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

224 Jens Hesselager
Methodologically, I should add that this thesis is not primarily based on
the evidence of contemporary reception. I do not claim, in other words,
that contemporary reviewers identified Pauline Rung’s voice as having a
“Jewish” timbre or that contemporary listeners necessarily perceived or
interpreted the qualities of her voice as expressive of a “Jewish” identity. 4
Rather, I turn this problem on its head: The question of what “Jewishness”
was made to sound like in 1842 should be understood quite literally and
along the lines of what Ralph P. Locke, in his volume Musical Exoticism:
Images and Reflections, has called the “All the Music in Full Context” paradigm.
In Jødinden, the Jewishness of Rachel is already defined by the plot
of the opera, by her costumes, in other words, by many factors that do
not necessarily relate to the music or to the vocal performance at all. It is
fully conceivable, in that context, that the musical sounds emanating from
Rachel could have been completely devoid of anything that might be identified
as “exotic” or “Jewish” in style. 5 And yet because they are sung in the
character of Rachel, at that moment they define the sound of that particular
Jewess. I will seek some idea of what characterised that sound in 1842 and
evoke what I believe to be a relevant context as fully as I can within the
limits of this chapter.
1842: The long-missed daughter of Zion
In a review in Berlingske Tidende of the Royal Theatre’s performance of
Jødinden on 26 February 1842, the first sentence refers explicitly to the
4 Indeed, if a reviewer were to have explicitly expressed the idea of Pauline Rung’s voice
sounding Jewish, it would have been at the risk of being interpreted by contemporary
readers as derogatory. When Johanne Louise Heiberg (1812-1890, née Pätges), the
most famous actress of her time, overheard, at the age of 15, a row between her parents
which revealed that her mother was in fact born a Jewess, she was, according to her
own memoirs, filled with grief and shame. As Poul Borchsenius comments, during her
childhood Heiberg would hardly have encountered the word “Jew” as anything other
than a term of abuse (Borchsenius 1968, 80). It took more than a few decades to change
this attitude radically.
5 Locke develops his concept of the paradigm “All the Music in Full Context” in contrast
to what he calls the “Exotic Style Only” paradigm. According to the latter, it makes
sense to apply the term musical exoticism only to music that incorporates musical
signifiers of Otherness (e.g. à la turca, “gypsy” scales, etc). The “All the Music in Full
Context” paradigm widens the scope of what may be discovered through using such
critical terminology, however, in that it takes a broader view of how images of Otherness
and music interact and reflect on each other as well as on a broader context. Musical
exoticism, within this broader paradigm, may be conceivable as both “exoticism with
and without exotic style” (Locke 2011, 43ff).