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Caroline Carvalho and nineteenth-century coloratura

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2012

Sean M. Parr
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Abstract

This essay explores how the soprano Caroline Carvalho (née Marie Félix-Miolan, 1827–95) perpetuated and extended the art of coloratura singing in the mid-nineteenth century. Creator of roles in sixteen operas, including five by Gounod, Carvalho achieved ‘superdiva’ status (Rutherford) by cultivating her voice – her ‘mécanisme prodigieux’ – to handle coloratura on a scale that explicitly invoked and rivalled the instrumental virtuosity of Paganini. In premièring the title role of Victor Massé's La Reine Topaze (1856), the soprano sang a variations aria based on the Carnival of Venice folk song and took one of the violinist's variations as a springboard to her own dazzling pyrotechnics. By allying her voice with the musical inventiveness of Paganini, who had achieved deific renown and artistic authority, Carvalho thereby acquired enough authority to catalyse a new genre, the valse-ariette. The popularity of a little-known aria that Gounod arranged for Carvalho, ‘Ah! Valse légère’ (based on the waltz chorus, ‘Ainsi que la brise légère’, from Act II of Faust, 1859), spurred a vogue for vertiginous waltz ariettes. Carvalho's association with this genre suggests even greater creative agency and indicates a shift in coloratura's signification from instrumentality to dance and the expressive body.

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Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 23 , Issue 1-2 , July 2011 , pp. 83 - 117
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 ‘La tradition de la musique de Rossini est depuis longtemps perdue … Cette musique vive, hardie, brillante, exige une grande légèreté de vocalise, une souplesse de gosier, une habitude du trille et de la roulade … L'habitude des cris et des violences prétendues dramatiques, prise par les chanteurs actuels, leur a rendu le larynx rebelle à ces délicatesses.’ Théophile Gautier, 4 January 1847, quoted in Lacombe, Hervé, Les Voies de l'opéra français au xixe siècle (Paris, 1997), 47–8Google Scholar (The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Schneider, Edward (Berkeley, 2001), 45Google Scholar). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent translations are my own.

2 From Berlioz, Hector, À travers chants (Paris, 1862)Google Scholar, quoted and translated in Berlioz, Hector, The Art of Music and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Csicsery-Rónay, Elizabeth (Bloomington, 1994), 69 (‘aussi agréable que le cri d'un petit chien dont on écrase la patte, cela suffit pour que la salle retentisse d'acclamations’), www.hberlioz.com/Writings/ATC08.htm (accessed 10 March 2009)Google Scholar.

3 Quoted in Walsh, T. J., Second Empire Opera: The Théâtre Lyrique, Paris 1851–1870 (London, 1981), 70Google Scholar. See also Hahn, Reynaldo, Thèmes variés (Paris, 1946)Google Scholar.

4 See Studd, Stephen, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography (London, 1999), 37Google Scholar. Of course, Saint-Saëns's imitation of Carvalho could also have been a form of flattery.

5 I have gathered biographical information about Carvalho from contemporary reviews as well as from the following sources: Spoll, Edouard-Accoyer, Mme. Carvalho: notes et souvenirs (Paris, 1885)Google Scholar; Soubies, Albert and Malherbe, Charles, Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique: la seconde salle Favart, 1840–1887 (Paris, 1892–3)Google Scholar; de Curzon, Henri, Croquis d'artistes (Paris, 1898)Google Scholar; Soubies, Albert, Histoire du Théâtre-Lyrique, 1851–1870 (Paris, 1899)Google Scholar; and Walsh, Second Empire Opera.

6 See M. B. Jouvin, Le Figaro, 12 November 1857, and Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 39–43.

7 See particularly the second chapter of her book, ‘Superdivas and Superwomen’, in Rutherford, Susan, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge, 2006), 58–89Google Scholar.

8 See M. B. Jouvin, Le Figaro, 12 November 1857.

9 The soprano's studies with Duprez overlapped almost exactly with his full tenure at the Conservatoire: Duprez taught there from 1842 to 1850.

10 In addition to the shifting emphasis and signification of coloratura, the rise of a fuller, more declamatory tenor sound is another important change in singing style that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1831, Duprez supposedly performed the first high C sung in full chest voice and ushered in a new, louder and more robust kind of tenor singing. However, Rodolfo Celletti, Marco Beghelli and Bloch have pointed out that several tenors were singing high notes in the new manner before Duprez. Beghelli and Bloch have complicated the story further by suggesting that Duprez's moment may not even have happened as it has commonly been described. See Beghelli, Marco, ‘Il “Do di petto”: Dissacrazione di un mito’, Il saggiatore musicale, 3 (1996), 105–49Google Scholar; Bloch, Gregory W., ‘The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez’, this journal, 19 (2007), 11–31Google Scholar; and Celletti, Rodolfo, A History of Bel Canto, trans. Fuller, Frederick (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar. Duprez's singing may also have involved more visceral emoting. Bloch observed this in his paper ‘Manrico's Manhood’, presented at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society of Music Theory on 3 November 2006. See also his ‘Early Vocal Physiology and the Creation of the Modern Operatic Voice’, Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, forthcoming).

11 Duprez was an emblem of the revolution in tenor writing during the 1830s and ’40s. As such, his identity and his teachings in particular serve as a benchmark in situating the shifting vocal practices of the nineteenth century. Duprez taught at the Conservatoire and later founded his own school of dramatic arts. His own pedagogical treatise reveals that he thought of coloratura and declamatory singing as fundamentally separate skills. Breaking from the pedagogical tradition of bel canto treatises as well as those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Duprez's treatise splits singing style into those two components (agile and sustained singing), and makes melismatic singing a secondary concern by means of a structural division into three parts: Part 1, ‘The Grand Style of Expression and Power’; Part 2, ‘The Style of Grace and Agility’; and Part 3, ‘Lyric Diction’. See Duprez, Gilbert-Louis, L'Art du chant (Paris, 1846)Google Scholar, reproduced in Roudet, Jeanne, ed., Chant: Les Grandes Méthodes romantiques de chant – Cinti-Damoreau, Concone, Conservatoire, Crescentini (1–2), Duprez, Fétis, Garaudé, García (père-fils), Lablache, Panofka (1–2), Panseron (1–2), Romagnesi, Rossini, III (Courlay, 2005)Google Scholar. Despite the fact that Duprez paved the way for the singer specialising in declamatory sustained singing, his most well-known and successful students were both singers of coloratura: his daughter Caroline Duprez-Vandenheuval (1832–75) and Caroline Carvalho. This reminds us that students do not necessarily replicate the vocal style of their teachers. For more on the pedagogical bifurcation between agility and volume in the context of musical training at the Paris Conservatoire, see my ‘Melismatic Madness: Coloratura and Female Vocality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century French and Italian Opera’, Ph.D. diss. (Columbia University, 2009).

12 The concert was reviewed in Le Ménestrel of 16 December 1849.

13 Henri Blanchard, La Revue et Gazette musicale, 28 July 1850. Blanchard and Hector Berlioz also had concerns about her. Blanchard thought her voice was best when required to be expressive and delicate rather than impassioned, writing that it lacked assured intonation when pushed (i.e., when she sang loudly). He hoped that she would choose roles carefully to highlight her strengths and avoid those that demanded lengthy sustained and intensely dramatic singing. Berlioz, while he thought her acting was charming and her physiognomy appropriate for the role, also thought her voice was a bit weak, unable to carry over the orchestra at times. See Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 17.

14 ‘Le troisième acte s'ouvre par un air brillant, admirablement exécuté par Mlle Félix Miolan. Ne remarquez-vous pas que ce nom de Félix porte bonheur? La voix de Mlle Félix est un soprano élevé: elle aime à planer au sommet de l'échelle musicale, et, comme un aéronaute intrépide, elle se plaît au plus haut du ciel. Les applaudissements l'y suivent.’ Fromental Halévy, La Revue et Gazette musicale, 28 July 1850.

15 Le Ménestrel, 28 July 1850. See also Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 16. Because of her rare ability to combine agility with gracefully spun, musical phrasing, Carvalho was also compared to Erminia Frezzolini (1818–84), Henriette Sontag (1806–54) and Angelica Catalani (1780–1849). Cf. Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 40.

16 While the overwhelming majority of coloratura material in mid-century Paris was written for the female voice, most often for the leading soprano, certain basse chantante roles contained a notable amount of fioritura. Perhaps the best example of a singer of these roles is Léonard Herrmann-Léon (1814–59), who created many opéra comique roles, including Michel in Thomas's Le Caïd (which includes a coloratura aria), Roland in Les Mousquetaires de la reine, and Don José in Clapisson's La Fanchonnette (1856). Herrmann-Léon also created Méphistophélès in the Opéra-Comique's production of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust (1846).

17 See the chart of performances in Soubies, Albert, Soixante-neuf ans à l'Opéra-comique en deux pages: 1825–1894 (Paris, 1894), 1Google Scholar.

18 After her run of performances as Suzanne in Reber's Les Papillotes de M. Benoist, Carvalho did not perform again at the Opéra-Comique until her return on 24 September 1854 when she sang Isabelle in Hérold's Le Pré-aux-Clercs. A flurry of letters was exchanged between various composers, Perrin and both Carvalhos during this period; see Archives nationales, Paris, AJ13 1137.

19 It is of course difficult to establish the extent of Caroline Carvalho's involvement in the management of the Théâtre-Lyrique, particularly because of the posthumous bitterness over the pair's participation in matters now considered the domain of composers. We know that while Léon was the official director, Caroline was sometimes called the ‘directrice’ of the theatre (see, for example, J. D'Ortigue, Le Ménestrel, 27 March 1859), and that she initiated benefit concerts, role choices, and aria insertions and modifications. Walsh attributes much of Léon's success as well as that of the Théâtre-Lyrique to his wife. See Walsh, Second Empire Opera, 69–82. Support for the Théâtre-Lyrique and the production of new French and older canonical operas was most evident in Le Ménestrel, a journal somewhat biased in its advocacy for the Carvalhos.

20 Walsh, Second Empire Opera, 162.

21 In the printed orchestral score, Fanchonnette ascends to the F-sharp above high C in the bolero. This is one of a few differences between the full and piano–vocal scores. See the orchestral score, La Fanchonnette (Paris: Lemoine, 1856) and the piano–vocal reduction, La Fanchonnette (Paris: Lemoine, 1856), copies at the Département de la Musique, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Vm51049 and Vm51051, respectively.

22 Bel canto soprano roles rarely call for this upper extension. Well-known but rare earlier examples of this writing include the arias Mozart wrote for soprano sisters, Josepha Weber Hofer (1758–1819) and Aloysia Weber Lange (c. 1760–1839), which extend up to high F (and, in one aria, to high G). Hofer created the Queen of the Night and was famous for singing difficult and high arias. For Lange, Mozart wrote the role of Mme Herz, the higher of the two coloratura soprano roles – both roles are also actual singers in the opera's plot – in Der Schauspieldirektor (1786) and the concert/insertion arias ‘Popoli di Tessaglia … Io non chiedo, eterni di’ K. 316 (1779) and ‘Vorrei spiegarvi, o Dio’ K. 418 (1783).

23 The operas featuring these highly difficult and melismatic roles succeeded largely because of Carvalho's vocal abilities. Many of the operas were never revived, and those that were revived had Carvalho again as the leading soprano or were modified for subsequent sopranos (see, for example, Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, discussed later in this essay).

24 There are of course many works that feature variations on the Carnival of Venice theme. These include several by Paganini, as well as Jean-Baptiste Arban's cornet piece Variations sur ‘Le Carnaval de Venise’ (1864) and Chopin's Souvenir de Paganini (KK IVa/10, 1829, of disputed authenticity). Théophile Gautier even wrote a series of poems, Variations sur ‘Le Carnaval de Venise’ which highlights the utility of the theme, its prominent association with the violin in particular, and its pervasive popularity. The poems were published in Gautier, Emaux et Camées (Paris, 1852). Gautier imitates the tune rhythmically in the first line of his second variation.

25 Carvalho may have learned other similar pieces in her training with Duprez. The tenor's treatise contains a theme-and-variations aria aimed at more expert singers of coloratura. See Duprez, L'Art du chant, 100–5. Reproduced in Jeanne Roudet, ed., Chant: Les Grandes Méthodes romantiques de chant, 212–17.

26 On other souvenir pages in Beauchesne's collection, performers credit the composer of the handwritten excerpt. See Alfred de Beauchesne's Album musical, held at the Département de la musique, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, W.24, 138. This album, along with a substantial collection of correspondence relating to nineteenth-century musicians, was given to the Bibliothèque nationale by Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (1821–1910), a folklorist, bibliographer and composer.

27 For more on interpolated arias in this period, see Gossett, Philip, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Poriss, Hilary, ‘Making Their Way through the World: Italian One-Hit Wonders’, 19th-Century Music, 24 (2001), 197–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford, 2009). I am grateful to Hilary Poriss for sharing portions of her monograph in advance of its publication.

28 I consulted the Paris (Schlesinger and Brandus, 1846) edition. Paganini's piece, ‘O mamma, mamma cara’ from Il carnevale di Venezia, 1829, Op. 10 (Paris and Mainz, 1851), consists of twenty variations. This edition does not contain the same variations as in the 1846 edition. As Paganini's cataloguers have noted, it was not unusual for the violinist to compose and perform more and different variations than those published in one edition – the earlier Paris edition may be one made from hearing Paganini in performance. The violinist performed and occasionally resided in Paris during the 1830s. For more on the manuscript of Paganini's variations, see Moretti, Maria Rosa and Sorrento, Anna, eds., Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini (Genova, 1982), xxii and 186–91Google Scholar.

29 There is a footnote in the score that acknowledges that the variation is Paganini's. See the piano–vocal score, La Reine Topaze (Paris, 1857), 195.

30 The treatise of the Italian castrato Pier Francesco Tosi (1654–1732), Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni (1723), is one of the first to delineate the idea of vowel articulation, a coloratura technique in which a vowel sound is re-imaged and restrengthened on each of the notes in a melisma. Tosi's words (and Agricola's commentary) describe this articulation in Tosi, Pier Francesco and Agricola, Johann Friedrich, Introduction to the Art of Singing, trans. and ed. Baird, Julianne C. (Cambridge, 1995), 151–3Google Scholar.

31 The association between the voice, violin and virtuosity may have been familiar to Carvalho from the career of her predecessor, Cinti-Damoreau. See Caswell, Austin, ‘Mme Cinti-Damoreau and the Embellishment of Italian Opera in Paris: 1820–1845’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 28 (1975), 459–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 On the only recording of the aria that I have been able to locate, Sumi Jo performs the piece down a semitone. See her Carnaval! French Coloratura Arias, Sumi Jo/English Chamber Orchestra/Richard Bonynge, ASIN: B00000422V (Polygram Records, 1994). Even with the aid of modern recording production and editing, the aria's original key made the tessitura and range too difficult for Sumi Jo, a consummate lyric coloratura soprano and a renowned Queen of the Night. On top of this, Carvalho's high E most likely sounded like a high F to our ears. Prior to the establishment of a standard diapason across Europe, nominally conforming to our current notion of A=440Hz, the mid-century Parisian diapason was almost a semitone higher – making Carvalho's singing all the more impressive. In France, the official standardisation occurred 1 July 1859, but probably took effect a bit later. The fact that the A in France was high at least until 1859 is documented by Haynes, Bruce, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ‘A’ (Lanham, MD, 2002), 346–9Google Scholar.

33 ‘Quant aux variations sur l'air du Carnaval de Venise, le compositeur n'a d'autre mérite que de s'être habilement effacé devant la cantatrice et d'avoir su avec adresse présenter les difficultés qui pouvaient le mieux faire triompher son talent. L'une de ces variations est de Paganini; M. Masset [sic] a eu le bon esprit de la conserver intacte. L'illustre virtuose, en écrivant pour le violon ces hardis passages, n'imaginait pas sans doute qu'une cantatrice aurait un jour à les chanter et qu'elle y parviendrait aux acclamations et aux applaudissemens frénétiques du public…. Je crois avoir déjà donné à entendre que l'exécution musicale de la Reine Topaze est la meilleure qu'on ait jamais entendue au Théâtre-Lyrique … Quant à Mme Miolan-Carvalho, son triomphe a duré quatre heures; c'étaient des applaudissemens gantés et non gantés, des bravas! Des fleurs, des rappels, des bis à donner le delirium tremens. C'est Ariel chantant, surtout dans ces redoutables variations sur le thème du Carnaval de Venise, dont elle fait scintiller la dernière en arpèges montans et descendans avec une sûreté d'intonations et un choix de nuances vraiment extraordinaires. Elle a d'ailleurs parfaitement rendu, comme actrice, tout ce long rôle, tantôt tendre et passionné, tantôt ironique et hardi.’ Berlioz, Journal des Débats, 31 December 1856.

34 D. A. D. Saint-Yves, La Revue et Gazette musicale, 4 January 1857. See also J. Lovy, Le Ménestrel, 4 January 1857.

35 These performances followed shortly after the soprano's 112 performances as Fanchonnette in the initial run of Clapisson's opera. Carvalho must have had significant vocal endurance to have been able to sing 227 performances of two long, extremely taxing and virtuosic roles in only a year and a half.

36 Not surprisingly, by achieving such renown, Carvalho also attracted imitators, and even rivals. Her performance of the ‘Carnaval de Venise’ aria spurred competition with a contemporary, the young Belgian soprano Marie Cabel (1827–85), then the dominant première chanteuse at the Opéra-Comique. In Ambroise Thomas's opera, Le Carnaval de Venise (1857), Cabel created the role of Sylvia, who at the end of the opera sings a series of on-stage vocalises which are praised by the chorus as her ‘concerto’ (‘son concerto’). The opera's title, its overture's inclusion of variations on the Carnaval theme, and this explicit moment of voice as virtuoso instrument suggest that Thomas and Cabel piggybacked off of Carvalho's success in La Reine Topaze. The vocalises are not nearly as demanding as those in the Massé. Cabel's are not at so high a tessitura, nor are they as wide ranging.

37 As Elaine Sisman has observed, variations were ‘implicated in the backlash against virtuosity’. The connections among variations, virtuosity and the instrumental resonate strongly with my suggestion that Carvalho's variations evoke not only virtuosity but also the mechanicity of the idiomatically instrumental. Typical of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century melodic-outline variations, Carvalho's variations employ a mix of pleonastic (‘the addition of “superfluous” notes within the melody or as a countermelody’) and periphrastic (the original notes replaced by a more ornate line, though with sufficient resemblance to the original, especially at cadences) types of figuration. See Elaine Sisman, ‘Variations’, Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (accessed 29 November 2007), www.grovemusic.com. For a recent exploration of Paganini and virtuosity, see Kawabata, Maiko, ‘Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil … What Really Made Paganini “Demonic”?’, Current Musicology, 83 (2007), 85–108Google Scholar.

38 See Ellis, Katharine, ‘Female Pianists and their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 353–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kawabata, Maiko, ‘Virtuoso Codes of Violin Performance: Power, Military Heroism, and Gender (1789–1830)’, 19th-Century Music, 28 (2004), 89–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 M. B. Jouvin, Le Figaro, 12 November 1857. Another reviewer observed that Carvalho's voice was a ‘docile instrument’, able to perform ‘impossible roulades and cadenzas’ and to imitate the violin and flute. Cf. Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 45–6.

40 See Berlioz, À travers chants. www.hberlioz.com/Writings/ATC08.htm (accessed 17 February 2011). Clearly in favour of shifting greater authority to composers and away from singers, Berlioz condemned the claque system that perpetuated performer authority and derided the popularity of emerging gendered vocal styles: the loud, shout-like singing of tenors, and the melismas and acuti of sopranos – the so-called ‘Lapdog School’. Although Berlioz considered Carvalho part of this school, he acknowledged that she was one of the few sopranos to actually reach her targeted high notes with consistent accuracy and security. His review of her performance of the ‘Carnaval de Venise’ aria amplifies Carvalho's exceptional status as a singer who could inspire and thrill with her expressive and virtuosic abilities.

41 It is worth emphasising the uniqueness, the markedness of coloratura in mid-century opera. Although one might argue that virtuosity in the operas of Rossini was also a prized commodity, there was nothing particularly extraordinary or marked about the coloratura in these operas. Bel canto singing by definition considers coloratura to be a normative singing style, one that pervades bel canto operas regardless of the dramatic situation. Melismatic singing was thus a skill all bel canto singers were expected to possess. In these French examples (and in those singular melismatic moments in Verdi's middle-period operas), coloratura is marked feminine, the exceptional singing style rather than the normative, and the vocal tessitura and range extend significantly higher than the melismatic examples from earlier in the century. That is, the singing is much more difficult and more virtuosic in Carvalho's variations, her subsequent Gounod coloratura arias, and in many of the contemporary examples in the Franco-Italian operatic literature, such as the coloratura arias of Violetta and Gilda. These arias reveal how mid-century coloratura becomes an increasingly marked musical gesture with a correspondingly more specific dramaturgical function that is gendered almost exclusively as the domain of the female singer. For a more extended discussion of this transition, see my ‘Melismatic Madness’.

42 Yaraman, Sevin H., Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Hillsdale, NY, 2002)Google Scholar.

43 See Yaraman, Revolving Embrace, 8–9, and Lydia Joel, ‘The Waltz: The Dance That Wouldn't Stay Banned’, Dance Magazine, 24 (November 1950), 30–1.

44 Gustave Flaubert's provocative prose in his Madame Bovary (1856) contains a relevant and contemporary perspective on the popularised sensual effects of the waltz on women. When Emma waltzes with the Vicomte, the increasing velocity of their dancing causes her dress to whirl upward, revealing her undergarments, then triggers dizziness as their legs intertwine, and finally makes her gasp for breath until she drops her head onto his chest. There are many other waltz scenes with suggestive bodily language in nineteenth-century French literature including: women being whirled away by a tempestuous waltz in Honoré de Balzac's Le Cousin Pons (1847); and a party waltz that sounds ‘like some breath of the flesh’ carrying women away in a wave of pleasure in its voluptuous whirl in Émile Zola's Nana (1880), set in the Second Empire. For an exploration of Napoléon III's imperial celebrations, see Truesdell, Matthew, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar. The Second Empire has also been derided for its more operatic and scandalous escapades. See, for example, Bierman, John, Napoleon III and his Carnival Empire (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

45 Of course, the waltz has a long history of association with opera and this association is explored by both Yaraman and Elvidio Surian, who locates its beginnings in late eighteenth-century Paris with André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's Richard-Coeur-de-Lion (1784) and later, Martín y Soler's Una cosa rara (1786) and the conclusion of Act I in Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787). See Elvidio Surian, ‘Turn and Turn About: Waltz-walzer-valse – le tre carte dicredito erotico dell'opera lirica’, EIDOS Rivista di Arti Letteratura e Musica (1991), 30–45, at 35–6. This association mainly consisted of people dancing the waltz onstage, or of offstage, diegetic music. The connection between the waltz and coloratura seems to have begun with the Carvalho–Gounod collaborations. Puccini would later use the waltz aria as a topic in La bohème (1896), as Musetta peripherally seduces Marcello with her waltz, ‘Quando m'en vo’. The source of the opera's libretto, Murger, Henry's Scènes de la vie de Bohème (Paris, 1851)Google Scholar, is set earlier in the century and does not allude to a waltz ariette. When reflecting on his salon piece, the waltz song ‘Il Bacio’, Luigi Arditi noted that he felt fortunate to have played off the public's taste for the genre, particularly French audiences. His song, markedly easier than the operatic waltz ariettes, was nonetheless composed for an operatic singer, Marietta Piccolomini, famous for her performances as one of the first sopranos to sing Violetta. ‘Il Bacio’ was written a year after Carvalho debuted her first valse-ariette. See Arditi, Luigi, My Reminiscences (London, 1896)Google Scholar. The vogue for the genre may have also been aided by the première of another waltz aria, one that was part of a mad scene and featured copious coloratura as well as a dancing soprano – Dinorah's Shadow Song from Meyerbeer's Le Pardon de Ploërmel (1859). The contemporaneity of this very difficult aria with the one introduced by Carvalho in the same year speaks to a coalescence of operatic and dance conventions in terms of a love-madness vocabulary that resulted in the establishment of the valse-ariette genre codified by Gounod and Carvalho. For more on Dinorah's Shadow Song and ideas of madness in Second Empire Paris, see my ‘Technologies of Operatic Madness in Second Empire Paris’, in Technology and the Diva: Opera and the Media from Romanticism to the Twenty-first Century, ed. Henson, Karen (Cambridge, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

46 One might even suggest that the exuberance and extravagance of the ariettes resonate with what Siegfried Kracauer has identified as the institutional motto of the Second Empire: joy to intoxicate and glamour to dazzle. See Kracauer, Siegfried, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. David, Gwenda and Mosbacher, Eric (New York, 2002), 151–62Google Scholar. First (German) edition published in Amsterdam, 1937.

47 In contrast to my opening examples of composerly diatribes that mock Carvalho, it is interesting that the soprano's collaborations with Gounod were remembered as such, and quite positively. In one of the singer's obituaries, it was observed that ‘the composer of Faust and of Roméo et Juliette recognising in her, according to his own expression, not merely an interpreter, but a collaborator’. See ‘Obituary: Madame Miolan-Carvalho’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular (1 August 1895), 550. If Gounod resented Carvalho's demands and involvement he did not put it in writing. His retrospective view of Carvalho's assumption as Marguerite is predictably self-aggrandising, but also glowing in his attitude towards the soprano: ‘She was so struck with the rôle of Marguerite, that Monsieur Carvalho begged me to let her sing it. I was naturally only too delighted, and the result proved my decision to have been something like an inspiration … Of course the part of Marguerite was not the first in which Madame Carvalho had found scope for that marvelous style and power of execution which have set her in the highest place among contemporary singers; but no previous rôle had given her so fine an opportunity of displaying the lyric and pathetic side of her gifts. Her Marguerite made her reputation in this respect, and will always be one of the glories of her brilliant career.’ See Gounod, Charles, Autobiographical Reminiscences with Family Letters and Notes on Music, trans. Hely Hutchinson, W. (New York, 1970), 158 and 160Google Scholar. First edition published in London, 1896.

48 The announcement that Ugalde was to create Marguerite appeared in Le Ménestrel, 11 April 1858. On 18 July, Gounod wrote of the possibility of Carvalho's assumption of the role. See Huebner, Steven, The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford, 1990), 51Google Scholar. The role exchange was official by late August. See Le Ménestrel, 29 August 1858. The story of the exchange, detailed in an article commemorating Faust, explains that Carvalho was so struck by Gounod's music when she heard it at a rehearsal that she immediately insisted on singing Marguerite. See Le Ménestrel, 16 December 1894.

49 Gabriela Gomes da Cruz has also noted a connection between Marguerite's jewels and the voice more generally in ‘On the Properties of Gems and Voice’, a paper delivered as part of Technologies of the Diva, an international, interdisciplinary conference on opera, co-organised by Cruz and Karen Henson at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University (23–4 March 2007).

50 The aria was first published as No. 3 in Gounod, Charles, Faust, Morceaux détachés (Paris, 1859)Google Scholar. We know that the waltz ariette was popular not only because it was published in several editions, simplified arrangements and transpositions (including a duet version first performed by Carvalho and Ugalde); it was also performed by students – for example Mlle Singelée, a student of Duprez, who sang it in early 1861 in concert. See L'Art musical, 7 March 1861. Another indicator of popularity was the publication of an entire collection of waltz arias, most of which feature coloratura: J. B. Weckerlin, Valses chantées (Paris, s.d.). No. 12, ‘L'Ondine du Rhin’, labelled ‘Grande Valse de Concert’, was sung by Adelina Patti. Weckerlin loved collecting souvenirs of famous musicians. He also transcribed Christine Nilsson's Swedish and Norwegian songs for piano and voice (with French text by Pierre Barbier). See J. B. Weckerlin, Airs suéduois and norvegiens (Paris, s.d.).

51 Although probably intended to increase its marketability as a catchy tune, the insertion of the ariette as No. 3 is interesting. It could have been inserted as No. 1, or somewhere in Act II near the actual chorus upon which it is based.

52 ‘Valse légère’ translates literally as ‘light waltz’ or ‘free waltz’. I have chosen to translate it as ‘gliding waltz’ in order to convey a more idiomatic sense of the dance's motion.

53 See the original livret de mise-en-scène reproduced in Cohen, H. Robert, The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991), 9 [109]Google Scholar.

54 Although it lacks the ‘valse’ expressive marking, Marguerite's Jewel Song in Faust might also be considered part of the valse-ariette generic history because of its rondo form and the fact that it features trills, a short fanfare opening, the triangle and triple metre. However, it should be emphasised that few melismas and no coloratura cascades are present in the vocal line, which, though certainly full of exuberance, is altogether more syllabic and even patter-like at times. Coloratura arias written for Carvalho by Gounod in Philémon et Baucis (‘Il a perdu ma trace’) and La Colombe (‘Je veux interroger’) lack the ‘valse’ marking as well, but do contain the climaxing coloratura cascades.

55 The manuscript of Mireille indicates that the valse-ariette ‘O légère hirondelle’, numbered 1bis, was written for Carvalho. See Charles Gounod, Mireille [MS], in the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection, The Morgan Library, New York City, G711.M674, Cary 278. See also the description of the aria in Turner, J. Rigbie, Four Centuries of Opera: Manuscripts and Printed Editions in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1983), 70Google Scholar.

56 Two recent essays on Léon Carvalho and the Théâtre-Lyrique regard the director's involvement in his productions from very different perspectives. Katharine Ellis sees the Théâtre-Lyrique as a ‘site of creative instability’ where Léon Carvalho's tendency to overspend and his penchant for large-scale, lavish productions, paved the road to the theatre's failure, a failure Ellis calls ‘almost foreordained’. On the other hand, Lesley Wright views Léon Carvalho as a hugely influential and positive force, ‘who presided over the development of French opera for most of the second half of the nineteenth century’. Wright's essay reveals Carvalho to be a shrewd businessman and a force of nature with extraordinary interpersonal skills and a complete devotion to operatic art that allowed him to find a balance between programming new operas as well as repertory works. See Ellis, Katharine, ‘Systems Failure in Operatic Paris: The Acid Test of the Théâtre-Lyrique’, in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Fauser, Annegret and Everist, Mark (Chicago and London, 2009), 49–71, at 50 and 56Google Scholar; and Lesley Wright, ‘Carvalho and the Opéra-Comique: L'art de se hâter lentement’, in ibid., 99–126, at 99.

57 Invocations of poetic personification are also found in the critical reception of Carvalho's portrayal of Marguerite. Although thought less favourable to her vocal abilities at first, Carvalho's Marguerite was so iconic that she was considered the embodiment of Ary Scheffer's Marguerite in the artist's popular paintings. See J. D'Ortigue, Le Ménestrel, 27 March 1859. Henry Morley went so far as to deem Carvalho a spiritual channeller of Marguerite, who ‘represents not so much the girl as the girl's soul’. See Morley, Henry, Journal of a London Playgoer, 1851–1866 (London, 1891), 256Google Scholar. Deeming Marguerite the most perfect of Carvalho's creations, even ‘progress in perfection’, one reviewer's ardour moved him to write: ‘she makes the jewel scene a wonder: never has the subtlety of the actress or the art of singing gone further. There does not exist on any French stage an artist capable of rendering a situation of this kind with so much naïveté, sincere passion, and purity.’ The same reviewer also observed Carvalho's vast expressive range: ‘Il ne vient pas! The melancholy refrain of the spinning-wheel song … is repeated by Miolan-Carvalho in a broken voice, with sobs so deep and true that the entire auditorium wept with her … The church scene, in which the eminent singer paints with such truth and profound variety of means the unspeakable horror that seeps through the veins of poor Marguerite … In the prison scene, Carvalho rises to the highest degree of pathos, and launches her prayer heavenward with extraordinary ardour, energy and fullness.’ See M. A. V., La France musicale, 18 September 1859.

58 Quoted and translated in Huebner, The Operas of Charles Gounod, 147. It should be noted, again, that the mid-century Parisian press was at times biased in its advocacy of the Carvalhos.

59 ‘Mme Carvalho a fait du rôle de Mireille la plus ravissante création du monde. Elle empreint ce rôle d'une poésie adorable, d'une grâce poétique des plus exquises. Et comme elle chante! Quelle pureté! quel style! quelle perfection!’ Etienne Desgranges, L'Entr'acte, 20 March 1864, reprinted in Charles Gounod, ‘Mireille’: Dossier de presse parisienne (1864), ed. Galland, Marthe (Bietigheim, 1995), 6Google Scholar.

60 Many singers were certainly accorded this creator status in premièring roles, but the trope of Carvalho as créatrice recurs throughout her career.

61 ‘Mme Carvalho réussit dans Mireille à faire entrer son remarquable talent dans une phase nouvelle, elle se transforme en forte chanteuse dramatique dans le sens le plus sympathique du mot, et c'est, en quelque sorte, une révélation dont les librettistes et les compositeurs s'applaudiront également.’ Charles Desolme, L'Europe artiste, 20 March 1864, reprinted ibid., 6–7.

62 Roqueplan was director of the Théâtre des Variétés from 1841 to 1847, co-director (with Charles Duponchel) of the Opéra from 1847 to 1849, sole director at the Opéra from 1849 to 1854, and director of the Opéra-Comique from 1857 to 1860. He was also known for his wit, eccentricities and for cultivating fads. He had a penchant for wearing bright reds and greens as well as for collecting bed warmers. See Curtiss, Mina, ‘Gounod before Faust’, The Musical Quarterly, 38 (1952), 48–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 ‘Mme Carvalho, dont le répertoire est déjà si riche, vient de l'accroître d'une création qui ne sera pas la moins belle. Je ne parle pas du talent de cantatrice dont elle y a fait preuve. On a usé pour elle, à ce point de vue, toutes les formes de l'éloge. Je parle de son talent de comédienne. Elle a su donner à la figure et à la passion de Mireille un aspect tout autre que celui de Marguerite. Marguerite est un être passif et tendre. Mireille est énergique. Marguerite meurt après avoir cédé, et pour s'être trouvée seule devant le danger. Mireille meurt sans tâche, mais peut-être aussi sans avoir couru de péril. Mme Carvalho a rendu toutes ces différences avec un rare talent de composition. Mistral doit reconnaître sa Mireille.’ Nestor Roqueplan, Le Constitutionnel, 21 March 1864, reprinted in Charles Gounod, ‘Mireille’, 43–4.

64 ‘Mme Carvalho chante le rôle de Mireille avec une virtuosité et une bravoure sans pareilles. Le pauvre Mireille a beau succomber à l'émotion, à la peine, son interprète traverse les défilés les plus scabreux, franchit les cimes les plus escarpées, et sa course est un triomphe.’ J. D'Ortigue, Journal des débats, 30 March 1964.

65 ‘L'air de Mireille se compose d'un larghetto rempli de tendresse et de passion, fort bien écrit pour la voix, merveilleusement chanté par Mme Carvalho qui en a fait un chef-d'oeuvre, et d'une cabalette entraînante à la manière italienne.’ A. de Rovray, Le Moniteur universel, 27 March 1864, reprinted in Charles Gounod, ‘Mireille’, 87.

66 Compare the list of Carvalho's sixteen role creations (Table 1) to the careers of other near contemporary coloratura singers who are all more well known to us today: Laure Cinti-Damoreau created seven roles – five by Rossini: Contessa di Foleville in Il viaggio a Reims (1825), Pamyre in Le Siège de Corinthe (1826), Anaï in Moïse (1827), Comtesse Adèle in Le Comte Ory (1828) and Mathilde in Guillaume Tell (1829), as well as Elvire in Auber's La muette de Portici (1829) and Isabelle in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831); Christine Nilsson created only three roles – Myrrha in Victorin Joncières's Sardanapale (1867), Estelle in Jules Cohen's Les bluets (1867) and Ophélie in Thomas's Hamlet (1868); Pauline Viardot created only two roles – Fidès in Meyerbeer's Le Prophète (1849) and the title role in Gounod's Sapho (1851), though one might also add the title role in Berlioz's adaptation of Gluck's Orphée, the title role of Massenet's oratorio, Marie-Magdaleine (1873) and the first performances of portions of Berlioz's Les Troyens (as Dido, 1859) and Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila (1874); and Jenny Lind created only one role – Amalia in Verdi's I masnadieri (1847), though Meyerbeer wrote Vielka in Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (1844) for her (she did not sing the première) and Mendelssohn wrote his unfinished opera Die Lorelei (1847) with her in mind.

67 ‘M. Gounod a enrichi son premier acte, déjà si complet, d'une valse vocalisé, dont l'exécution pleine d'intrépidité de Mme Carvalho a fait la fortune: c'est éblouissant, c'est vertigineux!’ Spoll, Mme. Carvalho, 73–4.

68 That Carvalho insisted on the aria's inclusion in the remounting is noted in Turner, Four Centuries of Opera, 70, and in Tiersot, Julien and Baker, Theodore, ‘Charles Gounod: A Centennial Tribute’, The Musical Quarterly, 4 (1918), 409–39, at 430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Incidentally, Roméo's aria ‘Ah! Lève-toi soleil’ was also originally performed and published in a higher key (in this case a semitone higher).

70 Reception of the ariette confirms its effectiveness. Critics agreed that the opera was a success not only because of Gounod, but also because of Carvalho. Armand Gouzien in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris of 5 May 1867 wrote that ‘La valse chantée par Mme Miolan avec une rare perfection a eu le succès de virtuosité qu'elle devait avoir’. Gouzien attributed the vogue for waltz ariettes to Arditi's song, ‘Il bacio’, which is actually predated by the Faust ariette written for Carvalho (‘elle est tailée sur le modèle des valses dont Il Baccio [sic] a donné le goût’). However, the vogue for ‘Je veux vivre’ seems to have diminished in subsequent decades. When the first Manon, Marie Heilbron (1851–86), sang Juliette, one critic wished that she had cut the ariette. He thought it had little to do with the plot and that Heilbron's voice was better suited to the more sustained, lyrical passages rather than the ariette's fioritura. H. Moreno in Le Ménestrel of 7 December 1884 wrote that ‘La principale attraction de la soirée consistait dans la prise de possession du role de Juliette par Mlle Heilbron. Mlle Isaac y avait laissé de grands souvenirs. La nouvelle Juliette n'est pas une virtuose achevée comme sa devancière, mais sa voix chaude, sinon très étendue, et son intelligence artistique ont suppléé à tout. Il avait été question, un instant, de supprimer à son intention la valse du premier acte et on eût bien fait, non seulement parceque ce genre de pyrotechnie vocale n'est pas trop dans les moyens de la cantatrice, mais encore parce qu'à notre sens le morceau fait tâche dans l'ouvrage. Il n'est plus du tout dans le sentiment si élevé du reste de l'ouvrage.’

71 Juliette's ariette begins with an instrumental fanfare very similar to that of Mireille's (as well as to the piano fanfare introduction of ‘Ah! Valse légère’). Both instrumental fanfares hark back to the ‘Carnaval de Venise’ aria, which also features a similarly rousing introduction, just before the first iteration of the theme. The two Gounod orchestral fanfares, as well as the Massé example, are all rhythmically punctuated by the triangle, a common instrumental adornment in French coloratura arias. The triangle's high, bell-like sound approximates the sound of a soprano's staccato high note articulations and the instrument's indeterminate pitch allows it to meld with any melisma.

72 As Yaraman points out, these accents, neighbouring motion and anticipations are idiomatic to the waltz and are often followed by a ‘fling, skip-wise or step-wise, to the strong beat, creating registral and durational accents’. See Yaraman, Revolving Embrace, 25. All of Carvalho's waltz ariettes feature these idiomatic elements.

73 By allying musical sound with worldly sound (making Gounod's music mimetic), I am self-consciously invoking the approach of musical semiotics. Several scholars have codified topics and gestures as musical signs with clear meanings in cultural contexts. Some of the most rigorous and interesting examples of this approach are Cumming, Naomi, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar; Hatten, Robert S., Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington, 2004)Google Scholar; and Monelle, Raymond, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral (Bloomington, 2006)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Marion Guck for helping me to integrate this analytical approach with my interpretation of the aria.

74 As Robert Tombs has noted, Napoléon III's authoritarian Empire ‘silenced feminist voices’ beginning in the 1850s. See Tombs, Robert, France 1814–1914 (Harlow, 1996), at 171Google Scholar, as well as Harvey, David, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, 2006)Google Scholar. The social historian Jules Michelet virtually codified the traditional roles of men and women in public and private in his La Femme (Paris, 1859). Such is the force of the gendering of mid-century singing styles that it is almost ludicrous to imagine a tenor breathlessly singing a valse-ariette. His earnest mode of lyricism and romantic desire in mid-century Paris was a more sostenuto aria, such as Faust's ‘Salut! Demeure chaste et pure’.

75 Yaraman and Surian both explore the connection between opera, the waltz and the erotic, but neither addresses coloratura's connection to the waltz.