Pascoe, Judith. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
What did the great Sarah Siddons sound like, and why were her romantic audiences so affected and entranced by her voice? In her quest to answer this question, Pascoe pieces together the trajectory of Siddons’s vocal career through her vast archive of theatre reviews, friends’ and admirers’ accounts, paintings, Siddons’s own prompt books. Despite its many changes—from her “grating” delivery of her early years to her cultivation of “a vocal brand that was reliably and recognizably Siddonian” (44) and until her voice’s decline after her public readings circuit—Siddons always had a voice worth remarking upon. Yet, was this because Siddons’s voice was something incomparably special, or was it because the romantics listened to and conceived the voice differently? A little bit of both, Pascoe concludes. For, at the core of this book, lie questions concerning not just the actress’s voice, but also the way “people listened in the Romantic period” (14). As ardently and delightfully as Pascoe tries to recreate the experience of hearing Siddons (through “Voice for the Actor” summer classes and hours spent listening to audio recordings of other actresses’ Lady Macbeth deliveries), she concludes that she cannot listen like a romantic. For the romantics lived in an epoch before what Steven Connor calls “the loss of the loss of the voice” (Connor 411). According to Pascoe, the romantics were “listeners…particularly attuned to both the power and the transience of sound” (111), listeners that anticipated sound recording in their desire to preserve sound that was still inevitably ephemeral.
In this book, form mirrors content, as Pascoe clearly worked hard to create a voice on the page as compelling as Siddons’s on the stage. Yes, this book is actually fun to read. And I’m not just saying that because Judith Pascoe is my special interest advisor for my comprehensive examination and likely the only person who will read this annotation very closely. So while Pascoe’s exploration of listening in the Romantic period will provide background and a point of contrast for my own examination of listening for Victorians, the book is also useful as a model for how scholarly writing can still sparkle. Part of the project’s vivacity stems from Pascoe’s “I-Search-esque” approach to research; the book narrates the (often entertaining) trajectory of Pascoe’s inquiry and research in a way that invites readers to join in this strange curiosity. Siddons’s voice, we find, is the sound we didn’t know we wanted to know. I also found compelling and familiar Pascoe’s attempt to “illuminate far-reaching issues,” like the soundscape and listening experience of Romantic theatregoers, by “zero[ing] in on something more narrow and precise” (31), like Siddons’s voice. What is that narrow and precise thing that I could to focus in on that broad and far-reaching question of how changing listening practices influenced how the act of authorship was conceived and figured in Victorian literature? Is “ears” too broad?
