This article could not have been written without the help of Rebecca Harris-Warrick, who generously shared with me the press and musical material she has gathered in her work on the critical edition of La Favorite, to be published in 1994 by Ricordi.

¹ In the last few years, feminist biography has begun energetically and imaginatively to absorb theoretical perspectives. See The Challenge of Feminist Biography, ed. Alpern, Sara et al. (Urbana, III., 1992)Google Scholar; Between Women, ed. Ascher, Carol, Louise DeSalvo and Sara Ruddick (Boston, 1984);Google Scholar and Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, ‘The Writing of Biography’, and ‘Psychoanalysis and Biography’, in Mind and the Body Politic (London, 1989), 125–54.Google Scholar Ruth Solie has examined theories and problems of feminist biography and musicology with sensitivity in her ‘Changing the Subject’, Current Musicology, 53 (1993), 55–65.Google Scholar

² Clément, Catherine, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis, 1988)Google Scholar; Koestenbaum, Wayne, The Queen's Throat Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

³ The difficulty of arriving at ‘biographical truth’ is a theme of most of the essays in The Challenge of Feminist Biography, and of Wolf's, Geoffrey ‘Minor Lives’, in Pachter, Marc, ed., Telling Liver. The Biographer's Art (Washington, 1979), 56–72.Google Scholar

⁴ Heilbrun, , Writing a Woman's Life;Google ScholarWoolf, , A Room of One's Own (1928; rpt. New York, 1982).Google Scholar

⁵ See, for example, Mordden's, EthanDemented: The World of the Opera Diva (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, and Susan McClary's discussion of the pejorative connotations of ‘demented’ in her foreword to Clément, xvi.

⁶ For a historical view of the controls exerted over female singers since the seventeenth century, see Rosselli, John, Singea of Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1992), 56–70.Google Scholar

⁷ Poizat, Michel, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Plearun Principle in Opera, trans. Denney, Arthur (Ithaca, 1992).Google Scholar

⁸ See, for example, Robinson's, Paul ‘It's Not Over Till the Soprano Dies’, New York Times Book Renew, 1 01 1989.Google Scholar

⁹ Clément, , 11, 29–30 and 32–3.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Escudier, , Mes Souvenirs (Paris, 1863), 50–1.Google Scholar

¹¹ Boigne, De, Petits Mémoires de l'Opéra (Paris, 1857), 204–5.Google Scholar The incident was first picked up in Cicconetti's, FilippoVita di Gaetano Donizetti (Rome, 1864)Google Scholar although Cicconem does not mention Stoltz, but rather blames the management of the Opéra. However, Alborghetti's, and Galli's, influential Gaetano Donizetti e G. Simone Mayr. Notizie e documenti (Bergamo, 1875), 191Google Scholar, takes note of the incident only to dismiss it.

¹² On these biases, see Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, ‘Historical Introduction’ to the critical edition of Donizetti's, La Favorite (Milan, forthcoming 1994);Google ScholarShulman, Laurie C., ‘Music Criticism of the Paris Opéra in the 1830s’, Ph.D. diss., Cornell University (1985)Google Scholar; Gann, Andrew G., ‘Théophile Gautier: Critique musicale et l'acceuil de Verdi en France’, Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier, 8 (1986), 179–91;Google Scholar and his ‘Théophile Gautier, Charles Gounod and the Massacre of La Nonne sanglante’, Journal of Musicological Research, 13 (1993), 49–66, here n. 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ The most enthusiastic of these, Pérignon's, EugénieRosina Stoltz (Paris, 1847)Google Scholar, was, not surprisingly, authorised by its protagonist; Lemer's, JulienMme. Rosine Stoltz Souvenirs biographiques et anecdotiques (Paris, 1847)Google Scholar and Cantinjou's, CorneilleLes Adieux de Madame Stoltz (Paris, 1847)Google Scholar are only slightly less admiring. Copies of these pamphlets, along with various newspaper obituaries and press accounts, are preserved in Stoltz's ‘Dossier d'artiste’ at the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra, Paris.

¹⁴ Anecdotes about Stoltz and assessments of her abilities, almost all of them negative, can be found in Duprez, Gilbert, Souvenirs d'un chanteur (Paris, 1880);Google Scholar Léon Escudier, Mes souvenirr, and Boigne, Charles de, Petits Mémoires de l'Opéra.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Bord, Gustave, Rosina Stoltz (Paris, 1909).Google Scholar The obituaries included in the ‘Dossier d'artiste’ at the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra are almost all negative. See, for example, Les Annales (9 08 1903)Google Scholar, the article by Pougin, Arthur in Le Ménéstrel (2 08 1903)Google Scholar, La Liberté (1 08 1903)Google Scholar and Le Soleil (31 07 1903).Google Scholar The only complimentary obituary appeared in Le Figao (31 07 1903).Google Scholar

¹⁶ The singer herself may have participated in this process: inspired by success in Halévy's, La JuiveGoogle Scholar, she is said to have fabricated a Jewish background for herself; after her appearance in Berlioz's, Benvenuto CelliniGoogle Scholar, she claimed to own a Christ figure sculpted by Cellini (Bord, 6 and 18).

¹⁷ According to Bord, Léonor, Stoltz sang in La Favorite 481 times.Google Scholar Her next most frequently performed roles were Catarina in Halévy's La Reine de Chypre (118 performances) and the trouser role of Lazarillo in Marco Aurelio Marliani's La Xacarilla (100 performances).

¹⁸ Such circumlocutions were necessary, since Pullet did not hesitate to sue journalists who attacked him openly. In the mid-1840s, the Paris theatrical papers regularly reported Pullet's lawsuits. La France musicale of 12 January 1845, for example, gives lively details of Pullet's fight with Le Constitutionnel.According to Bord (80–5), in 1842 Stoltz herself launched a defamation suit against Stanislas Champein, music critic of La Mélomane (later to become Le Musicien). In articles published between August and November of 1842, Champein accused Stoltz of eloping to Brussels with a fellow voice student, and of bearing and abandoning two children in 1833 and 1834.

¹⁹ La France musicale, 14 07 1844.Google Scholar

²⁰ ‘Seconde crucificatuon de la Favorite, grand opéra, en la personne de Maestro Donizetti’, Le Charivari 3 03 1841Google Scholar (thanks to Jeffrey Kaltberg for bringing this to my attention).

²¹ Gossett, , unpaginated ‘Introduction’ to the Garland facsimile edition of the first printed score of Dom Sébastien (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

²² Ashbrook, , Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge, 1982), 150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Ashbrook concludes his biographical note with a capsule summary of Stoltz's later life: ‘After being mistress of the Emperor of Brazil for a while, she married in succession a baron, a count and a prince’ (653).

²³ Huebner, Steven, The Operas of Chartes Gounod (Oxford, 1990), 51, emphasis added.Google Scholar

²⁴ A notable exception to this tendency is the biographical note in Pitou, Spire, The Paris Opera (New York, 1990), IV, 1264–6.Google Scholar

²⁵ A similar association between the opera star and female allegorical figures is drawn in Jean-Jacques Beneix's 1981 film Diva: when the star-struck fan finally connects with the diva he idealises, they take a walk through a Paris landscape dominated by grandiose stone figures of symbolic women.

²⁶ ‘Indiscrétion en trois actes et en vers par l'un des Trente-Six auteurs de la Tour de Babel’ (Paris, 1845).Google Scholar

²⁷ Revue et gazette musicale, 5 01 1845.Google Scholar

²⁸ Cantinjou, , Les Adieux (n. 13), 30–6Google Scholar, however, devotes a good deal of space to defending Stoltz from this accusation. He lists the sopranos who left the Opéra during Stoltz's tenure, exonerating his heroine in each case: Cornélie Falcon (the most frequently named victim of Stoltz's ambition) was already losing her voice by the time Stoltz arrived in Paris, Julie Doms-Gras could not act, Rossi-Caccia departed to take up a prior contract in Lisbon, Sophia Loewe could never sing anyway, and Sophie Méquillet was so near-sighted that she virtually had to be led on stageby the hand.

²⁹ Ad. V. de Pontecourt, ‘Influence de l'Académie Royale de Musique sur le sort des théâtres de la France et de l'étranger’ (in the third article of a four-part series), La France musicale, 9 02 1845.Google Scholar Pontecourt continues ‘We repeat again, to firmly establish our impartiality, that we recognise in Mme. Stoltz a great dramatic talent; she feels vividly, she gives a realistic, even sometimes too realistic, expression to her gestures [son jeu] and to her diction; but as a singer, we must deny her that wealth of qualities that certain newspapers, indiscriminate admirers of everything admired by M. Pullet, have attributed to her. Mme. Stoltz knows neither how to place her voice, nor how to move it around.… [Pullet] has worn out this actress by trying to make her, and her alone, shine always and everywhere’.

³⁰ This episode is narrated, from points of view ranging from sympathetic to cruel, in almost all accounts of her life and in most obituaries. The most famous is probably Gautuer's, Théophile compilation ofreviews, Histoire de l'art dramatique en France (Paris, 1858).Google Scholar Of the three laudatory pamphlets published in 1847 (see n. 13), Cantunjou and Lemer recount the Robert Brace incident from a sympathetic perspective, while Pérignon, the most fervent admirer of all, neglects to mention it. Gauner's excerpt is reprinted in Fayl, Ezvar de, L'Académie nationale de musique 1671–1877 (Pans, 1878), 302.Google Scholar

³¹ Lemer, , Mme. Rosine Stopz, 24.Google Scholar

³² See, for example, the Liberté obituary of 1 08 1903.Google Scholar

³³ Revue et gazette musicale, 21 03 1847.Google Scholar

³⁴ Journal entry of 13 April 1847. Duprez's memoirs are a goldmine of calumnies against Stoltz: the same entry accuses her of bringing his career at the Opéra to a premature end and recounts verbatim a conversation in which Stoltz blamed Pillet for all her difficulties at the Opéra. Souvenirs d'un chanteur, excerpts reprinted in Voix d'Opérao Ecrits de chanteurs du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1988), 159–60.Google Scholar

³⁵ Bord (n. 15), 149.

³⁶ Heilbrun, (n. 4), 109–12 and 116–18.Google ScholarGilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan call the woman's pseudonym ‘a name of power, the mark of a private christening into a second self, a rebirth into linguistic primacy’. See their No Man's Land (New Haven, 1988), 241;Google Scholar quoted in Heilbrun, , 110.Google Scholar

³⁷ Koestenbaum, , The Queen's Throat (n. 2), 90.Google Scholar

³⁸ Bord, , 112–13.Google Scholar

³⁹ Bord, , 25.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Thumer, , Les Reines du chant (Paris, 1883), 183–6.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Although Nourrit's ‘discovery’ of Stoltz is mentioned in most accounts of her life, Quicherat's, Louis comprehensive three-volume biography, Adolphe Nourrit ca vie … sa correspondance (Paris, 1867)Google Scholar, contains no menrion of her.

⁴² Rosselli, , Singers of Italian Opera (n. 6), 58–9.Google Scholar

⁴³ Quoted in Bord, , 54.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Gourret, , Engclopédie des cantatrices de l'Opéra de Paris (Paris, 1981), 78.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Bord, , 153–65.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Bord, , 161–2.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ The episode is recounted by Bord, , 173–9;Google Scholar he refers to newspaper accounts published in Le Temps (13 11 1881)Google Scholar and La Gazette des tribanaux (23 07 and 13 11 1881)Google Scholar when ME. was expelled from the church and legal proceedings initiated.

⁴⁸ The title of the pamphlet is given in Le Figaro of 31 07 1903.Google Scholar Several of the songs were published; copies are preserved at the Bibliothéque Nationale (Musique). In characteristic fashion, Bord (181–5) claims that the work on spiritualism is plagiarised and that Stoltz's songs are of the lowest quality, a charge partially supported by the conventional sentimentality of the ten song texts published in his appendix (223–33).However, the publication of her Dix Melodies in arrangements for violin and piano, piano solo, organ, harmonium and piano four-hands attests to their popularity.

⁴⁹ La Liberté, 3 08 1903.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Koestenbaum, (n. 2), 92 and 86.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Hadlock, Heather, ‘Peering into The Queen's Throat’, this journal, 5 (1993), 265–75Google Scholar, here 274.

⁵² See, for example, Le Corsaire, 4 and 10 12 1840Google Scholar; Le Ménéstrel, 6 December; Le Courier des théâtres, 8 December; Revue et gazette musicale, 13 December; La France musicale, 6 December; and Le Moniteur des théâtres, 5 December.

⁵³ Le Revue des deux-mondes, 10–12 1840, 56.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Pérignon, , Rosine Stoltz (n. 13), 25.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, ‘Historical Introduction’ to La Favorite.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ This cabaletta will be included in the appendix of the forthcoming critical edition of La Favorite.