Articles by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
The Opera Quarterly, 2022
In his 2019 novel Il colibri (The Hummingbird), Sandro Veronesi asks, "how do you begin telling t... more In his 2019 novel Il colibri (The Hummingbird), Sandro Veronesi asks, "how do you begin telling the story of a great love when you know it ended in disaster?" 1 The line has a double meaning: it frames the addiction-ridden story of ophthalmologist Marco Carrera, but it also outlines the novel's jigsaw-like form. Yuval Sharon quotes Veronesi's question in his program book essay for Detroit Opera's recent production of La bohème. Sharon's production of the canonic opera, like Veronesi's nonlinear novel, confronts, in the director's words, the "unruly and indirect nature of memory." 2 Sung in the original Italian but presented backwards-that is, beginning with act 4 (nicknamed "Death") then proceeding, without intermission and cut to 100 minutes, through acts 3 ("Barrière"), 2 ("Momus"), and 1 ("Love")-Detroit Opera's....
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2022
This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While schola... more This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While scholars have explored the opera's resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined 'East', Aida's etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 premiere. Her name is not Egyptian or Ethiopian but Greek, and her backstory was modelled on characters named 'Haidée' and 'Haydée' who appeared in works by Lord Byron and Alexandre Dumas fils, as well as in a celebrated opéra comique by Daniel Auber. Aida was thus an assemblage of ready-made character archetypes and scenarios rather than an author's sui generis depiction of non-Western culture. An intertextual reading of Aida offers a broader perspective on alterity in the nineteenth century, which eschewed geographical specificity for archetypes, quotations and allusions. It also offers another way to confront claims of authenticity made by current-day defenders of brownface in Verdi's work.
19th-Century Music, 2021
Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thri... more Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.
Journal of Musicology, 2020
The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,”... more The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.
Current Musicology, 2018
When Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne premiered in Paris in 1866, it entered a longstanding debate o... more When Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne premiered in Paris in 1866, it entered a longstanding debate on what it meant to be “Parisian.” This article uses La Vie parisienne to explore a key facet of Second Empire modernity: the notion that the Paris was a theater and that its dwellers were actors in a play. The operetta’s title alludes to a popular magazine likewise titled La Vie parisienne, which compared the rituals of Parisians to the scripted behaviors of theatrical characters. The librettists Meilhac and Halévy worked for the magazine in the early 1860s, and subsequently dedicated their operetta to the magazine’s founder, Marcelin. Three co-written vaudevilles reflect Marcelin’s attitudes about urban life and contain the prototypes of La Vie parisienne’s protagonists. As an example of what I call “cosmopolitan realism” in Second-Empire culture, the operetta assumed the function of an operatic anthology—analyzing, taxonomizing, and mythologizing Paris’s spaces, citizens and visitors. Long at the fringes of opera scholarship, operetta and vaudeville provide a rich corpus of literature that aestheticized the industrializing city, contributing to what Offenbach’s contemporaries, such as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Claudin, diagnosed as la vie moderne.
Essays by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Will Sound Studies Ever “Emerge”?
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2021
https://jhiblog.org/2021/02/10/will-sound-studies-ever-emerge/
In a recent issue of H-France For... more https://jhiblog.org/2021/02/10/will-sound-studies-ever-emerge/
In a recent issue of H-France Forum, four historians—David Garrioch, Éva Guillorel, Una McIlvenn, and Lewis C. Seifert—published reviews of Nicholas Hammond’s book, The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). Impressed by its use of sound as an area of inquiry, Lewis C. Seifert writes that Hammond’s book is “inspired by the emerging field of sound studies.” As a musicologist interested in the aural dimensions of nineteenth-century Parisian street culture, I was struck by this claim, as I have seen it before. In 1991, Alain Corbin warned that historians “can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception.” Years later, we learn in a 2007 edited volume that “historians have, until recently, been silent about sound.” Even practitioners of sound studies cannot resist the rhetoric of discovery, marking their field as “an emerging interdisciplinary area” and “a vibrant new interdisciplinary field.”
Reflecting on these claims of academic novelty, I began to think about how the rhetoric of emergence and interdisciplinarity can, ironically, thwart interdisciplinary exchange and silence research that is truly new. Reading these references to the “emergence” of sound and to the “pioneers” of its study, I also could not help notice the persistence of colonialist rhetoric that pervades subject areas which, though technically no longer marginalized, cannot shake their marginalized identity....
Three Musical Works about "Old Paris"
Musicology Now, 2019
Some of my reflections on Notre Dame, French music, and urban history. Blog post on "Musicology N... more Some of my reflections on Notre Dame, French music, and urban history. Blog post on "Musicology Now," the American Musicological Society blog.
Edited Books by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Musical Theatre in Europe, 1830-1945, ed. Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols)., 2017
Jacques Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle marked a watershed in the history of Parisian operetta. ... more Jacques Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle marked a watershed in the history of Parisian operetta. Up to 1858 the licensing of small theatres only allowed for three or four simultaneous on-stage performers. When restrictions loosened in 1858, operetta composers were able to stage more ambitious works. Thus Mesdames de la Halle, a one-act opérette-bouffe with a libretto by Armande Lapointe, was the first operetta to feature a chorus. The press reacted enthusiastically to the operetta’s premiere on March 3, 1858, acknowledging it as a momentous occasion in the Parisian entertainment scene. While most reviewers focused particularly on the chorus that dwarfed the Bouffes Parisiens stage, Jules Lovy of Le Ménestrel went as far as to add the operetta to a list of contemporary Parisian phenomena that included “la vapeur, le gaz, le daguerréotype, le télégraphe électrique…et les crinolines.” In short, Lovy had included Mesdames among the artifacts of Second-Empire modernity, thus preceding Walter Benjamin’s declaration that Offenbach “set the rhythm of Parisian life” (Benjamin 1999).
Yet a closer examination of the operetta’s dramatic and musical sources offers an alternate reading. This paper argues that Mesdames de la Halle belongs to a discourse of nostalgia for “old Paris,” which was disappearing in the midst of Haussmann’s urbanization of the capital. Set in the Marché des Innocents during the reign of Louis XV, the operetta opens with a chorus of street vendors who sing of their wares. This opening scene bears a close resemblance to the marketplace scene from Act III of Auber’s La Muette de Portici: both help create an “urban” atmosphere that serves as the backdrop for the “interior” drama of the main characters. But in fact, the representation of the cries of Parisian street vendors is a centuries-old practice; as historian Vincent Milliot has observed, Parisian street cries inspired numerous historical, visual, and literary reflections from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries (Milliot 1995). However, by the late 1850s, increased rent and the construction of wide boulevards pushed itinerant street hawkers from the city’s center into the banlieues.
Within this urban context, I read Offenbach’s Mesdames as symbolically transferring the sounds of Parisian hawkers from the streets to the operetta stage. Offenbach’s score features direct melodic quotations from Jean-Georges Kastner’s Les voix de Paris, a musical history of Parisian street cries published in 1857, a year before the premiere of Mesdames. Kastner’s little-known study consists of two parts: the first is an “ethnographic” prose history of street cries that featured copious musical transcriptions, while the second is a fully scored symphonic poem entitled Les cris de Paris. Upon its publication, Kastner’s book was immediately understood as a nostalgic text; as Joseph d’Ortigue remarked in the Journal des débats, Kastner had “documented the vestiges of vieux Paris.” Thus, by quoting musical transcriptions of cries from Kastner’s Les voix de Paris in the operetta’s choral numbers, Offenbach not only tested the dramatic and musical capabilities of a large operetta chorus, but also memorialized a vanishing urban soundscape.
Berlioz comme monument : géographie, commémoration et canonicité
RAMAUT, Alban, REIBEL, Emmanuel (éd.), Hector Berlioz 1869-2019 (150 ans de passion), Château-Gontier, Éditions Aedam Musicae, coll. « Musiques XIX-XXe siècles », p. 86-99, 210-211, 219, 227-231, 2019
Book Reviews by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2023
In Berlioz in Time, Peter Bloom assembles decades’ worth of research on
the composer’s life and s... more In Berlioz in Time, Peter Bloom assembles decades’ worth of research on
the composer’s life and social milieu. The title is an allusion to Edmund
Hippeau’s 1883 biography Berlioz intime. Although Bloom claims that
the allusion is “not by design” (p. 272), his book’s questions revolve
around intimate details of the composer’s personal and professional life.
While focused exclusively—sometimes obsessively—on the composer’s
personal affairs, Berlioz in Time is not a biography, not really. Consisting
of previously...
Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association, 2020
Review of Soubre, Sinfonie fantastique à grand orchestre, edited by Francesca Brittan (A-R Editions, 2017), Nineteenth-Century Music Review 14, no. 3 (December 2017): 435-7
Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association, Mar 2014
Conference Programmes by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city... more The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
Papers by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Berlioz in Time: From Early Recognition to Lasting Renown, by Peter Bloom
Journal of the American Musicological Society
Detroit’s Bohème
The Opera Quarterly
Cambridge Opera Journal
This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While sc... more This article presents a literary genealogy of the titular character in Verdi's Aida. While scholars have explored the opera's resonances with late nineteenth-century conceptions of Orientalism, Blackness and the imagined ‘East’, Aida's etymology and character traits reflect a much broader archetype that extends back a century from its 1871 premiere. Her name is not Egyptian or Ethiopian but Greek, and her backstory was modelled on characters named ‘Haidée’ and ‘Haydée’ who appeared in works by Lord Byron and Alexandre Dumas fils, as well as in a celebrated opéra comique by Daniel Auber. Aida was thus an assemblage of ready-made character archetypes and scenarios rather than an author's sui generis depiction of non-Western culture. An intertextual reading of Aida offers a broader perspective on alterity in the nineteenth century, which eschewed geographical specificity for archetypes, quotations and allusions. It also offers another way to confront claims of authentic...
Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret
19th-Century Music, 2021
Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thri... more Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proleta...
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Articles by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Essays by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
In a recent issue of H-France Forum, four historians—David Garrioch, Éva Guillorel, Una McIlvenn, and Lewis C. Seifert—published reviews of Nicholas Hammond’s book, The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). Impressed by its use of sound as an area of inquiry, Lewis C. Seifert writes that Hammond’s book is “inspired by the emerging field of sound studies.” As a musicologist interested in the aural dimensions of nineteenth-century Parisian street culture, I was struck by this claim, as I have seen it before. In 1991, Alain Corbin warned that historians “can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception.” Years later, we learn in a 2007 edited volume that “historians have, until recently, been silent about sound.” Even practitioners of sound studies cannot resist the rhetoric of discovery, marking their field as “an emerging interdisciplinary area” and “a vibrant new interdisciplinary field.”
Reflecting on these claims of academic novelty, I began to think about how the rhetoric of emergence and interdisciplinarity can, ironically, thwart interdisciplinary exchange and silence research that is truly new. Reading these references to the “emergence” of sound and to the “pioneers” of its study, I also could not help notice the persistence of colonialist rhetoric that pervades subject areas which, though technically no longer marginalized, cannot shake their marginalized identity....
Edited Books by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Yet a closer examination of the operetta’s dramatic and musical sources offers an alternate reading. This paper argues that Mesdames de la Halle belongs to a discourse of nostalgia for “old Paris,” which was disappearing in the midst of Haussmann’s urbanization of the capital. Set in the Marché des Innocents during the reign of Louis XV, the operetta opens with a chorus of street vendors who sing of their wares. This opening scene bears a close resemblance to the marketplace scene from Act III of Auber’s La Muette de Portici: both help create an “urban” atmosphere that serves as the backdrop for the “interior” drama of the main characters. But in fact, the representation of the cries of Parisian street vendors is a centuries-old practice; as historian Vincent Milliot has observed, Parisian street cries inspired numerous historical, visual, and literary reflections from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries (Milliot 1995). However, by the late 1850s, increased rent and the construction of wide boulevards pushed itinerant street hawkers from the city’s center into the banlieues.
Within this urban context, I read Offenbach’s Mesdames as symbolically transferring the sounds of Parisian hawkers from the streets to the operetta stage. Offenbach’s score features direct melodic quotations from Jean-Georges Kastner’s Les voix de Paris, a musical history of Parisian street cries published in 1857, a year before the premiere of Mesdames. Kastner’s little-known study consists of two parts: the first is an “ethnographic” prose history of street cries that featured copious musical transcriptions, while the second is a fully scored symphonic poem entitled Les cris de Paris. Upon its publication, Kastner’s book was immediately understood as a nostalgic text; as Joseph d’Ortigue remarked in the Journal des débats, Kastner had “documented the vestiges of vieux Paris.” Thus, by quoting musical transcriptions of cries from Kastner’s Les voix de Paris in the operetta’s choral numbers, Offenbach not only tested the dramatic and musical capabilities of a large operetta chorus, but also memorialized a vanishing urban soundscape.
Book Reviews by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
the composer’s life and social milieu. The title is an allusion to Edmund
Hippeau’s 1883 biography Berlioz intime. Although Bloom claims that
the allusion is “not by design” (p. 272), his book’s questions revolve
around intimate details of the composer’s personal and professional life.
While focused exclusively—sometimes obsessively—on the composer’s
personal affairs, Berlioz in Time is not a biography, not really. Consisting
of previously...
Conference Programmes by Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Papers by Jacek Blaszkiewicz