Otherworldly Voices in Opera

In Richard Wagner's music dramas, voices and bodies often exist at the limits of hearing and presence, appearing only half visible on the stage and singing from afar or above the drama as it unfolds. Such is the case with Erda at the end of _Das Rheingold_, the young sailor who opens _Tristan und Isolde_, and the mysterious "voice from above" at the end of Act I of _Parsifal_. These characters sing prophetic visions, often of future crises. In some cases, these double as interpretations of music drama itself, especially in Erda's case ("alles was ist, endet!"). These characters and their sung passages, due to their liminality, offer different experiences of the time and space they share with other dramatis personae, particularly the protagonists with whom they directly interact.


Wagner's philosophical theories of music drama make little mention of such personae. Often, their function in the plot is minor and short-lived. They push along a narrative point by momentarily guiding or warning the protagonist. I argue that these roles carry greater dramatic and ontological burdens, specific to the nature of Wagnerian music drama and its imagined limits of time and space. For example, in Erda's appearance in _Das Rheingold_, scene 4, she offers Wotan new knowledge-not only of the end of the gods-but of new spatial and temporal limits to the drama they inhabit. Her appearance, half on and half off the stage, troubles the boundaries of the stage-world. Similarly, the slow, primordial music that accompanies her ascent expands time by referring back to the beginning of the work; later in the same scene, she introduces music that foreshadows the ending of _Götterdämmerung_.


The young sailor and the "voice from above" come to Isolde and Parsifal respectively from a similar _dramatic elsewhere_. Similar phenomena in Wagner have been noted by Adorno and Abbate, but their arguments center on the changing abilities of protagonists (Wotan, Brünnhilde, etc.) without conceptualizing the source of those abilities. That source, I argue, is the elsewhere, the edge of the stage and the limit of proscenia, where only minor dramatis personae dwell.

In 19th-century European literature, visual arts, and public entertainment, a fascination with an unstable, insubstantial, and sometimes invisible physical presence prevailed. I argue that this interest in an ambiguous body-or the lack thereof-was not merely a visual phenomenon. The challenges of portraying an ambiguous body inspired some composers to explore novel treatments of timbre, and to re-consider music's relationship to space and even the legitimacy of its alliance with sight in the case of offstage music. Overlapping with scientific interest in explaining visual and auditory perceptions, such explorations offer a productive angle from which to discuss artistic approaches to the intangible and the supernatural. 


In this paper, I show how composers' reading of the fluctuating body responded to developments in visual and auditory cultures in the 19th century. Taking Jonathan Crary's theory of suspended perception and selected philosophers' definitions of ontology as my theoretical reference points, I begin with presentations of the insubstantial body in magic lantern shows, silhouette painting, and literary works belonging to the genre of the grotesque, showing their appeal to readers and audiences. I analyze Thomas Young's and Hermann Helmholtz's writings on sound and auditory perception in the context of the culture of listening, especially changes in audience's behavior at concerts. I conclude with selected scenes from _Das Rheingold_, _Les contes d'Hoffmann_, and _Die Frau ohne Schatten_. I show how Wagner, Offenbach, and Strauss dramatized physical transformation and the disjunction between vision and music, and how this challenged Young's analogy between sight and sound, which has been taken too literally in scholarship on music and science.  


Scholarship on music and the problematized body has been largely limited to opera studies. Here, I set this topic in a broader cultural context, in which composers' translations of physical fluctuation reflect their engagement with major trends in other disciplines. This approach enriches the discussion of music's relationship to iconography. In examining some composers' renderings of metamorphosis, an important topic in medieval cultural studies, I also offer a fresh perspective on medievalism in Romantic music. 

The De Bellis Collection at the San Francisco State University Library is a treasure trove of untapped resources for the study of eighteenth-century music. Among its highlights is an uncatalogued and hitherto unexplored group of some 40 manuscripts and librettos owned by Cecilia Davies, the first English soprano to triumph on the Italian opera seria stage. The musical material, some of it in Davies's own hand, is mostly unidentified. My initial sleuthing has yielded findings that help us approach an array of questions surrounding performers' lives and experiences during this era. Some pieces represent works by the era's leading composers for which no other materials are known to be extant. The ones she performed help us learn more about her voice, which, given Davies's famous European tours with her glass harmonica virtuosa sister, Marianne, reveal a striking element of her persona and point to its impact on her opera career. Davies was active as a music copyist, and comparing the De Bellis sources to others bearing her hand sheds light on this activity. A libretto in the collection documents an all-female production of an oratorio by Johann Adolf Hasse, Davies's teacher, in which she sang during her Naples sojourn that coincided with her debut as a prima donna. Scoring in some pieces attests to the particular strengths of local theatrical orchestras and offers new evidence on how collaboration must have worked. Contextualizing these findings within correspondence involving Benjamin Franklin, Pietro Metastasio, Davies's Venetian contact Giammaria Ortes, Hasse, and others, amplifies our view of celebrity's mechanisms.
Davies evidently collected and carefully preserved music from throughout her career. This important new corpus, a type that is rare among eighteenth-century materials, helps us build bridges between the milieus of earlier star singers (such as rival sirens Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni) and that of the nineteenth century's divas. Representing more a closet than a suitcase, from which Davies drew insertion arias and other pieces, the collection and its myriad contexts enrich our understanding of celebrity culture and its function within Enlightenment-era Europe.