In 1900, the soprano Jeanne Hatto recorded a scene from Gluck's 1779 opera Iphigénie en Tauride for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, an exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle that screened silent films manually synchronised with cylinder recordings. Recently restored and digitised by the Cinémathèque Française and the Gaumont Pathé Archives, Hatto's film affords us a glimpse into the revitalising force ascribed to female performers around the turn of the century: the ability to bring ancient statues – and antiquity itself – to life through physical movement. Through their embodiment of ancient Greek figures on stage and in visions animées, prima donnas laid claim to a form of corporeal authority that had all but disappeared from the French stage over the preceding century.

It is now a historical commonplace that nineteenth-century operatic singing became generally louder and heavier over the course of the century. Early in the century, before the advent of singers such as Gilbert-Louis Duprez, tenors sang high notes with a light, mixed voice, sometimes even falsetto. Strikingly, while such singing was virtually eliminated from Italian opera by the end of the century, the vocal practice continued in certain cases in the French repertory, some of which were created with one particular tenor in mind, Jean-Alexandre Talazac (1851–1896). Talazac was praised for his unique ability to sing high notes both softly and loudly. This article investigates the physical practice of producing what pedagogues and critics have called voix mixte, an enigmatic timbre applied to moments of soft, high tenor singing. In exploring these moments of what I call ‘léger mode’, I suggest that, by singing high notes softly in a post-Duprez operatic world, tenors transcend stage gestures through their use of a formerly normative performance style to mark moments musically as representations of vocal and masculine vulnerability. The historical evidence also argues for a renewed focus on what soft tenor singing might do for opera today.

This article explores the emergent genre of singers’ autobiographies in late nineteenth-century France. The moment singers took up the pen is telling, as it coincides with their dislodgement in the operatic marketplace from creator and collaborator to interpreter. In their life writings, Gilbert Duprez and Gustave Roger demonstrate a strong preoccupation with revising their public images and the histories that had been written about them. I argue that what critics felt was a flaw – the tenors’ predominant focus on relationships in their autobiographies, rather than on art – reveals how Duprez and Roger sought to reconstruct their artistic identities beyond the voice, locating their most profound contributions in their exchanges and actions within the musical community.

Lucy Arbell (1878–1947) assumed an important position in Massenet's compositional process and output. Beginning with Ariane in 1906, he wrote principal or secondary roles for the singer in all of his operas, as well as the celebrated song cycle Expressions lyriques (1909–1911). Despite Massenet's admiration, the French contralto was received ambivalently by critics and she fell into oblivion soon after his death. For some, her talents as an actress could not make up for the mediocre quality of her voice. Drawing on unpublished and hitherto unknown archival documents, this article explores Arbell's career, which has been largely overlooked by scholars. I reveal how her career's evolution was intimately connected to the professional and sentimental relationship between singer and composer. Massenet notably wrote roles for her that included extensive use of spoken declamation, which sets them apart in the history of opera.

It seems historiographically implausible to ascribe the reputation of fin-de-siècle Lyon as France's Bayreuth to the impact of a single middle-ranking soprano, but the Danish singer Louise Janssen's long-term presence, galvanic musical influence and box-office value suggest precisely that conclusion. Part of the explanation lies with the diva-worship of her supporters (‘Janssenistes’), who curated her image both during her career and in her retirement to create an adopted musical heroine whose memory remains guarded by Lyon council policy. That image, selectively constructed from among her Wagner roles, also typecast her as a singer who had much in common with Symbolist art – a potential Mélisande that Lyon never saw. This article brings together archival and press materials to explain how a foreign-born singer's agency and mythification contributed to a double French naturalisation – her own, and that of Wagner(ism).

This article explores a slice of the careers of two ‘rival’ coloratura singers – the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson and the French soprano Caroline Miolan Carvalho – during the period 1867 to 1870, and considers the internationalisation of singing careers, women's choices and negotiation of their career paths, and fortunes made and lost. With both singers employed at the Paris Opéra from November 1868 onwards as Gounod's Faust went into rehearsal, the focus falls on the ‘Battle of the Marguerites’ in the Parisian press in spring 1869, which raised heated questions of dramatic and vocal interpretation and style, often linked to cultural stereotypes, as well as artistic legitimacy and stature. Through examination of previously overlooked archival financial and legal records, this article also reveals for the first time that Miolan Carvalho was indentured to the director of the Opéra Emile Perrin during this period.

This article addresses several historiographical questions about narratives of nineteenth-century Italian opera by discussing the international career of prima donna Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani during the 1830s and 1840s. A number of hitherto overlooked letters between the singer and Carlo Balocchino, impresario of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, provide important insights into Tacchinardi-Persiani's strategies of self-representation in the context of a dynamic operatic network that included the Italian States, Vienna, Paris and London. By revealing shifting power dynamics between opera impresarios, performers and composers, these letters, read in parallel with reviews and other writings of the time, offer a fresh look at the economic, ideological and artistic factors that contributed to the shifting geography of the European operatic landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century.