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<jats:p>Operatic versions of the femme fatale, the preeminent figure of European modernist aesthetics, compel and allure because we witness her coming into material presence through the course of her opera. Through vocalizing, the femme fatale manifests her corporeality under imminent threats of erasure by coopting and manipulating the offstage world as represented by the orchestra. The Seguidilla seduction scene in George Bizet's Carmen and the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss's Salome raise the question of how subjectivity and material presence, especially of the femme fatale character, are depicted sonically, dramaturgically, and metaphysically.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In July 1892, Dr. Arthur Chervin (1850–1921), director of the Institut des bègues de Paris, was named physician of the Opéra, thus joining the group of health specialists tasked with the care of artists. A recognized specialist of vocal physiology and speech afflictions, Chervin was also the recent founder and editor of La Voix parlée et chantée, a periodical that straddled the worlds of medicine and lyrical performance. Vocal health and medicine, he and his community argued, were key to the execution of vocal prowess and the successful pursuit of lyrical ambitions for singers. This article explores the relationship of medicine and the burgeoning field of laryngology to the world of lyrical training and performance of the Belle Époque. In particular, we focus on the many roles played by laryngologists and physicians at the Opéra and the Conservatoire as well as in the pages of Chervin’s leading medical-musical journal. We argue that concerns driving the medical innovations of the increasingly sophisticated subfield of laryngology evolved in synergy with concerns about how to meet the demands of the changing world of the second half of nineteenth-century Parisian operatic performance. In so doing, we claim for medicine a key position in Paris’s vibrant world of lyrical performance during the Belle Époque.</jats:p>

<jats:p>André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus (1923), a song cycle scored for mezzo soprano soloist, women’s choir, string quartet, and two harps, has a lush sound world and dramatic vocal declamation, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by the Parisian musical press. The work’s religious topic—mysteries of the rosary—has long been taken as the unambiguous sign that the piece and its composer were unapologetically Catholic, like the author of the poems, the convert Henri Ghéon. In the context of a secular French nation, unambiguous Catholicism can easily signal reactionary politics. Moreover, since it does not project images of anarchy, flappers, or committed nonchalance toward morality, when interpreted vis-à-vis the narrative of French musical aesthetics in the 1920s, the work’s status changed from masterpiece to footnote. Yet, though the work’s early reception by Catholic writers cemented its classification as a sacred work, Caplet’s own goals were less clear. Through a comparative musical analysis of characteristics that Le Miroir shares with Caplet’s secular works whose themes come from classicism or mystery, I demonstrate his agnostic aesthetic. Through an investigation of archival sources relating to Caplet’s smaller contemporaneous projects, including a 1923 setting of a poem by Baudelaire, his contribution to La Revue musicale’s 1924 Le Tombeau de Ronsard, and his response to a 1924 survey about “new music,” Caplet’s interest in classicism emerges as a salient context for understanding his largest postwar composition. Additionally Caplet’s real-time documentation of his creative process and goals in detailed correspondence with his wife, Geneviève, contributes further evidence of Caplet’s pragmatism. Rather than moralistic and reactionary, Le Miroir can be understood in the context of postwar artists attempting to render spirituality less institutional and more personal.</jats:p>