Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T17:30:05.157Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Electrician, the Magician and the Nervous Conductor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2020

Francesca Brittan Open the ORCID record for Francesca Brittan [Opens in a new window]
Francesca Brittan*
Affiliation:
Case Western Reserve University [email protected]
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Berlioz's essay ‘Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art’ (1855) was among the first and most widely disseminated attempts to describe the art of modern conducting. Drawing together technical with literary and scientific language, it aimed to capture the relationship between leaders and players and, more broadly, the modes of animation underpinning nineteenth-century orchestral performance. Central to the essay are notions of electricity – animal, artificial and mesmeric. For Berlioz, the conductor's job is no longer simply to marshal his orchestral troops but to galvanize them: ‘his inner flame warms them, his electricity charges them.’ Here, I examine the medical and physical technologies that underpinned these descriptions – the ways in which podium conducting became newly intertwined with theories of bioelectricity, notions of spiritual or metaphysical ‘spark’, and emerging forms of electrical communication that rewired European conceptions of the body politic.

In Part I, I examine the ‘electric baton’ which allowed Berlioz to control the enormous orchestral forces of his 1855 Exposition Universelle concerts, generating a quasi-telegraphic network with imperialist resonances. Part II examines the role of nervous electricity in Berlioz's accounts of conducting, and his conception of music itself as a charged substance. Part III draws technological and medical discourses into conversation with magical cultures, showing how notions of nervous power (and peril) united Berlioz, Mesmer and the famous Robert-Houdin. The new romantic conductor, as I conclude, was a figure poised at the intersection of medicine, electric technology, and a newly charged spirituality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 19 , Special Issue 1: Music, Medical Science and the Body/Retrospect Opera: Reviving Britain's Nineteenth-Century Operatic Past , April 2022 , pp. 31 - 53
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Macdonald, Hugh, ed., Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise, A Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 337Google Scholar.

2 For details of the gestation, translation, and publication of the conducting essay, see Macdonald, ed., Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise, xxiii–xxv. As Macdonald and others have noted, there were precedents for Berlioz's work, although none as widely known: Ludwig Spohr published beat-patterns in his Violin-Schule (1831), and Ferdinand Gaβner (Hofmusikdirektor of the Baden Kapelle in Karlsruhe) included beating instructions, rehearsal strategies, and orchestral seating arrangements in his Dirigent und Ripienist (1844). In France, both François Fétis, in his Manuel des compositeurs, directeurs de musique, chefs d'orchestre & de musique militaire (1837), and Jean-Georges Kastner, in his Cours d'instrumentation (1839), offered advice to conductors on auditioning, tuning, rehearsing and organizing the orchestra.

3 Galkin, Elliott documents these innovations (while also acknowledging conflicting reports of Spohr's conducting method through the 1820s) in A History of Orchestral Conducting in Theory and Practice (New York: Pedragon, 1988): 487–519Google Scholar. Goulden, Michael provides a concise overview of early baton use, especially in Britain, in Michael Costa, England's First Conductor: The Revolution in Musical Performance in England, 1830–1880 (New York: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

4 Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): 311Google Scholar.

5 Reports of Mendelssohn's ‘electric’ conducting are noted in Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn, A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 304 and 539Google Scholar.

6 For general histories of conducting see, as starting points, the following: Galkin, A History of Orchestral Conducting; ‘Conducting’ by Spitzer, John, Zaslaw, Neal, and Botstein, Leon in Grove Music Online; Bowen, José A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Conducting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Illiano, Roberto and Niccolai, Michela, eds, Orchestral Conducting in the Nineteenth Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014)Google Scholar. Alison Winter highlights the magnetic rhetoric associated with early baton conductors in a tantalizingly brief section of her text Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, 309–320.

7 See Berlioz, Memoirs, trans. David Cairns (New York: Knopf): 225–6.

8 François-Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849), Directeur géneral de la musique at the Opéra from 1821 and Chef d'orchestre of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire from 1828, was among the key advocates of violin-leadership, and a long-time adversary of Berlioz's, exercising prodigious influence over French orchestral performance practice and music pedagogy. His approach was carried forward by virtually all later conductors of the Conservatoire orchestra, up to and including Édouard Deldevez (who held the post from 1873–1885), ensuring that violin-bow direction persisted in Paris well after the baton had triumphed in London and in the major German-speaking centres. See Hugh Macdonald, ‘The French Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, 134–45, and Charlton, David, ‘A Maître d'orchestra … Conducts: New and Old Evidence on French Practice’, Early Music 21 (1993): 341–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Holoman, D. Kern gives a good overview of Berlioz's emergence as a conductor, including his break with established French violinist-leaders, in Berlioz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 346–54Google Scholar. Galkin offers a more expansive account of his career in The History of Orchestral Conducting, 549–63. For a recent essay on Berlioz's technical innovations as a conductor, see Walter Kurt Kreyszig, ‘Hector Berlioz's Technique of Conducting in Theory and Practice: His Subdivision of the tactus in Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art and His Scores’, in Orchestral Conducting in the Nineteenth Century, 213–48. Rij, Inge Van deals with various aspects of Berlioz's conducting, especially its military associations, in The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. Berlioz's conducting legacy in England is detailed in Goulden, Michael Costa, and more briefly in Palmer, Fiona M., Conductors in Britain 1870–1914: Wielding the Baton at the Height of Empire (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

10 For more on the politics of the Exhibition, see Mainardi, Patricia, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Holoman describes Berlioz's role on the jury for new instruments in Berlioz, 423–7; see also Wilson, Flora, ‘Hearing Things: Musical Objects at the 1851 Great Exhibition’, in Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851, ed. Davies, James Q. and Lockhart, Ellen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017): 227–46Google Scholar.

11 With the exception of a new cantata, ‘L'Impériale’, the programme for the Exhibition concerts echoed that of the Festival of Industry performances. It included excerpts from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the ‘Blessing of the Daggers’ from Act 4 of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, the ‘Prière’ from Rossini's Moïse, Handel's ‘See the Conquering Hero’ from Judas Maccabaeus, Mozart's ‘Ave verum’, and portions of Berlioz's own large-scale works.

12 Macdonald, ed., Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise, 354–5.

13 Macdonald, ed., Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise, 356, where Macdonald also notes the connection between Berlioz's imagined metronome and Verbrugghe's invention. Others have made the same link: see Cairns, David, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness: 1832–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000): 562Google Scholar; Holoman, Berlioz: 470; Grant, Roger Mathew, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Inge Van Rij, The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz, 202.

14 Berlioz, ‘Euphonia’, trans. Jacques Barzun in Evenings with the Orchestra (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973): 258–97, at 283, 286Google Scholar.

15 The review describes ‘Berlioz, avec ses nombreux ministres ou lieutenants, avec sa cour ou son armée de douze cent cinquante artistes’, and culminates in the claim: ‘Impossible de mieux discipliner, de mieux dominer qu'il ne l'a fait cette formidable population de sonorités’. Gazette musicale (18 November 1855).

16 ‘Des orchestres de sept cents musiciens, des choeurs de six cents voix, d'innombrables phalanges de violons, d'altos, de harpes, de violoncelles, de contre-basses, des ouragans de cuivre à effrayer les archanges du jugement dernier, six généraux de division sous le commandement d'un chef suprême, transmettant ses ordres, ses mouvemens, sa mesure à l'aide d'un métronome électrique.’ Le Constitutionnel (16 November 1855).

17 ‘Une touche en cuivre semblable à une touche de piano, adaptée au pupitre du chef et à peine effleurée par l'index de sa main gauche, lui permet de marquer au loin les principaux temps de la mesure, pendant qu'il dirige avec son bras droit les groupes les plus rapprochés. Grâce à cet appareil si simple et si ingénieux, une seule personne pourrait conduire à la fois quatre orchestres placés au sud, au nord, à l'est et à l'ouest, aux quatre extrémités de la terre … avec un irréprochable ensemble, et iraient parfaitement en mesure, comme si elles avaient sous les yeux le bâton du chef.’ Revue franco-italienne (15 November 1855), in an advance report announcing the musical programmes for November 15 and 16.

18 The idea represented an expansion and updating of military tropes already associated with conductors. See Spitzer, John, ‘Metaphors for the Orchestra – The Orchestra as Metaphor’, The Musical Quarterly 80/2 (1996): 234–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Rij, Van, ‘“A Living, Fleshly Bond”: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment’, 19th-Century Music 39/2 (2015): 142–66Google Scholar.

20 For more on the geopolitics of telegraphic expansion, see Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; idem, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and National Politics, 1851–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Also helpful is Morus, Iwan Rhys, ‘The Electric Ariel: Telegraphy and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 39/3 (Spring 1996): 339–78Google Scholar; idem, ‘“The Nervous System of Britain”: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age’, The British Journal for the History of Science 33/4 (2000): 455–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Quoted in Morus, ‘The Electric Ariel’, 340.

22 See Morus, ‘The Nervous System of Britain’, and, for a more elaborate consideration of imperial time, Barrow, Adam, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar and Ferguson, Trish, ed., Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 ‘Demain, sans aucun doute, les instrumentistes et les chanteurs de Paris seront trouvés trop peu nombreux; on appellera ceux des départemens y compris la Corse et l'Algérie; puis pour couronner l'oeuvre, on fera venir ceux du nouveau monde pour les fondre avec ceux de l'ancien’; Revue musicale (20 November 1855).

24 See Schafer's classic The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar and Goodman, , Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

25 Cartoons satirizing the ear-splitting effect of Berlioz's orchestra on French audiences are well known, but its impact on foreign visitors was apparently equally devastating. Another image by Cham titled ‘Les Arabes à Paris’ (Charivari, 18 January 1845) shows a group of Arab visitors at one of the composer's ‘monster concerts’, covering their ears in postures of noise-induced anguish. A similarly robed and turbaned figure, now bearing an instrument, appeared in Cham's later cartoon of Berlioz's ‘global’ orchestra (as we saw in Figure 2). Foreign bodies seem both subjugated by Berlioz's ensemble and, at the same time, productive of its clamorous, annihilating effects.

26 See Morus, ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: 470–73; and Musselman, Elizabeth Green, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006): 190–97Google Scholar.

27 A tendency toward the cross-circuiting of organic and technological rhetoric in nineteenth-century descriptions of electrical communication is explored by in, Laura Otis Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001): 11–48Google Scholar, where it is connected particularly clearly to the writing of German physiologist Emil DuBois-Reymond. Nélia Dias also draws attention to metaphorical cross fertilization, noting that the French anthropologist Mathias Duval, writing in the 1880s, conflated not just organic and inorganic conceptions of electrical function, but also military metaphors, describing the brain as an army general receiving and transmitting orders across a system of nerves operating like a telegraphic network; see Dias, Nélia, ‘Exploring the Senses and Exploiting the Land: Railroads, Bodies and Measurement in Nineteenth-Century French Colonies’, in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History, and the Material Turn, ed. Bennett, Tony and Joyce, Patrick (New York: Routledge, 2010): 171–90, at 186Google Scholar.

28 For a detailed overview of Galvani's work and its controversies, see Pera, Marcello, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani–Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Mandelbaum, Jonathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Piccolino, Marco and Bresadola, Marco, Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brazier, Mary Agnes Burniston, A History of Neurophysiology in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Raven Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Otis, Networking: 11–48.

29 Electricity's fictional and poetic life in the nineteenth century has been widely explored. Recent treatments include Fairclough, Mary, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilmore, Paul, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Willis, Paul, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. The wider vitalist cultures that fed theories of mystical electrical communion are dealt with in Gigante, Denise, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Packham, Catherine, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reill, Peter Hans, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

30 References to electricity, both medical and metaphorical, weave through the composer's personal and critical writing of the 1820s and 1830s. That his interest in the subject began early is confirmed in the Mémoires, where he makes reference to ‘a course on experimental electricity’, with the chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac undertaken during his student days. See Berlioz, Hector, Mémoires, ed. Citron, Pierre (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969): 64Google Scholar.

31 ‘le publique arrive, l'heure sonne; exténué, abîmé de fatigues de corps et d'esprit, le compositeur se présente au pupitre-chef, se soutenant à peine, incertain, éteint, dégoûté, jusqu'au moment où les applaudissements de l'auditoire, la verve des exécutants, l'amour qu'il a pour son oeuvre le transforment tout à coup en machine électrique, d'où s’élancent invisibles, mais réelles, de foudroyantes irradiations. Et la compensation commence. Ah! c'est alors, j'en conviens, que l'auteur-directeur vit d'une vie aux virtuoses inconnue! Avec quelle joie furieuse il s'abandonne au bonheur de jouer de l'orchestre! Comme il presse, comme il embrasse, comme il étreint cet immense et fougueux instrument!’ Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Citron, Vol. II: 78.

32 For Winter's discussion of conducting see Mesmerized, 309–20; the image of Elliotson appears on p. 63.

33 Newton's notion of an ethereal fluid vibrating through solid nerve fibres is fleshed out in the second edition of his Optics (1717). It replaced (or in some cases was conflated with) older notions of ‘animal spirits’ coursing down hollow nerves, carrying messages between the brain and the periphery. See Smith, C.U.M., et al. , The Animal Spirit Doctrine and the Origins of Neurophysiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Penelope Gouk traces extensions of Newton's ideas through Cheyne, Hartley, and others in ‘Music and the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, in Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900, ed. Kennaway, James (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 44–71, at, 54, 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also idem, ‘Music's Pathological and Therapeutic Effects on the Body Politic: Doctor John Gregory's Views’, in Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine, ed. Gouk, Penelope and Hills, Helen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 191–207Google Scholar; and Kennaway, James, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)Google Scholar.

34 Lamarck's thoughts on fluidic sound are to be found in his Hydrogéologie. See also Carra, Jean-Louis, Examen physique du magnétisme animal; analyse des éloges et des critiques qu'on en faits jusqu’à présent … (London: Eugene Onfroy, 1785), especially p. 18Google Scholar, where he claims that ‘Le fluide électrique, le fluide lumineux, le fluide sonore, le fluide animal, &c. … dérivent du fluide universel’.

35 For an account of Mesmerism in France that gives a sense of the proliferation and conflation of various magical, magnetic, and electric ‘fluids’ in French and German discourses of the 1780s and 1790s, see Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also helpful is Riskin, Jessica, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, in this issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Peter Pesic, ‘Composing the Crisis: From Mesmer's Harmonica to Charcot's Tam-Tam’. Beiser, Frederick C. details the relationship between idealist thought and electricity in German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 506–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Raz, Carmel, ‘“The Expressive Organ Within Us”: Ether, Ethereality, and Early Romantic Ideas about Music and the Nerves’, 19th-Century Music 38/2 (2014): 115–44Google Scholar; and idem, ‘Reverberating Nerves: Physiology, Perception, and Early Romantic Auditory Cultures’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 2015). Music's vitalist histories have been explored, more recently, by Watkins, Holly, in Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Above, I quote from an essay on musical imitation and ‘electric’ communication by Fabre D'Olivet in La France musicale (17 November 1844). Contes fantastiques published in French musical journals through the 1830s and 1840s come back repeatedly to descriptions of magical, sonorous and electric fluids; see, for instance, Frédéric Mab, ‘Les cygnes chantent en mourant’, Gazette musicale (8, 15, and 22 March and 5 April 1835), discussed in Brittan, Francesca, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 123–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 de Pontécoulant, Adolphe, Les phénomènes de la musique ou influence du son sur les êtres animés (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868)Google Scholar; Chomet, Hector, Effets et influence de la musique sur la santé et sur la maladie (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1874)Google Scholar. For an exploration of music, physiology and fluid dynamics in a contemporary German context, see Helmholtz, Hermann von, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1863)Google Scholar, explored in Julia Kursell, '“False Relations”: Hermann von Helmholtz's Study of Music and the Delineation of Nineteenth-Century Physiology', in this issue.

38 Berlioz, A Travers chant, trans. by Barzun, Jacques as The Art of Music and Other Essays (Paris: Gründ, 1971): 60Google Scholar.

39 ‘je fus pris, en conduisant, d'un tremblement nerveux tel que mes dents s'entrechoquaient, comme dans les plus violents accès de fièvre. … J’étais dans un tel état … qu'il fallut suspendre assez longtemps le concert. On m'apporta du punch et des habits. Puis sur l'estrade même, réunissant une douzaine de harpes revêtues de leur fourreau de toile, on en forma une sorte de petite chambre dans laquelle, en me baissant un peu, je pus me déshabiller et changer même de chemise en face du public, sans être vu’, Mémoires, ed. Citron, Vol. II: 177. Berlioz's use of electric metaphor to describe the intense effect/affect of performance had, well before, become prevalent among singers; see Lockhart, Ellen, ‘Giuditta Pasta and the History of Musical Electrification’, in Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017): 133–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And for an account of electric rhetoric and musico-dramatic animation on English stages, see Sarah Hibberd, ‘Good Vibrations: Frankenstein on the London Stage’, in Sound Knowledge, pp. 175–202.

40 ‘l'impression de ce divin poème shakespearien que je me me chantais à moi-même, fut telle qu'après le finale je courus tout frémissant me réfugier dans une chambre du théâtre, où quelques instants après Ernst me trouva pleurant à flots. “Ah! me dit-il, les nerfs! je connais cela!” Et s'approchant de moi, il me soutint la tête, et me laissa pleurer comme une fille hystérique, pendant un grand quart d'heure’, Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Citron, Vol. II: 272.

41 In a letter of 28 April 1847, Correspondance générale de Berlioz, vol. III, no. 1108, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).

42 Engel, Louis, From Handel to Hallé: Biographical Sketches (London: Swann, Sonnenschein, 1890): 232Google Scholar, quoted and translated in Galkin, The History of Orchestral Conducting, 555.

43 Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Citron, Vol. II: 78.

44 During, Simon, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially chap. 3Google Scholar, ‘Egg-Bag Tricks and Electricity: The Founding of Modern Commercial Conjuring’, 74–106, here at 85; and chap. 4, ‘Magic's Moment: The Illusion Business’, 107–34.

45 During, Modern Enchantments, 91–92.

46 During, Modern Enchantments: 118–34. The electric tricks I outline above are described in detail by Robert-Houdin in Les secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie: comment on devient sorcier (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1868)Google Scholar, trans. by Hoffmann, Louis as Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, Or How to Become a Wizard (London: Routledge, 1878)Google Scholar. Robert-Houdin, like many earlier magicians, figured himself as both an entertainer and a disseminator of scientific knowledge. For more on this slippage, particularly the interface between public education and theatrical display in the mid-late nineteenth century, see Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

47 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, trans. Hoffmann: 65.

48 Macdonald, ed., Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise, 340.

49 For more detail, see Sconce, Jeffry, ‘Mediums and Media’, in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000): 21–58Google Scholar; Sharp, Lynn L., Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (Plymouth: Lexington, 2006)Google Scholar; Winter, ‘The Mesmeric Cure of Souls’, in Mesmerized, 246–75. Van Rij touches on Berlioz's satirical attitude toward Spiritualism, as well as his orchestral imitation of its ‘telegraphic’ effects in the unfinished opera La nonne sanglante in The Others Worlds of Hector Berlioz, 177–8 and 185–6.

50 See During, Modern Enchantments, 127–131. Robert-Houdin gives elaborate accounts of the electric tricks performed in Algeria in his memoirs and other publications; see Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, trans. Hoffmann: 80; and Memoirs of Robert-Houdin: Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer, chapter XX (‘A Trip to Algeria’), trans. R. Shelton Mackenzie (Philadelphia: G. Evans, 1859).

51 For a rich working-out of these perceived links in a French context, see Tresch, John, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Otis points out that, while patterns of metaphorical exchange among nineteenth-century physicists and physiologists reveal crucial patterns of intellectual formation and exchange, some scientists (famously, Claude Bernard and Hermann von Helmholtz) remained sceptical about the epistemological value of metaphor, calling for clear separation between empirical knowledge and mere analogy; see Networking, pp. 1–10.

52 Winter compares Berlioz's to Wagner's electricity in Mesmerized, 314–15. An account of Strauss's magnetic conducting, as described in a review by Hanslick, is given in Crittenden, Camille, Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 39Google Scholar. Reports of the magico-electric qualities of Toscanini and Stokowski are ubiquitous; see, for instance, the reviews and recollections collected in Civetta, Cesare, The Real Toscanini: Musicians Reveal the Maestro (Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2012)Google Scholar and in Daniel, Oliver, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York: Dodd, 1982): 70–76Google Scholar.

53 Bernstein, Leonard, ‘The Art of Conducting’, in The Joy of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960): 150Google Scholar.