Tubercular Singing

When the tubercular courtesan Marguerite Gautier, the title character of Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, returns to Paris in 1856 as Violetta Valéry, in Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic adaptation of the play, La traviata, how did Parisian audiences listen to the singing voice of this woman with galloping consumption who is progressively dying before their eyes and ears? As Arthur Groos has observed in his article “‘TB sheets’: Love and disease in La traviata,” Violetta’s death “appears to be the first operatic death by phthisis (or any specific disease)” (233). Groos notes that Verdi and his librettist Francesco Piave had to radically abridge the play in order to turn it into an opera, and that, “in the process, they eliminated the wide variety of anterior circumstances used in suggesting the heroine’s illness and character, leaving only one previous attack of acute phthisis the year before, an event that is associated with the beginning of the hero’s [Alfredo’s] love” (241). Groos draws our attention to two instances in the opera where Verdi attempts to translate the sound of a tubercular sufferer into Violetta’s vocal line: the “impression of gasping for breath” in her Act I exchange with Alfredo and, in her final moments in the opera and in life, a vocal euphoria that stands in for spes phthisica, that is, the false hope of tubercular sufferers.
 
But Groos also notes, in the conclusion of his study, that “Violetta’s death by consumption both reflects and participates in a significant movement in nineteenth-century cultural history, the emergence of our modern consciousness of death as a defining characteristic of the individual” (260). In listening to Violetta dying, therefore, 1850s Parisian audiences were listening not to the sounds of a generalized death, but to the sounds of a particular death—the sounds of, as the plot would have it, a “fallen” woman whose voice bears her moral failing, her mental suffering, her physical decay, and her nostalgia for what could have been. How, then, would Parisian audiences have listened to this voice so diversely constituted and new to them?
 
This operatic performance comes after the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a watershed moment in Paris for our understanding of singing as it relates to the body. The era began with the publication of Joseph Fourier’s 1822 treatise The Analytical Theory of Heat, in which the mathematician “made possible a thorough mathematical analysis of musical sounds” (Kline 288), which mathematicians know today as “harmonic analysis”; according to Fourier, all sound is capable of being mathematically described and thus capable, in theory, of being synthetically produced in a laboratory (Kline 287). The era ended with Manuel Garcia’s landmark 1840s publications on the physiology of singing, culminating in 1854 with the announcement of his invention, the laryngoscope, which mechanizes singing instruction.
 
With Paris then the center of medical practice and singing instruction, scientific treatises on the body and singing forewent any vitalist theorizing and definitively mechanized the body, including the vocal apparatus for speaking and singing. As a consequence, understanding what can produce human “singing”—where we locate it, what it means, and how it relates to the human subject with which that singing is associated—changed radically over these twenty-five years, and necessitated new listening pedagogies to make sense of a singing now so unanchored that it accumulated meanings that exceeded the body (human or otherwise) that produced it.
 
This essay comprises several case studies, all of which concern a tubercular sufferer “produced” in Paris whose “singing voice” is the conclusive indication of pending death—the singer’s swan song. Such an understanding arises first in medicine, then spills out variously into literature, music reception, and, finally, opera. This essay visits all of these domains. In so doing, I shift between registers (metaphorical and literal), fields of study, and materials being analyzed, precisely because the kinds of listening habits I see evolve are interdisciplinary, cross-fertilizing, and promiscuous. Containing them would flatten and obscure the multifariousness of this new listening pedagogy. Instead, understanding tubercular singing requires a code-switching as fleet-footed as the kind that was required of those listening to tubercular singing on the stage for the first time.
 
This listening pedagogy has its roots in 1820s Paris, with the emergence and cultivation of new listening pedagogies for music and for disease—specifically, pedagogies for close listening both to music and to the sounds coming from the chests of tuberculosis patients. These listening pedagogies, one musical and the other medical, have been studied separately, to the extent that their contemporaneous cross-fertilization has not been explored.[1] My goal here is to recover this cross-fertilization, and so to configure a new understanding for the way that one, in 1850s Paris, might have listened to and made diagnostic sense of Violetta’s voice, especially in the music (not addressed by Groos) of the second part of her famous aria at the end of Act I, whose words foreshadow her final death scene. This understanding configures both close listening to music and to disease as diagnostic activities. What links these close-listening pedagogies is their reliance on the transcription of sound into musical notation. It is in the late 1820s, when the diagnosis of disease turns to not only the close-listening of the body but also the transcription into musical notation of the sounds coming from that body, that these pedagogies enter into direct conversation with one another, as listening to disease draws on the pedagogies for listening to music, and listening to music draws on those for listening to disease. This is a conversation that is played out in notes and in words—in music transcriptions and music scores, literature, medical and scientific treatises, music pedagogies, music criticism, letters, memoires, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. In order to register this conversation, we must necessarily admit into our consideration this wide range of source materials. For my contention throughout this essay is that the listening of a Parisian at mid-century was shaped by this wide-reaching conversation, ranging across disciplines and literary and musical genres.
 
While my ultimate case study in this essay is Violetta’s tubercular singing, the path to her singing is one determined by the varied and overlapping case studies that constitute the conversation between the musical and medical close-listening pedagogies that emerge in Paris in the 1820s. I begin, therefore, with René Laënnec’s listening pedagogy and musical transcriptions, and his isolation of a song coming from the arteries of tubercular patients. I then analyze stories of Honoré de Balzac from the early 1830s; they are the linchpin for understanding why tubercular singing receives particular traction beyond medical circles. Balzac’s stories frame the reception of the most famous tubercular “singer” of the July Monarchy, the pianist-composer Fryderyk Chopin, my penultimate case study, whose playing of his own compositions was deemed a singing without equal. With Chopin, Laënnec’s tubercular singing has migrated to a machine, Chopin’s piano. At last given audible music, Chopin’s singing nevertheless stirred philosophical uneasiness: where, in this instrumental singing, was Chopin’s soul? Considered in this light, the migration of tubercular singing to the body of Violetta, to an actual singing voice, amounts to a long-delayed arrival—a realist turn brought about by Dumas’s and then by Verdi’s art.
 
Listening to a tubercular singing voice such as Violetta’s will ask us to register its physical, mental, and moral inflections, and still more. For the migration of tubercular voices that prepare this vocal arrival, moving from arteries to landscapes to pianos, will ask us what is meant by “voice,” where we locate voice, and what can produce voice. By recovering the overlapping listening pedagogies that could have been deployed to make sense of tubercular singing, we can thus access a web of interconnected listening strategies that would have informed a literate and music-appreciating Parisian of the 1850s listening to Violetta’s staged musical death for the first time.
 

Laënnec listens: from musical metaphor to musical notation

I chart the emergence of tubercular singing from the 1820s, with the close-listening technique advanced by René Laënnec, the inventor of the stethoscope. The 1826 second edition of his treatise on diagnostic pathology includes new case studies that announce something remarkable, what medical historian and Laënnec biographer Jacalyn Duffin calls “the most disarming passage in his entire opus” (192): a “song (chant)” coming from the carotid artery of certain female patients who are both in the advanced stages of tuberculosis and suffering from nervous agitation. In order to appreciate this development from the first edition of his treatise, we must first understand the substance and impact of that earlier edition.
 
From its 1819 publication, De l’auscultation médiate (On mediate auscultation) was hailed by the medical community. In it, Laënnec introduces his invention the stethoscope, and, in turn, revolutionizes the diagnosis of disease, from that of observing external physical symptoms to that of listening closely to the sounds coming from diseased chests. In his “Reception of the stethoscope and Laënnec’s book,” medical historian P.J. Bishop uses “contemporary book reviews and other notices … to trace the reception of the stethoscope and Laënnec’s book between 1816 and 1826” (487). Bishop quotes an English reviewer in 1820 who claimed that “if [Laënnec’s] method had only a quarter of the utility attributed to it by its inventor, it would still be one of the most precious discoveries of medicine” (488). Bishop also quotes a French reviewer who in the following year writes that
 

Laënnec’s discovery exacted great attention. If some doctors compromised their judgment and the dignity of their characters for only making it a subject of caricature and pleasantry, the majority welcomed it. The public, far from ridiculing it, also welcomed it. The stethoscope can henceforth only have detractors who are deaf or those who do not want to hear. (487)

Even an early negative review of the stethoscope, from 1818, in response to Laënnec’s public presentation of his method, understands what is at stake in this invention: “The ear is now invested with the right to appreciate the circulation of the heart and the entry of the air in the cells of the lung” (qtd. in Bishop 487). Laënnec’s publicizing of his method, through lectures, through the publication of his treatise, and through his enthusiastic taking-on of students from many different countries, assured both the rapid refinement of this technique and its dissemination far and wide.[2]
 

Early reviews of Laënnec’s treatise focus on the diagnostic breakthrough that occurred when, through the use of the stethoscope on consumptive cases in the advanced stages of the disease, Laënnec discovered what he calls pectoriloquism or pectoriloquy. According to Laënnec, pectoriloquism “is a true pathognomonic sign of phthisis, and announces the presence of the disease sometimes in an unequivocal manner, long before any other symptom leads us to suspect its existence. I may add, that it is the only sign that can be regarded as certain” (De l’auscultation 57). He defines pectoriloquism by way of example:
 

In the case of a woman affected by a slight bilious fever, and a recent cough having the character of a pulmonary catarrh, on applying the cylinder below the middle of the right clavicle, while she was speaking, her voice seemed to come directly from the chest, and to reach the ear through the central canal of the instrument. (De l’auscultation 17)

Often accompanying this so-called chest-speaking is a phenomenon Laënnec dubs metallic tinkling, where “every word is followed by a sort of tinkling, like that of a small bell or glass that is finishing resounding, which dies away in the tube at a variable altitude” (De l’auscultation 48). In Laënnec’s later brief essay devoted to metallic tinkling, published in 1826, shortly before he died of tuberculosis, he adds to this tinkling bell and ringing glass the sound of “the vibration of a metallic chord touched by the finger” (“Auscultation” 32). Pectoriloquism accompanied by metallic tinkling thus amounts to a speaking chest with musical accompaniment.
 
Jonathan Sterne devotes the second chapter of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, “Techniques of Listening,” to Laënnec’s listening technique. Following Foucault, who examines Laënnec in detail in The Birth of the Clinic, Sterne argues that mediate auscultation “developed at a time when medicine itself was undergoing a major epistemic shift” (90).[3] Neither Foucault nor Sterne discusses the musical language in Laënnec’s treatise, and because Foucault relys on the first edition of the treatise and Sterne on a redacted English translation, neither could be alert to Laënnec’s remarkable addition in the 1826 edition. Laënnec’s clinical work from 1824 and 1825 brought to his attention an acoustic phenomenon, related to tuberculosis, only hinted at in his earlier diagnostic work, which now compelled him to move from verbal metaphor to musical notation in order to describe and analyze it. Duffin is, to the extent that I have been able to determine, the only person since the nineteenth century to discuss these 1826 additions to Laënnec’s treatise. But because Duffin’s focus in her biography of Laënnec lies elsewhere, her discussion of this passage is understandably quite brief. I have thus translated this passage and offer it here at length. The phenomenon at issue is the bruit de soufflet musical, “the musical bellows sound.”  I quote at length:
 

This variety [of bellows sound] occurs only in the arteries, or at least I have never encountered it in the heart. The arterial bellows sound frequently degenerates (especially in moments when the patient, for any reason, is more restless than usual) into a whistling sound similar to that made by wind passing through a pinhole or the resonance of a metallic string that vibrates long after being struck. The sibilant sound of the arteries can even perfectly imitate the resonance of the tuning fork that is used to tune keyboard instruments.
 
These sounds, always not very intense, are, nevertheless, very appreciable, and one can easily find the notes they represent in a particular pitch; what is more, in these cases, rare though they may be, the resonance moves up or down in intervals of a tone or semitone, as if the artery had become a vibrating string on which a musician, advancing or recoiling the finger, would make two or three notes sound in succession. This fact being one of the most extraordinary of those presented to me by auscultation, I report here an outstanding example.
 
On March 13, 1824, I was consulted by a lady in whom I found some signs of pulmonary consumption. In exploring the region of her right subclavian artery, I heard a moderately intense bellows sound. I wanted to see if this sound was not also in the carotid artery on the same side. I was strangely surprised to hear, instead of the bellows sound, the sound of a musical instrument, performing a song rather monotonous, but very distinct and capable of being notated. I thought at first that the music was coming from the apartment below! I listened closely, I placed the stethoscope on other points: I heard nothing. Having thus ascertained that the sound was happening in the artery, I studied the song: it traveled over three notes, very nearly forming an interval of a major third, the highest note was a bit too low, but not enough to be marked with a flat sign. In respect to the value or duration, these notes were fairly equal. The tonic alone was prolonged, and formed a sustained note, whose [rhythmic] value varied. I notated this song accordingly as follows:
 

The sound was as weak as it was distant, a little shrill and very similar to that of a mouth harp, with the difference that this rustic instrument can execute only detached (pointées) notes, and here, on the contrary, all notes were slurred. The transition from one note to another was obviously determined by the diastolic pressure, which, in the same sustained notes, rendered perfectly the slight shake musicians notate with a dotted-slur. The weakness of the sound made me believe at first that it was happening in the distance, but by listening closely and touching the artery with my finger, one recognized that the sound was linked to a slight tremor of the artery, which, in its diastoles, seemed to rub, through its vibrations, the tip of the stethoscope. Moreover, from time to time the melody suddenly ceased and gave way to the sound of a very loud rasp. This alternation had the effect of which I can only give an idea, at the risk of using an odd comparison, by comparing it to a military march in which the sounds of military instruments are occasionally interrupted by the raucous sound of drumming. (Traité 423-424)

The next patient Laënnec examines is a woman who exhibits a bellows sound, who has “coughed for several months, sometimes spitting much blood,” and who was “prone to experience a quite pronounced nervous agitation” (Traité 426). Laënnec continues:
 

Since that time, I have encountered two subjects whose carotid arteries whistled two notes at an interval of a tone:

and a third in whom the whistle, prolonged until the next diastole, then rose a semitone:
 

(Traité 426)

That is the extent of Laënnec’s music notation. He then proceeds to describe a case from July 1825, when he was consulted by a thirty-year-old woman “with a very nervous constitution” (Traité 426). The left ventricle of her heart produced a “very strong bellows sound,” and the “right carotid artery gave a slight sibilant breath similar to the sound of a tuning fork” (Traité 426). Laënnec even recalls hearing in this patient the “metallic tinkling,” consequent of tuberculous evacuation, at the top of her lung (Traité 427). And finally for our consideration, Laënnec begins his subsequent section, entitled “Causes of the bellows murmur,” with the following observation:
 

I have seen die from very varied acute or chronic diseases quite a number of subjects who presented the bellows sound (during the last days of their lives, and sometimes for several months) in a very clear manner, in the heart and in various arteries. And upon opening up their bodies, I have found no organic lesion that coincided consistently with these phenomena, and that is not frequently found in subjects who present none of these phenomena. (Traité 428)

The musical bellows sound is thus a death knell, a swan song. And the music that Laënnec listens to, notates, and analyzes is the song that arises from a combination of nervousness and tuberculosis. Healthy bodies do not produce this song; fatally diseased bodies do—it is a wordless song whose very existence signals death.[4]
 

Tubercular singing chez Balzac

While Laënnec’s musical notations in his 1826 edition find immediate traction in French medical literature and remain there throughout the century (even after Robert Koch isolates the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882), the immediate musical conclusions drawn from Laënnec’s work are found in the work not of a doctor or a musician, but a novelist. In his stories ranging from The Magic Skin (1831), where Raphael de Valentin suffers both from tuberculosis and from nervous agitation, to Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1847), with its linking of tuberculosis to courtesans, Balzac confirms that tuberculosis—“pulmonary phthisis” is what he calls it—is a disease that one listens for. The sound announces the disease. What is remarkable is that Balzac, as a great chronicler of the era who himself displayed symptoms of tuberculosis in 1826 (Robb 124), interprets Laënnec’s musical bellows-sound as an actual swan song, one that is produced not by a woman, but by a feminine or feminized male tubercular sufferer. Moreover, Balzac acknowledges up front the acoustic indeterminacy of this singing: what is its source—human, animal, or (in the case of La Zambinella in “Sarrasine”) machine?
 

This is the point of a scene in his 1833 novel Le Médecin de campagne [The Country Doctor], where Balzac stages the musical diagnosis of tuberculosis, a passage that merits consideration at length. In this scene, Bennasis, the doctor of the title, escorts Genastas, a soldier passing through the area, to a remote cottage. Their pausing en route inspires a sense-enlivening communion with their surroundings, which culminates in their detecting a “distant sound of singing”:
 

They rode on slowly and in silence, listening to their horses’ hoof-beats; the sound echoed along the green corridor as it might have done beneath the vaulted floor of a cathedral.
 
“How many things have a power to stir us which town-dwellers do not suspect,” said the doctor. “Do you notice the sweet-scent given off by the gum of the poplar buds, and the resin of the larches? How delightful it is!”
 
“Listen!” exclaimed Genastas. “Let us wait a moment.”
 
A distant sound of singing came to their ears.
 
“Is it a woman or a man, or is it a bird?” asked the commandant in a low voice. “Is it the voice of this wonderful landscape?”
 
“It is all of these things,” the doctor answered, as he dismounted and fastened his horse to a branch of a poplar tree. (122)

Genestas, deprived of the sight and knowledge of the source of the singing, marvels at the sound’s indeterminacy. Bennasis’s reply, that the singing is “all of these things,” registers at first as a tease and a dodge. What kind of singing could actually be man, woman, bird, and landscape? After yet another paragraph extolling the rural landscape, Balzac begins to answer this question, a startling answer that unfolds over several paragraphs:
 

The wide landscape seemed at the moment to have found a voice whose purity and sweetness equaled its own sweetness and purity, a voice as mournful as the dying light in the west—for a vague reminder of Death is divinely set in the heavens, and the sun above gives the same warning that is given here on earth by the flowers and the bright insects of a day. There is a tinge of sadness about the radiance of sunset, and the melody was sad. It was a song widely known in days of yore, a ballad of love and sorrow that once had served to stir the national hatred of France for England. Beaumarchais, in a later day, had given it back its true poetry by adapting it for the French theater and putting it into the mount of a page, who pours out his heart to his stepmother. Just now it was simply the air that rose and fell. There were no words; the plaintive voice of the singer touched and thrilled the soul.
 
“It is the swan’s song,” said Benassis. “That voice does not sound twice in a century for human ears. Let us hurry; we must put a stop to the singing! The child is killing himself; it would be cruel to listen to him any longer. Be quiet, Jacques! Come, come, be quiet!” cried the doctor
 
The music ceased. Genestas stood motionless and overcome with astonishment. A cloud had drifted across the sun, the landscape and the voice were both mute. Shadow, chillness, and silence had taken the place of the soft glory of the light, the warm breath of the breeze, and the child’s singing. (123)

There ensues an exchange between Benassis and this “lad of fifteen, who looked as delicate as a woman … the color in his face was so bright that it seemed hardly natural.” Gently chastising, the doctor asks, “What put it into your head to sing?”
 

“Dame! M. Benassis, it was so very warm out here, and it is so nice to feel warm! I am always cold. I felt so happy that without thinking I began to try over Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre, just for fun, and then I began to listen to myself because my voice was something like the sound of the flute your shepherd plays.” (124)

While talking to the child, Benassis proceeds to examine him. The boy’s eyes “shone with a soft feverish light”—“It is just as a thought, you are covered with perspiration,” said Benassis. Balzac’s readers would have known that this perspiration, along with the aforementioned unnatural brightness of the boy’s face, was a sign of hectic fever. Moving inside the cottage, a lit candle exposes the “extreme thinness of the child, who seemed to be little more than skin and bone.” Benassis ends his examination with diagnostic percussion: after the child has gone to sleep, the doctor “tapped the lad’s chest, and listened to the ominous sounds made in this way by his fingers” (125).
 

For Balzac’s original readership, the diagnosis would have been a foregone conclusion, and they would have reacted with the same surprise to Genestas’s question as does the doctor:
 

“Is that little peasant consumptive (poitrinaire)?” asked Genestas.
 
“Mon Dieu! Yes,” answered Benassis. “Science cannot save him, unless Nature works a miracle. Our professors at the École de Médecine in Paris often used to speak to us of the phenomenon which you have just witnessed. Some maladies of this kind bring about changes in the voice-producing organs that give the sufferer a short-lived power of song that no trained voice can surpass. I have made you spend a melancholy day, sir,” said the doctor when he was once more in the saddle. (126)

Thus the scene ends with the doctor’s clinical wave of the hand, correcting the impression of metaphysical song with the diagnosis of pathological physiology. The singing landscape was actually the singing of a tubercular boy in the final stages of his disease.
 
Deprived at first of seeing the source of this singing, the doctor surmises that this source could really be anything—a man, woman, bird, or the landscape itself—while the singing boy thought he sounded like a flute. This acoustic indeterminacy is in keeping with the writings of the great physiologist of the era, François Magendie, who urges students attending his 1842 Collège de France lectures to read Laënnec in order to begin understanding the way that all sounds, no matter how varied and including all of the sounds we make through our vocal apparatus, are reducible to physics (9). With Fourier and Garcia, Magendie materializes and mechanizes singing.
 
In this context, Balzac’s reference to the aged castrato in his 1830 story “Sarrasine” as a “frail machine” assumes greater meaning.[5] Unobserved in commentaries on Balzac’s story is that tuberculosis is the probable source of La Zambinella’s frailty. Balzac writes of him that an “anatomist would have promptly recognized the symptoms of galloping consumption by looking at the skinny legs supporting this strange body” (Balzac 229).[6] Balzac’s characterization of La Zambinella as a diseased machine thus marks an epistemic shift that is of a piece with the ones detected by Foucault in Birth of the Clinic and Sterne in The Audible Past. This is a shift in thinking about the body and its relation to singing, as singing migrates from the vocal apparatus to other parts of the body, to machines such as the piano, to a mechanism that should physically not be able to sing—the hollowed-out lungs and vocal apparatus of a female or, in the case of Balzac, feminized, late-stage tubercular sufferer.

Listening to Chopin

As the most famous musical tubercular sufferer of the 1830s and ’40s, Chopin playing the piano becomes the real-life analogue to the diseased machine that is Balzac’s La Zambinella. With Chopin, the mechanism for “tubercular singing” is the instrument-performer, and those who hear him his diagnostic pathologists. Those auditors would have placed him in the same category as Laënnec’s nervous, female, song-producing tubercular patients: Chopin’s nervousness kept him from the concert stage, contemporaries viewed his manner and dress as feminine, and his compositions, technique, and choice of instrument (a Pleyel piano) led to his being fashioned as a “singer” without parallel (Kasunic 2004).
 
Contemporary auditors, such as Balzac and George Sand, translate the progressive hollowing-out wrought by Chopin’s disease as dematerializing and spiritualizing the composer, rendering Chopin as a tubercular soul whose music has a divine origin.[7] They imply a medical diagnosis: a body producing sounds whose source is invisible. For Balzac and Sand, Chopin’s tubercular singing arises from a preexisting web of biographical and acoustic associations, from Chopin’s visible disease and lyrical piano technique, to the shared timbre of the soprano range in Pleyel pianos of the period and certain singing voices of women and children, which is the range of many of Chopin’s melodies (Kasunic, “Chopin’s Musical Disease” 118). In his review of Chopin’s May 1841 concert at the Salle Pleyel, music publisher and critic Léon Escudier emphasizes that Chopin’s soft singing requires our close listening:
 

Chopin doesn’t care for that kind of music which accomplishes nothing but to drown out the orchestra. On the contrary, pay attention to how he dreams, how he weeps, how he sings so sweetly, tenderly, and with such sorrow, how he expresses to perfection everything that is heartfelt and noble. Chopin is the pianist of feeling par excellence. (qtd. in Atwood 235)

Elsewhere, Escudier and others draw on acoustic imagery shared by diagnostic pathology to describe the sounds they heard when Chopin performed his own music on a Pleyel piano. In his review of a February 1842 Chopin concert, Escudier draws our attention to ringing bells and vibrating glass:
 

In listening to all those sounds and nuances which pour forth one after the other, weaving about each other to disengage and then reunite once more as they give shape to the melody, one cannot help but think he is hearing the faint voices of fairies sighing under silver bells or showers of pearls falling on crystal tables. (qtd. in Atwood 239)

As Jeffrey Kallberg has reminded us, making Chopin a fairy is a listening strategy similar to those of Balzac, Sand, and Chopin’s other contemporary auditors, who couple and perhaps even correct the physical impression of Chopin’s tubercular singing with metaphysical displacement (62-86).

Listening to Violetta

Chopin died in 1849, the year after Dumas fils published the novel La Dame aux camélias, and three years before Dumas brought it to the stage.[8] Escudier, as Verdi’s Parisian publisher, corresponded with the composer as he was adapting the play into an opera and as he was preparing for the opera’s Parisian premiere, on December 6, 1856. In his review of that performance, Escudier tells us that, in the run-up to opening night, Paris was abuzz with interest in the singer who would be playing Violetta, Maria Piccolomini (398). And what was the governing impression that Piccolomini made on Escudier? That of a fairy: “Is it a fairy, this young artist who has captivated public attention to this point? Yes, Miss Piccolomini has all the magic of a fairy: she exerts a magnetic influence on her listeners” (398). Escudier’s interpretation of this Parisian Violetta thus invites us to hear in her tubercular singing an echo of Chopin’s wordless fairy song, and in so doing, invites us to enter into a diagnostic mode of close listening and analysis of her song.
 
Violetta introduces her Act I aria with words that return in her death scene, “E strano … è strano”: might we hear in this aria more than a textual allusion to her death? Violetta startles herself from her cantabile repose with a tempo di mezzo that begins by repeating the word “Follie (Madness)!”  She attempts to banish thoughts of leaving her current life. The tempo di mezzo culminates when she repeats the word “gioir (rejoice),” each repetition progressively more florid and ushering in the cabaletta “Sempre libera,” which contains Violetta’s most florid singing in the opera. Here is the abridged tempo di mezzo section that leads to the repeat of the cabaletta:
 

Fig. 1. End of Act I of La traviata, the second bridge section (tempo di mezzo) of Violetta’s aria, “Ah, fors’è lui … Sempre libera” (Milan: Universal Music Publishing Ricordi, 2006).
 

Announced by the very word “madness,” this florid singing bears the mark of Donizetti’s figuring such extravagant coloratura as the symptom of Lucia’s madness. In 1835, the year of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, doctors still cited moral and social causes for hysteria. At the time of Dumas fils’s play, B.-A. Morel begins to cite “hereditary pathologies of the nervous system” as causes for the same (Gill 161). By the early 1850s, both tuberculosis and hysteria were understood to result from hereditary factors, from biology: the wordless musical signs of Lucia’s madness can serve as a template for those of Violetta’s nerve-addled consumption. In her Act I aria in particular, Violetta behaves like one of Laënnec’s “excessively nervous” female tubercular sufferers who produce a wordless lyrical excess. What we may hear, then, in the florid eruptions in Violetta’s aria, is the operatic moment that confirms the epistemic shift, begun in the 1820s, in French medicine’s diagnosis and understanding of disease, one marked by its gradual collapse of mind into body.  By 1902, Berthelot’s Grande encyclopédie identifies “hysterical tuberculosis” as a kind of hysteria that produces all of the physical symptoms of tuberculosis in a patient who does not have tuberculosis.[9] At mid-century, the sounds of Violetta’s temporary madness are the same sounds that definitively confirm the advanced stage of her tuberculosis.

Violetta’s progeny

Violetta’s most oft-invoked tubercular operatic successor is Puccini’s Mimì, from La bohème. There are French successors as well, such as Offenbach’s Antonia, from Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and Debussy’s Lady Madeline, from La Chute de la Maison Usher. Debussy’s opera, especially, gathers the tubercular threads I have been tracing.[10] Debussy worked on his Usher opera for almost a decade, and it remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1918. Like his French literary confrères, he was besotted by Poe, steeping himself in Poe’s writings and laboring over La Chute’s libretto. One of Debussy’s remarkable changes to Poe’s text has neither received the attention it is due nor been explained. In Poe’s text, the family doctor and Madeline are mute. Debussy not only gives these two characters much greater prominence in the opera, but he has Lady Madeline (as Baudelaire, Poe’s French translator, and hence Debussy refer to her) become a tubercular soprano singer whose very singing puts her life in peril. As Robert Orledge observes, Debussy originally gave Lady Madeline an “extravagantly high and florid” part, which he later rejected (113). The Doctor’s comments to Roderick’s friend about Lady Madeline’s singing take a page from Balzac’s Country Doctor:
 

If only you could hear that voice which seems to come from so much beyond herself! . . . Many a time he makes her sing music fit to damn angels! It’s incomprehensible and dangerous. A woman, after all, is not a lute … but he won’t accept! He isn’t aware that it’s her very soul which is departing with the song … Oh! Why won’t she listen to me? I have done everything to warn her. I tried everything. She is so beautiful! (15)

Balzac is one potential inspiration for this scene. Offenbach’s Antonia is another. But there is still another possible source for this scene. French Poe fandom is well known. Books in French on Poe proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emile Lauvrière’s book on Poe’s life and work, a “study of pathological psychology,” rehearses the then common anecdote about the cause of death of Poe’s wife, Virginia, who suffered from tuberculosis: “It was in the spring of 1842, an evening when Virginia was singing, when the sweet melody was suddenly and forever stopped: a broken vessel, a trickle of blood flowed” (154). By staging this exchange between the fretful Doctor and the singing Lady Madeline, Debussy takes us back to the era of Chopin, Balzac, and Duplessis by staging his understanding of Poe’s biography—of the death of Poe’s wife from tubercular singing.

Afterword

From melodies produced by the arteries of nervous female tubercular sufferers, to the singing of the feminized male tubercular sufferers of Balzac’s fiction, to the mechanical wordless songs of the feminized and nervous male tubercular sufferer that was the pianist-composer Chopin—understanding actual wordless singing of a woman portraying, for the first time, a nervous female tubercular sufferer on the stage required a pedagogy of listening that could code-switch, analyzing “singing” variously construed. From Laënnec’s notational transcriptions of wordless melodies, to Chopin’s and then Verdi’s doing the same, the leveling of singing that occurs in musical notation speaks appropriately to sound science in the mid nineteenth century, and anticipates sound sciences of the future and their attendant pedagogies. A voice so destabilized was free to roam and gather meanings along the way. Charting those peregrinations is a task for our listening today: the more we understand the contingency and genealogy of our listening to voices, the better we will understand what those voices are telling us.