The cantatrice and the profession of singing at the Paris Opéra and Opéra Comique, 1830-1848
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the profession of singing and the representation of female singers at the Paris Opéra and the Opéra Comique during the July Monarchy, 1830-1848. Professional operatic singing afforded women the opportunity to overturn entrenched ideas about labour by earning high salaries and assuming social, gender, and sexual roles that were forbidden for most other women. Their testing of the acceptable boundaries of feminine behaviour—even in an industry that depended upon their participation and complicity—meant that their position, both in the workforce and in society-at-large, was fragile. I present the cantatrice as a waged labourer in the context of her peers by considering all female singers (primary, secondary singers, and even "failures") and provide a thorough analysis of the quotidian complications of the profession, tracing career trajectories from training and debuts through to retirement. Drawing on a wealth of biographies, journalistic reviews, fictional stories, and iconography, I reveal cultural tensions that underlay the diverse and contradictory representations of these artists in this period. Through the scrutiny of the primary source record in addition to an analysis of critical reception during momentous life and career events—for example the debut, contract negotiation, the retirement benefit concert, and marriage—I uncover evidence of professional agency and thus reveal the different ways in which these women actively participated in the construction and promotion of their celebrity. I argue that we might better view the cantatrice as an icon of emerging female emancipation rather than a victim of a patriarchal industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".