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66 3 The Sontag-Malibran Stereotype The word female (femina) seems to derive its etymology from the word family (familia) since woman is the common centre of all families, the source of the generations of men, and the universal link of human beings. She gives life, and she leads to death; her purity is the great support of morality, and the very ground-work of society; and her profligacy enervates the courage of men, and depraves the morals of the community. Possessing equally the power of good and evil, of love and hatred, of pleasure and pain, she becomes the vis insita, the regulator, and the perturbing force in the whole system of human nature. . . . A being so feeble is, even from the very debility of her organisation, more liable to adopt every impression, to lend herself to all the sensations of the heart and mind, and to increase their energy and elevation by means of her exquisite sensibility. From this endless pliability of the female character, and the imitative quality annexed to it, as well as that extreme versatility which complies with every modification of manners, arises a contradictory creature, which is incapable of definition, and distinct discrimination. With women every thing is easy, variable, fleeting. Étienne de Jouy (ethnologist, hermit, former political prisoner, and librettist of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell) LONDON Just before two o’clock on the afternoon of 30 May 1829 there was a rush at the doors of the Argyll Rooms, a suite of four spacious apartments on Regent Street, in central London. Carriages drew up along the arcade (John Nash’s recent design); attendants hustled up and down making way for their employers. Most of the fashionables pressing on the entrance were women who, having paid ten shillings and sixpence at the door, had their coats removed as they climbed the stairs to the main chamber. Those who had obtained copies of the fashion journal La Belle Assemblée probably stole a march on their rivals: they entered the Argyll’s strange parallelogram-shaped concert room in short-sleeved rose satin dresses à la Circassienne . Convent crosses and cordons of embroidered flowers were also de rigueur The Sontag-Malibran Stereotype 67 for the season. If brave, one might even try a headdress in rose crepe adorned with ostrich feathers. The boxes and parterre were already overflowing. Patrons might perhaps overhear talk of Turner’s views of England and Wales, which were being exhibited around the corner in the Egyptian Hall at 22 Piccadilly.1 The less fortunate , denied entrance for want of proper seating, arranged refunds at the door and doubtless contemplated the tedious journey home. In the bustle, it was unlikely that too many noticed the giant mythological figures—“discreditably painted,” so one critic judged—adorning the walls of the 713-seat venue.2 The Times reported of the second concert that the room was “so exceedingly crowded that it was found necessary to accommodate some of the company with seats in the orchestra.”3 Whether this measure was strictly necessary or not, seating ladies among the instrumental players had a striking visual effect. Had the critic recalled his review of Giuseppe de Begnis’s benefit on Thursday morning, 21 May, he would have remembered that this arrangement was no mere emergency measure . On that day too, the Italian basso buffo had given a concert at which “a great number of ladies [had] sat amidst the performers in the orchestra.” An explanation suggested itself: “The coup d’oeil from thence to the pit, which was almost exclusively occupied by ladies dressed in the gayest attire of the season, and wearing satin hats of various colors, ornamented with flowers, was of the most picturesque description that can well be imagined.”4 By 30 May, nine days after the experiment was first tried, the practice of adding delicate female touches to the male orchestra had been more or less established. Seating women among the instrumentalists, in short, was not only the pragmatic response to a lack of seating. The innovation added attractive feminine color to an otherwise traditionally uniform and masculine space. Similar scenes characterized each of the “grand morning concerts” cohosted by Velluti and Thomas Welsh in mid-1829. Welsh relished the phalanx of fashion in his chambers: he was a music seller, ex-bass, proprietor, and principal shareholder of the Regent’s Harmonic Institution, a music publishing company attached to the Argyll Rooms. The forty-eight-year-old Velluti, struggling in his career as...

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