Double-voiced singing was a popular form of variety show entertainment from the 1860s through to the 1920s. Double-voiced performers were able, through intonation and tone, to sound as though they had at least two separate and distinct “voices,” generally one soprano and one baritone. But as Claire Rochester, a double-voiced singer of the early twentieth century made clear, their act was more than just a matter of a woman singing low notes or a man singing high ones; it was all about a performer adopting the “voice” of the other sex. The unusual practice of these singers was to sing duets (and sometimes as much as quartets) to themselves and by themselves, flipping back and forth between their male to female “voices.” I place this strange form of entertainment in the context of changing attitudes to gender and sexuality and suggests that conventional interpretations of “freak” performances as “transgressive” fail to account for these vocal wonders. Double-voiced singers shunned the “transgressive” billing, especially when their own sexual identity was called into question. In making this argument, I suggest that we need to widen our understanding of “freakery,” imposture and the meaning of “nature” and “truth,” as they were revealed both on stage and off.

The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

Life in the cultural shallows tested the character of American art. Where the Depression had encouraged artists to engage in social and political criticism, the early cold war years constricted and confounded them. By conflating dissent and disloyalty, the triumphant conservatism of the cold war not only shifted the frame of cultural reference dramatically to the right, it narrowed it as well. This had a profound impact on America's cultural establishment. With conservatives now in possession of the moral absolutes, the more politically progressive artists felt pressed into the position of endorsing ambivalence and moderation. The result, for many, was a quiet retreat from principle; unwilling to blindly adopt the conservatives' standard of good and evil, and yet unable to risk their own, forward-thinking artists ended up chronicling rather than challenging their age. So much of fifties art became an exploration of the ordinary – domestic comedy, social commentary, “wistful melodrama,” sermons on rootlessness or delinquency or affluence – instead of a questioning of the larger truths. Tragedy, which, by challenging certitudes, required the moral commitment of liberal writers, became, in this context, anachronistic. “We are not producing real tragedy,” observed Leonard Bernstein in 1952, because “caution prevents it, all the fears prevent it; and we are left, at the moment, with an art that is rather whiling away the time until the world gets better or blows up.” Art had adopted the Technicolor blandness of the age.B. Witham, “Appropriately Wistful: Blacklisting and the American Theatre,” Exchange (winter, 1978), 11–17; Leonard Bernstein to Irving Fine, 19 Sept. 1952, cited in H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: 1994), 229, J. Elsom makes the same point in Cold War Theatre (London: 1992), Ch.2.

For many Germans in the immediate postwar period, all that remained of their country was its art. Subjugation, destruction, the pain of unfathomable guilt: these had ripped away at the national psyche, severing nation from nationalism, person from people, the present from the past. “We are,” wrote Wolfgang Borchert in 1946, “a generation without a homecoming, because we have nothing to which we can return.” Nation: what would that word now mean? An occupied state no longer possessing statehood, a conquered people starved even of the moral strength that might come from resisting. Even if the institutions of national governance could be recreated, they could have no historical legitimacy; if Bonn were not to be Weimar, it would equally not be the kaisers' or the Führer's Berlin. For many, refuge from the shaming of the nation lay, as Theodor Heuss reflected, in a “decentralizing of the emotions,” in a “flight” to those fields “where the violence of the great political world shake-up is not felt so directly.” This drove literate Germans back to Goethe and music lovers to the endlessly-performed postwar symphonic cycles of Brahms and Beethoven. And yet, escaping into what Jost Hermand aptly termed “the protective wall of self-absorption” did not completely preclude connection to the national community of Germans. In fact, a powerful communion with the whole might still come through the personal enjoyment of a shared art or culture. In art might reside the essence of the national community, a stateless collectivity, without territories perhaps, but with borders and guardians nonetheless