Conference Agenda

The migration of Metropolitan Opera stars to the silent screen in the 1910s generated profound cognitive dissonance. “Farrar voiceless!” a Photoplay reporter protested: “The Mona Lisa without her smile; a Stradivarius without its strings.” While the phonograph had accustomed audiences to the disembodied voice, the silent screen presented an inverse paradox: the voiceless body. Extending Elena Mosconi’s concept of the Silent Singer from Italian cinema to the American context, and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation as a work’s necessary afterlife (Fortleben), I argue that these appearances were not a technological deficit but a generative mode of what I term fractured performance: a specific mode of reception in which opera’s traditionally unified sensory experience is ruptured into independently circulating visual and sonic components.

Employing intermedial archaeology—a methodology that triangulates material, institutional, and discursive connections—I analyze the Robinson Locke scrapbooks, the Geraldine Farrar Papers, studio contracts, and trade journals to reconstruct this media convergence. The screen’s structural constraints functioned divergently across gender lines. Enrico Caruso, whose authority was acoustically bound, collected a reported $100,000 for My Cousin (1918)—a personal windfall yoked to a public failure. The film was undone by misjudged publicity and the tenor’s discomfort before the camera, but above all by audiences who viewed a voiceless Caruso as a negation of his primary asset. Geraldine Farrar, by contrast, converted the same silence into a site of agency, negotiating contracts upwards of $150,000 across a sustained screen career. Willing to sacrifice “tonal beauty to dramatic effect,” she shed the “exaggeration of the operatic stage,” translating the sacralized aura of the Met to the democratized landscape of the feature film.

This analysis posits a reverse genealogy in which cinematic realism began to unsettle operatic performance practice. Reading the “public frenzy” documented in Moving Picture World alongside the calculated “democratizing gestures” of studio press releases, I demonstrate that the Silent Singer did not merely document a loss of voice. Rather, this figure used the medium’s fracture to dismantle the barriers between highbrow and lowbrow culture, transforming the prima donna from a distant elite into a mass-mediated icon of American modernity.