Operatic Battlefields, Theater of War

Willson’s chapter explores how opera inflected listening for British officers and tourists in and near Crimea: in particular it discusses operatic perceptions in the Pera district of Constantinople, the site of the city’s first opera house, as well as ways of listening to traveling military bands connected with the Ottoman imperial court. It also examines European elites’ perceptions of foreign battlefields and cityscapes, with the aim of examining a larger shift in the history of listening: that of middle-class audiences falling silent in theatrical spaces during the nineteenth century, supposedly to devote more concentrated attention to elite music. The chapter argues that these listening habits, formed in part in the opera house, persisted well beyond its hallowed enclosures when war came to extend the complex geographies of attentive listening.

Orienting the Martial

Bohlman’s chapter explores the fragmented archive pertaining to Polish military involvement in the Crimean War, focusing on evocations of military power and travel in legion songs. The chapter suggests that legion songs were a political technology for preserving and promoting Polish nationhood during a time of partition. Not only did such songs stimulate nationalist sentiment (both at home and abroad) and portray the legion as the fulcrum of Poland’s aspirational sovereignty, they also posited a relationship to land rooted in mobility. The chapter argues that poems and songs served to sing a nation into being, redrawing constantly shifting imaginary borders between Poland and the imperial forces that kept it splintered.

Overhearing Indigenous Silence

Sonevytsky’s chapter considers the noteworthy lack of historical sources pertaining to Crimean Tatar experiences of the War. It attempts, through analysis of what remains in sonic form, to recover experiences that have largely disappeared from cultural archives through a method of “overhearing” Crimean Tatars in outsider accounts. The chapter examines one British account of the Crimean War, and one Crimean Tatar “émigré song” anthologized by Soviet ethnographers. A closing section discusses Russia’s present-day annexation of Crimea and contemporary efforts to use musical memory as a means of political resilience.

Earwitness

Tapp’s chapter considers one of the Crimean War’s most celebrated literary productions, Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories. Through comparison with Virginia Woolf and her innovative narrative technique, it discusses the workings of wartime sound in Tolstoy’s famous text. In particular, it elucidates the representation of battlefield noise, whose valence changes as it approaches the war zone. In Tolstoy’s Stories sound becomes a cipher for unmediated reality and ultimately for truth: a means to gesture toward authentic experiences of combat. The chapter shows how Tolstoy cordoned off audible reality from its supposedly less immediate visual counterpart, reproducing an audiovisual split that was pervasive in nineteenth-century culture.

The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed

McMurray’s chapter argues that law is a profoundly sonic medium, acting in, through, against, and modeled on sound—and more particularly, voice. Legal and cultural reforms in Islamicate societies in the Black Sea region during and around the time of the Crimean War illustrate these dynamics especially well. The first part of the chapter compares the legal reforms of the Caucasian Imamate (in North Daghestan and Chechnya) and the Ottoman Empire, showing how sound played a central role in negotiating new meanings of Islamic shari‘a law within those societies. Law thus becomes a critical archive for histories of sound, vocality, and listening. The latter part then reflects on the ontologies of law as a medium, considering both its sonic qualities—a recurring motif in both Anglo-American and Islamic jurisprudence—and its relation to the telegraph in particular, as a communications technology that simultaneously facilitated and challenged extant legal regimes.

Gunfire and London’s Media Reality

Williams’s chapter discusses the pervasive representation of gunfire across different media forms (piano sheet music, newspapers, theater) in London in late 1854, in response to breaking news of the Battle of Alma. It argues that theaters, newspapers, and printed music were mutually inflecting domains in wartime London: areas of sonic knowledge and experience that gave particular significance to musical and sonic simulations of the battlefield both at home and in the larger urban public sphere. The chapter considers the implications of this historical mediation of wartime sound, and attempts to show that the macabre fascination produced by gunfire was linked to the invisibility of low-ranking soldiers.

Sympathy and Synesthesia

Gusejnova’s chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova turns to the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, later adapted to film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualizes the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques through which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. She argues that Tolstoy’s reproduction of multi-sensory experiences through montage is a statement of his political thought, reflecting his intent to increase the human capacity for compassion in light of cosmopolitan ideals. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.

InConsequence

Schwartz’s chapter deploys historical listening as a critical and creative methodology. It opens with the sound of the whistling of dying horses as a means of generating a panoply of war-related homophones and connotations, inviting us to hear the decline of shrilling round shot on the battlefield and the ascendency of spiralled, hissing bullets. The chapter’s centerpiece is an extended analysis of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” one of the most whistled tunes in wartime Britain. Venturing an explanation for the refrain’s ubiquity, it argues that its “lexical potential energy could be enlisted to do highly kinetic, cultural work in dozens of contexts”—including military, political, literary, and scientific contexts, across and between which the idea of potential energy emerged.

A voice that carries

Casadei’s chapter examines the geopolitical uses of aurality, sketching a history of Italy during the Crimean War “as heard from the outside.” It charts an ideology of the bella voce and considers voice as a means of projecting and disrupting national boundaries in the years before Italy’s unification, concentrating particularly on literary accounts of the Crimean War from the later nineteenth century. It notes the capacity for voices to make (new) sense of geographical distinctions, and interrogates what was at stake in the Sardinian troops’ ability to organize themselves, even to understand one another, amid countless regional dialects in the Crimean campaign. The chapter thus uncovers a telling episode in the history of Italian sound: one in which voice and the capacity for language are fashioned into politicized and even oppositional terms.

Who Sings the Song of the Russian Soldier?

Karnes’s chapter examines the Crimean War’s Baltic theater. It considers ways in which acts of listening structured understandings of conscription, encampment, combat, and mourning as experienced by individuals stationed or living on the eastern Baltic Coast. It focuses in particular mass mobilization of Russian troops, which occasioned many first encounters: between culturally heterogeneous Romanov subjects; between “Russians” and Europeans from the West; and between Europeans both Eastern and Western, as well as non-European others. The chapter argues that such encounters refashioned mental geographies of Europe, and that listening to others’ voices in wartime had the power to shatter habitual associations between peoples and spaces.