Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), a British film about a boy from the industrial north-east who forsakes his roots to train as a professional dancer, opens and closes with two almost mythic scenes of male dancing. In the first, the film’s opening, the eleven-year-old Billy lays the stylus on a T-Rex LP and, after a scratchy false start, the soundtrack begins with the 1978 ‘Cosmic Dancer’. Hopping onto his bed, Billy starts to leap up and down – first as any boy would, but then higher and higher, his body caught in slow motion in a variety of abstract poses. In the film’s final scene, we return to Billy dancing, this time as a mature, muscular adult arriving in the wings of a London theatre. This is the first and only time we see the grown-up Billy, and his face is kept from us so that we can focus on the strength and immensity of his limbs, the astonishing athletic body. At the climactic statement of a soaring late Romantic phrase – the music is now Swan Lake – Billy leaps onto the stage. Boy becomes man, adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism and film and soundtrack freeze, capturing Billy in another abstract leap.

The tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez is today remembered for his invention of the ‘C from the chest’, first presented to Parisian audiences in 1837. This has retrospectively been mythologised as the origin-point of modern tenor technique, though recent research has thrown the exact nature and significance of Duprez’s achievement into doubt. Nonetheless, one context in which Duprez was understood as revolutionary was in the scientific work of two Lyonnais doctors, Paul Diday and Joseph Pétrequin, whose 1840 essay ‘Mémoire sur une nouvelle espèce de voix chantée’ offers a unique perspective not only on what Duprez sounded like, but also on developments in the understanding of the physiological phenomenon of singing itself. Placing this work in the context of earlier medical writings on the voice, and of the authors’ subsequent debate with the singing teacher Manuel Garcia Jr., suggests that the late 1830s were a period of flux in the history of the understanding of singing, one in which long-held certainties were being questioned. Duprez thus arrived in Paris at a unique moment. The changing conceptual background shaped the understanding of Duprez’s voice even as the tenor was used by the doctors as a ‘living experiment’ to reach conclusions about the function of the voice generally.

The notion of studying the nineteenth-century danseur is problematic because of an anti-male strain in dance historiography that has led some to suggest that he virtually disappeared from the stage. André Levinson is largely responsible for the danseur’s poor reputation: he minimised the narrative aspect of nineteenth-century ballet and declared in 1929 that the ballerina Marie Taglioni had ‘evicted’ men from the stage. Levinson also canonised La Sylphide (1832), a ballet that he, like his nineteenth-century predecessors Théophile Gautier and Jules Janin, gendered as feminine. He promulgated the term ‘ballet blanc’, a feminising but misleading term now in common use and rarely interrogated. And yet men danced on the stage throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of the Paris Opéra, men contributed to ballet as principal dancers, soloists and in the corps de ballet. A brief study of La Jolie Fille de Gand, a ballet contemporaneous with La Sylphide, shows a rich set of male roles calling on men’s skill as mimes and dancers in various styles. Further studies of the long-maligned nineteenth-century danseur are needed.

This article begins with a late Verdian conundrum, one that is arguably distinctive of the fin de siècle: even as Verdi seemed to be withdrawing from the stage, he turned repeatedly to a small group of practical musicians, among them the French baritone Victor Maurel, the first Iago and Falstaff and creator in 1881 of the revised role of Simon Boccanegra. An exploration of the circumstances in which Maurel first made an impression on the composer, as Hamlet and Amonasro at the Paris Opéra in 1880, suggests a significant role for the baritone in late Verdian historiography. In particular, Maurel’s case reveals a Verdi interested in and even actively encouraging new approaches to operatic acting and declamation, a fact we might want to relate to the composer’s larger trajectory in this period. It also reveals a fin de siècle in which singers continued to be important, in spite of composers’ anti-performance rhetoric.

It seems a very long way from a dog howling in pain on François Magendie’s laboratory table in 1816 to Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s more-or-less novel accomplishment at the Paris Opéra two decades later: the tenor’s high C from the chest; the darkened voice; the sound of the future first heard in a performance of Guillaume Tell. Most obviously, the sounds of the dog were horrible and horrifying. When Magendie’s teacher, the great Xavier Bichat, tried the experiment some years earlier, his cleaning lady asked to move her chambers from near the scene because she could not bear the dog’s cries. Duprez’s sound was, arguably, beautiful; at least some people thought so, even if two doctors, driven to study the physiology of singing by the occasion, claimed that most people thought the voice was forced and false. Whether it was ‘pathological’ or not – I’d prefer, at worse, ‘pathogenic’ in the sense that so many unnatural new activities of the nineteenth century, like sitting long hours at a desk or riding on a train, were thought to make one ill – the tenor’s high C did, even its detractors admitted, ‘transport and dominate with its power’. It was musical and in the minds of many opened up radically new interpretative possibilities.