in search of operara

IN SEARCH OF OPERA PItINCETON STUDIES IN OPEItA CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER Series Editors Reading Opera EDITED BY ARTHUR GROOS AND ROGER PARKER Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition WILLIAM ASHBROOK AND HAROLD POWERS Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century CAROLYN ABBATE Wagner Androgyne JEAN-JACQUES NATTIEZ, TRANSLATED BY STEWART SPENCER Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers PIERLUIGI PETRO BELLI, WITH TRANSLATIONS BY ROGER PARKER Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse ROGER PARKER Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal DAVID J LEVIN Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition CHARLES DILL Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera GARY TOMLINSON The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment MARY HUNTER Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" HEATHER HADLOCK Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle MARIAN SMITH Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera EDITED BY MARY ANN SMART In Search of Opera CAROLYN ABBATE IN SEARCH OF OPERA CAItOLYN ABBATE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX2o ISY Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2003 Paperback ISBN 0-691-II731-4 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Abbate, Carolyn In search of opera / Carolyn Abbate p cm.-(Princeton studies in opera) ISBN 0-691-09003-3 (alk paper) I Opera Music-Philosophy and aesthetics ML3858 A19 782.I-dC21 I Title II Series 2001 2001036271 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in 10.8!I5 Dante Printed on acid-free paper 00 www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 0.>0 CONTENTS vii Preface I Chapter I • Orpheus One Last Performance 55 Chapter • Magic Flute, Nocturnal Sun I07 Chapter • Metempsychotic Wagner I45 Chapter • Debussy's Phantom Sounds I85 Chapter • Outside the Tomb 247 Acknowledgments Notes Sources for Figures Index 25I 28I 283 qSb PR.EFACE T his book explores two extremes that may seem irreconcilable At one extreme are a series of operatic moments that attempt something impossible: to represent music that, by the very terms of the fictions proposing it, remains beyond expression Such music is so magical or fugitive that it escapes cages: we never hear it At the other extreme, there are opera's "facts of life"-live performance, grounded and intensely material, with its laboring singers, breathing that becomes singing, staging, interpretation, and mortality I have sought the connections between the two, the metaphysical flight and the fall to the earth They come together as a paradOxical amalgam-one could even say, as a quintessentially operatic phenomenon The notion that opera plays with representations of transcendence is not new In earlier writings, I suggested that there are schisms in Romantic opera-especially the break between onstage songs and "everything else"-that reflect among other things a boundary between material and transcendent worlds, and ways to bridge the two This came to seem too simple and homogenous, encouraging too strongly a sense that "everything else" captures a transcendent object, when "everything else" is, rather, one aspect of representing a distinction What began to interest me was something more radical, music that literally is not present in the work: a musical object to which, as I saw it, the listener is directed, without that object ever being revealed To write about music that is not present, rather implied, to see the music that is there as a pointer toward this other, may seem quite absurd, vii ! 'Viii Preface too aristocratic or abstract, futile, or may seem to embrace Romantic and Symbolist aesthetics, rather than dissect them as a historical curiosity.2 And still, the gesture was insistent, so that refusing to question its presence appeared perverse I wondered, for instance, whether the odd genius of Wagner's later music might not involve getting quite close to disclosing what is being concealed, or at least (of course) creating that impression And perhaps the ineffability of music (or apparent ineffability)-the commonplace that music escapes philosophy, that musical works stand in oblique relationships to the force fields of culture or history, or to verbal description, and thus inspire many writers including myself to gnomic or paradoxical formulations-has been expressed within music by such gestures of concealment or flight That imputes to music so much philosophy that, ironically, music trumps philosophy one more time An inclination to praise the ineffable may be the high form of the banal impulse to rely on mystery Mystery itself, however, has an ethical dimension, as Vladimir Jankelevitch points out in his critique of Enlightenment: There is the mystery and there is the secret The thing that is secret, like the riddle of the Sphinx, is nothing more than a puzzle, whose entire problematic consists of convoluted terms: the baroque maze is the ideal type In its negative form, as the arcane, "secret" is simply that which is refused to the profane and reserved for initiates, that which must not be spoken of, but which is already known to certain privileged individuals and where the secret isolates, because it is a secret for someone in relation to someone else (or for one clan in relation to another, or one mystic in relation to another), the mystery, the self-contained secret-that is, universally, eternally and naturally mysterious, unknowable for all, no longer taboo or subject to interdiction-this mystery is a principle of fraternal sympathy, of shared humility.3 This goes beyond truisms that freedom for one subject creates slavery for another, or that enlightenment creates a class of the excluded, the unenlightened The ethical aspect, the issue of humility, should not be forgotten One might therefore say that contemplating the ineffability of music entails seeking out places where opera posits inaccessible music beyond what we can hear, as a specific sign for that general elusiveness But it also means choosing to write about music in certain ways: no pins, no jagged Preface ix edges When musical works are required to represent pure structure or autonomous discourse, detached from the social conditions of their production and reception, something has been lost-no less, however, when they are fashioned into breathtakingly straightforward reflections of dramas, novels, class structures, nationalities, sexual politics, contemporary literary strategies or genres, into language (without words), or into something that has been waiting for the divining rod of post-structuralist knowledge This is not because such arguments cannot or should not be made, nor because the possibility that musical works reflect social reality is foreclosed, nor because poetry, language, or stage action not inflect the composition and interpretation of music, nor because music is not sometimes a beautiful ornament The suffering and the loss devolve upon the sharp objects in the writing, and this is one reason why much academic discourse on music seems resistant to the very object it wishes to honor The greatest exception I know is Jankelevitch himself, a philosopher whose luminous writing on an "unreal chimera" sees music as "engendering both metaphysical and moral problems." This is not just mystification: in that simple "both," there is so much to consider.4 When we write about music, what object are we honoring? This question is a catapult to my other extreme-opera as embodied, very far from being in any way metaphysical To write about opera, to represent it in fiction, or as a metaphor in poetry, or as a figure in philosophy, is to add to the architecture of its necropolis This is ironic, because the first and enduring bases for a passion about opera are not operatic works in the abstract, as intentional objects, but operas and their singers in performances One could ask whether opera exists outside the performance that creates it in the only form of material being it can possess The reason we put opera into video boxes or on film or inscribe it on LPs or CDs or other disks and cylinders is that we need to use "dead arts" to "rescue the ephemeral and perishing art as the only one alive."5 A performance is "the only work that counts" and paradoxically is "not a work at all."6 By invoking the distinction between a work and its performance (between the transcendent and the material, in yet another form), I am referring to a longstanding debate on the ontology of music without citing philosophical pedigrees, or to the fine degrees to which a musical 276 Notes to Pages 196-201 33 This parallel evolution is beautifully described in Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris During the Age of the Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 160-210 34 G.W.R Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans T M Knox, vol (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 955 35 Ibid., 956 36 The prescription for an ideal performance-" obedient" yet not merely "mechanical"-sounds like Gorodish's prescription for the perfect caviar sandwich in Jean Beneix's Diva (1981): "The baguette The knife Not too thin, but not too broad And the bread itself Fresh But not too fresh." 37 See Richard Taruskin, "Stravinsky Lite (Even The Rite)," in Text and Act, 360-63 38 Hegel, Aesthetics vol 2, 956-57 39 "[E]taient-ils pour cela musiciens? Non: mais des automates en musique, dont tout la merite est de battre des petits morceaux de bois ou d' ebene qui rendent des sons" (Goudar, La Brigandage, 110) Goudar's association of automata with the defects of Italian music continues with his distinction between '1a machine harmonieuse" and "l'intelligence harmonique" (115) 40 "Mit Recht vergleicht man Wunderkinder den Kometen Jedes, das da geboren wird, verstort die musikalische und nicht bloB musikalische Ordnung in ihrem BewuBtsein von Wiirde, Autonomie, und Freiheit" (Theodor Adorno, "Drehorgel-Stiicke" [1934], reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol 18, 43) 41 Annette Richards cites contemporary accounts characterizing the child Mozart as an "automatic genius" and reflecting conventional associations between prodigies and automata Mozart, she indicates, went somehow beyond the mechanical in his effect, becoming not so much machine as aeolian harp, played (as it were) by divine nature See 'j\.utomatic Genius," 381-82 42 There is no early-nineteenth-century tradition for hearing the movement this way Arnold Schering reads Beethoven's next symphony, the Eighth, as a confrontation with various mechanical musical instruments devised by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, including the Panharmonicon, a form of Orchestrion, and the metronome (Humor, Heldentum, Tragik bei Beethoven [Strassbourg and Kehl: Librairie Heitz, 1955], 13-17) The general theme of Beethoven and machines is explored by Ulrich Schmitt, who links speed in performance, abruptness, and a sense of dramatic process to industrial novelties of the early nineteenth century, including steam propulsion, railroads, and the technology of dioramas and panoramas (Revolution im Konzertsaal: Zur Beethoven-Rezeption im 19 Jahrhundert [Mainz: Schott, 1990]) Beethoven's steam coffee machine is the critical appliance in a new hermeneutics of Beethoven's work 43 See Heather Hadlock, "Return of the Repressed: The Prima Donna from Hoffmann's Tales to Offenbach's Contes," Cambridge Opera Journal (1994): 221-43 44 For a response to such critiques see Dolar, "The Object Voice," :31 45 Ibid., 19 46 C M Gabriel, "Machine parlante de M Faber," Journal de physique theorique et appliquee (1879): 274-75 Faber's machine had a vibrating ivory reed mounted in its "throat" to serve as its vocal chords, which suggests less than perfect flex- Notes to Pages 202-205 47 48 49· 50 51 52 53 277 ibility (see Henry Seymour, The Reproduction of Sound [London: W B Tattersall, 1918], 8) By 1918 Faber's machine was mythical; Seymour vaguely dates its creation to 1860 Gessinger cites a report in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung of 1847 that refers to singing and is possibly an allusion to Faber's machine: "dasselbe spricht in mehreren Sprachen, flustert, lacht, und singt" (Auge und Ohr, 629) See also Thomas L Hankins and Robert J Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 214-16 Seymour, Reproduction of Sound, On Chladni's experiments and the prehistory of the phonograph see Thomas Y Levin, "For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," October; no 55 (1990): 38-41 Ibid., 23-47· Levin, "For the Record," 33 Levin connects Adorno's ideas on gramophonic inscription to other modernist notions concerning utopian forms of writing or expression, such as cinema as "universal language." This modernist trope could be set against Enlightenment fascination with alternative "universal" alphabets that looked like the sounds they represented, such as the "ecriture organique" proposed by Charles de Brosses in the Traite de la formation mechanique des langues (Paris, 1765) De Brosses devised an alphabet that would iconically reproduce articulation and intonation patterns of phonemes On such alphabets see Gessinger, Auge und Ohr, 633-719 Levin, "For the Record," 38 Ibid., 33 Adorno, "Drehorgel-Srucke," 38; on this essay, see Levin, "For the Record," 33-34· 54 In 1925, the year of L'Enfant et les sortileges, Roland-Manuel referred to Vaucan- son in discussing L'Heure espagnol, where people are given the attributes of marionettes, while automata are ensouled, as by "the great eighteenth-century inventor Vaucanson, who 1;new how to transform gearboxes into living material." See Roland-Manuel, "L'Esthetique de !'imposture," 20-21 On Vaucanson and his several musical automata, as well as his famous mechanical duck (which could digest food), see Cottom, "The Work of Art," 52-64; and Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso, 162-67 55 The best English description of both automata appears in Alfred Chapuis, History of the Musical Box and of Mechanical Music, trans Joseph E Roesch (Summit, N.J.: Music Box Society International, 1980), 32-36 and 49-53 See also Gessinger, Auge und Ohr, 391-409 56 Chapuis, History of the Musical Box, 33 For an illustration of the mechanism, see Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Le Monde des automates; Etude historique et scientijique, vol (Paris: E Gelis, 1928; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1984), 150, reproduced in Gessinger, Auge und Ohr, 428 57 On the shift from androids to boxes see Gessinger, Auge und Ohr, 620-31 Singing androids constituted a minor literary theme in nineteenth-century novels, as in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Evefuture, whose heroine contains a phonograph Kittler, Discourse Networks, 347-49 analyzes the novel 278 Notes to Pages 206-213 58 On the development of the first music boxes both as mechanisms and as objets d' art, see Chapuis, History of the Musical Box, 135-245 Musical watches or clocks in the eighteenth century had delicate bells as instruments; manufacture of music boxes with metal combs is dated from 1796 See also Arthur W.S.G OrdHume, Clockwork Music: An fllustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Music Box to the Pianola, from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to Orchestrion (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), 63-102 Ord-Hume reproduces early-nineteenth-century posters for eighteenth-century musical automata, indicating that, as public attractions, such devices remained popular even as the boxes began to compete for attention (see 42-43) 59 Article in the Teutscher Merkur of 1784, cited in Gessinger, Auge und Ohr, 620 60 For illustrations see Chapuis and Droz, Le Monde des automates vol 2, 150, 156 Gessinger discusses Mical, von Kempelen, Christian Gottlob Kratzenstein (whose experiments with building an artificial vox humana device fed into the prehistory of the speaking machines), a series of other "talking statues" from the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth-century end products of this history (Auge und Ohr, 398-434, 537-67, 586-600, and 627-31) 61 See, for instance, the illustrations in Harvey N Roehl, The Player Piano Treasury (Vestal, N.Y.: Vestal Press, 1961), 83-219 62 Advertisement from 1902 for the Pianola piano-player, reproduced in ibid., 7-8 63 Ibid., 35-37 64 Roehl reprints an article from Scientific American of November 1927, which marvels how "manifestations of the soul of the artist are being analyzed for mechanical reproduction through the record music roll," and how what seems to be a perfect performance will, "when submitted to the tests of an uncompromising measuring machine," reveal "grossly faulty" playing (ibid., 61-64) Reengineering was common: mistakes could be restenciled, and artists could dictate changes after hearing the unedited roll 65 Literature on the technology of reproducing pianos is extensive For a review of the Welte Mignon see Peter Hagmann, Vas Welte-Mignon Klavier, die WeltePhilharmonie-Orgel, und die Anfiinge der Reproduktion von Musik (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and New York: Peter Lang, 1984); for shorter histories of reproducing pianos, as well as technical details of the inscription process, see the following articles in The Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, ed Q David Bowers (Vestal, N.Y.: Vestal Press, 1972): David L Saul, "Reproducing Pianos," 273-310; Claes o Friberg, "Hupfeld Reproducing Pianos," 3II-17; David L Saul, "Understanding the Welte Mignon," 319-23; and Ben M Hall, "How Is It Possible? The Welte Technique Explained," 327-38 66 Advertisement for the Welte Mignon from 1928, cited in Bowers, Encyclopedia, 71 67 Cited by Richard C Simonton, 'l\ Personal Experience with Welte," in Bowers, Encyclopedia, 324 68 JankeIevitch, Ravel, 78 69 Charles Baudelaire, The Philosophy of Toys, trans Paul Keegan (London: Syrens, 1994),14 Notes to Pages 213-243 279 jankelevitch, Ravel, 78 Ibid., 79 Ibid Ibid., 82 Ibid., 80, 81 Ibid See Mario Vieira de Carvalho, "From Opera to 'Soap Opera': On Civilizing Processes, the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Postmodernity," Theory, Culture, and Society 12, no (1995): 41-61; and Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 134-42 77 The transcription was published by Arbie Orenstein ("Some Unpublished Music and Letters by Maurice Ravel," Music Forum [1973]: 330-31) and has been discussed by Messing (Neoclassicism in Music, 50-52) and Hyde ("Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses," 206-U) 78 See ZiZek, "Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist," in The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 199 79 Wilfrid Meliers, Franfois Couperin and the French Classical Tradition, rev ed (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 468-69 80 Ibid., 471-72 81 Arthur W.S.G Ord-Hume, Barrel Organ: The Story of the Mechanical Organ and Its Repair (South Brunswick and New York: A S Barnes, 1978), 254-61 An illustration of this Musette is found in Bowers, Encyclopedia, 769 82 See Arthur W.S.G Ord-Hume, Pianola: The History of the Self-Playing Piano (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 278 and 319 Plate 148 illustrates a modern player piano manufactured in the 1960s by Aeolian, also named Musette 83 jankelevitch, Ravel, 133 84 jankelevitch calls it a musette (Ravel, 127); he also characterizes the scene as a Pastorale (71, 109) 85 Walter Benjamin, 'i\ Glimpse into the World of Children's Books" (1926), reprinted in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed Marcus Bullock and Michael W jennings, trans Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:435· 86 jankelevitch, Ravel, U5 87 Baudelaire, The Philosophy of Toys, 24 Possibly, Colette in creating the Child in L'Enfant et les sortil£ges was drawing on Baudelaire's prose But perhaps she was simply familiar with the habits of small children 88 See Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, II-12 89 ZiZek, "Robert Schumann," 203-6 90 Ibid., 207 91 Ibid., 208 92 jankelevitch, Ravel, 132 93 ZiZek, "Robert Schumann," 205 94 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, I03 95 ZiZek, "Robert Schumann," 205 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 280 Notes to Pages 244-245 96 Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Experiment: The Wild Boy of Aveyron (New York: Far- rar, Strauss, Giroux: 1980), 91-II9 and 192-207 97 "Jean de Ia Porte Napolitain, Auteur d'un Traite de Ia Magie naturelle, & grand Musicien, dis que c' est par Ie moyen de Ia Musique artificielle, qu' on peut apprendre a un muet a parler & a chanter, quoique sourd de naissance, dont il a fait plusieurs experiences, ainsi qu'ill' enseigne, en disant qu'il n'y a, enjouant de quelque Instrument de musique, qu' a en faire mordre Ia manche a un sourd, & que sur Ie champ on Ie voit tressaillir de joye, & on con