Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes D'Hoffmann

176 Pages·2000·3.798 MB·English

by  Heather Hadlock

MAD LOVES
PRINCETON STUDIES IN OPERA
CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER
SERIES EDITORS
Reading Opera edited by Arthur Groos and
Roger Parker
Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition
William Ashbrook and Harold Powers
Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century Carolyn Abbate
Wagner Androgyne Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
translated by Stewart Spencer
Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and
Other Composers Pierluigi Petrobelli,
with translations by Roger Parker
Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse
Roger Parker
Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen:
The Dramaturgy of Disavowal
David J. Levin
Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition
Charles Dill
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera
Gary Tomlinson
The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna:
A Poetics of Entertainment
Mary Hunter
Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Heather Hadlock
Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality
in Opera edited by Mary Ann Smart
MAD LOVES
WOMEN AND MUSIC IN OFFENBACH’S
LES CONTES D’HOFFMANN
Heather Hadlock
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hadlock, Heather
Mad loves : women and music in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann / Heather Hadlock.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-05802-4 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Offenbach, Jacques, 1819–1880. Contes d’Hoffmann.
2. Women in opera. I. Title.
ML410.O41 H33 2000
782.1—dc21 00-023688
This book has been composed in Galliard
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(R1997) (Permanence of Paper)
http://pupress.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
“Voulez-vous le récit de ces folles amours?”

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Chapter One
Telling the Tales 17
Chapter Two
Mesmerizing Voices:
Music, Medicine, and the Invention of Dr. Miracle 42
Chapter Three
Song as Symptom:
Antonia, Olympia, and the Prima Donna Mother 67
Chapter Four
Offenbach, for Posterity 86
Chapter Five
Reflections on the Venetian Act 113
Notes 135
Bibliography 149
Index 161

Acknowledgments
THROUGHOUTTHEresearch and writing of this book I have had many oc-
casions to be grateful for Carolyn Abbate’s discernment and skill as an ad-
visor, critic, and mentor. I have relied on Roger Parker’s critical and edi-
torial acumen since the very early stages of this project, and his detailed
commentary on the penultimate version of the manuscript did much to
shape its final form. I also appreciate the encouragement I have received
from my colleagues at Stanford University during that process of revision
and transformation. The Opera Studies Workshop funded by the Stanford
Humanities Center has provided a lively forum for discussions of opera and
opera scholarship, due in large part to the ongoing involvement of Paul
Robinson, Herbert Lindenberger, Karol Berger, Thomas Grey, and Ste-
phen Hinton. John Speagle has been an indefatigable source of intellectual
and moral support.
Thanks are due to the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Mu-
sicological Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Sum-
mer Stipend Program for their support of dissertation and post-disserta-
tion research and writing. I thank the program committees of the Third
Feminist Theory and Music Conference (June 1995) and of the 1995
American Musicologial Society meeting for opportunities to present por-
tions of the chapter on music and mesmerism; the University of Califor-
nia–Berkeley colloquium audience for their stimulating response to my
colloquium on the Venetian act in 1996; and Mary Ann Smart for inviting
me to speak on Les Contes as a fantastical narrative in her 1999 symposium
on “E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music,” also at Berkeley. An earlier version of
Chapter Three appeared as “Returns of the Repressed: The Prima Donna
from Hoffmann’s Tales to Offenbach’s Les Contes,” in Cambridge Opera
Journal 6, no. 3 (November 1994): 221–43.
From the moment I began to write it, I have imagined this book as an
expression of gratitude to tenor Neil Shicoff, for his performance in the
Metropolitan Opera’s 1988 Contes d’Hoffmann; and to my mother, for
taping it.