Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

Rachel the Jewess in Copenhagen
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nistic scheme, but more often as complementary values which needed to be
somehow balanced against each other.
In what follows, my main focus will not be on Rossi’s company at the
Court Theatre, but on the Royal Theatre and particularly its performances
in 1838 and 1842 of the opera Jødinden – a Danish adaptation of Jacques-
Frommental Halévy’s grand opera La juive, which premiered in Paris in
1835. Even more specifically, my focus will be on the soprano who starred
in the role of Rachel, the Jewess of the opera’s title. She was Pauline Lichtenstein,
becoming Pauline Rung in 1841, when she married the Danish
composer and soon-to-be singing master at the Royal Theatre, Henrik
Rung. Pauline Rung was not Italian, of course, and while hopes were high in
1838 that she might become a prima donna capable of handling the virtuoso
Italian bel canto repertoire, her voice never quite developed in that direction.
Even so, her singing and acting were very much praised for having
many of the positive qualities otherwise associated mostly with the Italians
– qualities which many of her Danish colleagues at the Royal Theatre
were often said to lack: warmth of expression, the ability not only to sing
well, but also to act in an emotionally convincing and touching way, and so
on. The perception of such qualities in her singing and acting in fact predated
the arrival of the Italian company in Copenhagen. These “southern”
qualities of her performances, furthermore, seem to have resonated in the
“exotic” identity of several of her roles, not least in the Jewish identity of
Rachel. Another important context for this enquiry into her performances
as Rachel therefore concerns the history of Jewish culture, and thus of anti-
Semitism, in Denmark at this point in time.
Finally, the enquiry concerns the ways in which these exotic, southern
or Jewish qualities were represented in performance, particularly in the
qualities of Pauline Rung’s vocal performances (insofar as sources permit
any reliable impressions of them). What was “Jewishness” made to sound
like, in 1842? In dealing with this question, I am seeking to understand a
rather complex cultural phenomenon, which I believe Pauline Rung may
allow us to glimpse, and which ultimately has to do with a very ephemeral
event – the relation of an individual’s vocal performance to its contemporary
cultural context. The trajectory of this investigation does not follow
a straight line, yet by the end of this text, there is something like a thesis
that the articulation of a certain moderately “exotic” or “southern” quality
became part of Pauline Rung’s vocal style, particularly in the 1842 performances
– and that this quality contributed to the articulation of the “Jewishness”
of Rachel, and possibly, by implication, of Pauline Rung herself.