Conference Agenda

“Perhaps I would have exploded.” Thus mused Gilbert-Louis Duprez in his memoir (1880), considering his past vocal exertions. His contemporary Giambattista Rubini—so the rumor went—had actually done so, shattering his clavicle with his voice alone. Duprez’s chest-voice high C has often served as a mythic symbol for the birth of modern operatic singing technique; but as Gregory Bloch (2007) has argued, the furor at the time was not so much about the pitch of the note as its timbre, a mysterious “darkened” sound that was dubbed the voix sombrée.

The voix sombrée was roundly condemned by everyone from voice faculty at the Conservatoire (Panseron 1840, Garaudé 1841) to medical doctors (Diday and Pétrequin 1840), an attitude that continues even today: the current Grove entry asserts it “can be vocally damaging.” It did have some defenders: Manuel García (1841/7) supported an expressive timbre sombre, a rebranding of the same concept (Davies 2014). Yet its critics and supporters alike concurred that this “darkening” was the product of keeping the larynx in a consistent location throughout the vocal range, which is fundamental to modern operatic technique. Today, we all sing in voix sombrée.

This paper therefore does not approach the “darkened” voice as a potentially dangerous anomaly, but rather as a familiar sound. I demonstrate that discomfort with the voix sombrée stemmed from its incompatibility with long-held (but mistaken) anatomical theories of the voice (Magendie 1816/7, Ferrein 1741, Dodart 1703) and from singers’ conscious use of it in violent dramatic effects that departed sharply from the conservative technical consensus at the time, not from documented vocal damage. Furthermore, drawing on Martha Feldman’s (2015) metaphor of voice as palimpsest, I offer a reconstruction of the voix claire, the now-forgotten opposite of the voix sombrée, from its various fragments in the historical record—pedagogical treatises, roles written for specific singers, and a few early sound recordings. Reconstructing the voix claire can illuminate not only the exact timbral experience of the early-nineteenth-century opera house but also the developing ideological use of the operatic voice to represent new understandings of gender, liberal selfhood, and empire.

This paper interrogates how prosthetic devices of disability have been historically implemented on the operatic stage. I will begin by untangling the complex genealogies of Rigoletto’s (1851) textual sources to better grasp Verdi’s proposed agenda of historical authenticity. Based on Victor Hugo’s 1832 play Le roi s’amuse—a narrative which unfurls around the “true” court jester of Francis I—Rigoletto soon reveals itself as a meditation upon myth. In both the play and the opera, plot is contingent on the exploitation of embodied difference, specifically of the so-called “hunchback” trope: a vogue which permeated across the literary, visual, and musical sites from the mid-century. Instead of producing a historical account, Hugo sutured the bodies of three separate, but documented, individuals of the court—all of whom were born with different and varying degrees of embodied disability—as one enmeshed and fictionalised entity. This, in turn, reconfigures the “truth” behind Rigoletto, both in narrative and in legacy. Not only is Rigoletto not as historical as once purported, but is also debunked as not the first (or indeed, only) nineteenth-century rendering of the so-called “hunchback”. By examining the contextual source of both works, as well as the universalising conflation of bodily difference, the first half of my paper seeks to better understand nineteenth-century attitudes towards enactments of difference on the operatic stage.

The second half of my case study grapples with Rigoletto’s reception history through a critical historiography of its nineteenth-century premiere at La Fenice (1851). Through a forensic examination of the body of Felice Varesi (1813-1889), I will grapple with how Verdi and his contemporaries vetted the singer through letter exchanges, press reviews, and crucially to this paper, as an apt bodily candidate to champion costumed prosthesis on-stage. Panning out to contemporary operatic practice, I will present curious cases of on-stage prosthesis, from wearable “hunches” to counterintuitive podiatry “aids”. By reconsidering this problematic vogue, one which ranges from vocal stutters to mobility, visual indexes to mental faculty, I will scrutinise how material markers of disability have historically been enacted and what the afterlife of Rigoletto’s prosthetic devices can tell us about opera’s material histories.

Sprechgesang, a mode of vocalization introduced by Engelbert Humperdinck in Die Königskinder (1897), had already been documented in German vocabulary to refer to Wagnerian declamation, notably by the vocal pedagogue Julius Hey who trained Wagner’s singers in Bayreuth (1875–1876). Still, the origins of Sprechgesang and its shifting meanings prior to Wagner remain unexplored in scholarship.

My paper sheds new light on this term. First, I locate its origins in the eighteenth century: in 1769, Herder referred to Sprechgesang as the “unarticulated tones” of a primeval form of utterance; in 1781, the anonymous libretto of a pastoral play invoked Sprechgesang as an “elevated” form of speech, each time a mortal character renders in direct discourse the divine word of Apollo. In the early nineteenth century, these two different meanings were subsumed in German lexica where Sprechgesang was routinely considered a Verdeutschung (Germanisation) of the Italian recitative. In parallel to the well-documented Wagnerian Sprechgesang as a vocal style antithetical to bel canto, I show that the term gained traction in the writings of the Caecilian movement where it referred to ancient forms of cantillation: such distinction culminated in a 1897 essay by the music critic Richard Batka where he forcefully posited two distinct meanings for Sprechgesang: an artistic form of declamation vs. a quasi-Herderian Ur-speech.

I argue that these semantic nuances of Sprechgesang were informed by the concept of Sprechmelodie, the intrinsic melos of German language, widely developed in nineteenth-century theories on German declamation and linguistics. Characterized by an obsessive search for this Sprechmelodie, these theories helped to move away from the belief that an uneven ratio between consonants and vowels was detrimental to German theatrical declamation and singing.

While these theories have been addressed in theater and literary studies (Kühn 2001, Trummer 2006, Meyer-Kalkus, 2020) and in musicology from the Wagnerian angle (Knust 2007, Trippett 2013), I demonstrate how, prior to Wagner, Sprechgesang came to herald the paradigmatic expression of this idealized Sprechmelodie, showcasing its consonantic character as a proper German quality that set it apart from the vocalic nature of bel canto.