Freya Jarman | The Jew’s noise and the castrato’s voice: the sound of sexual difference

Event details

Speaker: Dr Freya Jarman (University of Liverpool) 

Date: Thursday 29 February 2024

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

At the peak of their popularity, the castrati were the darlings of the operatic stage, the bearers of prized bel canto voices whose loss would later be the epicentre of vocalic nostalgia. Yet even in their own time, and certainly after it, they were also pitiable creatures whose dignity was sacrificed in the name of entertainment for the increasingly out-dated tastes of the ancien regime. More than this, there was an element of foolishness about them, a sense of the “comically abject” as Martha Feldman describes it (2015: 25). Moreover, the abjection they embodied was inextricably linked not simply to the challenge their existence presented to a new sexual order (as described by Laqueur, 1990), but also to the vocality that was their raison d’être. That is to say, the comical abjection would manifest in comparisons of their voice with, for instance, roosters—or, more pointedly, capons.

I want to take comically abject vocality of the castrato as a starting point to explore the pervasive discourse around Jewish vocality on the operatic stage and the attendant anxieties about Jewish masculinity that cluster around a slippage between circumcision (the defining feature of the Jewish male body) and castration. As Ruth HaCohen rigorously demonstrates (2011), Jews have for centuries been negatively characterised as noisy (on stage, in oratorios, and outside of musical contexts) and, relatedly, limited in musical potential. Looking at Thomas Rowlandson’s 1802 caricature of Jewish tenor John Braham in the comic opera Family Quarrels, the extreme high pitches, the rapid melismata, and the direction “All^o squekando” could perhaps just as easily have been lampooning a castrato. Later in the same century, the voice of Beckmesser in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1867) aligned cantorial flexibility with pitches too high for the bass role in ways that drew clearly from antisemitic stereotyping. This paper considers a range of representations of Jewish vocality (in opera itself, in visual and written discourse around opera, and also in children’s puppet shows) and traces their connection with anxieties around sexual difference that align the Jewish male with the castrato.

Biography

Freya Jarman is a Reader in Music at the University of Liverpool, and has a wide-ranging interest in issues of the voice and vocality in their cultural and historical contexts, and especially through the critical lenses of queer theory. Freya is currently working on a wide-ranging historical exploration of the gendered values of high notes in western vocal music (contracted with Oxford University Press), which sets out to use voice to demonstrate how gender is always-already intersectional.