Celluloid Diva: Staging Leoncavallo’s Zazà in the Cinematic Age

ABSTRACT

Geraldine Farrar’s performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Zazà (1900) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar’s Zazà in the context of New York’s post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar’s own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo’s opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar’s critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

I would like to thank Marco Ladd, Ceri Owen, Enrique Sacau, Francesca Vella, Benjamin Walton, Gavin Williams and Flora Willson for their support in developing this article, as well as the editors of and the anonymous readers for this journal. John Pennino (at the Metropolitan Opera House) and archivists at the Library of Congress and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts all generously provided help with images. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Tosc@Bologna conference in July 2015, and the ‘Operatic Immersions’ conference in Leeds and Huddersfield in January 2016.

Notes

1 Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 169–70.

2 ‘Hail Farrar Queen as She Sings Adieu’, New York Times, 23 April 1922; Ruth Crosby Dimmick, ‘Farrar Receives Record Ovation’, unidentified newspaper cutting, Washington DC, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 28. Farrar maintained detailed scrapbooks of her media coverage, but unfortunately they are inconsistently referenced, with dates, authors and/or sites of publication sometimes missing. Box numbers are listed here when appropriate. Dimmick was the author of Our Theatres Today and Yesterday (New York: H. K. Fly, 1913), a study of New York’s theatrical life.

3 ‘Miss Farrar’s Operatic Farewell’, Literary Digest, 13 May 1922.

4 ‘Farrar Quits amid Tears and Cheers’, New York Tribune, 23 April 1922.

5 The opera was featured on the annual tour and later transferred to the West Coast: <http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archives/frame.htm> (accessed 21 March 2017).

6 On emerging entertainments in New York, see for example Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), esp. pp. 33–91, and Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

7 See for example Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 488–548.

8 On early interactions between the two media, see for example Between Opera and Cinema, ed. Rose Theresa and Jeongwon Joe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002). For a recent study of Casa Ricordi’s legal and technological responses to cinema, see Christin Thomas, ‘When Opera Met Film: Casa Ricordi and the Emergence of Cinema, 1905–1929’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2016); on early opera films, see also Jennifer Fleeger, Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera and Jazz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9 Opera’s remediation via video has, however, generated much recent interest. See for example David Trippett, ‘Facing Digital Realities: Where Media Do Not Mix’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 26 (2014), 41–64. On the persistence of old media, see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), and David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

10 On New York and modernism, see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London: Picador, 1995), and Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). A contrasting account that focuses upon continuities is offered by Laura Tunbridge, ‘Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 66 (2013), 437–74.

11 See in particular Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singer and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

12 On the operatic culture industry, see Alessandra Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 1–19.

13 Mary Simonson, Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), examines intermediality in dance performance.

14 Konrad Dryden, Leoncavallo: Life and Works (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 79.

15 Ibid., 82–100.

16 On the tour, see ibid., 115. The tour encompassed 18 performances of five different operas.

17 Grenville Vernon, ‘Operas of the Coming Season’, New York Tribune, 29 June 1919.

18 Davide Ceriani, ‘Italianizing the Metropolitan Opera House: Giulio Gatti-Casazza’s Era and the Politics of Opera in New York City, 1908–1935’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2011), examines Gatti-Casazza’s efforts covertly to promote Italian works during his tenure at the Met, and the critical anxieties such moves provoked among pro-Germanic critics. On Franchetti, see pp. 116–46. The première of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West at the Met in 1910, while highly publicized, received a mixed reception on both sides of the Atlantic: see Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

19 ‘Music and Drama; The Metropolitan Directorship’, New York Evening Post, 1 February 1908, cited in Ceriani, ‘Italianizing the Metropolitan Opera House’, 63.

20 Katherine Preston has cautioned that English-language performances of foreign works remained popular in the post-bellum era, in ‘Between the Cracks: The Performance of English-Language Opera in Nineteenth-Century America’, American Music, 21 (2003), 349–74.

21 See Carolyn Guzski, ‘American Opera at the Metropolitan, 1910–1935: A Contextual History and Critical Survey of Selected Works’ (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2001), esp. pp. 146–336.

22 Ibid.

23 Henry T. Finck, My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1926), 390.

24 James Gibbons Huneker, ‘A Triple Bill at Metropolitan’, New York Times, 13 March 1919.

25 Allen J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19–34.

26 On mythic connections between America and cinema in this period, see Paula Marantz Cohen, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). On cinema and the construction of a national imaginary during the 1910s, see also Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–1914 (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2006).

27 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 171–88.

28 On changing venues, see David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York and Chichester, NH: Columbia University Press in association with the Library of Congress, 1996), 141–76; on cinema’s role in reshaping class and cultural distinctions, see Rob King, ‘1914: Movies and Cultural Hierarchy’, American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, ed. Charlie Keil and Ben Singer (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 115–38.

29 ‘New Strand Opens: Biggest of Movies’, New York Times, 12 April 1914. The Strand Theatre offered nearly 3,500 seats and its opening attracted a celebrity audience.

30 On plans to rent out the Met, and listening practices at early movie theatres, see Erin Brooks, ‘Movies at the Met? Space and Meaning in Early Film Screenings’ (conference paper delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Vancouver 2016). The New York Times recorded that discussions in 1918 had once again collapsed: ‘No Movies in the Metropolitan’, 24 March 1918.

31 Brandon Mathers, ‘Are the Movies a Menace to the Drama?’, North American Review, March 1917, 447–54 (pp. 448–9).

32 On sound and listening in silent film, see for example Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

33 For an overview of the tour, see James Greening, ‘Leoncavallo in New York and Other American Cities: 1906 and 1913’ (D.M.A. dissertation, City University of New York, 2010). Leoncavallo briefly returned to New York in 1913 en route to California, but his visit was almost entirely overlooked by the local press.

34 The tour included extracts from I Medici, Chatterton and Roland de Berlin, alongside Zazà.

35 New York Herald, 11 October 1906. Leoncavallo Clippings Files, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division.

36 Quoted in ‘Leoncavallo Concert Opens New York’s Musical Season’, Musical America, 13 October 1906.

37 ‘Leoncavallo in Concert’, New York Sun, 9 October 1906.

38 ‘Leoncavallo in New York’, Brooklyn Eagle, 9 October 1906.

39 ‘Leoncavallo and Other Latinisms’, Musical Courier, 17 October 1906.

40 For more on debates surrounding Italian opera and italianità in New York around 1900, see my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Bygone Modernity: Re-imagining Italian Opera in Milan, New York and Buenos Aires, 1887–1914’ (University of Cambridge, 2019).

41 ‘Hammerstein’s Death Leaves Unfilled Void in America’s Music World’, Washington Times, 4 September 1919.

42 ‘The Stage’, New York Herald, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 17; undated, but the article refers to her as ‘this sixteen-year-old girl from Boston’.

43 ‘One Opera Season Begun’, New York Sun, 27 November 1906.

44 ‘Miss Farrar as Juliet is Superb’, Boston Herald, 27 November 1906; William R. Lester, ‘Geraldine Farrar’s Voice Pleases; She’s Too Active’, unidentified newspaper cutting, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 27.

45 Hilary Poriss discusses such worries in relation to Adelina Patti’s New York recitals in ‘She Came, She Sang … She Conquered? Adelina Patti in New York’, European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840–1900, ed. John Graziano (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 218–34.

46 Walter T. Stephenson, ‘A Talk with Miss Farrar’, Vogue, undated magazine cutting, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 27.

47 Ibid.

48 Cosmopolitan, 29 August 1924, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 30.

49 See Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

50 See Elizabeth Nash, Geraldine Farrar: Opera’s Charismatic Innovator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 66–7.

51 ‘Singer Gives her Ideas of Life, Love, Careers, Marriage Duties and the Ideal Man’, New York Herald, 31 August 1915.

52 See Jessica E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music, Emotions and Politics in Transatlantic Relations since 1850 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Tunbridge, ‘Frieda Hempel’, draws attention to related difficulties for Hempel in her Anglo-American appearances.

53 Boston Record, 30 April 1915, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division, Geraldine Farrar Clippings File.

54 ‘Geraldine Farrar Defends Americanism’, New York Tribune, 12 March 1917.

55 Henry T. Finck, ‘Geraldine Farrar’s Career’, Vanity Fair, November 1922.

56 Edward Wagenknecht, Geraldine Farrar: An Authorised Record of her Career (Seattle, WA: University Book Store, 1929), 56–63. Given Farrar’s fame and the succession of English-language works at the Met, the omission is especially striking.

57 Geraldine Farrar, ‘What’s the Matter with our Music?’, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 4. A version of this talk was also published in The Etude, August 1930.

58 Ibid. On anxieties about American art music composition, see Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005).

59 Of Farrar’s 14 films, only Carmen used explicitly operatic source material. Her collaborations with Cecil B. DeMille were particularly lucrative: Joan the Woman (1917) ran for 16 weeks at New York’s 44th Street Theatre. See Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 24.

60 See Mary Simonson, ‘Screening the Diva’, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83–100, for a discussion of the films of Farrar and Mary Garden that examines their physicality as a symbol of modern womanhood.

61 See for example Carmen, at 22′ 34″. Produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille; Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company; filmed in summer 1915; premièred at Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, on 1 October 1915, with music from Bizet’s Carmen arranged by Hugo Riesenfeld. Gillian Anderson’s 1996 restoration of the film has been commercially released by Video Artists International.

62 Ray W. Frohman, ‘Here’s Where Voice Won Place on Screen’, Evening Herald, 1919, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 42.

63 The opening credits of Carmen and Maria Rosa were planned to feature stills of her operatic roles: see Anne Morey, ‘Geraldine Farrar: A Star from Another Medium’, Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s, ed. Jennifer M. Bean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 137–54 (p. 145).

64 Melina Esse, ‘The Silent Diva: Farrar’s Carmen’, Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age, ed. Karen Henson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 89–103 (p. 89).

65 Ibid., 98–102.

66 ‘Miss Farrar to Act in Movies, Highest Salaried Film Star’, unidentified newspaper cutting, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 42.

67 ‘Our Geraldine Is Home Again from Movie Land’, New York Times, 22 August 1915.

68 1918 article, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 39. On tropes of embalmment, see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

69 See Andreas Giger, ‘Verismo: Origin, Corruption and Redemption of an Operatic Term’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 271–315, for a study of the term’s mixed fortunes. For a more recent assessment, see Arman Schwartz, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music, 31 (2007–8), 228–44.

70 See Henson, Opera Acts.

71 See Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley, CA, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), esp. pp. 120–39.

72 On the urban spectacular in Paris, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1999).

73 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 15. On New York’s commercial culture, see William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

74 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1979) provides the seminal account of celebrity as a vehicle of commodity culture.

75 ‘Geraldine Farrar a Lively Carmen’, New York Times, 18 February 1918.

76 ‘Our Geraldine Is Home Again from Movie Land’.

77 Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).

78 While prohibition is not discussed in surviving reviews, comments on the opera’s plot are certainly characterized by a similar moralizing impulse.

79 See Dryden, Leoncavallo.

80 ‘Genius the Word for Mrs Carter’, New York Press, 10 January 1899.

81 ‘The Carter Rage’, Dramatic News, 21 January 1899.

82 ‘Zazà at the Garrick Theatre’, New York City Town Toper, 12 January 1899.

83 Carter returned to the New York stage as Zazà in 1915, starring in her own vaudeville show, derived from the play’s fourth act, at the Palace Theatre. See ‘Mrs Carter Gives Zaza at the Palace’, Evening World, 10 March 1915.

84 <http://web.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/PF/reviews/zaza.htm> (accessed 23 May 2017).

85 ‘Zaza at Strand Theatre’, New York Tribune, 6 October 1915. The film had nearly been destroyed in a blaze at the company’s studios, a matter of especial concern given its publicity: see ‘Zaza Is Saved from Flames’, New York Tribune, 19 September 1915.

86 ‘Miss Frederick in “Zaza” at Columbia Today’, Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), 18 March 1916, 6.

87 Emilio Sala, The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s La traviata (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 64.

88 See Schwartz, ‘Rough Music’, esp. pp. 232–3, on singing’s troubled status in verismo.

89 On the première, see Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Saint-Étienne et l’opéra vériste: Zazà de Leoncavallo’, Le naturalisme sur la scène lyrique, ed. Jean-Cristophe Branger and Alban Ramaut, trans. Anne Penesco and Vincent Giroud (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004), 367–96.

90 James Gibbons Huneker, ‘Zazà as Geraldine Farrar’, New York World, 17 January 1920, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 28.

91 William J. Henderson, ‘Geraldine Farrar Real Siren in “Zazà”’, New York Sun, 17 January 1920, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 28.

92 ‘Metropolitan Produces Zaza’, unidentified newspaper cutting, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 28.

93 Herbert F. Pey, ‘“Zazà” Yields a Mighty Triumph for Mme Farrar’, Musical America, 24 January 1920.

94 Henry T. Finck, ‘Geraldine Farrar in Zazà’, Performance Herald, December 1921.

95 Pey, ‘“Zazà” Yields a Mighty Triumph’.

96 E. H., ‘Farrar as Zazà Attains Apex of Operatic Acting’, San Francisco Journal, 23 September 1921.

97 Max Smith, ‘Farrar Wins Artistic Triumph in Operatic Version of Zazà’, unidentified newspaper cutting (from New York Press?), Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 28.

98 See Ellen Lockhart, ‘Photo-Opera: La fanciulla del West and the Staging Souvenir’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 23 (2011), 145–66; and, for a discussion of Belasco’s preservationist efforts, Lockhart, ‘Laggìu nel soledad: Indexing and Archiving the Operatic West’, Giacomo Puccini and his World, ed. Arman Schwartz and Emanuele Senici (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 85–110.

99 ‘Mystery of What Happened to Mme Walska’s “Career”’, Washington Times, 9 January 1921.

100 ‘Defend Singer against Pastor’, unidentified newspaper cutting, Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 30.

101 E. H., ‘Farrar as Zazà Attains Apex of Operatic Acting’.

102 On Belasco’s realism, see Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Marvin Carlson, Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror: Theatre and Reality (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 67–8. For a critical contemporary account of Belasco’s practices, see Sheldon Cheney, The New Movement in the Theatre (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), 151–76.

103 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, ed. Marvin Carlson, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 78–137.

104 Recent scholarship has drawn upon Tom Gunning’s work on visual exhibitionism to revise (and backdate) Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze to the silent era: see Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Oh, “Doll Divine”: Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze’, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 349–73. The large female audience for Farrar’s films partly complicates such a view, yet the cinematic techniques used in her films are also characteristic of the works critiqued by Mulvey and Studlar. The problem of accounting for a specifically female spectatorship has been explored in a significantly later period by Jackie Stacey in Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994).

105 Michal Grover-Friedlander, Operatic Afterlives (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2011), 48; see also Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Opera to Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

106 Marco Ladd, ‘Defining the Interior: Bourgeois Reality in Leoncavallo’s Zazà’ (unpublished essay).

107 Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 134.

108 See Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship, for an exploration of spectatorship in late nineteenth-century Italian opera.

109 Schwartz, ‘Rough Music’, discusses this issue compellingly (pp. 231–2).

110 On the importance of the body in melodrama, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), esp. p. 35. For a study of melodramatic modes in nineteenth-century opera, see Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2004).

111 Amplification has become the standard solution for projecting the child’s voice in the theatre; Leoncavallo himself also allowed the piano to be performed from the pit to reduce the difficulties of finding a suitable child actor that could perform in time with the orchestra.

112 Richard DeCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

113 Ibid., 112.

114 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 1–24.

115 On the history of sound technology, see James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

116 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 2008), offers the canonical discussion of how liveness has been defined by recording.

117 Finck, ‘Geraldine Farrar in Zazà’.

118 Ibid.

119 Geraldine Farrar, ‘Whither Grand Opera?’, 12 February 1935, script in Library of Congress, Geraldine Farrar Collection, Box 4.

120 Quoted in Fleeger, Sounding American, 5.

121 Enrico Caruso’s outrage at being slapped by Farrar during a performance of Bizet’s Carmen, for example, centred in part upon what forms of physical realism were appropriate on the operatic stage: see ‘Strenuous as Carmen: Caruso Opposed to Movie Realism in Opera’, New York Post, 19 February 1916.

122 Simonson, Body Knowledge, describes Pavlova’s live and cinematic performances of La muette de Portici as ‘creatively and economically symbiotic, each (re)creat[ing] the other, marking its existence within an intermedial relationship’; and yet, tellingly, her analysis focuses upon the film (p. 188).

123 Meike Wagner, ‘Of Other Bodies: The Intermedial Gaze in Theatre’, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 125–37. Wagner’s essay focuses upon puppet theatre, and in particular the dialectic between identification and alienation that it engenders in the viewer.

124 Deirdre Loughridge similarly urges a longer history of opera’s relationship with other media, although her focus is on eighteenth-century visual technologies. Loughridge, ‘When Media Meet’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 26 (2014), 203–13 (p. 213).

125 Flora Willson discusses the orphic powers attributed to Pauline Viardot several decades earlier, in ‘Classic Staging: Pauline Viardot and the 1859 Orphée Revival’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 22 (2010), 301–26.

126 The term ‘quilting point’ is derived from Lacan’s ‘point de capiton’, denoting a point of convergence within a signifying chain that makes meaning possible. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), 303.