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Return of the repressed: The prima donna from Hoffmann's Tales to Offenbach's Contes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Heather Hadlock
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Extract

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?

Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:

[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 1994 , pp. 221 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Levertov, Denise, ‘In Mind’, from Poems, 1960–1967 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

2 Hoffmann, E. T. A., ‘Rat Krespel’, trans. Bealby, J. T., in The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. Bleiler, E. F. (New York, 1966), 229–30.Google Scholar

3 Hoffmann, , ‘Rat Krespel’, 228.Google Scholar

4 The opera's third tale, the story of the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, is based on Hoffmann's ‘New Year's Eve Adventure’. Although it ascribes sensual power to Giulietta's singing, her voice never becomes an object of narrative contention like those of the other heroines. The opening ‘Barcarolle’ is the operatic realisation of Hoffmann's statement that ‘Giulietta sang … her full but clear voice conveyed a secret ardour that inflamed them all. The young men clasped their mistresses more closely.’ Yet this number, a sensuous duet between Giulietta and Nicklausse, does not fit into the logic of the plot, functioning more as an atmospheric prelude. The Venetian tale emphasises visual rather than aural magic, and the play and libretto accordingly provide few musical cues: Hoffmann's couplets, Dappertutto's diamond aria and the love duet. Giulietta has no prima-donna moment, for her seductive power is located in her ‘lovely eyes’ rather than her voice.

5 Charlton, David, ed., E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings (Cambridge, 1989), 190.Google Scholar

6 Charlton, , 37.Google Scholar

7 Charlton, , 159–65.Google Scholar

8 Hoffmann, , ‘Rat Krespel’, 232.Google Scholar

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11 Klaus Hortschansky cites this text from the unpublished Hamburg score of Die Rhein-Nixen in ‘Offenbach’s “Groβe romantische Oper”’, in Jacques Offenbach: Komponist und Weltbürger, ed. Kirsch, Winfried and Dietrich, Ronny (Mainz, 1985), 229–30.Google Scholar

12 Hoffmann, , ‘Don Juan’, 64.Google Scholar

13 Hoffmann, , ‘Rat Krespel’, 232 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

14 Barbier, Jules and Carré, Michel, Les Contes fantastiques d'Hoffmann, Act III scene 8 (Paris, 1851), 48.Google Scholar

15 Barbier, and Carré, , Les Contes (Act III scene 13), 56.Google Scholar At Dr Miracle's command ‘Ecoute!’, the text indicates, ‘on extend la ritournelle de la “Marguerite” de Schubert’ (the introduction of Schubert's ‘Gretchen’ is heard), and the play's incidental music indicates that the mother should actually sing her text to the tune better known as ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin’.

16 See Solie, Ruth, ‘Whose Life? The Gendered Self in Schumann's Frauenliebe Songs’, in Music and Text Critical Inquiries, ed. Scher, Steven Paul (Cambridge, 1992), 234.Google Scholar Arthur Loesser remarks that the spinning topos had become a familiar part of the piano repertoire for ‘accomplished’ Parisian ladies in the first half of the nineteenth century: ‘about 1830 the titles of pianoforte pieces were content to give a vague hint of a basic rhythmical mood … rapid chromatic oscillations could readily call up the image of a buzzing wheel, and tunes with such accompaniments were now sometimes called “spinning songs”’; see Men, Women and Pianos (New York, 1954), 393.Google Scholar

17 Gérard de Nerval, in the introduction to his translation of Goethe's Faust, remarked that ‘It was difficult to decide on the optimum moment for this publication; Faust is represented incessantly in all the theatres of Paris’ and went on to challenge his readers to compare the ‘original German masterwork’ with the degraded versions available on various Parisian stages; quoted in Balmas, Enea, Immagini di Faust del romanticismo francese (Fasano, 1989), 149.Google Scholar

18 See Balmas, , 149–93Google Scholar; Meier, Andreas, Faustlibretti: Geschichte des Fauststoffs auf der europäischen Musikbühne nebst einer lexicalischen Bibliographie der Faustvertonungen (Frankfurt, 1990), 205–54Google Scholar; and Huebner, Stephen, The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford, 1990), 100–7.Google Scholar

19 Barbier, and Carré, , Les Contes (Act III scene 13), 56.Google Scholar

20 Hanslick, Eduard, ‘Hoffmann, Erzählungen, phantastische Oper von Offenbach: Erste Aufführung in Wien 1881’, in Hoffmanns, Erzählungen: Texte, Materialen, Kommentare, ed. Csampai, Attila and Holland, Dietmar (Hamburg, 1984), 241.Google Scholar

21 Solo woodwind often speak for silent women, a trope in French opera that dates back at least to 1828 and Auber's use of the clarinet to speak for the mute Fenella in La Muette de Portici.

22 Rouff, Marcel and Casevitz, Therèse, La Vie du Fête du Second Empire: Hortense Schneider (Paris, 1930), 98.Google Scholar The existence of this biography is one mark of Schneider's importance in the opérette-bouffe genre; another is Emile Zola's hugely successful novel Nana (1880), whose anti-heroine, a comic opera diva and courtesan, has a career and physical appearance clearly modelled on Schneider. The connections have led Offenbach's biographers to confuse the real woman and the fictional one: Harding describes Schneider's debut in La Belle Hélène as ‘like something out of Emile Zola's Nana’, and goes on to cite from the novel, substituting Hortense's name for Nana's. In fact Schneider's life followed a very different trajectory from that of Nana, who had only one theatrical success and died an early death from smallpox, her physical decay a now-famous metaphor for the spiritual corruption Zola saw in Paris.

Schneider's career will undoubtedly reward the kind of feminist scrutiny Mary Ann Smart has recently given to her grand-opera contemporary Rosine Stoltz, another example of how, in Smart's words, ‘the soprano's power … seems to demand containment, and much of the rhetoric that surrounds her, whether in “primary’ sources, journalistic writings or biographers, attempts to control or limit her potential supremacy'; see ‘The Lost Voice of Rosine Stoltz’, this journal, 6/1 (1994), 31–50, here 49.Google Scholar

23 Rouff, and Casevitz, , 122.Google Scholar

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25 Rouff, and Casevitz, , 136–7.Google Scholar

26 This story, attributed to Ernest Guiraud, appears in many accounts of Carmen's genesis, each betraying a slightly different attitude towards the prima donna's contribution. See, for example, Landormy, Paul, Bizet (Paris, 1924), 124Google Scholar; Istel, Edgar, Bizet und ‘Carmen’: Der Künstler und sein Werk (Stuttgart, 1927), 112Google Scholar; Cooper, Martin, Georges Bizet (Oxford, 1938), 109Google Scholar; Curtiss, Mina, Bizet and His World (New York, 1958), 383Google Scholar; Dean, Winton, George Bizet, His Life and Work (London, 1965), 215nGoogle Scholar; and McClary, Susan, Georges Bizet: “Carmen” (Cambridge, 1992), 74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Smart, , 49.Google Scholar

28 Brindejont-Offenbach, Jacques, Offenbach, mon grand père (Paris, 1940), 88.Google Scholar

29 Brindejont-Offenbach, , 89.Google Scholar The author does not transmit this portion of the tale uncontested, noting that André's father, the Duc de Gramont-Caderousse, had died of tuberculosis at an early age: might he not have passed on his ‘tainted constitution’ to his son? Schneider denied this logical explanation, and Brindejont-Offenbach speculates that she claimed responsibility for her son's weakness in order to protect the reputation of his father, ‘the only man she had ever loved’. Since the medical details of André's condition are obscure, we have only Schneider's narrative, which tells more about the prima-donna archetype (and the degree to which she had internalised it) than about her son's diagnosis.

30 Brindejont-Offenbach, , 90.Google Scholar

31 Hoffmann, , ‘The Sandman’, 205.Google Scholar

32 Hoffmann, , ‘The Sandman’, 207.Google Scholar

33 Hoffmann does not show ‘Olympia’ becoming human, but his complex and subtle story concerns itself on several levels with the perhaps more terrifying vision of humans behaving mechanistically. The story of ‘The Sandman’, of which the Olympia episode is only a portion, is less concerned with machines coming to life than with the robotic quality of human actions.

34 Faris, Alexander, Jacques Offenbach (New York, 1980), 205.Google Scholar

35 Barbier, and Carré, , Les Contes (Act I scene 12), 29.Google Scholar Gabrielle Brandstetter transcribes this vocalise in her catalogue of the play's incidental music in Hoffmann Erzählungen (Laaber, 1988), 471.Google Scholar

36 Barbier, and Carré, , Les Contes (Act I scene 12), 29.Google Scholar

37 A search of Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts in the Library of Congress recorded music collection turns up the following obedient Olympias: Munsel, Patrice on 26 02 1994 (#ncp 2369)Google Scholar; Peters, Roberta on 3 12 1955 (#T7330 R28)Google Scholar; Miller, Mildred on 12 12 1956 (#ncp 1539)Google Scholar; and Marie Rogndalh in an undated broadcast conducted by Sylvan Levin (#ncp 1004). In recitals, where the signer is no longer confined by the plot's robotic logic, sopranos typically subject the ‘doll song’ to as many virtuosic variations as any other showpiece aria, freely rewriting Offenbach's passagework and making the second verse more elaborate than the first.

38 Farrar, Geraldine, The Autobiography of Geraldine Farrar: Such Sweet Compulsion (New York, 1938), 60.Google Scholar It is delicious to speculate how Miss Farrar's resentment might have borne on an interpretation of Offenbach's three heroines; regrettably, the role was not in her repertory.

39 Hoffmann, , ‘Don Juan’, 62.Google Scholar

40 Offenbach, , Les Contes d'Hoffmann, 312.Google Scholar

41 Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, 1988), 31.Google Scholar

42 Cone, Edward T., ‘The World of Opera and its Inhabitants’, in Music: A View from Delft (Chicago, 1989), 125–38.Google Scholar

43 The Paris première, as recorded in the first published score (Choudens, 1881), did feature a duet for Stella and Hoffmann in the epilogue. However, its placement was due only to pragmatic considerations: Carvalho had decided to abridge the opera by omitting the unfinished ‘Giulietta’ act, and reassigned that act's two best numbers to other parts of the score. Thus the indispensable Barcarolle was sung during the ‘Antonia’ act, and the love duet for Giulietta and Hoffmann given to Stella. With the restoration of the ‘Giulietta’ act in the Vienna production that same year, the duet returned to its rightful place, where it has remained in all subsequent editions. Only one modern version of the opera uses Stella's voice in a set-piece, making her a singing character like all the rest: Richard Bonynge's 1972 recording adapts that apocryphal septet (‘Helas, mon coeur’) of the ‘Giulietta’ act into a quartet for Hoffmann, Lindorf, Nicklausse and Stella.