Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century by Karen Henson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century by Karen Henson James P. Cassaro Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century. By Karen Henson. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xvi, 264 p. ISBN 9781107004269 (hardcover). $102.00; (e-book). $79.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Opera has for some time now provided fertile ground upon which varied and multivalent approaches have been used, resulting in a dizzying array of provocative readings of the artform's cultural, sociological, and gendered force. When you think there are no more ways of looking at a blackbird, along comes a study that convinces you otherwise. Such is the case with Karen Henson's Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Opera series, this book is a persuasive narrative that focuses on a generation of singers in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, plotting their interactions with composers—in particular, Giuseppe Verdi, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet—and their impact on the creation of opera and operatic style. In the book's introduction, Henson sets out the methodology for her study, noting that "by the late nineteenth century singers were no longer creators but rather intermediaries, executants, faithful (or disloyal) interpreters" (p. 3), and invoking Verdi's opinion that this generation of singers "specialized in 'not singing'" (p. 4). Central to Henson's study is an understanding of the term physiognomy, a descriptive word, employed quite actively by French critics in the early-nineteenth century, referring to facial features or physical expression that are indicative of character. This is not to be confused with physiology, the science of vocal technique and the mechanics of singing. The shift of emphasis from the beauty of the voice—bel canto—to the visual—i.e. not purely the vocal—informed both singers and audiences about a character's particular motives and relation to others around them. Through this lens, Henson devotes four in-depth chapters to the fin-de-siècle singers Victor Maurel (1848–1923), Célestine Galli-Marié (1837/40–1905), Sibyl Sanderson (1865–1903), and Jean de Reszke (1850–1925). In the concluding chapter, Henson offers shorter evaluations of eight additional singers: Emma Calvé (1858–1942), Victor Capoul (1839–1924), Jean-Baptiste Fauré (1830–1914), Marie Heilbron (1849/51–1886), Paul Lhérie (1844–1937), Paola Marié (1851–1920), Edouard de Reszke (1853–1917), and Josephine de Reszke (1855–1891). The author devotes chapter 1 to the relationship between Verdi and the French baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago in Otello in 1887 as well as the title role in Falstaff in 1893. In the 1870s, Verdi began to take a much more strident approach to the authority of the composer, limiting the influence of singers and other personnel on an opera's production. In this approach, Verdi composed not with a [End Page 76] particular performer in mind, as he had earlier in his career, but for his pleasure, a stance that made him "indifferent to and supremely in control of performance" (p. 20). Rather than focusing on the singer as the motivating drive of the operatic experience, his emphasis shifted toward the "work" as a concept. Henson characterizes this move as an "anti-performing posture"—a distancing by late-nineteenth-century composers from the singer and from the "very idea of performance" (p. 20). Although Henson uses this concept as the basis for her argument, she and other scholars (James Hepokoski, in particular) note that it was not as rigid in practice as it was in theory. She argues that a distinctive feature of this period was the coexistence of an "anti-performing posture and a more performer-oriented reality" (p. 21). Maurel, for Henson, is a prime example of this coexistence. In order to provide a fuller understanding of the singer, Henson looks at Maurel's other (non-operatic) pursuits, including teaching, directing, writing, and publishing. In a number of his writings, Maurel openly engaged with and criticized Verdi. Ultimately these "extra-vocal" activities led to the composer "distancing himself from what he perceived as their excessive...