AMSGNY Meetings

Why did the Paris Opéra, at the height of its influence and fame, turn to history for its subjects? And why did it invest so much effort and money into historical accuracy? Several scholars have investigated these questions by seeking out connections between historical operas and the ideologies of the reigning political and cultural institutions that sponsored them. This paper seeks to continue their work by posing a more radical question – what if these works received immense support because opera was the ideal medium for writing and disseminating history in the early 19th century?

Peter Mondelli is a Ben Franklin Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the history of music at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is writing a history of the idea of voice told through the material cultures of reading and singing in 19th century Paris.

Melismatic Madness in the Age of Charcot
Sean Parr

In this paper, I will explore how the musical depiction of madness in opera can be viewed in the context of the medical diagnosis of hysteria. Mary Ann Smart (1994) has considered operatic mad scenes to lie somewhere between “representation and reality;” in much the same way Jean-Martin Charcot’s "hysteria shows," based on his self-described “museum of living pathology,” occupy a space that is neither overt theater nor fully true. Mad scenes from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Etoile du nord (1854) and Le Pardon de Ploërmel (1859) and Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (1868) reveal how sopranos became stylized, historicized icons of hysteria. Employing close readings of the music, I will also consider the original staging manuals (the livrets de mise en scène) which highlight the importance of the visual in mid-century opera mad scenes.

Sean M. Parr is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Musicology at Columbia University where he is writing adissertation on the feminization of coloratura in mid-nineteenth-century French and Italian opera.