Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton

62. 7 octobre 1848 : Programme des trois années de l'enseignement spécial établi dans les lycées et les collèges (extrait)

Vaulabelle Achille de. 62. 7 octobre 1848 : Programme des trois années de l'enseignement spécial établi dans les lycées et les collèges (extrait). In: L'histoire et la géographie dans l'enseignement secondaire. Textes officiels. Tome 1: 1795-1914. Paris : Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 2000. pp. 192-196. (Bibliothèque de l'Histoire de l'Education, 8

60. 15 juillet 1848 : Révision du programme d'enseignement pour l'histoire de France et l'histoire moderne

Vaulabelle Achille de. 60. 15 juillet 1848 : Révision du programme d'enseignement pour l'histoire de France et l'histoire moderne. In: L'histoire et la géographie dans l'enseignement secondaire. Textes officiels. Tome 1: 1795-1914. Paris : Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 2000. p. 191. (Bibliothèque de l'Histoire de l'Education, 8

Historia de las dos restauraciones, hasta el advenimiento de Luis Felipe (enero de 1813 a octubre de 1830)

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 201

Notes sur le Coup d'Étal du 2 décembre 1854

Vaulabelle Achille de. Notes sur le Coup d'Étal du 2 décembre 1854. In: La Révolution de 1848. Bulletin de la Société d'histoire de la Révolution de 1848, Tome 3, Numéro 15, Juillet-août 1906. pp. 157-159