Conference Agenda

François-Adrien Boieldieu’s 1825 La dame blanche was the epitome of opéra comique during the 19th century. Not only did it reach 1000 performances at the Opéra-Comique by 1862 but it was performed far and wide in translations into German, English, Danish, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Dutch and Hungarian – all before 1830. The two-hundredth anniversary of its premiere was celebrated to the day on 10 December 2025 with a conference at the Opéra-Comique itself. The success of La dame blanche was at least in part the result of the sustained engagement with the supernatural that underpins the entire work; it directly informs two arias: ‘D’ici voyez ce beau domaine’ sung by Jeny in act I and ‘Viens gentille dame’ performed by Georges in act ii, and responds to traditions of the supernatural that go back to the middle ages.

Despite its unprecedented performance history in Paris and beyond, La dame blanche and its music was as well-known through the use of its melodies as timbres in vaudevilles and related works. Music from La dame blanche appears in anything from between 100 and 200 vaudevilles during the 19th century (the latest dates from 1907). ‘Viens gentille dame’ is one of the most widely used of these timbres, and as the epicentre of the work’s supernatural tinta poses a number of questions about the function of La dame blanche and the transmission of the supernatural throughout the occult of nineteenth century France. Timbres were not merely melodies to be re-appropriated in new contexts; they also transmitted elements of their original dramatic context. Tracing the reception of ‘Viens gentille dame’ across dozens of vaudevilles reveals how two competing contexts in the original opéra comique – subterfuge and the occult – unfold over the course of the century.

Whilst living in Paris in the 1890s, Frederick Delius developed a large circle of friends with shared interests in the occult, including August Strindberg, Julien Leclerq, Emma Calvé, and Papus (pseudonym of Gérard Encausse), the most prolific writer of occult literature of the period. In 1894, Papus and Delius collaborated on a joint publication, Anatomie et Physiologie de l’orchestre, in which they consider the orchestra analogous to a human body, and give a guide for how to orchestrate according to occult principles. Scholars have mostly accepted Lionel Carley’s view (1975) that occultism was a distraction from rather than an influence upon Delius’s compositions, a view which requires reappraisal in light of the proliferation of occultism studies over the last forty years.

In this paper I ask what impact occultism had upon Delius’s own developing orchestrational practice, and to what extent he implemented the ideas in Anatomie himself. Opera was his main focus during the 1890s, and my analysis of The Magic Fountain (1895) and Koanga (1896–7) demonstrates that occultism influenced his orchestration decisions as well as being an important element in both plots. I trace this through into later works such as A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901–5), arguing that the occult phase of Delius’s life played a more significant role in his formation than has previously been considered. Both musicians and occultists shared intense reactions to Richard Wagner, and I show that occult interpretations of Wagnerian mysticism are clearly relevant to Delius’s conception of opera’s capabilities, but that the influence of science on occultism (through Papus, who was himself a medical doctor) leads Delius to an approach that is distinct from other composers (such as Erik Satie’s collaboration with Joséphin Péladin).

By analysing Delius from an occult perspective, I take inspiration from recent work that situates Delius within wider historical trends (Collins 2015; Grimley 2018), countering the perception of him as a lone figure which has been prevalent throughout his reception history. Indeed, occultism’s tendency to challenge musicological boundaries proves particularly helpful in understanding Delius, whose lack of institutional links has hidden him from histories of fin-de-siècle Paris.

A prevailing view of late-Romantic harmony concerns its constant sense of shuffle between two competing orders: (i) authentic diatonic syntax and (ii) third-related symmetrical systems. Though less intermingled, there are also two main theories of gendered harmony in the period (Lal 2026). The first concerns the opposition between tonic/masculine-coded and dominant/feminine-coded themes, as often grafted onto sonata forms following the seminal theories of A.B. Marx. The second framework relies less on the axial opposition of tonal areas in musical structure and is more a matter of their intrinsic harmonic character; this latter conception concerns the idea of gendered Leitharmony (Stravinsky's moniker), a cousin to the Wagnerian phenomenon of Leitmotif.

Taking this recent delineation as a starting point, this paper turns from the Romantic corpus-majority toward its precipice to explore gendered-harmonic theory in a near post-tonal environment. I zone in particularly on two composers of differing aesthetic proclivities who drew strikingly similar inspirations from Occult and Mystical source-materials, uniting writings from the formalised Theosophic and Esoteric traditions with the pessimistic last gasps of German idealism. Several late works by Scriabin and middle-period pieces by Schoenberg are contextualised. It is argued that as tonality ceases to serve as an arbiter of large-scale coherence, harmonic systems transmute from discrete categories into continuous spectra. This paper thus calls for a renewed focus on the gender-coded nonconformity, or androgyny-coding, found in much late tonal/early post-tonal music, both programmatic and absolute.