Constructing the Self: European Vocal Techniques and Aesthetics, 1825–1850

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that changes in vocal technique in the opera houses of mid-nineteenth-century Europe were intimately connected to changes in how “voice” was understood as an aesthetic phenomenon and political metaphor during that period. These technical changes allowed the voice to become charged with identity—usable as a metonym for the entire self—for contemporary audiences. This vocal self was bound up with recently reified ideas of gender and sex, but also dependent on a relatively new liberal political context still negotiating the difference between abstract individual rights and conventional, corporate views of society.In the first part of this work, I offer a history of vocal technique in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through archival work on the traces of singers’ voices—what Martha Feldman (2015) calls “palimpsests”—and particularly through a close attention to pedagogical material, I reconstruct the shifting ways in which the singers of this era were trained and the effects their techniques would have had in the opera house or concert hall. By approximately 1850, a new sound had emerged, one that is far more recognizable to a modern operagoer than the technique of 1800. In the second part, I map the ways in which these new vocal sounds were used to construct gendered and political identities, from intimate serenades to the sprawling tableaux of grand opéra. Voice today is an easy and politically resonant metaphor, but it emerged from the specific ideological context of early-nineteenth-century liberals attending to the specific sonic context of opera. When we slip too easily into metaphors of voice, in scholarship or in public affairs, we risk importing various primo ottocento assumptions about gender, political capacity, and empire with them.