through Dance" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998);
86. Lynn Garafola, "The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet," Dance Research Journal 17, no. 2 and 18, no. 1 (1985-1986): 35-40;
87. Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 49-112.
88. A review of the premiere in the Parisian journal La Pandore (3 March 1828) is less enthusiastic about this use of Fenella as a foil to Masaniello and the political plot.
89. Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 145.
90. Fenella's affliction might even be placed in a yet broader cultural arena, as a manifestation of the pattern Barbara Johnson has traced through texts as disparate as Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn ("still unravished bride of quietness")
91. Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano, in which female muteness is treated as a condition for artistic creation (Johnson, "Muteness Envy," in Human, All Too Human [Essays from the English Institute], ed. Diana Fuss [New York and London: Routledge, 1996], 131-48).
92. For an exploration of the national associations of vocal ornament and muteness during this period
93. see my "Roles, Reputations, Shadows: Singers at the Opéra, 1828-49," inCambridge Companion to Grand Opéra, ed.David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108-28.
94. F-Pan, AJ XIII 135, in Schneider and Wild, Muette, 96.
95. On the various levels of censorship during the Restoration, see Victor Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théâtrale en France (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862);
96. Odile Krakovitch, Hugo censuré: la liberté au théâtre au xixe siècle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985);
97. Fulcher, Nation's Image, 28-32.
98. report of Jury littéraire, 24 October 1825, in F-Pan, Procès verbaux O3 1724 [II], in Schneider and Wild, Muette, 195-96).
99. On the theatrical dimension of Pinel's so-called traitements morales
100. see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 64-119.
101. Fenella herself is described as bordering on madness in the final tableau of act 1.
102. The analyse-programme (or plot synopsis) prepared for the first production directs that during this scene: "Avant de fuir, la soeur de Masaniello donne des signes de l'égarement, la douleur et le dépit lui ôte la raison; c'est en donnant des signes de folie qu'elle disparaît à travers la colonnade" (analyseprogramme; F-Po, Dossier de l'oeuvre La Muette de Portici).
103. The final version of the libretto also specifies that Fenella should regard Alphonse "avec égarement" at this point.
104. This affirmative view of hysteria within feminist theory originated with Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, The Newly-Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
105. More recent explorations of the eloquence of the hysteric within the specific context of nineteenthcentury France include Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hyste-ria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);
106. Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
107. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
108. The explosion of publications launched by the work of the abbé de l'Epée toward the end of the eighteenth century continued unabated in the first half of the nineteenth, as did the debates in France about whether deaf-mutes should be trained in speech or in sign language.
109. For an overview of early-nineteenth-century views on the education of deaf-mutes
110. see Michel Poizat, La Voix sourde: la société face à la surdité (Paris: Métailié, 1996).
111. "Quant à Mlle Noblet, la seule qui ne parle pas dans cet opéra, c'est elle qui se fait le mieux entendre" (Le Corsaire, 2 March 1828).
112. "[J]'écrivis bien sous la dictée des gestes de Mlle Noblet" (Le Corsaire, 5 March 1828).
113. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, à l'usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, in Diderot Studies, ed. Paul Hugo Meyer (Geneva: Droz, 1965), 7 :52-53.
114. As he liked to sum it up to his perplexed neighbors in the balcony, "chacun avait sa façon d'écouter, et que la mienne était de me boucher les oreilles pour mieux entendre."
115. "Pour le rôle de Fenella, sa pantomime se trouve réglée dans la partition: ce n'est que là qu'on pouvait l'indiquer, d'après la brochure" (Solomé, "Indications générales et observations pour la mise en scène de La Muette de Portici," in The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières, ed. H. Robert Cohen [Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991], 24).
116. On the reticence of the livret regarding Fenella
117. see Cormac Newark, "Staging Grand Opéra: History and the Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1999).
118. On changes in ballet notation from the demise of Feuillet notation in the late eighteenth century to the primacy of verbal choreographic scenarios
119. see Susan Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 10-11.
120. Johann Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (1783), trans. Henry Siddons as Practical Illustration of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, adapted to the English drama (London: Richard Philips, 1807), 29-30.
121. Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: A Practical and Historical Treatise on the Ballet, Dancing, and Pantomime with a complete theory of the art of dancing: intended as well for the instruction of amateurs as the use of professional persons (1828; reprint, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons, n.d.), 134.
122. Gioia was active as a dancer and choreographer in Naples, Vienna, and Milan from about 1789 to 1825.
123. Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 70-75.
124. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 18.
125. Gilbert Austin, Chironomia, or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, ed. Mary Margaret Robb and Lester Thonsen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966).
126. For a discussion of the surviving scores for mélodrame
127. see Emilio Sala, L'opera senza canto: il mélo romantico e l'invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice: Marsilio, 1995).
128. On several pages in the autograph score Auber even canceled stage directions and recopied them, positioned more accurately above the music to which they correspond (F-Pn, M.S. 2775).
129. See Anne Dhu Shapiro, "Action Music in Pantomime and Melodrama (1730-1913)," American Music 2, no, 4 (1984): 49-72;
130. Sala, L'opera senza canto, 159.
131. Anne Dhu Shapiro, "Action Music in Pantomime and Melodrama (1730-1913)," American Music 2, no, 4 (1984):49-72;
132. Sala, L'opera senza canto, 159.
133. Camille is described as "très agitée, et jette des regards effrayés sur tout ce qui l'environne" (quoted in Sala, L'opera senza canto, 159).
134. F-Po; Mat.19e La Muette de Portici, no. 359 (partie de ballet).
135. The targeting of these closed dance forms for cuts suggests a further pragmatic dimension, the desire to make the role of Fenella accessible to actresses as well as dancers: the staging manual specifies that, although the part was played in large cities by a ballerina, smaller theaters that lacked a ballet company might cast an actress (Solomé, "Indications générales," 3).
136. The note goes on to advise that "actresses who had played the roles of the mute in L'Abbé de l'Épée or of Rose in Les Deux Mots [both popular plays featuring mute characters] would be well suited to play Fenella."
137. Hector Berlioz, Revue et gazette musicale, 22 October 1837 and an anonymous writer in La Gazette musicale de Paris, 21 September 1834, quoted in Marian Smith, "About the House," in Reading Critics Reading: French Opera and Ballet Criticism, 1789-1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 224 amd 222.
138. On the other hand, Ivor Guest quotes Berlioz lauding the performance of Fanny Elssler in an 1837 performance as Fenella specifically for the timing of her gestures to the rhythm of the music "in the Italian manner" (Journal des Débats, 27 September 1837, quoted in Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris [London: Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1966], 165).
139. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 218.
140. Sala, L'opera senza canto, 147.
141. Ann Daly, "Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze," in Gender and Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 239-59;
142. Susan Manning, "The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze: Feminist Critiques of Early Modern Dance," in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 153-66.
143. Le Corsaire (2 March 1828) reports that the sets "toutes sans exception, ont étés copiées sur les lieux, et . . . ont presque la vérité des toiles du Diorama."
144. La Pandore (1 March 1828) mentions that the modeling was on Sanquirico rather than on nature.
145. La Pandore (1 March 1828);
146. letter of 3 March 1828, quoted in Nicole Wild, Décors et costumes du xixe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987).
147. Fulcher, Nation's Image, 17.
148. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1974; New York: Norton, 1992), 174-76, quoted in Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 149.
149. Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11-17.
150. The chapter's epigraph from Virginia Woolf ("On Being Ill," in Collected Essays [New York: Harcourt, 1967], 4:194) is quoted in Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
151. For a fuller exploration of conventional melodic figures in this repertoire, see my "In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings," Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 1 (2000):25-68.
152. The word "filosofia" is first mentioned in connection with Bellini in a letter the composer wrote to Francesco Florimo during the rehearsals for the revised version of Bianca e Fernando in 1828.
153. Bellini quotes the first violinist of the Genoa orchestra, who complimented his music as "well reasoned, full of philosophy" (letter to Florimo, 2 April 1828, in Carmelo Neri, Lettere di Vincenzo Bellini [1819-1835] [Palermo: Publisicula Editrice, 1991], 41 [no. 23];
154. Also published in Luisa Cambi, Bellini epistolario [Turin: Mondadori, 1943], 70-72).
155. Another prominent mention of the word came from Rossini, who, in an encounter Bellini never quite forgot, damned Il pirata with faint praise, as "full of great feeling, but taken to such a pitch of philosophical reasoning that the music somehow lacked brilliance" (as recounted by Bellini in a letter to Vincenzo Ferlito, 28 Aug 1829, in Neri, Lettere, 123 [no. 77], quoted in John Rosselli, The Life of Bellini [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 131).
156. Heinrich Heine, "Florentinische Nächte," in Der Salon (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1840), 2:36.
157. Marcello Conati has shown that as late as the 1847 premiere of Verdi's Macbeth critics and audiences still thought Italian theaters deficient in their techniques for bringing off fantastic effects and believed that the Italian spirit was inherently unsuited to representing the supernatural (Conati, "Aspects of the Production of Macbeth," in Verdi's Macbeth: A Sourcebook, ed. David Rosen and Andrew Porter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 231-38).
158. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (NewYork: Methuen, 1986), 158.
159. She continues, "like the characters impressed on them, the faces themselves seem to be halfway toward becoming a language, a code, a limited system of differentials that could cast a broad net of reference and interrelation.
160. Since faces in these novels are said to record history and every social relation, such a language could have a great deal to say.
161. 'Halfway toward' becoming a language is exactly the locus of tyrranny, however."
162. R. C. Maturin, Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand (London: John Murray, 1816).
163. Bellini and Romani based their libretto on a French adaptation of Maturin's play, I. J. S. Taylor's Bertram, ou le pirate (1822).
164. Parenthetical references in the text or notes are to act and scene (or act, scene, and line).
165. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Imitation," in Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Chez la veuve Duchesne, 1768), 250.
166. Peter Lichtenthal, "Pittura musicale," in Dictionnaire de musique, trans. Dominique Mondo (Paris: Troupenas, 1839), 181.
167. Bonifazio Asioli, Il maestro di composizione, ossia seguito del trattato d'armonia (Milan: Ricordi, n.d.), vol. 1, art. 6, 42.
168. It is an indication of Asioli's influence that the young Verdi was schooled on at least one of his composition treatises, L'allievo al clavicembalo
169. RobertaMontemorra Marvin, "Aspects ofTempo in Verdi's Early and Middle-Period Italian Operas," in Verdi's Middle Period: Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 395-96)
170. Asioli, Il maestro di composizione, vol.3, art. 6, 81.
171. In his discussion of the relationships between verse meters and melody (Il maestro di composizione, vol. 3, art. 5, 50-51), Asioli cites several examples from Il pirata, as well as two passages from Bellini's Straniera.
172. Examples in the treatise as a whole are drawn in large numbers from works by Mozart, Paisiello, Marcello, Rossini, and even Meyerbeer (one);
173. oddly, Donizetti is completely excluded.
174. Jacques-Arsène Ancelot and Joseph-Xavier Boniface Saintine, Têtes rondes et cavaliers (Paris: J. N. Barba, 1833).
175. Respectively, I.vi and II.v. Frederick Burwick has pointed out that offstage sound effects were one of Victor Hugo's innovations, used to heighten suspense and expand the sphere of action beyond the stage.
176. Burwick also notes that Hugo "teases his audience with [references to] exterior places that cannot be seen" and that Hugo makes use of the offstage area "actively, not merely referentially": in Amy Robsart a character looks out of a window and comments on the weather, another throws a dagger out the open window.
177. Burwick connects this predilection for references to offstage and for the placement of important events offstage with a desire to exploit a supernatural mental space: "Hugo is especially concerned with dramatizing the opposition of the practical and the imaginary, and his stage settings provide for the context between real and irreal"
178. Burwick, Illusion and the Drama [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991], 256 244).
179. More precisely, "ici quiconque vous verrait, vous prendrait pour la mariée" (I.xi).
180. "Avec égarement, et en promenant ses mains sur elle-même" (I.xiv).
181. "Cette femme! ce n'est donc pas moi? . . . moi, où suis-je donc? . . . c'est moi qui suis son épouse! Pourquoi suis-je près de vous, Mulgrave? Il y a donc deux Lucy! une pour vous, une pour lui!" (I.xiv).
182. The text of this scenario is reproduced in Pierluigi Petrobelli, "Bellini and Paisiello: Further Documents on the Birth of I puritani," in Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 179;
183. originally published as "Bellini e Paisiello: Altri documenti sulla nascita dei Puritani," in Il melodramma italiano dell'Ottocento: studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).
184. Following Jürgen Maehder, Anselm Gerhard links the prevalence of military effects in offstage music to the "perceptual expectations of an age shaken by incessant wars" (Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 202).
185. He asserts that all the earliest examples of such offstage effects concern military marches, as in opéras-comiques by Grétry and Monsigny, Giovanni Simone Mayr's Zamori (1804), and Spontini's Fernand Cortez (1809).
186. Maehder, "Banda sul palco: Variable Beseztungen in der Bühnenmusik der italienischen Opera des 19.Jahrunderts als Relikte alter Besetzungtraditionen," in Alte Musik als ästhetische Gegenwart: Bach, Händel, Schütz, ed. Dietrich Berke and Dorothee Hanemann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), 2:293-310.
187. The autograph score shows that Bellini in fact conceived the third act as just two numbers, entitled "Scena d'Arturo" and "Finale del Atto Terzo."
188. The engravers of the vocal score interpolated the heading "Recitativo e Duetto Arturo ed Elvira" between the two.
189. the facsimile of the autograph, ed. Philip Gossett (New York: Garland, 1983).
190. See, for example, Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 347-48, 405-8, and passim.
191. Libretto by Adolphe Nourrit;
192. music by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoffer.
193. Théophile Gautier, Les Beautés de l'opéra (Paris: Soulié, 1845).
194. See especially Wagner's early review "Bellini: Ein Wort zu seiner Zeit," originally published in the Riga Zuschauer in 1837, reprinted in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, eds., Vincenzo Bellini, Musik-Konzepte no. 46 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1985), 5-6.
195. "Der Name Véron wird ewig leben in den Annalen der Musik: er hat den Tempel der Göttin verschönert, aber sie selbst zur Tür hinausgeschmissen.
196. Nichts übertrifft den Luxus, der in der grossen Oper überhand genommen, und diese ist jetzt das Paradies der Harthörigen" (Heinrich Heine, "Über die französische Bühne," Vertraute Briefe an August Lewald [1837], quoted in Jürgen Maehder, "Historienmalerei und Grand opéra: Zur Raumvorstellung in den Bildern Géricaults und Delacroix' und auf der Bühne der Académie Royale de Musique," in Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater, ed. Sieghart Döhring and Arnold Jacobshagen [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1998], 258).
197. In fact, the libretto was a collaboration between Scribe and Emile Deschamps, the latter contributing mainly to revisions during autumn 1834 when Scribe was too busy to give them his full attention (Steven Huebner, "Les Huguenots," New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 1992], 2:765).
198. I puritani was first performed on 24 January 1835;
199. Les Huguenots received its premiere on 29 February 1836.
200. In his Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Gary Tomlinson argues that opera has always been a privileged site for the exploration of human relations with the divine and the supernatural.
201. However, when Tomlinson's ambitious rewriting of operatic history arrives at the nineteenth century, he prefers to focus on manifestations of psychic disruption such as mad scenes and the sleepwalking scene in Verdi's Macbeth, passing over more literal representations of the supernatural with little comment, perhaps because depictions of interior flight into an alternate reality fit better with his account of shifts in philosophical understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine.
202. It is tempting to wonder whether this gradual shift from a dramaturgy based on vision to one based on information conveyed by voices has anything to do with the fact that the opera's last two acts were universally received as masterworks by contemporary critics, while the first three were criticized as too long and uneventful.
203. For a brief overview of this critical bias, see Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998), 186.
204. The stage directions in the vocal score specify that nothing is visible except the light of torches and the flash of arms: "On voit briller les torches et les fers des lances. Les meurtriers viennent de pénétrer dans l'église, dont ils ont achevé de briser les vitraux" (Giacomo Meyerbeer, Les Huguenots [Paris: Benoit aîné, n.d.], 432).
205. The livret de mise en scène directs that "the hymns of the Protestant virgins being massacred are heard in the distance, off-stage" (Luigi Palianti, "Quelques Indications/Sur/La mise en scène/Les Huguenots/Grand Opéraencinq actes/Paroles de Mr. Scribe/Musique de Mr. Meyerbeer," in The Original Staging Manuals for Ten Parisian Operatic Premières, 1824-1843, ed. H. Robert Cohen [Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1998], 167).
206. The scenic setting given in the livret for the beginning of Act V calls for a layered set of flats to facilitate this offstage effect: "Sumptuous palace, divided into two levels and halflit in the middleground. . . . When the Seigneurs rush in crying for vengeance, a backdrop is lowered between the first and second flats;
207. It shows the interior of a Protestant church at night; this is for the scene of the grand trio" (165).
208. The title page of this manuscript version of the livret, preserved in the collections of the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, announces that the manuscript is a copy of the version of the livret de mise en scène that was published by the firm of Duverger in 1836. However, Matthias Brzoska suggests that the massacre is not totally invisible but can be glimpsed at the back of the stage throughout the scene, with the effect that the audience feels the massacre advancing on them, culminating in the final scene of the act, where we, along with Valentine and Raoul, are under direct attack by the raging Catholics (the set design reproduced by Gerhard seems to support this).
209. Following Brzoska, Gerhard also approaches this scene in primarily visual terms, pointing out its reliance on "dissolves" and "montage" and "dubbing" effects to illustrate the acceleration of operatic pace and increasing reliance on musical and scenic techniques that convey a sense of simultaneous action on several levels, a frenzied pace that Gerhard sees as reflecting the increased urgency of Parisian life in the mid nineteenth century (Matthias Brzoska, "Historisches Bewusstsein und musikalische Zeitgestaltung," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 45, no. 1 [1988]:60-63;
210. Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 198-99.
211. "[S]'incarne toute pensée, et tout verbe se fait chair" (Camille Bellaigue, Portraits et silhouettes de musiciens [Paris: Librairie Charles Delagrave, 1896], 317).
212. Elsewhere, she writes that "[Scribe's] social awareness is a product of deliberate calculation, and this attitude caused him to change with the time and the regime and in turn caused his enemies to accuse him of having no principles at all" (Pendle, Eugène Scribe and French Opera of the Nineteenth Century [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979], 397 5.
213. Gerhard supports this view by quoting an entry in the margins of Scribe's personal ledgers for 1830, "There has been a great revolution. I neither deplore nor approve its causes.
214. I have never concerned myself with politics but only with literature, and it is from that standpoint alone that I shall examine the consequences of a change which may do me more harm than good" (F-Pn, n.a.f. 22573, fol.53, quoted in Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 126).
215. Walter also notes that, beginning with Madame de Staël's Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818), it became common to associate the Huguenots' battle for religious freedom in the sixteenth century (which was also a popular uprising, in a way) with the Revolution's struggle for political freedom (Walter, Huguenotten-Studien [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987], 25-60).
216. "Avez-vous rejeté toute chaîne mortelle, tout espoir d'ici-bas? Et la foi seulement dans vos coeurs survit-elle?" (Meyerbeer, Les Huguenots, 429-32).
217. After reading Scribe's first prose draft for the work in 1832, Meyerbeer wrote to his librettist begging him "not to forget that this work is, after all, to be performed in a Catholic country" (F-Pn, n.a.f. 22502, fol.65v, quoted in Jean Mongrédien, "Aux sources du livret des Huguenots: la collaboration entre Scribe et Meyerbeer," in Giacomo Meyerbeer-Musik als Welterfahrung: Heinz Becker zum 70.Geburtstag, ed. Sieghart Döhring and Jürgen Schläder [Munich: Ricordi, 1995], 161).
218. In fact, the opera was banned by the censors in Berlin on religious grounds, and in several other German cities its libretto had to be rewritten, appearing as Anglikaner und Puritaner in Munich and as Die Ghibellinen vor Pisa in Kassel (Huebner, "Les Huguenots," 2:765;)
219. Heinz and Gudrun Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters [Portland, Or.: Amadeus Press, 1989], 12).
220. Meyerbeer himself was sensitive to another aspect of the opera's religious content.
221. In 1837 he wrote to Gottfried Weber, the editor of the journal Cäcilia, defending himself against charges of blasphemy for using a Lutheran chorale in a stage work.
222. He asserted, "the chorale is always treated in a severe and ecclesiastical style, as a contrast to the secular music;
223. it is always heard as an emanation from a better world, as a symbol of faith and hope, and always as a rallying call at times of danger or in moments of the highest exaltation. . . . When a hymn is treated like that, it is my belief that it deserves to be called a consecration rather than desecration" (letter of 20 October 1837; Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1960-1985], 3:72, quoted in Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 209).
224. In Opera and Drama Wagner maligns Meyerbeer for demanding from Scribe librettos that are "a monstrous piebald, historico-romantic, diabolicoreligious, fanatico-libidinous, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-criminal, autolycosentimental dramatic hotch-potch, therein to find material for a curious chimeric music" (Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 94).
225. Becker calls the role "a burning example of a politically engaged music" ("'. . . der Marcel von Meyerbeer': Anmerkungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Huguenotten," in Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1979-80 [Berlin: Merseburger, 1981], 100).
226. One dissenting opinion comes from Gerhard (Urbanization of Opera, 173), who argues that Marcel exists only in relation to Raoul, as a mouthpiece for Raoul's Protestant upbringing.
227. A copy of the plan with detailed marginal comments from Meyerbeer is preserved in the Scribe papers at the Bibliothèquenationale;
228. Mongrédientranscribes Meyerbeer's comments in full in "Aux sources du livret."
229. In the course of the 1834 revisions Meyerbeer added a monologue for Marcel in Act III that had to be cut just before the first performance because of the excessive length of the act.
230. The discarded monologue is discussed in Sieghart Döhring, "Der andere Choral: Zur Dramaturgie von Marcels Monolog aus Les Huguenots," in Giacomo Meyerbeer-Musik als Welterfahrung, 39-61.
231. Meyerbeer wrote to his wife a few months before the opera's premiere that "Marcel's role is worth more than all the other music I have written in my life, including Robert [le diable]. Whether he will be understood, I am not sure. I fear that at first probably not" (letter of 15 September 1835; Briefwechsel, 2:480, quoted in Becker, "Marcel von Meyerbeer," 80).
232. Much of Meyerbeer's dissatisfaction with Scribe's first version of the libretto focused on the depiction of Marcel.
233. As Becker has shown, Meyerbeer took the libretto with him to Italy, where he enlisted his former collaborator Gaetano Rossi to help with revisions, while apparently trying to keep Rossi's intervention a secret from Scribe.
234. During this period he wrote to Scribe complaining that the conception of Marcel did not correspond to the idea of the character as he had imagined it, and warning Scribe that he had rewritten the part substantially according to his musical needs (letter of 2 July 1834; Briefwechsel, 2:376-77, quoted in Becker, "Marcel von Meyerbeer," 82 and 84).
235. The chorale is often lauded both for the continuity it provides between widely separated musical numbers and for its invocation of a "characteristic" style that resonates with Victor Hugo's contemporary appeals for the introduction of couleur locale into drama.
236. For a sustained discussion of the opera's characteristic elements in light of Victor Hugo's Romantic aesthetics, see Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 162-70.
237. The Act IV romance was probably cut at a very late stage but appears as an appendix piece in some vocal scores.
238. Mongrédien, "Aux sources du livret," 159.
239. Becker, "Marcel von Meyerbeer," 88 and 90.
240. Steven Huebner, "Italianate Duets in Meyerbeer's Grand Operas," Journal of Musicological Research 8 (1989):229-34.
241. Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 177.
242. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
243. Gerhard sees Raoul as similarly passive, grouping him among the irresolute and indecisive tenor heroes new to grand opéra from Rossini's Guillaume Tell on.
244. While there may some truth in this, Raoul does sing two fullscale arias compared to (usually) none for Valentine.
245. It is interesting in this context that the opera's second act alone, with its ornate aria for Marguerite, was allowed to remain in a conventional mold.
246. One effect of this decision is to present Marguerite's pleasure-loving court at Chenonceaux as a foil for the "real" world of Paris, the setting for the last three acts, where honorable duels could turn into ambushs and bloody massacres could be plotted with the participation of the clergy (as in the "Bénédiction des poignards" in Act IV).
247. According to the livret de mise en scène, Valentine is also clearly visible (but veiled) for an extended period in the previous scene (scene iii)
248. Palianti, "Quelques Indications," 137
249. Margaret Olin, "Gaze," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 212.
250. Moving beyond Les Huguenots itself, the opening scene ofVerdi's La traviata suggests another way that Meyerbeer could have given the scene a double focus, split between the energy of the party scene and a more intimate glimpse of Valentine, parallel to the brief duet for Violetta and Alfredo that Verdi inserts into his party scene.
251. This situation is common enough in French opera that James Hepokoski has given this type of aria the label of the "first glimpse" romance.
252. Later examples occur in Donizetti's La Favorite ("Un ange, une femme inconnue")
253. Verdi's Don Carlos ("Je l'ai vue, et dans son sourire")
254. Luisa Miller ("Lo vidi, e'l primo palpito")
255. Puccini's Manon Lescaut ("Donna non vidi mai")
256. Hepokoski, "Ottocento Opera as Cultural Drama," in Verdi's Middle Period, 1849-1859: Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 180-81.
257. The livret for Les Huguenots, like most of the livrets de mise en scène published in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, appears under the name of Luigi Palianti.
258. However, as H. Robert Cohen has shown, Palianti should probably be thought of more as a collaborator on a staging prepared by a whole team at the Opéra than as sole author.
259. As Cohen puts it, "it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to identify the 'author' of a given mise en scène, for this responsibility appears to have varied from theatre to theatre.
260. In one opera house, the theatre director may have been responsible, in another, a régisseur, and in yet another, an actor" (Cohen, ed., The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières [Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991], xix).
261. Palianti, "Quelques Indications," 137.
262. Parenthetical page citations are to this staging manual.
263. The difference may result simply from the fact that many scenes in the last two acts are simpler and more intimate, and so require less in the way of traffic direction.
264. I am grateful to John Roberts for this information about the scenario.
265. Gerhard, Urbanization of Opera, 184-93.
266. Roger Parker has suggested something similar about disagreements between Verdi and the authors of the staging manuals for his middle-period operas.
267. The author of the livret for Les Vêpres siciliennes, for example, often appears to be more conservative than Verdi, struggling to carve out static set pieces in the midst of numbers that deliberately resist patterned, predictable alternations of "static" and "kinetic" (Parker, "Reading the livrets, or the Chimera of 'Authentic' Staging," in Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 134-35).
268. The opera was originally commissioned by the playwright often considered the inventor of the classic mélodrame, René-Guilbert de Pixérécourt, in his position as director of the Opéra-Comique.
269. After various delays, the project was transferred to the Opéra and revised substantially (principally by the reduction of the comic role of Raimbaut and the addition of a ballet) before being premiered there in 1831.
270. Hepokoski points to connections with Anna's "Al dolce guidami" from Donizetti's Anna Bolena (actually completed before Robert, in 1830)
271. and Marie's "Il faut partir" from his Fille du régiment (1840)
272. Hepokoski, "Genre and Content in Mid-CenturyVerdi: 'Addio, del passato' [La traviata,Act III]," Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 3 [1989]:260-61).
273. Verdians have perceived echoes of Isabelle's refrain in almost every number from La traviata.
274. Already in 1859, Abramo Basevi traced a line of influence between the fortissimo declamation of the third refrain in Isabelle's cavatine and Violetta's Act II outburst "Amami, Alfredo."
275. More recently, Julian Budden has adduced Isabelle's cavatine as a model for the slow movement of Violetta's Act I aria ("Ah! fors'è lui"), pointing especially to the way both arias sustain a pregnant E natural for a full measure before releasing into the F that begins the refrain (Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi [Florence: Tofani, 1859], 236, quoted in Hepokoski, "Genre and Content," 260;)
276. Budden, The Operas of Verdi [London: Cassel, 1978], 2:134.
277. Verdi probably knew Robert le diable well already by 1834, when he was involved with a performance at Milan's Teatro dei Filodrammatici.
278. Although he later complained about Meyerbeer's habit of bribing the Parisian press to write favorably about his works and to criticize those of his rivals, Verdi also expressed admiration for Meyerbeer's theatrical gifts, especially for his ability to capture dramatic "truth."
279. In an 1852 letter to Scribe, Verdi specifically praised the coronation scene from Le Prophète (27 July 1852, quoted in Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 2:172);
280. the remarks about theatrical "truth" are from Italo Pizzi's Ricordi verdiani inediti (Turin: Roux e Viarengo, 1901), excerpted in Marcello Conati, ed., Encounters with Verdi, trans. Richard Stokes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 344.
281. Several of Enrico delle Sedie's plates are reproduced in James Hepokoski,"La disposizione scenica per l'Otello di Verdi: studio critico," in Otello di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. James Hepokoski and Mercedes Viale Ferrero, Collana di disposizioni sceniche ridotta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrerro (Milan: Ricordi, 1990), 85-87.
282. Among other techniques Verdi may have learned from the boulevard theater, Emilio Sala has listed the use of a split stage (in Rigoletto, Act III and the final scene of Aida), the effect of reading a letter aloud in speech (rather than song) over orchestral accompaniment, and the rousing rhythms of revolutionary songs (in the chorus "Viva Italia! Sacro un patto" from La battaglia di Legnano) (Sala, "Verdi and the Parisian Boulevard Theatre, 1847-49," Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3 1995]: 185-205).
283. Marcello Conati, "'E quasi si direbbe prosa strumentale': L'aria 'a due' nello Stiffelio," in Tornando a Stiffelio: popolarità, rifacimento, messinscena, effettismo e altre 'cure' nella drammaturgia del Verdi romantico, ed. Giovanni Morelli (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 253.
284. Alessandro Pascolato, 'Re Lear' e 'Ballo in maschera': lettere di Giuseppe Verdi ad Antonio Somma (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1913);
285. Peter Ross, "Amelia's Auftrittsarie im Maskenball," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 40 (1983): 126-46;
286. Harold S. Powers, "'La dama velata': Act II of Un ballo in maschera," in Verdi's Middle Period, 1849-1859: Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice, ed. Martin Chusid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 273-336.
287. I borrow the term "quasi-refrain" from Powers, "La dama velata," 294.
288. H. Robert Cohen, ed., The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991), 183-210.
289. The disposizione scenica for Ballo was compiled by Giuseppe Cencetti and published by Ricordi in 1859;
290. David Rosen and Marinella Pigozzi, eds., Giuseppe Verdi: Un ballo in maschera, Collana di disposizioni sceniche ridotta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrerro (Milan: Ricordi, 2002).
291. "Al lontano suono della campana, che batte mezzanotte, riprende animo per eseguire ciò che si è proposta, quando una orribile visione le toglie la forza di proseguire il cammino, e cade sulle ginocchia nel mezzo della scena" (Cencetti, Disposizione scenica, 18). As Powers ("La dama velata," 292) points out, Verdi's autograph score had already included the instruction "cadendo sulle ginocchie [sic]."
292. The material in the next five paragraphs, as well as parts of section 3 of this chapter, appear in a slightly different form in my article "Cadere in ginocchio: Melodrama and Transcendence in Middle-Period Verdi," in Verdi 2001: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica (Florence: Olschki, 2003).
293. The phrase "solita forma" is Basevi's, from his Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (see note 3).
294. "Production Book by Giulio Ricordi," translated in Verdi's 'Aida': The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans Busch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 565.
295. The unconventionality of this stage direction is underlined by the fact that none of the productions I have seen execute it-probably because sopranos simply do not want to be invisible when they end their arias. I discuss this unusual conjunction of music and staging further in "Ulterior Motives: Verdi's Use of Recurring Themes," in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 135-59.
296. Markus Engelhardt sees this expansion into the offstage space as one of the disposizione's many anticipations of filmic technique; see his "Verdi regista di Aida," in La realizzazione scenica dello spettacolo verdiano, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli and Fabrizio Della Seta (Parma: Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 1996), 58-71.
297. Powers ("La dama velata," 286-93) shows that the repetition of the phrase "povero cor" to end each strophewas a feature of Somma's earliest drafts for the aria, retained through several phases of revision.
298. "Riccardo, che tenevasi celato dietro le colonne n.7, si avanza rapidamente per soccorrere Amelia; ma questa, sorpresa, per subitaneo impulso di pudore si slontana da lui, avanzandosi a destra, finchè giunge nel mezzo del proscenio [Riccardo-Amelia] Presso la fine del duetto, la luna, ch'erasi di nuovo celata nelle nubi, torna a mostrarsi" (Cencetti, Disposizione scenica, 19).
299. Gilles de Van has aptly characterized Riccardo's statement as "totally lacking in that willful tension native to the Verdian tenor . . . in fact more murmur than song, a confession of desperation rather than a declaration of love" (de Van, Verdi's Theater: Creating Drama Through Music, trans. Gilda Roberts [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 230).
300. Roger Parker and Matthew Brown have identified the use of dominant harmony over tonic pedals as an important characteristic of the opera's opening scene, one they propose might be a "Gallic" element, since Auber's Gustave III also makes extensive use of the device (Parker and Brown, "Motivic and Tonal Interaction in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera," Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 [1983]: 253).
301. The eavesdropping theory has been proposed by David Rosen in his introduction to the disposizione scenica, and by Heather Hadlock in a paper delivered at Cornell University in 1991 entitled "The Interrupting Tenor in Three Verdian Seduction Duets." Two staging manuals for productions of the opera at Paris's Théâtre Lyrique in 1860 and 1861 make the possibility of eaves-dropping more explicit, specifying at the beginning of the act that "Richard is on stage behind the first pillar and entirely concealed by it" (F-Po B.398 [I] and F-Po C.4909 [I]). Thanks to David Rosen for making these documents available to me and for sharing his wise insights into these questions.
302. Powers ("La dama velata," 316-18) notes this melodic resemblance, but his comments are restricted to observing how the thematic link contributes to what he sees as the coherence of Act II as a whole.
303. Emanuele Senici, "'Teco io sto': Strategies of Seduction in Un ballo in maschera," Cambridge Opera Journal 14, nos. 1-2 (2002): 79-92.
304. Siegmund Levarie, "Key Relations in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera," 19th-Century Music 2 (1978-79): 143-47;
305. Joseph Kerman, Guy A. Marco, and Levarie again, 19th-Century Music 2 (1978-79): 186-91, and 3 (1979-80): 83-89;
306. Levarie, "A Pitch Cell in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera," Journal of Musicological Research 3 (1981): 399-406.
307. Parker and Brown, "Motivic and Tonal Interaction"; and Piero Weiss, "Verdi and the Fusion of Genres," Journal of the American Musicological Society 35 (1982): 138-56.
308. Hudson, "Masking Music: Light and Shade in Un ballo in maschera," in Verdi's Middle Period, 258).
309. For a view of this question that gives more weight to plot, see Hudson, "Masking Music," 268-69.
310. The uniqueness of Ballo's focus on physical love has been noted by many crititcs, including Gabriele Baldini (The Story of Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Fe-dele d'Amico, trans. Roger Parker [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 251)
311. Parker and Brown ("Motivic and Tonal Interaction," 245).
312. The phrase originates with Louis Véron, director of the Paris Opéra from 1831 to 1835. In his memoirs, he calls for an operatic style in which "the dramatic action can be completely understood by the eyes alone, as can the action of a ballet" (Louis-Désiré Véron, Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris [Paris: Gonnet, 1854], 3:252
313. Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 147).
314. Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 1862-1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 1 : 164.
315. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], 23 September 1878; 2 : 154).Several other comments recorded by Cosima suggest that Wagner's apprehension about the staging of Parsifal should be taken seriously (see, for example, entries for 8 August and 16 September 1878). But these concerns were specific to the demands of Parsifal and to this disaffected time in Wagner's life and should not be seen as representative of a broader distrust of all staging.
316. Carl Dahlhaus, Die Bedeutung des Gestischen in Wagners Musikdramen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1970).
317. Carolyn Abbate, "Immortal Voices, Mortal Forms," in Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation: Essays on Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 293.
318. Abbate sketches this idea most fully in the last chapter of Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 214
319. where she perceives Brünnhilde as a "sibyl" whose speech is "sounding board for speech that originates elsewhere . . . the sound of an aeolian harp played by an unseen presence, or even the speech of a ventriloquist's doll." As Abbate puts it, such discourse "seems to have complete authority since we sense an ultimate speaker (the speaker whom we assume to speak through the sibyl) who is mysterious and omniscient." In "Immortal Voices"(289)
320. Recently Abbate has carried her fascination with voices emanating from unseen sources into music of the turn of the century; see her "Debussy's Phantom Sounds," Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 1 (1998): 67-96;
321. "Outside Ravel's Tomb," Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 3 (1999): 465-530; both subsequently collected in In Search of Opera, 145-246.
322. The idea of the female body as possessing secrets and opening the way to knowledge is indebted to Peter Brooks; see his Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
323. Corbin, Women for Hire, trans. Alan Sheridan [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990]).
324. Quoted in Lockspeiser, Debussy, 164.
325. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans and ed. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 665.
326. Gary Tomlinson has advanced the argument that Nietzsche's disenchantment with Wagner developed as part of a larger shift in his late writings, towards integrating soul and body, and towards experiencing art and achieving intersubjectivity through movement and bodily sensation, a position Tomlinson glosses as "aesthesis in the guise of kinesis" (Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999], 117).
327. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 666.
328. Heinz Becker specifically contrasts the musical weight assigned to glances in Wagner with the lack of musical emphasis given to the voyeuristic scene of Valentine's entrance in the first act of Les Huguenots ("' . . . wonnig weidet mein Blick': Blick und Augensprache bei Richard Wagner," Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 150, no. 10 [1989]: 4). As Jacob Hosler has reminded me, the characters in this scene are usually far from immobile in modern productions: typically, Walther paces the stage nervously while Eva cranes her neck from a pew.
329. As Abbate has pointed out, the scene is characteristic of Wagner's tendency to "use orchestral-vocal effects to replace characters' voices that have been temporarily silenced by an emotional overload" ("Immortal Voices," 294).
330. " Later he complains that by the nineteenth century "the Musical drama became in truth a peep-show (Schauspiel), whereas the Play (Schauspiel) remained a hear-play (Hörspiel)" (Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis [1893; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 127 and 135).
331. Opera and Drama, 225.
332. The mixed signals proliferate when, almost in the same breath as he celebrates this idea of gestural melody, a bizarre footnote informs us that the woodbird-soon to become the voice of Nature in Siegfried-"expresses its emotion most melodiously, [yet] lacks all power of accompanying its song by gestures." In Siegfried the woodbird is wordless and clairvoyant, the epitome of pure voice divorced from either word or gesture, but in the context of Opera and Drama she seems to stand for the expressive limits of instrumental music. The woodbird may sing beautifully, but, deprived of the ability to accompany her song with gestures, she will never approach the integrated, profound expression of the "purelyhuman" realm thatWagner lauds (Opera and Drama, 225).
333. Dahlhaus, Die Bedeutung des Gestischen, esp. 9-25; the analysis of Tristan Act I scene v is reworked and expanded in Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57-61.
334. Opera and Drama, 367-68. Wagner said something very similar in 1879, when he wrote that the "remote harmonic progressions" of the opening scene of Lohengrin were made intelligible by the scenic action of Elsa's pantomime ("Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama," Bayreuther Blätter 2 (1879), 313-25
335. "On the Application of Music to the Drama," in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995], 6 :173-92).
336. Berthold Hoeckner has examined this statement and the music in question in his "Elsa Screams, or The Birth of Music Drama," Cambridge Opera Journal 9, no. 2 (1997): 97-132.
337. There is evidence that the Bayreuth style called for such effects frequently. The conductor Felix Mottl's annotations to the score of Tristan supply many additional directions for synchronization of music and movement, based on his experience conducting the opera's Bayreuth premiere in 1886. Mottl's directions are reproduced in the current Dover full score of the opera (New York: Dover, 1973).
338. Richard Wagner, "Remarks on Performing the Opera 'The Flying Dutchman,'" in Der fliegende Holländer, trans. Melanie Karpinski (English National Opera Guide) (London: John Calder and Riverrun Press, 1982), 37-42.
339. Dahlhaus, Die Bedeutung des Gestischen, 9-16;
340. Alfred Heuss, "Zum Thema: Musik und Szene bei Wagner. Im Anschluss an Wagners Aufsatz: Bemerkungen zur Aufführung der Oper 'Der fliegende Holländer,'" Die Musik 10, no. 1 (1911): 3-14 and 10, no. 2 (1911): 81-95.
341. Wagner, "Remarks," 38.
342. Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the 'Ring': An Eyewitness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43.
343. Hans von Wolzogen, Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik von R. Wagners Festspiel 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' (Leipzig: E. Schloemp, 1876), 45-46;
344. Robert Donington, Wagner's 'Ring' and Its Symbols (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 291.
345. While the Love motive is heard for the first time in this scene, some critics hear it as a drastically slowed-down version of the motive for Freia's flight from the giants in Das Rheingold (Donington, Wagner's 'Ring,' 88; and Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End [London: Oxford University Press, 1979], 48-56).
346. Thomas S. Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. chap. 3.
347. James Deaville with Evan Baker [Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1998], esp. 107, 46, 70-71).
348. Nietzsche, Case of Wagner, section 7, 170; my emphasis.
349. Indeed, just as Adorno borrows from Nietzsche and translates his critique into more technical terms, it could be argued that Dahlhaus in turn borrows the terms of his approach to gesture from Adorno, rendering the language yet more technical and domesticating some of Adorno's criticisms into more positive judgments.
350. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Verso, 1985), 34-37.
351. The suspicion of opera's visual (indeed, many of its most pleasurable) aspects comes through most clearly in Adorno's essay "Bourgeois Opera," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. and trans. David J. Levin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 25-43.
352. The first formulation comes from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the second from Michael Steinberg (Lévi-Strauss, "From Chrétien de Troyes to Richard Wagner," in The View from Afar [New York: Basic, 1985], 219
353. quoted in Steinberg, "Music Drama and the End of History," New German Critique 69 [1996], 163-80).
354. "Allmählich, während Gurnemanz und Parsifal zu schreiten scheinen, hat sich die Szene bereits immer merklicher verwandelt; es verschwindet so der Wald, und in Felsewänden öffnet sich ein Torweg, welcher die Beiden jetzt einschliesst" (Gradually, while Gurnemanz and Parsifal appear to walk, the set has already become more and more noticeably transformed; thus the forest disappears, and a doorway opens in the cliff walls, which now surround the two) (Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in drei Aufzügen [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983], 24).
355. Despite the apprehensive remark cited at the beginning of this chapter about the invention of an "invisible theater" perhaps being the only solution to the problems of staging Parsifal, in other contexts Wagner appeared to embrace the visible aspects of his last opera. He sent Richard Fricke, the ballet master who had helped with the choreography of the Ring, a copy of the Parsifal li-bretto inscribed "Ganz besonders gedichtet, componirt und mit scheinbarem Ballet versehen" (Especially composed, set to music, and with "visible ballet" plotted out) (Fricke, Wagner in Rehearsal, 105).
356. "Kundry stürzt hastig, fast taumelnd herein. . . . Sie eilt auf Gurnemanz zu und dringt ihm ein kleines Krystallgefäß auf. . . . Sie wirft sich auf den Boden" (Wagner, Parsifal, 9).
357. Elisabeth Bronfen connects Kundry's hysterical symptoms with Nietzsche's attacks on Wagner as decadent and as a neurotic ("Kundry's Laughter," New German Critique 69 [1996]: 147-61).
358. Wagner, Parsifal, 21.
359. Opera and Drama, 320.