The methodology and subject matter of this essay venture into the disciplinary borderlands of musicology. Taking Disdéri’s carte-de-visite portraits of the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcìa as a starting point, it attempts to broaden the notion of of the author for a historical period that quintessentially stood for the establishment of the concept of genius and thus for a definition and limitation of authorship as individual and singular. The article combines an interdisciplinary approach by considering image and media theory, theories of art and its practices, alongside historical musicological methods. Its theoretical perspective is situated at the intersection of performativity and media theory via the concepts of the ›messenger figure‹ (Botenfigur) and the ›reading of traces‹ (Spurenlesen) both according to Krämer, thus opening up a historical resonance space for contemporary music practices. As a consequence, the re-perspectivization goes beyond the basic understanding that multiple authorships are at work in every form of sounding music. Instead, it fixes diverse facets of the term authorship on a concrete example and reframes them methodologically. Thus, as a basis for a systematic generalization in music research, a model is proposed that makes medial transitions in performatively negotiated authorships describable, categorizable, and at the same time historicizable. With these interdisciplinary concerns in mind, Viardot-Garcìa’s photographic portraits in her role as Orphée in Gluck’s opera of the same name from 1859 appear to have been instrumentalized in a multilayered representational way: as images standing for a performance, as a photographic image reminiscent of a painting, as a depiction of classical Greek costume that takes on meaning for the present, as the visual standing in for the acoustic, as a depiction of a female singer embodying a man, and finally also of a title role standing in for an opera as a whole. How exactly these relations of representation are to be grasped – both in the French Gluck opera revival and in the photographic images discussed – has not yet been explored in depth. To attempt to entangle all these meanings is not motivated by trying to identify the ›actual‹ portions of the musical adaptations made by different persons to Gluck’s opera in the course of its 1859 revivals. Rather, this new perspective on the carte-de-visite photographs is intended to outline Viardot-Garcìa’s figure with the help of the numerous functions the singer assumed in the production. The essay thus looks at a blind spot that is still dominant in music research, namely the question of the methodological framing of performative authorship in historical perspective. It questions the critical concepts of ›messenger figure‹ and of the ›reading of traces‹ not only for their suitability to grasp the basic questions of the example dealt with in the text, but also for their potential for generalization.
