Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), a British film about a boy from the industrial north-east who forsakes his roots to train as a professional dancer, opens and closes with two almost mythic scenes of male dancing. In the first, the film’s opening, the eleven-year-old Billy lays the stylus on a T-Rex LP and, after a scratchy false start, the soundtrack begins with the 1978 ‘Cosmic Dancer’. Hopping onto his bed, Billy starts to leap up and down – first as any boy would, but then higher and higher, his body caught in slow motion in a variety of abstract poses. In the film’s final scene, we return to Billy dancing, this time as a mature, muscular adult arriving in the wings of a London theatre. This is the first and only time we see the grown-up Billy, and his face is kept from us so that we can focus on the strength and immensity of his limbs, the astonishing athletic body. At the climactic statement of a soaring late Romantic phrase – the music is now Swan Lake – Billy leaps onto the stage. Boy becomes man, adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism and film and soundtrack freeze, capturing Billy in another abstract leap.
Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and '90s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Among surviving portraits of Augusta Holmès is a photograph taken towards the end of her life (Fig. 1). The setting is her home: possibly the main room, but more likely a study, since the picture is dominated by a grand piano at which the composer stands imperiously. Images such as this – emphasising professional zeal rather than feminine charm – were the exception in the representation of women composers at the end of the nineteenth century. A vase of flowers, a flowing gown and a recumbent posture would have been typical. In high-necked blouse and dark skirt, hair pulled back severely to reveal a large, pale face, Holmès is less alluring; but she is ready to compose. The image also engages with contemporary conventions of representing male composers. Within the photograph is another, a framed portrait on the piano, positioned so that it reproduces Holmès' features. Richard Wagner: same bushy cravat, same forbidding pose. Almost the same, but not quite.
This article begins with a late Verdian conundrum, one that is arguably distinctive of the fin de siècle: even as Verdi seemed to be withdrawing from the stage, he turned repeatedly to a small group of practical musicians, among them the French baritone Victor Maurel, the first Iago and Falstaff and creator in 1881 of the revised role of Simon Boccanegra. An exploration of the circumstances in which Maurel first made an impression on the composer, as Hamlet and Amonasro at the Paris Opéra in 1880, suggests a significant role for the baritone in late Verdian historiography. In particular, Maurel's case reveals a Verdi interested in and even actively encouraging new approaches to operatic acting and declamation, a fact we might want to relate to the composer's larger trajectory in this period. It also reveals a fin de siècle in which singers continued to be important, in spite of composers' anti-performance rhetoric.
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