Cinematic Dreams, Recorded Fantasies: Opera and Technology in Fin-De-Siècle Paris

From the late nineteenth century well into the twenty-first, authors attentive to the relationship between technology and opera have tended to focus not on the productive possibilities of sound recording or cinema, but rather, on the troubling effects the mechanical might have on the operatic voice, body, and subjectivity. Nineteenth-century French novelists fabricated tales about opera singers who engaged with technology and suffered physical harm and even death as a result, while recent film studies have interpreted the singer’s inability to make herself heard through the medium of silent cinema as a loss or lack of voice and, by extension, of subjectivity. Such narratives—whether fictional or scholarly—have tended to overlook singers’ actual experiences with technology, focusing instead on inherited anxieties about the mechanization of modern life.

Drawing upon archival sources, including recordings and films synchronized at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, this paper examines how French singers and pedagogues used technology to expand understandings of the operatic body, voice, and subjectivity in the age of mechanical reproduction. Far from finding such technologies threatening, as many prominent voices then and now have done, the performers and pedagogues I discuss uncovered the productive capabilities of sound recording and film, ultimately reuniting the operatic voice and body by means of the very technologies that many argued would be their destruction. By illuminating fin-de-siècle efforts to realize a technological utopia at the Paris Opéra and beyond, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the crisis posed by modernity and its many machines.