M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Mary Ann Smart Voiceless Songs: Maria Malibran as Composer Not long after his death in 1848, a claim began to circulate that Gaetano Donizetti’s prodigious success in both serious and comic opera derived from a neurological idiosyncrasy. As biographer Filippo Cicconetti related, the composer had been ambidextrous, in a unique sense. Examining the failing composer, doctors noticed that he had »two founts of inspiration, one on the left side, which gave forth comic music, and the other on the right, from which sprung the serious music. When he sat down to compose it worked like a valve, which opened on one side or the other depending on the genre of the opera.«1 his is just the most whimsical of the innumerable anecdotes that highlight the speed with which the Italian composers of the era worked. Elsewhere Donizetti is described as tossing of melodies in quarter-hours in cofee houses, and Rossini’s facility was supposedly such that it was easier for him to rewrite a page from Il barbiere di Siviglia than to retrieve a page of music that had blown out of his hands.2 hese indications of haste were compounded by accusations of opportunistic recycling of musical material. With Italian opera early in the nineteenth century still more securely deined as »act« than as »text,« the question of who deserved to be called an »author« was an important topic of debate in journalistic discourse, broached implicitly whenever vignettes of speed or self-borrowing were retailed in the press. In light of the disapproval that informs such anecdotes, contemporary accounts of the composerly acitivities of mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran make surprising reading. In memoirs and early biographies, Malibran is celebrated for just the kind of speed and distraction that raised critical eyebrows when 1 2 Filippo Cicconetti, Vita di Gaetano Donizetti, Rome 1864, p. 178. Donizetti’s biographer Cicconetti relates that »often fearing that the ideas that came to mind during his walks through the city and during his pleasant conversations would lee from his memory before he returned home, [Donizetti] would enter some restaurant and, taking up a piece of paper, would notte his ideas with lightning speed«. Ibidem, pp. 69–70. he Rossini anecdote was irst recounted in Geltrude Giorgi Righetti, Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra di maestro Rossini, Bologna 1823, and reprinted in Luigi Rognoni, Rossini, Parma 1956 (Biblioteca di Cultura Musicale 6), pp. 304–305. Philip Gossett discusses these tropes of speed and carelessness in his »Gioachino Rossini and the Conventions of Composition,« in: Acta Musicologica 42/No. 1–2 (1970), pp. 48–58, here: pp. 49–50. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 138 Mary Ann Smart suspected in Rossini or Donizetti. As the Comtesse de Merlin recounts in her 1838 memoir of the singer, Malibran would often pass the time during rehearsals either drawing sketches and caricatures or jotting down songs. Merlin claims that Malibran could compose even amid the din of orchestral warm-ups and carpenters hammering away at the set: »I have seen her with a sheet of music paper and a pencil, busily noting down, without labor or study, airs worthy of a irst-rate composer.«3 Merlin is, in fact, one of the very few biographers who comment at all on Malibran’s activities as a composer: most accounts of her career focus exclusively on Malibran’s triumphs on the opera stage, her intense personality, and her colorful behavior, both on- and of-stage.4 Merlin mentions Malibran’s work as a composer several times, but the compositions are always invoked in contexts that emphasize lightness, efortlessness, conviviality, entertainment, and sociability. Expanding on her boast about Maria’s speed, Merlin describes an encounter in Florence at which Malibran tossed of a new »romance« in a mere quarter of an hour for the Marquis de Louvois, to make up for having forgotten her promise to write a new piece for him.5 In other contexts composition is equated with improvisation, or with caricature or social games such as charades.6 3 4 5 6 Countess Maria Mercedes de Merlin [Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo Merlin], Memoirs of Madame Malibran / by the Comtesse de Merlin and other intimate friends / with a / selection from her correspondence / and notices of the / progress of the musical drama / in England, Vol. 1, London 1840, p. 219. Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo (1789–1852) born in Havana to an aristocratic family, married the French General Christophe Antoine Merlin in 1809. Once settled in Paris, the Countess studied voice with Malibran’s father Manuel Garcia, established a successful literary salon, and became a ixture in Balzac’s salon. In addition to her memoirs of Malibran, she published three memoirs and a series of travel narratives, although a good deal of her writing may actually have been written by Prosper Merimée. On Merlin’s writings and the charges of plagiarism, see Adriana Mendez Rodenas, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba. he Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Nashville and London 1998; on the connection to Balzac, see Michael Lucey, he Misit of the Family. Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality, Durham/N.C. 2003. See, for example, April FitzLyon, Maria Malibran. Diva of the Romantic Age, London 1987; Patrick Barbier, La Malibran. Reine de l’opéra romantique, Paris 2005; and Howard Bushnell, Maria Malibran. A Biography of the Singer, University Park/Pennsylvania, 1979. Merlin, Memoirs of Madame Malibran (note 3), pp. 218–219. he romance must have been Les Noces d’un Marin, which was published with a dedication to Louvois. Confronted in Venice with a gondolier who arrived under her window in the middle of the night to sing an unlattering song about her private conduct, Maria improvised a reply on the spot; see Merlin, Memoirs of Madame Malibran (note 3), p. 219. Merlin also reports that Malibran »possessed a great talent for caricaturing; but she never exercised M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 139 By all accounts Malibran had a voracious, almost desperate, appetite for parties, and her friends often remark on her talents for theatricals, comic impressions, and for improvising jokes and riddles. he pianist Ignaz Moscheles described one such gathering in his diary for 1836: »She came at three o’clock; with her were halberg, Benedict, and Klingemann. We dined early, and immediately afterward Malibran sat down at the piano and ‹sang for the children’, as she used to call it, the Rataplan and some of her father’s Spanish songs. For want of a guitar accompaniment she would, while playing, mark the rhythm now and then on the board at the back of the keys. After singing with exquisite grace and charm a number of French and Italian romances of her own composition, she was relieved at the piano by halberg, who performed all manner of tricks on the instrument, snapping his ingers as an obbligato to Viennese songs and waltzes. I played afterwards with reversed hands, and with my ists, and none laughed louder than Malibran.«7 Later that evening, after a group outing to the Zoological Garden, Malibran entertained the company further with impressions of singers, conductors, and patrons, before settling down to sing some Lieder and then moving on to Don Giovanni, for which she played and sang all the parts herself. hese vignettes are usually trotted out to emphasize Malibran’s tendency to excess, her compulsion to over-exert herself and burn the candle at both ends – qualities that are treated as helping to explain her early death, with which critics and biographers were obsessed. But the same stories could be read as part of a deliberate strategy to humanize the diva and to delate the signiicance of her compositions, to reduce her music to just another form of entertainment or diversion. In addition to the insistence that Malibran’s music arose from sudden inspiration rather than hard work, the Comtesse de Merlin takes pains to assert that the singer’s music was intended exclusively for personal or philanthropic use, rather than for publication or inancial gain. Blotting out Malibran’s impressive publication record – which comprised more than forty songs, issued in multiple editions and transcriptions across four countries during her lifetime – Merlin insists that »she exercised [this talent] only for amusement, giving to her friends, 7 this talent in a way to wound the feelings of others. Her sketches were incomparably droll, but not ill-natured. Her great amusement was to sketch the proiles of her operatic colleagues during the time of a performance, and this generally when she was waiting between the side-scenes to come on. She frequently took caricature likenesses of all the performers in the green room, and showed them to the parties themselves, who, knowing that no malice was intended, would be heartily amused«. Ibidem, p. 211. Charlotte Moscheles, Life of Moscheles, with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, in two volumes, Vol. 2, London 1873, pp. 7–8. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 140 Mary Ann Smart or to charities, the pieces she composed«, and drives the point home with a sentimental anecdote. Malibran once approached an impoverished but proud friend claiming that she had composed six airs without text, asking if the woman’s son, a poet, might consider supplying the words, so that they could divide the proits when the songs were published.8 As Merlin tells the story, Malibran never did publish the songs, but nevertheless bestowed six hundred francs on the woman, allowing her to believe they were proit from the publication. It is easy to imagine that the picture Merlin paints was shaped partly by contemporary unease about a woman making money or damaging her reputation by putting herself into the marketplace, concerns that stiled the desires of both Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann to disseminate their music in print. But the broad dissemination of Malibran’s songs in published form makes the dénouement of Merlin’s tale seem to stretch credulity beyond the breaking point. On one level it is no surprise if Malibran’s public image, and the reception of her compositions, were subject to the familiar anxieties and constraints that attended creative women in the early nineteenth century. Yet we might expect something diferent of the singer who led a fairly unconventional personal life (including an annulled marriage and a common-law relationship with Charles de Bériot) and whose enormous fame as a performer might seem to neutralize any questions of exposure or display raised by the comparatively modest step of publishing her songs. But it is not only because Malibran lived her entire career in the public eye that the conventional historiographies of gender and genius in the nineteenth century do not quite it. Her case is complicated also by the type of music she wrote, which was conceived – and received – primarily within the not-quite-public yet not-quite-private sphere of the salon. he music Malibran wrote down bears little resemblance to what we might call her true authorial signature, residing in the music she performed on stage, and especially in her distinctive interpretative twists and embellishments. With the exception of a few operatic arias for her own performance, Malibran composed entirely in the genres of solo and chamber vocal music. Over the last ten years of her life she published four song collections, along with many individual songs, many of which appeared in separate editions in London, Naples, Milan, Leipzig, and Paris (see Table 1 for an overview of her published music). Generically, these songs correspond neatly with the familiar categories of Parisian salon music – melancholy barcarolles, nocturnes for two similar voices, comic 8 Merlin, Memoirs of Madame Malibran (note 3), pp. 105–106. On the importance of charity and philanthropy in the image-making of nineteenth-century female singers, see Hilary Poriss, »Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism,« in: he Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, Oxford 2012. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO 141 Voiceless Songs chansonettes, and such – and the vocal demands are modest, within the reach of competent amateurs.9 he dedications of individual songs further underline their destination for the salon, with many inscribed to the hostesses of the leading Parisian musical salons. La tarantelle is decidated to the Countess Merlin, while the two-voice »romance« Les Refrains is ofered to Madame Orila, another prominent salonnière and the wife of a prominent Parisian doctor and toxicologist, while Il mattino is dedicated to the Countess Giuilia Samoylof, who was the patroness and lover of Giovanni Pacini. A smaller number of songs are dedicated to fellow musicians (Gioachino Rossini, tenor Adolphe Nourrit, bass Luigi Lablache), and a handful of the songs for »deux voix égales« are inscribed to Malibran’s close friend the Comtesse de la Sparre, herself a professional singer, suggesting that the two may have sung them together.10 11 Matinées musicales: album lyrique (Paris: Troupenas, c.1828, Naples: Girard, 1828) song, genre 1. Le beau page, ballade 2. Il ritrovo, barcarola a due voci uguali 3. Il gondoliere, barcarola a due voci uguali 4. Rataplan, chansonette 5. La Bayadère: romance 6. No chiú lo guarracino (nuova tarantella napoletana) 7. Il barcajuolo, barcarola a due voci 8. Il follettino, barcarola a due voci 9. Chant caractèristique des matelôts anglais («Enfants, ramez«) 10. Le Mènestrel: romance 11. La voix qui dit: je t’aime, romance 12. Les refrains, romance Poet Loraux de Ronsière Marcelline DesbordesValmore adapted from »Tambour de Ville,« by Robert-deRigoulène11 Ambroise Bétourné [unknown] dedicatee Comtesse de la Sparre Comtesse de la Sparre Gioachino Rossini Ambroise Bétourné Sylvain Blet Ambroise Bétourné 9 On the topoi and archetypal genres of Parisian salon music in the 1830s, see Mary Ann Smart »Parlor Games. Italian Music and Italian Politics in the Parisian Salon,« in: 19thCentury Music 34/No. 1 (2011), pp. 39–60. 10 he Comtesse de la Sparre was born Mademoiselle Naldi, daughter of a prominent Parisian singer. When Maria’s marriage to businessman Eugene Malibran, ended, the Comtesse de la Sparre took her into her own home and became her chaperone. 11 Poem printed in Le Chansonnier des grâces pour 1831, Paris: F. Louis. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 142 Mary Ann Smart Album lyrique, composés de quatorze chansonettes, romances et nocturnes mis en musique avec l’accompagnement de piano e dédié au Général Lafayette par Madame Malibran12 (Paris: Troupenas, 1833; Naples: Girard, 1833) Song 1. Le Réveil d’un beau jour, chansonette 2. La voix qui dit: je t‹aime, romance 3. Le village, chansonette 4. La tarentelle › chansonette 5. Les refrains, romance 6. Rataplan, chansonette 7. La Bayadère, chansonette 8. La résignation, romance 9. Le Ménestrel, romance 10. Enfants, ramez!, chant caracteristique des matelôts anglais 10a. Row, boys! 11. Le Batelier, nocturne à deux voix égales 12. Le Rendez-vous, nocturne à deux voix égales 13. Belle, viens à moi, nocturne à deux voix égales 14. Le lutin, nocturne à deux voix égales poet Ambroise Bétourné dedicatee General Lafayette Sylvain Blet Alexandre Duponchel [unknown] Madame la Duchesse d’Allupin Mme. Lagrange Comtesse Merlin Mme. Orila Comtesse de la Sparre Comtesse de la Sparre Comtesse de la Redorte Baronne de Rothschild Rossini [unknown] Comtesse de la Sparre [unknown] Comtesse de la Sparre Marceline DesbordesValmore Marie-EmmanuelGuillaume-Marguerite heaulon Madame Naldi M. Zacharie ils Ambroise Bétourné Ambroise Bétourné [unknown] Ambroise Bétourné Ambroise Bétourné Comtesse de la Sparre Les sept romances françaises (Naples: Girard, 182?) La iancée du brigand Le message Le retour de la tyrolienne Hymne des matelôts Au bord de la mer Le montagnard Ambroise Bétourné Emile Deschamps M. Loraux de Ronsière [unknown] [unknown] Ambroise Bétourné Prière à la Madone Marquis de Louvois Sophie Bertin de Veaux Virginie Cottinet Clotilde Troupenas Paul Perignon Daniel-François-Esprit Auber Sophie Boutellier 12 Re-issued as part of Album lyrique and Dernières Pensées, New York 1984. Also published with guitar accompaniment, with fourteen lithographs. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO 143 Voiceless Songs Dernières pensées, album lyrique faisant suite aux Matinées musicales (Troupenas, Girard, 1837)13 Published posthumously, bringing together the contents of the Sept Romances francaises and the Trois Ariettes. La iancée du brigand, ballade Le message, romance Prière à la Madone, romance Hymne des matelôts Les noces du marin, chanson Au bord de la mer Adieu à Laure Addio a Nice, canzonetta Le montagnard, tyrolienne Ambroise Bétourné Emile Deschamps Marquis de Louvois [unknown] Ambroise Bétourné Emile Deschamps Mestastasio, trans. Deschamps Ambroise Bétourné Les brigands, ballade La morte Le Moribond F. Géraldi Antonio Benelli Sophie Bertin de Veaux Virginie Cottinet Sophie Boutellier Clotilde Troupenas Marquis de Louvois Baron Paul Perignon Rossini Daniel-François-Esprit Auber Adolphe Nourrit Lablache Individual Songs, not included in collections Title Tyrolienne («Adieu, douce pensée), à deux voix Le Prisonnier Les Adieux d’un brave (Ecossais) La fête du village Prendi: per me sei libero; substitute aria for L’elisir d’amore Table 1 poet Marceline DesbordesValmore Pierre-Jean Béranger Zacharie Zacharie Felice Romani publisher, date Girard, c. 1832 Pacini, n.d. Garcia, c. 1820 Garcia, c. 1820 Milan: Ricordi 1837; irst ed. attributed to Charles de Bériot) Maria Malibran’s published compositions his association with salon performance brings with it speciic assumptions about authorship and the status of the work that have more to do with function than with gender. Although most of the music heard in salons was composed by men, the salon was a feminine space. All salon music is gendered feminine, in the sense that it has no more than a passing acquaintance with genius, and is instead bound and shaped by mundane factors like function, performance setting, the identity of the performers, and taste. Salon music was conined within narrow social and expressive boundaries – presented as just one element in a constellation that might include, on a single evening, poetic recitation, charades and riddles, tableaux vivants or amateur theatricals, and 13 Also published posthumously with texts in English, by Mori and Lavenu. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 144 Mary Ann Smart conversation. Within such a mosaic of sociability and convention, authorship devolves into groupthink – into music that is more a barometer of collective taste than expression of individual style. Far from being marginalized as »trivial« or »light,« as was once the case, such music has become central to musicological investigations that focus on understanding how music functioned as an element of social and political discourse, and on how audiences listened and processed musical style.14 Valuable as this new direction is, we perhaps have not yet taken account of its implications for gender studies. In the context of the occasional, anonymous, and convention-driven world of salon performance, songs by Malibran become almost indistinguishable from songs by Louis Niedermeyer, or Henri Romagnesi, or Vincenzo Bellini. Do gender and authorship dissolve completely as heuristic concepts when we focus on this kind of generic, social music? In an interpretive sphere in which the idea of authorship yields to an event-based, performative and collective notion of expression, what role remains for speciically female experience and creativity? One answer is suggested by Jefrey Kallberg, who has theorized the piano nocturne as a genre that was addressed to a speciically feminine audience, and whose content and musical gestures reference dramatic scenes in which a male lover courts a beloved woman with song.15 Kallberg focuses on a single genre, and his methodological goals are to destabilize musical autonomy and to show how musical details acquire new relevance when viewed through a lens of reception and social meaning. In what follows I want to explore what happens if we approach a broader array of genres from this angle, thinking not just about the demonstrably feminine associations of the nocturne but about the implicit feminization of the salon space and the music written for it. Kallberg’s understanding of genre as a social category rather than a formal one is a crucial starting point, as is his observation that genre functions as a »communicative concept, shared by composers and listeners alike«16. I want 14 Recent studies include homas Christensen, »Four-Hand Piano Transcriptions and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception«, in: Journal of the American Musicological Society 52/No. 2 (1999), pp. 255–298; Jennifer Ronyak, »‹Serious Play.’ Performance, and the Lied: he Stägemann Schöne Müllerin Revisited,« 19th-Century Music 34/No. 2 (2010), pp. 141–167; Dana Gooley, »Liszt, halberg, and the Parisian Publics,« in: he Virtuoso Liszt, Dana Gooley, Cambridge 2004, pp. 18–77; and Peter J. Rabinowitz, »›With Our Own Dominant Passions‹: Gottschalk, Gender, and the Power of Listening«, in: 19th-Century Music 16/No. 3 (1993), pp. 242–252. 15 Jefrey Kallberg, »he Harmony of the Tea Table. Genre and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne,« in: Representations 39 (1992), pp. 102–133. 16 Ibidem, p. 103. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 145 to ask what social and expressive messages are communicated by these genres of salon song, and especially to probe the ways these songs mean diferently from the autonomous music to which musicologists still devote greater attention. As we shall see, one key diference lies in their approach to subjectivity – in the ways they constitute the speaking or singing subject as a ictional author. he music Malibran composed both was and was not intended for herself to perform, was and was not intended to showcase her own voice. She did sing much of this music herself, but never in the big public settings of opera house or concert hall. It was, instead, destined to be heard often late at night, amid noise and gossip. Nor do these songs have anything musically in common with the operatic music on which Malibran’s fame was built. As described by Henri Romagnesi in his 1846 treatise »L’Art de chanter les Romances, les Chansonettes, et les Nocturnes…«, this music called for a different voice altogether: not the »strong and rebellious« vocalization of opera, but a voice that is »more modest and more accommodated to the majority of amateurs«.17 Romagnesi also observes that intensive study is not only unnecessary for salon music, but may even be harmful, damaging the larynx of a delicate voice. Finally, Romagnesi speciically cautions against too much overt emotion or expression, which would be suitable only in the theater. Although the salon singer should evidence a strong and sincere emotional connection with the music s/he sings, the confrontational address and dramatic gestures of an actor in the theater would be in bad taste in the more intimate setting of the salon. One typical example of the style is Malibran’s 1828 »romance« Le Prisonnier, with words by Pierre-Jean Béranger. Beginning as a straightforward barcarolle, the song could be another of the many characteristic songs, colorful sketches of picturesque regions or pastoral scenes, that illed contemporary song collections. Béranger’s poetry was originally penned as a scene for an operetta (Amadée de Beauplan’s La Balançoire), and thus contains more narrative content and dramatic tension that the average barcarolle, qualities that are emphasized by Malibran’s music.18 A prisoner closed into a cell 17 A. [Antoine Michel, dit Henri] Romagnesi, L’art de chanter les Romances, les Chansonettes, et les Nocturnes et généralement toute la musique du salon, Paris 1846, pp. 14–15. 18 See Patricia Adkins Chiti (Ed.), Songs and Duets of Garcia, Malibran, and Viardot. Rediscovered Songs by Legendary Singers, Van Nuys 1997, p. 45. Malibran did not set the irst quatrain of Béranger’s text, which reads: »hus sings, through the bars, a captive, who every day sees a most beautiful girl sail by on the waters that bathe the tower.« She also omitted his inal stanza in which the prisoner’s hope revives that he may still be rescued tomorrow. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 146 Mary Ann Smart gleans knowledge of the outside world only through the overheard songs of a girl who passes each day in a boat, and he imagines that she will become his savior, his path to freedom. In its original incarnation, Béranger’s text began with a quatrain that set the scene, a narrator intoning: »hus sings, through the bars, a captive, who every day sees a most beautiful girl sail by on the waters that bathe the tower.« But Malibran’s song begins in medias res, with the prisoner’s invocation of the girl and her sailing song, sung by two sopranos: Reine des lots, sur ta barque rapide, vogue en chantant, au bruit des longs échos. Les vents sont doux L’onde est calme et limpide. Le ciel sourit: vogue, vogue, vogue, reine des lots. (Queen of the tides, on your quick boat, row and sing with the sound of the distant echos. he winds are gentle, the waves are calm and limpid. he sky smiles: row, row, row, queen of the tides.) his refrain alternates with three stanzas sung by the lead soprano alone, expressing the prisoner’s yearning for freedom. In the irst stanza he equates the pleasure of the hearing the girl’s voice with the hope of liberty; in the second he imagines that the gondoliera will actually set him free; and in the third he gives up hope («Tu passes, tu fuis, et je meurs«). Moi, captif, à la leur de l’âge, Dans ce vieux fort inhabité J’attends chaque jour ton passage Comme j’attend la liberté. De quel espoir mon coeur s’ennivre! Tu veux m’arracher de ce fort. Libre par toi, je vais te suivre: Le bonheur est sur l’autre bord. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 147 Tu t’arrêtes et ma soufrance Semble mouiller tes yeux des pleurs. Hélas! semblable à l’espérance, Tu passes, tu fuis, et je meurs. (I, captive, in the lower of the my youth, in this old fortress… every day I await your passage, just as I await freedom. What hope seizes my heart! You wish to rescue me from this fortress. Free by your hand, I will follow you: happiness lies on the opposite shore. You pause, and my sufering seems to soak your eyes with tears. Alas! like hope itself, you pass, you disappear, and I die.) By leaving out Béranger’s explanatory prelude, Malibran renders the song less dramatic and less speciic, and the luidity of its persona is intensiied by the intertwining of the paired voices in the refrain. he two singers – together perhaps representing the voice of the boatwoman, as replayed in the prisoner’s mind – either call to each other, echoing across space, or sing in close harmonies in the lilting compound-meter refrain (see Example 1). Effects like the luxuriant sustained dissonance of the simultaneous G and A in the voices on the word »échos« (m. 11) and the sequence of 3rds and 6ths beginning at »le ciel sourit« (mm. 16–22) capitalize on the timbral possiblities of the paired-soprano combination. he solo verses, in duple meter and the tonic minor, are more down to earth, musically and poetically. In a series of rhythmically chunky, resolutely stepwise phrases, the prisoner speaks in the irst person, articulating the usual dreams and dashed hopes of the Romantic subject. he play of subjectivity and impersonation in this »romance« goes beyond the usual limits of salon performance. Duets were common, of course, combining all manner of voices; but they usually cast the voices either as undiferentiated, not as characters at all, or as engaged in a lirtatious dialogue appropriate to the voice types employed. An obvious model for the duet is the »nocturne«, a sub-genre of »romance« that was always composed for two like voices.19 One close analogue is 19 Romagnesi, L’Art de chanter les Romances (note 17). Romagnesi himself composed many nocturnes for two sopranos, as did his Parisian contemporaries Félice Blangini and Auguste Panséron. In a recent study that examines the vocal nocturne as a model for Chopin’s nocturnes, James Parakilas characterizes the two-voice nocturne as a genre that can adopt any metrical topos but that is often set as a barcarolle, and as »not a genre that entirely shunned the pleasures of operatic singing«. See Parakilas, »‹Nuit plus belle qu’un beau jour’. Poetry, Song, and the Voice in the Piano Nocturne,« in: he Age of Chopin. Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. by Halina Goldberg, Bloomington 2004, pp. 203–223, here: p. 218. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 148 Mary Ann Smart Rossini’s song La pesca, from his 1835 Soirées musicales, set to a text by Metastasio.20 But the timbres in the refrains of Le Prisonnier also recall the blend of voices 20 Malibran herself composed at least two other similar songs, with watery themes, for two like voices: Le Batelier (poet unknown) and Belle, viens à moi (to poetry by Marce- M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 149 line Desbordes-Valmore). he irst of these is sung by a boatman or gondolier («girls of the village, come out with me in my boat, in the nice weather, the air we breathe is so sweet…«), who eventually consoles a girl, Alizon, who has been betrayed by an inconstant lover. he Desbordes-Valmore text exhibits a split persona similar to that of Le Prisonnier, shifting mid-verse from the person listening to the sound of the eaves and the song of the gondoliers («do you hear the gondolas, wandering on the tides, the gentle barcaroles of the young boatmen? everywhere gentle desire awakens pleasure«) to the active the boatman himself («Imm. row 1–30, towards ah, ah, songs Example 1 voice MariaofMalibran, Le Prisonnier, in:you, Songs andah…«) DuetsBoth of Garcia, Mailbran, andharmonic Viardot.simplicity Rediscovered Songs by conined Legendary Singers, ed. by Patricia share the of Le Prisonnier, mostly to tonic-dominant alAdkins Chiti, Van Alfred Music Publishing 1997and the occasional bitternation, and Nuys/California: the latter song’s infatuation with parallel thirds tersweet major second (over a dominant seventh) between the voices. Au bord de la mer (poetry by Emile Dechamps, for a single voice) is a strophic song in which the speaker’s emotions exactly mirror the state of the sea by which he sits (irst serene, then stormy); Malibran’s music here is slightly more adventurous harmonically and melodically. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 150 Mary Ann Smart cultivated in the classic Rossini repertoire that Malibran performed to clamorous acclaim in duo-recitals with the soprano Henriette Sontag. Sontag and Malibran irst sang together in a concert organized by the Comtesse de Merlin in 1828, the very year Le Prisonnier was composed; as their duo-act migrated from the salon to the concert stage their signature pieces were duets from Rossini’s Tancredi (Fiero incontro) and Semiramide (Ebben, a te: ferisci). James Davies has written about the curiosity of these duo appearances, the near-paradox that Malibran seemed to deine herself most fully as a diva when she blended her voice imperceptibly with that of another prima donna who might usually have been considered a rival. Davies connects the public fanaticism aroused by these performances with the seismic shift that took place in the distribution of voices and dramatic types at this time: just as the soprano took over from the castrato and the trousered hero as the central and compelling archetype of opera, public enthusiasm began to be directed not so much towards dramatic impersonation, nor to the polish or control of a voice, but to the elemental »charge« that could be emitted by a voice, and especially by two voices in tandem.21 his strange phenomenon, of a diva making a splash by melding her voice with that of another singer, draws attention to a rarely noted feature of Malibran’s songs, and of salon song in general. his music not only disperses the author-function into an ether of social practice and generic expression; it also, to a surprising extent, sacriices the representation of a uniied subjectivity, blurring the identity and afective proile of the singing persona much as it erases the imprint of a particular author. In fact, it may be easier to deine this repertoire in terms of lack than of its actual qualities: there are no characters to speak of, to identify with, and only the slimmest shards of narrative or setting to grab on to. In this sense, Malibran’s songs and their many salon siblings operate on a diferent expresssive plane than the one usually assumed to operate in nineteenth-century music. What marks these performances is that they were not really Romantic, although their poetry supericially adopts the tropes and preoccupations of Romantic literature.22 Rather than showing listeners to themselves, or allowing listeners to experience grander and better versions of themselves in a heroic mold, these songs ofer generic and anonymous perso21 James Davies, »Gautier’s Diva. he First French Use pof Word« in: he Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, Oxford 2012; and James Davies, »he Sontag-Malibran Stereotype« in: Romantic Anatomies of Performance, ed. by James Davies, Berkeley and Los Angeles, forthcoming 2013. 22 In this they have much in common with the Lieder of the Biedermeier period, which re-purposed the traits of Romantic poetry within a more sentimental and more domestic context; see Jane Brown, »In the beginning was poetry,« in: Cambridge Companion to the Lied, ed. by James Parson, Cambridge 2004, pp. 12–32. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 151 nae that blur and mesh with each other promiscuously.23 he very blankness of the images, and the slim narratives of the songs, may have wielded its own expressive power, perhaps by opening up what Catherine Gallagher has called »suppositional identities« – vaguely delineated characters that could be temporarily appropriated by anyone, allowing readers or listeners to try on emotions with minimal personal investment.24 Gallagher connects the demand among eighteenth-century readers for such labile, forgettable personae to changes in the economic basis of British society. In the Parisian setting in which Malibran’s songs were created and performed, uncertainty about the nature of political authority seems a stronger force than economic anxiety. he July revolution had overthrown a king, Charles X, but on 9 August 1830 resulted in a coronation, of Louis-Philippe. As Sandy Petrey has written »Louis-Philippe was known as the Citizen King, and a century and a half of repeating the designation has concealed the fact that it’s a glaring oxymoron«25. he interchangeability and permeability of the selves represented in these songs, as well as the weakening of the identity of the author, may have made them a perfect cultural pursuit for a Parisian society in which the lineaments of the king and the government kept shifting in subtle ways and in which disillusion reigned supreme. To talk about authorship in the nineteenth century is to talk also about broader historical notions of subjectivity. When the author is female, understanding the nature of authorship also entails careful attention to the boundary between actual artistic creation and representations of that creative act. Perhaps all authorship is subject to rhetorical exagerration and mythologization; 23 he subjective, or »heroic«, model of nineteenth-century listening has been described by Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero, Princeton 1995; Michael Steinberg, Listening to Reason. Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteeth-Century Music, Princeton 2004; and John Toews, »Integrating Music into Intellectual History. Nineteenth-Century Art Music as a Discourse of Agency and Identity«, in: Modern Intellectual History, 5/No. 2 (2008), pp. 309–331. 24 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story. he Vanishing Act of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1994. Gallagher argues that early female novelists blurred the boundaries between their own identities and those of their characters, or disappeared into collaborations with their fathers, in order to secure a position in the literary marketplace. For Gallagher characters in these early novels are »nobodies«, characters with whom readers could identify while they were reading, and from whom they could learn to navigate the new feelings and relationships required of them in a new economy based on exchange rather than land-ownership. For an insightful discussion of Gallagher’s book in these terms, see also Blakey Vermeule, »Gossip and Literary Narrative«, in: Philosophy and Literature, 30/No. 1 (2006), pp. 102–117. 25 Sandy Petrey, »Pears in History«, Representations 35 (1991), pp. 52–71, here: p. 61. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 152 Mary Ann Smart for female authors, that rhetoric leans heavily away from narratives of genius and rebellion, toward domestication and self-erasure. No surprise there – except that as a lamboyantly public igure who also lived an unconventional personal life very much in the public eye, one might have expected Maria Malibran to be immune to the imperative to tone down her authorial persona. We have seen that Malibran’s compositional role was downplayed both by the narrative spin provided by the Comtesse de Merlin and by the dispersal of her compositions into the multi-voiced (yet anonymous) realm of salon performance. I want to suggest in closing that the seismic event of the prima donna’s sudden death at the age of only twenty-eight fundamentally altered that unwritten contract, so that the events of last year or so of her life are narrated in very diferent terms. he circumstances of the singer’s demise have stimulated the imaginations of journalists and biographers since 1836. he cause of death was a fall from a horse, but Malibran lived for three months, plagued by pain and headaches before succumbing; the combination of sudden violence and lingering decline allow biographers to evoke vividly both the cataclysmic drama of injury and the periods of melancholy retrospection that followed. One of her last compositions was the song Le Moribond, written and performed privately several times in 1836, but published only posthumously. he convergence of her composition of a song about a dying man with her own demise just two months later has proved sentimentally irresistible to chroniclers, who are unanimously compelled to posit connections between the artistic work and the life. he comtesse de Merlin calls the song he Romance of Death, and notes (as did every subsequent writer) the sad irony that Malibran wrote it just a month before her death, while the author of the poetry, Antonio Pellegrino Benelli, had himself died just two months after he penned the verses in 1830.26 Merlin recalls that Malibran had always had presentiments that she would die young, and notes that in her last weeks of life, her behaviour became even more extravagant: »in the intervals between her severe bouts of headache […] She would run about, dance, disguise herself, paint her face to perform burlesque scenes: never was joy so exuberant.«27 Another account tells that just two weeks before her death Malibran wanted to sing the »romance« for bass Luigi 26 See Merlin, Memoirs of Madame Malibran (note 3), pp. 259–261. Antonio Maria Pellegrino Benelli (1771–1830) was a tenor, voice teacher, and composer based in London, and later Dresden. In 1819 he published the Regole per il canto igurato, o siano precetti ragionati per apprendere i principi di musica, con esercizi, lezioni, e inine solfeggi per imparare a cantare, Dresden 1819. 27 Ibidem, p. 261. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 153 Lablache, but while singing she became so overwrought that she had to retire to her bed.28 he song to which to which these premonitions attach is a surprising vehicle for this sentimental reception, since its address to death is resolutely ironic. Benelli’s poetry is disjunctive, almost modern in its disregard for regular patterns and clear structure. A twist on the »death and the maiden« topos, the song begins and ends with an onomatopoeic stanza in which death knocks on the door and demands to be admitted. his is answered by two quatrains in the voice of the invalid, who laments that he had continually wished for Health to visit him, but had never been able to convince her to stay long: Pan, pan! Qui frappe là? Pan, pan! Je suis la mort. La mort! Eh, camarade! Vite, ouvre la porte, Que je t’emporte, Ouvre à la mort. Belle santé, tous les jours je t’invoque, l’ingrate qui se moque parait et puis s’en va. La folle aux bois danse avec les bergères, Crie et tempête avec les militaires, Chante avec les saints frères, Et moi me laisse là. (Tap, tap! Who knocks there? Tap, tap! I am death. Death! Ah, comrade! Quick, open the door, so that I may take you away; open up to Death. Beautiful Health, every day I invoke you, the ingrate who makes fun of me appears and then runs away again. he madwoman dances in the woods with the shepherdessess, cries and storms with the soldiers, sings with the holy friars; but me she leaves all alone here.) As in Le Prisonnier and the other two-voice nocturnes, the singer is asked to portray a shifting persona, envoicing irst Death himself, then the invalid. he characterization of Health as an »ingrate« and a »madwoman« who dances with shepherdesses and sings with monks lends the poem a grotesque tinge that is matched by Malibran’s musical setting. he invocation of Health moti28 See Bushnell, Maria Malibran (note 4), p. 220. 1 . KO R R E K T U R 154 Mary Ann Smart vates a shift to the major key and some bright and mercurial musical efects, especially for the third verse. For all three stanzas, Malibran’s music emphasizes the instability of the invalid’s situation. he opening section is marked by the onomatopoeic F pedal in Bb minor, with a good deal of chromatic coloration (see Example 2). he elusive quality of Health is represented in the second section by a long descending bass line from the tonic Eb (mm. 26–32), and a play of substituting dominants that never quite resolve directly, beneath syncopated cries of »Ah!« in the voice (mm. 33–40). he music for the third verse is both the most harmonically stable and the most changeable, adopting a new local tonic and new rhythmic topoi for each of the three settings in which Health is imagined (pastoral, military, religious; mm. 47–60). he song ends with a literal reprise of the opening section, the solid closure it provides almost certainly probably signifying the death of the invalid. he constant tonal shifts and the restless motion of the bass line project a condensation and detachment that dilute the song’s emotional impact, rendering it less immediate. Yet the song’s slim contemporary reception betrays none of this uncertainty about its intention, instead wholeheartedly embracing the weighty parallels with its composer’s untimely death. Besides the overwhelming compulsion to equate art and life that shapes so much nineteenthcentury biography, and that beckons especially to those who write about the transgressive lives of female singers, that reception may have been informed by Malibran’s performance practice and by a general climate in which female authors were almost joyfully understood through images of death. his was a period that was anyway obsessed with death, and that had with the English Romantics found some new ways to write about loss, memory, and funerary monuments. But Patrick Vincent has recently suggested that female poets were particuarly dependent on close association with death, whether as authors of elegies or as the subject of odes and elegies when they themselves expired. Vincent describes a kind of parasitical relationship, in which poetesses could be forgiven for venturing into print, exposing themselves to wide dissemination, and making money, their successs redeemed or defanged by a morbid gloriication of their deaths.29 Maria Malibran was the subject of scores of such funerary lamentations, as well as of a surprising number of valedictory poems penned during her life29 Vincent attributes a similar redeeming function to the salon, suggesting that by 1830 the actual salon had become irrelevant to literary success in Paris, but that critics like SaintBeuve still liked to read female poets as tied to the salon as a nostaglic signiier for a time when literary production by women was more private and personal. Patrick Vincent, he Romantic Poetess. European Culture, Politics, and Gender, 1820–1840, Lebanon/NH 2004. M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs Dies obige Bild wurde aus der Word-Datei entnommen. Nicht druckgeeignet. 155 1 . KO R R E K T U R 156 Mary Ann Smart M TR ER RE SK ET I TUERN 1U . KSO Voiceless Songs 157 Example 2 Maria Malibran, Le Moribond, mm. 1–71, in: Maria Malibran, Album lyrique and Dernières pensées, New York: Da Capo Press 1984 1 . KO R R E K T U R 158 Mary Ann Smart time as she departed from Naples or Bologna or Lucca to perform in the next city.30 Malibran’s own »Romance of Death«, Le Moribond, completely eschews the consoling Romantic language that posits ever-resounding poetry or song, or the vibrating strings of an Aeolian harp, as a substitute for the voice of the deceased person. he refusal of that particular poetic and musical convention may be another attribute by which we can arrive at a sense of who Malibran was as an author. Although the songs do exist in a space between performed event and notated text, they do so in a way that has little or nothing to do with Maria Malibran’s operatic self, and everything to do with her friends and patrons and the social world she occupied. his also must be on some level an authorial choice, whether conscious or conditioned. It is a strange irony that to ind notations of what Malibran’s public performances sounded like we must look not to her own compositions, but to those of her friend Moscheles, who transcribed her embellishments for arias by Mozart, Rossini and Niccolini in two virtuosic works for piano solo titled Bijoux à la Malibran. In these pastiche compsitions vocal spontaneity melds seamlessly with instrumental mechanicity, resulting in a transcription of Malibran’s voice that artiicially emphasizes speed, range, and mastery of ioritura. Perhaps it is in the space between the virtuosic voice transferred to the piano and the tamer utterances of the salon songs that Malibran’s true voice can be discerned. 30 A number of these are reprinted in Merlin, Memoirs of Madame Malibran (note 3), pp. 271–294. he most famous of the many poetic laments written after her death is Alfred de Musset, »À la Malibran. Stances« (1836).