Singer-Machines: Describing Italian Singers, 1800-1850

Puppets, automata, electric creatures: in numerous descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, Italian singers were presented as singing and acting machines. Whether mechanical or electrical, such models do not merely reflect the technologies of the time and their circulation across a wider discursive field; nor do they simply illustrate a special case of cultural appropriation of science and technology in the emergent discipline of music criticism, in search of specialized tools and terms with which to describe operatic performance. Although mechanical models were usually used satirically to condemn specific singing or acting practices, and electrical models to applaud others, they were not limited to mere pejorative or laudatory criticism. Italian opera singers, whether compared to mechanical machines or considered as truly electric instruments, were discursively transformed into technical objects and thus acquired stronger aesthetic, cultural and social meanings. In her introduction to the recent issue of Opera Quarterly devoted to opera and machines,1 guest editor Bonnie Gordon proposed “decenter[ing] opera, [moving] away from thinking of it as dependent mostly on the subjective experiences of composers, performers, and audiences … moving from a subject- to an object-oriented approach.”2 Problematizing the relationship between musical performance and machines implies, however, a full analysis and historicization of discursive fields and their various intricacies. “Machines are social before being technical,” wrote Gilles Deleuze.3 The singer-machine is thus “simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation.”4 The present article will concentrate on precisely this discursive assemblage. Rather than reconstituting “mechanical” or “electric” acting and singing practices, or linking them to real technological uses in or outside theaters, I intend to focus here on the singer-machine by analyzing specific discursive models of description and observation in use among early nineteenth-century operatic critics.5