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123 LOSING VOICE Historians still remember the year of Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s return from Italy as the year when the Paris Opéra fell into “triste décadence.”1 A dark veil descended in 1837, when a long-favored artist-citizen was forced into exile: Adolphe Nourrit, legendary singer, idol of the Salle Le Peletier, and former inspiration for a host of high-profile Rossini and Meyerbeer roles. Duprez made his Parisian debut as Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell—a signature Nourrit role—on 17 April. The new tenor’s entry heralded a new era of political self-interest, or so they said. Not only the Opéra but Paris itself was passing away—“our Paris, the Paris where we were born,” as the Goncourts lamented some years later.2 Those circles of friendship, which had been an organizing principle for conservative liberal elites since long before the July Revolution, were unraveling; the networks of intimacy—those cautious doctrinaire alternatives to the hierarchic social architecture of the prerevolutionary era—were weakened. Assailed by factionalism, cultural life itself was dulled, enfeebling the amitié of bohemian life and socialist phalansteries as so enthusiastically attended by Nourrit on the rue Taitbout. Salons, too, were losing their luster. The boudoirs of Madame Apponyi , the rooms of Comtesse de Merlin, and the political activity of the Faubourg Saint-Germain: these havens of exclusive and often liberal intimacy no longer thrived. The old socialities were going the way of the elite ideal in which citoyens capacitaires were threaded together, not by top-down obligation or force but by close personal attachment and elective affinity. Things were changing even on the street, 5 In Search of Voice Nourrit’s Voix Mixte, Donzelli’s Bari-Tenor 124 In Search of Voice where once men walked arm in arm, held hands, and poured out their private affection in touching love letters: “I have missed you,” “I love you,” “Embrace me,” Nourrit wrote to male friends such as August Féréol.3 A new Paris was apparently being born, a world of suspicion and market capitalism. This was the dawn of Balzac’s la vie parisienne, characterized by flânerie and anonymous theater going, free-press journalism, draconian theatrical censorship, increased police surveillance , criminality, selfish pleasure, and the telegraph. It was the dawn of private luxury, the inalienable natural right, and lawyers—a France “without faith, without love, without excitement, without glory,” as Virginie Ancelot wrote. Once it had abolished intimacy, according to François Guizot, connoisseur of beautiful friendship and minister of public instruction from 1832 to 1837, the new mondanité would have but one axiom: “enrichissez-vous.” Louis Quicherat, childhood intimate and biographer of Nourrit, pointed accusingly at the director of the Opéra, Henri Duponchel, who had apparently concocted the fiction of “the new species of tenor” and erected the Duprez-Nourrit échafaudage merely to generate profit. A stench of business hung over the “système materialiste” of this “little yellow man,” a man who dressed more like an undertaker than a theater director, as Heine observed.4 Already in 1840, Ange-Henri Blaze reported that the Opéra had become “an enterprise without direction, without unity, without system, surrendered to the hazards of fortune.” “What had become of those singers,” Blaze complained, “whose individuality merged into the ensemble?” (He had Nourrit in mind.)5 In his memoirs, Berlioz called Duponchel a “monophile.” Léon Escudier thought the former metteur en scène “a director of indisputable incapacity.” Quicherat remembered an administration of press bribery and claquerie to the extent that applause would occur before cadences; in short, it was a system propagating the kind of rampant individualism that made nuanced French art impossible.6 “The Opéra,” wrote Heine in 1837, “has become reconciled with the enemies of music.” The Salle Le Peletier was “a sahara of music.”7 All the complaints of the salonnières, however, could not undo Duprez’s success . La Presse used the example of the “new tenor” both to question Nourrit’s masculinity and attack the high voix mixte. “For our part,” the correspondent wrote, “we have a horror of those little fluted falsetto notes, that make one doubt the virility of he who produced them, and prefer, as in modern drama, to hear a man’s voice from a man’s chest.” Frédéric Soulié hailed Duprez as a straight shooter. His unfussy style and declamatory energy expressed an “ever-present, rich, liberal voice, which retracts...

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