Victor Capoul, Marguerite Olagnier's "Le Saïs", and the Arousing of Female Desire

Abstract

We tend to think of exoticism in late nineteenth-century French opera as a very male-oriented phenomenon: as "cultural work" carried out mainly by men and for the male spectator's pleasure. This article takes as its starting point a rather different configuration of opera, exoticism, and gender issues, exploring the possibility of a form of French operatic exoticism aimed at the fantasies and desires of women. In particular, the article focuses on a now wholly forgotten work, Marguerite Olagnier's Le Saïs (1881), and on the role in this and other operas of Victor Capoul, an Opéra-Comique tenor once celebrated not only for his vocal and dramatic skills, but also for his popularity with female listeners. In addition to providing a firm historical basis from which to begin theorizing about the relationship between exoticism and the late nineteenth-century female listener, the case of Capoul and Le Saïs reveals how operatic men, even the most high-voiced and seemingly effeminate, can be as complexly compelling-and even as liberating-for women as recent critics have argued for sopranos and "queer" listeners.