Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century by Karen Henson (review)

"The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent," Roland Barthes famously observed in his melancholy late study of photography, Camera Lucida. "From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being … will touch me like the delayed rays of a star."¹ In the search for a vanished subject, the photograph promises a material trace of presence that moves across time and impresses itself anew upon our retinas. Although such encounters are inevitably mediated by the camera's technological capabilities, the photograph offers a glimpse at a lost world—one that, in Barthes's interpretation, can be endlessly revisited, and yet also remains haunted by the spectre of death. Every photograph, even of the living, is for Barthes a kind of ghost: an object that reanimates the past, yet does so in a curiously lifeless form.

One such image graces the front cover of Karen Henson's thought-provoking and engagingly written Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century. The subject in question is Célestine Galli-Marié: the first performer of Bizet's Carmen, here caught in a pose at once alluring and disinterested. Her left hand clasped to her hip, Galli-Marié turns forward toward the camera, while her head faces right into the distance. Dressed in costume, her mantilla is pushed back, framing a voluptuous figure that dominates the image without the singer's eye directly acknowledging the viewer. Even if she could speak, it seems, this Carmen "chante pour elle-même," and refuses to offer herself up entirely for our twenty-first-century perusal. Behind her runs an extract from French baritone Victor Maurel's letter to a relative in 1899, discussing his own performance as Don Giovanni at New York's Metropolitan Opera House that season. Obscured by Galli-Marié, the text recedes into the background against the immediacy of the photographic document. The back cover offers an equally tantalizing image of Verdi and Maurel after the 1894 Paris premiere of Otello—the composer patrician and stiff, the singer opulently dressed and half-smiling. What words have just passed between them, and which figure commands our attention more: the aged and suited Verdi, or the harlequinesque Maurel, whose right arm gestures as if to speak?

Questions such as these—and the frustrations engendered by the available historical evidence—repeatedly circle throughout Opera Acts, and outline broader difficulties in excavating the operatic past. As Henson sets out in her introduction, the overarching aim of her book is to revise by-now familiar narratives of late-nineteenth-century operatic culture as dominated by the twin figures of the great composer and the abstract musical work, and to uncover a more complex interchange between performers and composers, performances, and works in this period. In Henson's formulation, the ideals expressed in terms of Werktreue or "anti-performance posturing" (21) were "precisely that, ideals," and "even as they were becoming dominant, a more performer-oriented reality existed alongside them" that informed both theatrical practices and compositional processes (14). While singers in the first half of the nineteenth century could enjoy a quasi-authorial role through alternate arias or personally tailored roles—and later generations could preserve their interpretations for posterity via recordings—singers at the fin-de-siècle could, in Henson's view, enjoy more covert forms of influence over both performance and composition as they continued to add works to an increasingly entrenched operatic canon. Moreover, even when evidence exists for more old-fashioned forms of compositional intervention, Henson argues that it can be "misleading, contradictory, or simply not what seems important about the case" (16). As she acknowledges, however, seeking to uncover these discrete yet ultimately more pervasive modes of agency also requires letting go of some of our conventions for establishing historical truth, and adopting "less...