The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice by Judith Pascoe (review)

Judith Pascoe pursues the alluring voice that was the prime attraction of actress Sarah Siddons with imaginative dedication, intending to discover how the actress sounded and also what it was like to listen to her in the pre-audio recording era. Is this what is meant by an “audio file”? (The term is never directly explained.) To compile it, Pascoe enrols in a “Voices for Actors” class in order to better appreciate vocal technique and commentary thereon. She also engages in numerous other fields of enquiry. These include theatre aesthetics; by the end of her career a new generation of more demonstrative actors over-shadowed the once preeminent Siddons. Pascoe also considers theatre acoustics (theatre capacity increased enormously during Siddons’s career), and also the history of recording technology that was a post-Siddonian development. Pascoe seeks an “audio vestige” (104) of Siddons’s performances by listening to historical recordings of Lady Macbeth, Siddons’s most celebrated role. Pascoe also relies on the memories of the actress’s peers, including the enormously helpful George Joseph Bell (b.1770), who compiled three volumes of notes whilst observing Siddons over the years. Bell not only described Siddons’s “exalted prophetic tone” while declaiming Lady Macbeth’s opening lines, he also devised a shorthand to indicate the rise or fall or her voice, while indicating the mood (“mournful”) or impression (“very horrible”) created by Siddons’s delivery of particular passages. Perhaps then, an audio file can be likened to a silhouette: it offers an impression rather than a complete likeness.

The very detail of Bell’s testimony led Pascoe to reflect on the “historical specificity” of listening itself (116), and about the kind of lasting impression that sound could have when the listener relied on cultural memory to preserve it. Siddons’s auditors were typical Romantics in their capacity for nostalgia, and they treasured the voice of her prime while decrying later performances as defective. The voice they remembered was lost to physical reality, and existed only in their memories. Pascoe came to realise that modern auditors experience a greater loss, for we (reliant on recording technology to do our listening for us) lack the Romantics’ capacity to listen. We can never hear Siddons, nor hope to apprehend her through an audio file.

And so Pascoe concludes this interesting investigation by abandoning it. Instead, she should have reconsidered how she cast Siddons within her study. She frames the earlier chapters (all untitled, so the reader is cast adrift rather than directed) in the context of a “media triangle” (56). Siddons is considered as a transmitter of content; this works very well indeed for Pascoe supplies ample testimony about the actress’s ability to take content (“familiar plays”) and make people hear it “in a new way” (45). It is when Pascoe insists on re-casting Siddons’s voice (an ephemeral phenomenon) as the content itself that her project falters. Yet, in conveying the impact of this celebrated voice through a most imaginative research process Pascoe delivers enough material of interest that we can ignore this miscasting. Even as we accept the limitations of her project, we can still enjoy her quest for the pot of gold at rainbow’s foot.