Technologies of singing, teaching, and spectating in French operatic culture, 1870-1914

Includes abstract and vita.This dissertation examines how audio and visual technologies intervened in French operatic culture between the late 1870s and early 1910s. The four chapters pursue interesting points of intersection between the history of technology and that of opera, including the establishment of a musée phonographique devoted to the preservation of operatic voices, the telephonic transmission of performances at the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, the use of photography to study and train singers' voices, and the creation and screening of synchronized sound films based on operatic excerpts. Focusing on the performative strategies, pedagogical practices, and spectatorial habits that emerged in response to technological innovation, I argue that technology extended and disrupted contemporary modes of operatic engagement. Seeking to illuminate how singers, teachers, and audiences envisioned and employed technologies such as the telephone, phonograph, and camera, my study draws upon a rich collection of primary-source documents, ranging from press reports to pedagogical and technological manuals to sound recordings and films. Chapters 1 and 4 investigate the modes of operatic consumption made possible by the telephone, phonograph, and cinema, demonstrating that--even as French cultural leaders attempted to reform their nation's entertainment-oriented approach to opera--such technologies enhanced the notion of opera as spectacular distraction. Chapter 2 examines how laryngologists and pedagogues used vocal science and visual technologies to cultivate a speech-oriented voix naturelle, in an effort to resist forms of singing ill-suited to the pronunciation of the English language and to articulate new notions of French vocality and subjectivity. Chapter 3 contextualizes the soprano Jeanne Hatto's physical gestures--perserved on a synchronized sound film first screened at eh 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris--alongside late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of animaton, as well as critical and fictional discussions of living statues and moving-picture machines