1 Connor, Steven, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

2 Thomson, Stephen, ‘Ancillary Narratives: Maids, Sleepwalking, and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’, Textual Practice, 29, 1 (2015), pp. 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here pp. 94–5.

3 For the development of this notion see Stephen Thomson, ‘Sleepwalking Certainties: Agency, Aesthetics, and Incapacity in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers’, Comparative Literature, 65, 2 (2013), pp. 162–81.

4 In Charles Ludlam's play about Maria Callas, Galas: A Modern Tragedy (1983), there is a ‘disobedient voice’, a kind of parallel to The Empress's Feet's ‘disobedient feet’. Galas/Callas says, ‘I told you, sometimes the voice obeys and sometimes it will not. Tonight it will not! … It has! [a will of its own] It does! Tonight it will not obey’ (Act I, sc. v). See Charles Ludlam, Galas: A Modern Tragedy, in Ludlam, The Mystery of Irma Vep and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999), pp. 59–115, here pp. 88–89.

5 On the composer see www.evelynficarra.net/about, accessed 1 April 2021. On the librettist see www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/70284, accessed 1 April 2021.

6 ‘The Empress's Feet’, in Chinese Fairy Tales (Mount Vernon: Peter Pauper Press, 1961; first published 1946), pp. 40–5, here p. 43.

7 We are in the realm of the Little Mermaid, who gains her human feet while in pain and at the price of the loss of her voice; and of Cinderella, who possesses the smallest foot in the land, the one that makes the perfect match with the shoe. The latter tale originated in China in the ninth century – around the time of the origin of the custom of foot binding. Susanne Sara Thomas terms the foot that perfectly fits the shoe a ‘phallic foot’. Fitting the shoe with its proper wearer is the climax of the tale and stands for the sexual act. She argues that foot binding renders the foot phallic. Susanne Sara Thomas, ‘“Cinderella” and the Phallic Foot: The Symbolic Significance of the Tale's Slipper Motif’, Southern Folklore, 52, 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 19–31. For the symbol of the shoe in fertility rituals and marriage, and as forms of possession, see Jacob Nacht, ‘The Symbolism of the Shoe with Special Reference to Jewish Sources’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 6, 1 (July 1915), pp. 1–22.

8 See www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/study/teaching-staff/linda-hirst, accessed 1 April 2021.

9 This was a co-production of the Barbican and The Puppet Center that was part of a puppetry and opera conference.

10 The parts in A are entitled: ‘A Woman Wakes’ (i), ‘First Song’ (ii), ‘Night Music One’ (iii), ‘A Dream’ (iv), ‘Night Music Two’ (v). In the B part an operation is performed on the feet to terminate sleepwalking: ‘Opera (vi), ‘Aria’ (vii), ‘Bowls and Towels’ (viii). In the A′ part the titles are ‘Second Song’ (ix), ‘She Dreams’ (x), ‘She Wakes’ (xi), ‘Third Song’ (xii).

11 I view the voice in relation to conditions of sleepwalking. This provides a different take from those offered in recent theories of plurality and multiplicity of voice. Katherine Meizel, for instance, coins the term ‘multivocality’ or ‘multivoicedness’ to account for multiple ways of being and acting in the world through voice. Following Bakhtin, she views all singing as multiple and polyphonic. Singing in many voices navigates in between one's selves, negotiating one's several identities. See Katherine Meizel, Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Konstantinos Thomaidis's ‘monophonic chorus’ is an inscription of vocal moments that have made and will continue to make our plural vocal self. The term captures the sense of voice, not as a single unified essentialized entity but as an assemblage, a multiplicity, a back-and-forth movement between the many voices of a voicer and its many listeners. See Konstantinos Thomaidis, ‘Voicing: Dramaturging the I-Voicer in A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does: Methodologies of Autobiophony’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 5, 1 (2020), pp. 81–106.

12 Evelyn Ficarra, The Empress's Feet (1995), Contemporary Voices (London), c/o British Music Information Centre.

13 Marianna Ritchey, ‘Echoes of the Guilliotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic’, 19th-Century Music, 34, 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 168–85, here p. 183.

14 For more on sleepwalking scenes see, for instance, Sarah Hibberd, ‘Dormez donc, mes chers amours’: Hérold's ‘La Somnambule’ (1827) and Dream Phenomena on the Parisian Lyric Stage’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 16, 2 (July 2004), pp. 107–32. For more on the monodrama see Francesca Placanica, ‘The Unsung One: The Performer's Voice in Twentieth-Century Musical Monodrama’, Journal of Musicological Research, 37, 2 (2018), pp. 119–40; and Jessica Payette, ‘Dismembering “Expectations”: The Modernization of Monodrama in Fin-de-siècle Theatrical Arts’, in Sarah Hibberd, ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 137–58.

15 Sleepwalking is one way in which walking and voice are strangely related, a feature the opera magnifies and focuses on. Marc Shell, in his book on stuttering, finds a linkage between voice and walking in the twin difficulties of stammering and limping. Linguistically, stammering and limping are often synonymous, found together (Moses) and tied symbolically (Freud). See Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 109–12.

16 Arya Madhaven and Sreenath Nair, ‘The Kinetic Body: Foot, Memory and Dispositions of the Body in Performance’, in Sandra Reeve, ed., Ways of Being a Body: Body and Performance (Charmouth: Triarchy Press, 2013), pp. 149–62, here p. 151.

17 The Empress's Feet, pp. 41–2.

18 Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger and John Bulevich, ‘Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre’, European Romantic Review, 21, 6 (December 2010), pp. 794–6.

19 Ibid., p. 795.

20 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, ‘The Similarity of the Process in the Emergence of the Spirit World and the Analogy between the Forces Prevailing in the Inner Life with the Magnetic State (Excursus on Magnetism, the Gradations of Magnetic Sleep etc.)’, in Schelling, The Ages of the World, third version (c.1815), trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 65–72.

21 Lisa Feurzeig, ‘Heroines in Perversity: Marie Schmith, Animal Magnetism, and the Schubert Circle’, 19th-Century Music, 21, 2 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 223–43.

22 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘Magnetic Gnosis: Somnambulism and the Quest for Absolute Knowledge’, in Andreas B. Kilcher and Philipp Theisohne, eds., Die Enzyklopädik der Esoterik: Allwissenheitsmythen und universalwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Esoterik der Neuzeit (Wilhelm Fink: Paderborn, 2010), pp. 118–34, here p. 120.

23 Ibid., p. 128.

24 Ibid., p. 133.

25 Stiles, Finger and Bulevich, ‘Somnambulism and Trance States’, p. 803.

26 Ibid., p. 804.

27 See Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

28 Lois Cucullu, ‘Sleep Deprived and Ultramodern: How Novels Turned Dream Girls into Insomniacs’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 42, 2 (2009), pp. 304–10, here p. 305.

29 Ibid., p. 306.

30 Stiles, Finger and Bulevich, ‘Somnambulism and Trance States’, p. 790.

31 H. M. Stallman and M. Kohler, ‘Prevalence of Sleepwalking: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, PLoS ONE, 11, 11 (2016), e0164769, p. 1.

32 A. Zadra, A. Desautels, J. Petit and D. Montplaisir, ‘Somnambulism: Clinical Aspects and Pathophysiological Hypotheses’, The Lancet: Neurology, 12, 3 (2013), pp. 285–94, here p. 285.

33 Ibid., p. 289.

34 Valérie Cochen de Cock, ‘Sleepwalking’, Current Treatment Options in Neurology, 18, 6 (2016), pp. 1–9.

35 Stallman and Kohler, ‘Prevalence of Sleepwalking’, p. 1.

36 Ibid., p. 2.

37 Claudio Bassetti, Silvano Vella, Filippo Donati, Peter Wielepp and Bruno Weder, ‘SPECT during Sleepwalking’, The Lancet, 356 (2000), pp. 484–5.

38 D. Oudiette, S. Leu, M Pottier, M. A. Buzare, A. Brion and I. Arnulf, ‘Dreamlike Mentations during Sleepwalking and Sleep Terrors in Adults’, SLEEP, 32, 12 (2009), pp. 1621–7.

39 Zadra et al., ‘Somnambulism’, p. 285.

40 Ibid., p. 288.

41 Stallman and Kohler, ‘Prevalence of Sleepwalking’, p. 1.

42 Zadra et al., ‘Somnambulism’, p. 291.

43 Ibid., p. 285. Interesting research introduced a novel approach by conducting a study in which sleepwalkers are taught sequences of movements while awake, showing that these are later re-enacted in sleep. See D. Oudiette, I. Constantinescu, L. Leclair-Visonneau, M. Vidailhet, S. Schwartz, et al., ‘Evidence for the Re-enactment of a Recently Learned Behavior during Sleepwalking’, PLoS ONE, 6, 3 (2011), pp. 1–8.

44 See, for instance, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ‘Gender and Sinology: Shifting Western Interpretations of Footbinding, 1300–1890’, Late Imperial China, 20, 2 (December 1999), pp. 1–34.

45 Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women (New York: Boyars, 1991; first published 1974), p. 83. The view is criticized by Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 6–7.

46 Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

47 For details see ibid., especially pp. 109–31.

48 Ibid., p. 229.

49 Quoted in ibid., p. 152.

50 ‘The girl splendid in walking’ is how Gradiva in Jensen's novella acquires her name. What attracts the archeologist in Jensen's novella is Gradiva's mysterious gait: ‘With her head bent forward a little, she held slightly raised in her left hand, so that her sandaled feet became visible, her garment, which fell in exceedingly voluminous folds from her throat to her ankles. The left foot had advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only lightly with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel were raised almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of exceptional agility and confident composure’. Wilhelm Jensen, ‘Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy’, trans. Helen M. Downey, in Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusion and Dream’ and Other Essays, trans. Helen M. Downey et al., ed. Philip Rieff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), pp. 147–235, here p. 148. For discussion of this aspect of Gradiva see Andreas Mayer, ‘Gradiva's Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman’, Critical Inquiry, 38, 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 554–78.

51 For a similar view see Thomas, ‘“Cinderella” and the Phallic Foot’.

52 Bonnie Gordon, ‘It's Not about the Cut: The Castrato's Instrumentalized Song’, New Literary History, 46, 4 (Autumn 2015), pp. 647–67, here p. 650.

53 Alex Hennessey, Brooke Harnisch and C. T. Farmington, ‘Chop-era: The Operatic History and Modern Relevance of the “Castrato”’, Journal of Urology, 201, 4S (3 May 2019), Supplement, p. e246. And further: ‘Prepubertal androgen deprivation prevents vocal cord elongation and thickening, allowing for both a higher vocal range and more nimble, delicate ornamentation. Additionally, low testosterone levels can delay epiphyseal closure, which led to unusually large ribcages and unrivalled lung power’. See also Gordon, ‘It's Not About the Cut’, p. 651: ‘Castrati had higher voices and extra brilliance that came from the short, thin vocal cords and the close proximity of the larynx to the head. Famous for the vocal pyrotechnics, vocal control, and brilliance of tone enabled by the castration procedure, they also had bodies that stood out as unusual. The alterity of every part of their physicality highlights the madness of the voice and the similitude between the stuff of the body and the stuff of the voice. Boys who were castrated lost the major source of testosterone before puberty. For the purposes of singing, this meant that their larynxes stayed small and did not descend into the throat. They had the vocal box of prepubescent boys. But they also often developed extra large chests, heads, jaws, and noses, which meant that their resonating chambers were much larger in proportion to their vocal materials than in unaltered bodies. Lack of testosterone meant that growth plates in the joints did not fuse at the normal time, and often their limbs, jaws, facial bones, and ribs grew to extraordinary length, giving them a strange appearance. They had flat feet, never grew beards, had luxuriant hair on their scalps, developed extra fat deposits on their chests and hips, and tended toward obesity later in life’.

54 ‘Though canon law had long forbidden bodily mutilation, castration was thought to cure a variety of ailments including epilepsy, gout, and hernia. It also served as a form of corporal punishment’. Gordon, ‘It's Not About the Cut’, p. 652.

55 Wendy Heller, ‘Varieties of Masculinity: Trajectories of the Castrato from the Seventeenth Century’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (2005), pp. 307–21.

56 Uta Protz, ‘Review of Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)’, Cultural History, October 2015, pp. 103–5, here p. 104.

57 See Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), for a new explanation of the decline of the castrati in the late eighteenth century (chapter 5).

58 Ensemble TA OPERA ZUTA at Tmuna Theatre, Tel Aviv, 2014. For performance on YouTube see www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OYtN3fD9xo. Singing (recording): Doron Schleifer; performance artists: Jonathan Opinya, Ofri Omer, Gony Paz, Reenat Caidar-Avraham; directing and artistic management: Michal Grover-Friedlander; stage design and props: Eli Friedlander, Thom Friedlander, Coline Faucon; lighting and sound design: Nadav Barnea; production: Shira Yasur.

59 Laura E. DeMarco, ‘The Fact of the Castrato and the Myth of the Countertenor’, Musical Quarterly, 86, 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 174–185, here pp. 174–5.

60 Ibid., p. 174.

61 Bradley K. Fugate, ‘The Contemporary Countertenor in Context: Vocal Production, Gender/Sexuality, and Reception’, PhD diss., Boston University, 2016, p. 2. Another important distinction Fugate alludes to concerns differentiation between countertenors employing different singing styles: ‘Hard rock singers produce falsetto sounds that are powerful, strained, tense, and piercing, which is often interpreted as masculine in the stereotypical Western mindset. Soul/R&B singers use a more intimate falsetto and, in comparison, could seem less masculine/more feminine. So, the production of sound affects the perception of the listener. As aforementioned, the capacity of bel canto technique to create loud or resonant sounds could influence the perception of the listener to the extent that a high-pitched falsetto voice can sound very masculine’. Ibid., p. 119. For the distinction between countertenor and falsetto see also ibid., p. 16: ‘Making distinctions between the early sound of the male falsettist and that of the contemporary countertenor is very important due to the fact that the countertenor, who utilizes bel canto singing techniques as opposed to pop/folk singing styles, possesses a very unique sound in the history of Western singing’.

62 See Ilona Krawczyk and Ben Spatz's account for unintentional and unexpected bends and cracks in the voice. Krawczyk, Ilona and Spatz, Ben, ‘Dreaming Voice: A Dialogue’, in Kapadocha, Christina, ed., Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 140–54Google Scholar.

63 In ‘Footnotes’, Peter Stallybrass beautifully explores how the foot figures in performance acts, from dancing with toe shoes to circus acts: ‘In the nineteenth century, a new foot was invented through the invention of toe shoes. Toe shoes are the material precondition for ballet. The ballerina dances en pointe; her foot is transformed into a disappearing act … Through the ballerina, we can image an individual who is not grounded.’ Stallybrass continues, noting that ‘this transformation of the foot reaches its apotheosis in the circus … The aerial artists … ascend into the heavens; their feet no longer touch the ground at all … the aerial jugglist defies gravity, suspending objects in air … the aerialist walks on air … Like ballet, the circus images as one of its possibilities a human whose feet have disappeared, transformed into tapering points’. Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Footnotes’, in Hillman, David and Mazzio, Carla, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 313–325Google Scholar, here p. 313.

64 Bouissac, Paul, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), p. 45Google Scholar.