Response: Men with a past

Abstract

It seems a very long way from a dog howling in pain on François Magendie’s laboratory table in 1816 to Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s more-or-less novel accomplishment at the Paris Opéra two decades later: the tenor’s high C from the chest; the darkened voice; the sound of the future first heard in a performance of Guillaume Tell. Most obviously, the sounds of the dog were horrible and horrifying. When Magendie’s teacher, the great Xavier Bichat, tried the experiment some years earlier, his cleaning lady asked to move her chambers from near the scene because she could not bear the dog’s cries. Duprez’s sound was, arguably, beautiful; at least some people thought so, even if two doctors, driven to study the physiology of singing by the occasion, claimed that most people thought the voice was forced and false. Whether it was ‘pathological’ or not – I’d prefer, at worse, ‘pathogenic’ in the sense that so many unnatural new activities of the nineteenth century, like sitting long hours at a desk or riding on a train, were thought to make one ill – the tenor’s high C did, even its detractors admitted, ‘transport and dominate with its power’. It was musical and in the minds of many opened up radically new interpretative possibilities.