Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures: Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis [1 ed.] 036718804X, 9780367188047

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on contributors
Introduction
PART I:
Setting the scene
1. Synch: scenes of implication
2.
Armida in-between: the translation of the affetti
PART II:
Voice as presence and absence
3. La voix humaine (1959–2016) and the “epiphany” of the performer’s identity
4. Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes: Phelim McDermott’s Satyagraha
5. Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary
6. A new Carmen for a new Spain: nationalism and cinema during the Spanish Civil War
PART III:
Beyond borders
7. “Uber opera”: the politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles
8. Quel trouble me saisit?: the arrested gaze of Armide in Poussin, Quinault and Lully
9. Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema: musical experimentation in the service of revolutionary ideology
10. Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria
11.
There’s meth in the madness: music and incongruence
in AMC’s Breaking Bad
PART IV:
From silence to sound and back
12.
Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing
in Titian’s Marsyas
13.
Armonia, seeing and hearing in Paolo Veronese’s
Le nozze di Cana
14. Listening to space in time
15.
The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland
Index

Citation preview

Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures

Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies scholars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts – threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understanding and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images. Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in parallel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods. Contributors explore a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conversation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and moves the study of music and visual culture forward. Antonio Cascelli is Lecturer in Music at Maynooth University, Ireland. Denis Condon is Lecturer in Film at Maynooth University, Ireland.

Music and Visual Culture Series Editors: Anne Leonard, Clark Art Institute, USA Tim Shephard, University of Sheffield, UK

Music and Visual Culture is a new series of both monographs and anthologies that offer original insights into musical and visual concepts or practices in combination. Bursting the bounds of traditional iconographic studies, research in this area draws upon a wide range of materials (visual art, objects, ephemera, film and television, music video, multimedia installation, online content, video games, metaphor, criticism and aesthetics, staging for opera and dance), and springs from a broad array of disciplines (musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, film studies, game studies, performance studies, cultural studies). The series aims to include work representing the full span of geographies and eras, and engaging with a variety of approaches such as cultural history; ethnomusicology; opera, film, and performance studies; multimedia phenomena; and music psychology or cognitive neuroscience. The editors’ premise is that studies in music and visual culture should not be seen as occupying a middle ground between these two disciplines, but rather as integral to each field – participating in and helping to advance each disciplinary discourse equally. Icons of Sound Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art Edited by Bissera V. Pentcheva Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis Edited by Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Music-and-Visual-Culture/book-series/MVC

Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis

Edited by Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon individual chapters, the contributors The right of Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-18804-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19836-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Notes on contributors Introduction

vii 1

ANTONIO CASCELLI AND DENIS CONDON

PART I

Setting the scene

15

  1 Synch: scenes of implication

17

ALESSANDRA CAMPANA

  2 Armida in-between: the translation of the affetti

33

GIOVANNI CARERI

PART II

Voice as presence and absence

51

 3 La voix humaine (1959–2016) and the “epiphany” of the performer’s identity

53

FRANCESCA PLACANICA

  4 Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes: Phelim McDermott’s Satyagraha

64

HAYLEY FENN

  5 Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary JENNIFER O’MEARA

79

vi  Contents   6 A new Carmen for a new Spain: nationalism and cinema during the Spanish Civil War

91

LAURA MIRANDA

PART III

Beyond borders

105

  7 “Uber opera”: the politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles

107

MONICA C. CHIEFFO

 8 Quel trouble me saisit?: the arrested gaze of Armide in Poussin, Quinault and Lully

120

MICHAEL LEE

  9 Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema: musical experimentation in the service of revolutionary ideology

131

MARYSOL QUEVEDO

10 Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria

142

PASCAL VANDELANOITTE

11 There’s meth in the madness: music and incongruence in AMC’s Breaking Bad

153

JESSICA SHINE

PART IV

From silence to sound and back

167

12 Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas

169

ITAY SAPIR

13 Armonia, seeing and hearing in Paolo Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana

179

ANTONIO CASCELLI

14 Listening to space in time

193

SUSANNA PASTICCI

15 The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland

207

DENIS CONDON

Index

220

Notes on contributors

Alessandra Campana is Associate Professor of Music, Film and Media Studies at Tufts University. Giovanni Careri is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a Professor at Università Iuav of Venice. Monica C. Chieffo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hayley Fenn is completing a doctoral thesis on puppetry and music at Harvard University Michael Lee is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow in Music at Trinity College Dublin. Laura Miranda i s Lecturer in Music at the University of Oviedo. Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Susanna Pasticci is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Cassino. Francesca Placanica is Lecturer in Music and Director of Performance at Maynooth University and a 2021-23 MSCA IF Artistic Research Fellow at University of Huddersfield. Marysol Quevedo is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. Itay Sapir is Associate Professor of Art History at the Université du Québec, Montréal. Jessica Shine is Lecturer at the Department of Media Communications, Munster Technological University. Pascal Vandelanoitte is Lecturer in Film Studies and Head of Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels.

Introduction Antonio Cascelli and Denis Condon

The visual arts and music have often been considered as separate modes of cultural expression or as activities in which one of them predominates thoroughly and appeals entirely or almost entirely to either the sense of sight or to the sense of hearing. Music and other sound arts are often created to be experienced as autonomous aesthetic phenomena, but they are also frequently designed to be experienced with image-based media of some kind. The relationship between music and visual cultures is the subject of this book, which distinguishes itself from other works in this expanding field of study by developing concepts for the ways in which looking and listening are shaped by the particular constellation of image- and sound-based media. The connections between these sensory modes are frequently mentioned in work in the area, but they are seldom theorized. Drawing on a range of case studies in music and visual cultures that date from the Renaissance to the 2010s, this book offers concepts for thinking about that relationship. Those concepts are threshold, intermediality and synchresis. Critics and practitioners have discussed the aesthetic power of music and visual cultures to deeply affect their audiences throughout the period examined here. Writing about music in the sixteenth century, for instance, Claude Palisca has argued that “composers increasingly bent their creative efforts toward moving the affections.”1 He refers to Nicola Vicentino who in his L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555) contended that “the composer’s sole obligation is to animate the words and, with harmony, represent their passions – now hard, now sweet, now cheerful, now sad – in accordance with their subject matter.”2 As an example of the early reception of sixteenth-century secular music, Palisca then reminds us how Francesco Dalla Viola praised Adrian Willaert’s ability to “make the soul feel, at his bidding, every affection that he proposes to move.”3 But one has only to think of the myth of Orpheus at the basis of the development of the first musico-theatrical events, from Angelo Poliziano’s to Iacopo Peri’s, Giulio Caccini’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s texts. Orpheus epitomizes the power of music, but Euridice’s too is the embodiment of the same power. In fact, in Poliziano’s text, she is described as having the ability to change the course of the river with her own singing.4

2  A. Cascelli and D. Condon With the invention of moving, living or animated pictures at the end of the nineteenth century, the power of images became manifest in their ability not only to depict movement by mimicking it but also to move – to physically displace and emotionally affect – their audiences. Indeed, long before a medium of cinema emerged, movement became inscribed into the name of this new phenomenon and the myths that accumulated around its origins. Members of the first moving-picture audiences were said to have fled the venues at which they saw these new and troubling images in the terror that – to take the most often cited case – an onrushing train would burst from the screen and crush them. The panicking spectators of the first film shows were key protagonists of this “train myth,” cinema’s primal scene, beloved of the early writers of an ahistorical cinema history, and although that myth has long been thoroughly debunked, it certainly encoded the feeling that moving images were realistic in a thoroughly unprecedented way and confronted a new audience for visual culture, a mass audience viewing together, not the elite single viewer but a plurality of spectators who, as the myth illegitimately implies, had little sophisticated knowledge of how to engage with images let alone these new technologically enhanced images.5 More plausibly, Tom Gunning has influentially argued that early cinema audiences experienced moving picture as a “cinema of attractions” whose first programmes of typically one-minute films provided a series of moments of visual stimulation during which the audience might be pleasurably shocked by the sight of a speeding train but they stayed to be delighted immediately afterward by the spectacle of a boy drenching a gardener by standing on his hose or by boxing cats or by dragoons riding through city streets, to mention some other popular early films.6 In this context, narrative was sacrificed to the power of the purely visual, or if continuity was provided across the fragmented visuals, it was created by the music, spoken commentary or other sounds that accompanied the images. These voices and music were provided at the screening event at which moving pictures were first shown. As a result, both music and visual cultures have the power to move their audiences. But if such powers are similar, can music and visual cultures act independently from each other? And what happens when they are joined or separated in our perception? In his version of the paragone, Leonardo da Vinci attempts to elevate painters to the intellectual status enjoyed by musicians by arguing that “there arises from painting harmony of proportions (proportione armonica), just as many different voices joined together in the same instant create a harmony of proportions which gives so much pleasure to the sense of hearing that the listeners remain struck with admiration as if half alive.”7 However, Leonardo was not content to establish that painting enjoyed the same rational basis and the same aesthetic powers as music; he wanted to establish that painting was superior to music: Painting serves the eye – the noblest sense and nobler than the ear – much greater than the effect of musical harmony is the effect of

Introduction 3 beautiful proportions of an angelic face represented in painting, for from these proportions rises a harmonic concert which hits the eye in one and the same instant as it does with the ear in Music.8 Sight, furthermore, is stable and instantaneous, whereas sound is fleeting as it “dies instantly after its creation.”9 Music, thus, in Leonardo’s view seems to be downgraded; but it is thanks to music and its power that it is possible to elevate the status of painting. The two have a common ground in mathematics, in that both music and painting share mathematical proportions. Yet, in the way the comparison between the arts develops in the sixteenth century (see for example Il Figino),10 mathematical proportions become less relevant and the ability to arouse emotions in the body of the audio-spectators, to use Michel Chion’s term, turns out to be increasingly the central tenet of the argument.11 The choice between emotional or intellectual response also marked the discourse about the transformation of cinema that took place following the achievement of reliable moving-image-and-sound synchronization in the late 1920s. The heads of film studios saw the commercial benefits in providing musical films to replace the musicians who accompanied silent films and the business synergies that might be created between entertainment industries in popular theatre, in music publishing and recording, and radio. Many filmmakers and critics were less convinced. They mourned the demise of silent cinema, which had by that point developed a subtle visual language capable of transcending linguistic barriers. For many critics, the primacy of cinema’s visuality was threatened by the advent not so much of sound per se but of dialogue-heavy “talkies.” “For sound films to be true to the basic aesthetic principle,” writes Siegfried Kracauer, “their significant communications must originate with their pictures.”12 What emerges, thus, is a sensory web where the audio and visual domains are interconnected and merge in the bodies of the audio-­ spectators through their senses. The use of the word “web” here is significant because in our exploration, we aim to get beyond linear conceptions of the senses working in parallel in order to allow for more complex interactions that the idea of a web can accommodate, including marked inequalities or disjuncture between sight and hearing. Our positing of a sensory web is made in the knowledge of findings in cognitive science on the operation of sensory plurality, explicitly invoked in Matthew Fulkerson, “Rethinking the Senses and Their Interactions: The Case for Sensory Pluralism.”13 From a philosophical point of view, we acknowledge that the way that dialogue takes place can be answered with reference to the philosophies of understanding and aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Mikhail Bakhtin and Miguel de Beistegui. In particular, Beistegui’s Aesthetics after Metaphysics offers a compelling framework to understand

4  A. Cascelli and D. Condon dialogue within a more concrete bodily presence. In the philosophy of art from Plato to Hegel and Adorno, art’s materiality, its “irreducible sensory dimension [is subordinated] to its truth, understood as the truth of the Idea or the Concept.”14 In this metaphysical frame and its main paradigm, that of mimesis, then, the work of art is required to adhere to a truth which exists before and outside the event of the artwork, unable, thus, to “produce its own truth, or disrupt that of philosophy.” If modernity is characterized by a “discordance of art and truth,” for Beistegui this is a “cause for celebration, not lament. … raising the possibility of thinking the event of the work of art outside the play of universality and particularity.” Art is neither to be aligned with the materiality of the world nor with the transcendence of the Idea; it is instead located, as an event, between them. In this in-between, “there is the space (and the time) of what, for lack of a better world, I suggest we call the hypersensible. Between the impression and the idea there is the work of art, the operation of which, I want to suggest, is metaphorical.” In this metaphorical dimension, the artwork, as an event, always produces an encounter with a body which is transformed; the body is not the end of the artwork, instead “it incorporates itself – and this means expands, dissolves or disorganizes itself – in matter.” The artwork, of course, when confronted with ordinary objects, does not look away in search of “more noble or higher objects”; it confronts them straight on, trying to reveal their “forgotten, overlooked or exhausted intensity. It is not a matter of objects, but of perspective, and the manner in which, in each instance, the body is called upon and provoked.”15 Hence, for Gian Paolo Lomazzo, writing in 1584, a painting “will cause the beholder to wonder when it wondreth,” and for Giovanni Battista Armenini, in 1587, the eye “moves the minds to hatred, love and fear, more than all the other senses.”16 As a result, Orpheus and Eurydice with their ability to move rivers, mountains, rocks and afflicted souls “expand, dissolve or disorganize themselves in matter” through an artistic vision that “interrupts and disrupts” the ordinary perception of the world.17 And hence, in the “train myth,” viewers run away, convinced that the train is going to crush them. Metaphor has the ability to unravel outside the opposition between materiality and transcendence of form; it allows us to “recognize something in something else, and see the beauty of an object in a different object.” The action, the movement of the recognition here is fundamental for Beistegui because it does not suggest that beauty is the Kantian result of a correspondence between an object and a subject in what is the aesthetic judgement. The movement of recognition, whilst bringing one object into another, puts in action a judgement in which no particular is subsumed under a universal. “Escaping the play of the universal and the particular, it opens onto the world of singularities, and is both connective (and…and…) and disjunctive (either…or…or…).” Metaphor, therefore, can be understood “as the schema – or, better said perhaps, the hypotiposis [sic] – of the hypersensible, that is, as the operation that reveals or opens up that space and time, hidden

Introduction 5 or folded in the space and time of ordinary perception and cognition.”18 If this is what metaphor does, it seems to us that it is the framework to understand the sensory web within which sight and hearing operate. The artwork is where and when the dialogue between the various senses takes place, without negating differences and possible discontinuities but at the same time allowing for the bodily experience as the scenario of meanings where this takes place. The event is that space and time opened between the artworks and the audio-spectators; metaphor is central to the event as it does not schematically reduce the artwork to “the direct mode of presentation of the pure concepts of understanding, nor symbolic, that is oriented toward the indirect or analogous presentation of ideas of reason.”19 If metaphor is the “ability to recognize something in something else and see the beauty of an object in a different object,”20 it is inevitable for the various senses to intersect and cross paths, almost stumbling on each other. We would like to suggest then that the categories that best capture the possibility of expressing the “forgotten, overlooked, or exhausted intensity” of artworks/events are threshold, synchresis and intermediality. These categories reveal the conditions for the stumbling of the senses, in our case sight and hearing, on each other.

Threshold/in-between Threshold is a concept closely related to the event-ness of performance. As Erika Fischer-Lichte states, in a performance participants experience themselves as subjects who partially control, and are partially controlled by, the conditions – neither fully autonomous nor fully determined. They experience performance as an aesthetic and a social, even political, process in which relationships are negotiated, power struggles fought out, and communities emerge and vanish. Concepts and ideas that we traditionally see as dichotomous pairs in our culture – such as autonomy and determinism, aesthetic and politics, and presence and representation – are experienced not in the form of either/or but as not only/but also. Oppositions collapse.21 It is this collapse of dichotomies that brings the spectators into the threshold, “the liminal space between poles such as presence and representation, and a feeling of in-betweenness dominates. Performance enables a threshold experience that can transform those who experience it.”22 The concept was developed in the anthropological theories of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner; the latter subsequently collaborated with Richard Schechner. In anthropological terms, the threshold is the transformation phase peculiar to any rite of passage.23 For Turner, the threshold phase is the “liminal state,” that phase “betwixt and between the position assigned and arrayed

6  A. Cascelli and D. Condon by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.”24 It is the state in which experimentation and innovations can happen: “in liminality, new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols are tried out, to be discarded or accepted.”25 As a state open to experimentation and innovation, the threshold/liminal state enhances the sensory web (with both continuities and discontinuities) exposing the space and time in-­between different senses and experiences. Fischer-Lichte contends that “the experience of a liminal situation destabilizes one’s sense of self and of the world at large. Such an experience often implies strong feelings and changes in a person’s physiological, energetic and affective state. The experience of liminality is articulated in both cognitive and somatic ways. A person experiences liminality first and foremost as a bodily transformation.”26 In the state of self-destabilization, the pair/ opposition between the eyes and the ears is disrupted; whilst navigating this state of destabilization, the self-­experience that nothing is purely sound and nothing is purely vision, a web is possible connecting the two domains wherein one becomes a condition of the other. Vision always already incorporates the possibility of sound and sound brings with it the possibility of vision, so the threshold represents that experience of being suspended between different senses and as such it can be translated into different sensory experiences to ultimately re-build a temporary stabilization of the self.

Intermediality Intermediality also suggests an in-between state but it differs from the liminal state of the threshold, in that it generally implies an exchange or borrowing between or from (other) media forms. Although “medium” is a notoriously difficult term to define, a definition often relying on the purpose and disciplinary background of the scholar-definer, it is broadly referred to in this book as conventionally established ways of communicating musical and/or visual content. The media considered here are painting, poetry, opera, cinema, puppetry and television. Under such a definition, new forms of media can be described as constitutionally intermedial, in that they do not initially have their own defined media identity, and so adopt the practices of one or more existing media until their unique practices are eventually developed and recognized. This definition of intermediality may have particular relevance in the context of the emergence of such new media as cinema in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the recently emerged – and still emerging – digital media, where a cultural technology is invented but there is a period before its affordances become apparent. Such a definition does not exhaust the ways in which the concept has been used and will be used in this book. Intermediality has received a significant critical attention as the umbrella term for discussions of the many kinds of relationships between and among cultural forms, including adaptation, transmediality, multimediality, multimodality, convergence and remediation. Writing in the introduction to her Handbook of Intermediality, Gabriele

Introduction 7 Rippl observes that “in our digital age many works of art, cultural artefacts, literary texts and other cultural configurations either combine and juxtapose different media, genres and styles or refer to other media in a plethora of ways.”27 Indeed, Rippl is just one of several scholars who have shown how thinking about the relationships between and across media under the rubric of intermediality exposes the conventional nature of the boundaries between media and of the hierarchical distinctions between art and popular culture. As a result, intermediality has become a key term in thinking about the relationships between and among media, but a good deal of variation remains in how individual scholars use it, as will be outlined in more detail below.

Synchronization and synchresis Along the web expressed by intermediality, moments of attraction occur, during which the threshold/in-between state emerges very tangibly through synchronization and synchresis. These concepts refer to the connection created in the mind by sounds and vision being experienced at the same time. Although these concepts originate in film studies where they emerged as a way of describing the effects of sound cinema, it is possible to argue that they can actually be detected in artistic forms preceding the invention of cinema. Certainly, opera is one of the main fields in which it is possible to experience the connection between hearing and sight. Music, both vocal and instrumental, is able to conjure up in the mind of the audio-spectators a series of affects in which vision and music become indistinguishable, the effects of the text and the music together create affects. Likewise, the visual effects of a painting or a movie may conjure up a series of aural effects and affect the mind of the viewer. By considering the moment when seemingly separate senses are brought together, synchronization and synchresis invite us to experience the senses in such a way that the total is more than the sum of the individual components, bringing us back to the original conditions of threshold and in-between.

Setting the scene The chapters that follow explore the sensory web between seeing and hearing and the “ability to recognize something in something else, and see the beauty of an object in a different object” through the three categories outlined above.28 In this spirit, the two opening contributions begin by opening up these concepts in ways that are pursued in the chapters that follow. Focusing on synchronization and synchresis, Alessandra Campana’s “Synch: Scenes of Implication” examines how power is experienced in the connections between the audio and visual domains, drawing on Althusser’s scene of interpellation. In particular, she asks if and how it is possible to retrace metaphorical paths through scenarios used to explain theoretical

8  A. Cascelli and D. Condon concepts in order to create a link between “figuring” and “sounding.” She argues that theatricality is inherent in the scenes of theory that are “products of imaginaries and practices that are always already of/in sound.”29 Using Althusser’s scene of interpellation as a dramaturgical guideline in which a subject is created through seeing and hearing, and through Orpheus’s gesture of turning back, Campana explores a series of scenes that invert features traditionally associated with the visual and sound domain: music becomes spatial and images become temporal. Giovanni Careri considers how “affects as force” are the conditions that allow the migration of the same story through different sensorial realms and media. He looks at Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) not under the traditional rubric of source but instead by reconsidering how and why “something” of this poem is transposed in music, painting and ballet. Focusing on the love affair of Rinaldo and Armida, he shows how Tasso constructs a very original phenomenology of the specularity of love and war. In a game where the lovers are mirrored in each other’s image, a process of transformation, conversion and conformation is set in place that continues through and beyond the medium used to narrate it. Specular reflection between war and love is expressed through various registers: at the level of the metre of the poem in graphic and sonorous terms, but also at the semantic level, which describes actual process of conformation. The specularity is what keeps both seeing and hearing in suspension, through “affects as force” and the story becomes word, word becomes music, and music becomes ballet. As an extensive case study, Careri’s chapter ultimately emphasizes issues of the in-between, the hypersensible and the event. It is exactly because of the inherent eventness and the metaphorical quality of the episode in question – seeing oneself in someone else is like recognizing the beauty of one object in another one – that it is possible to transfer that episode to different media. The references to opposing forms of an affective phenomenology, specularity, the connection between love, resemblance and sexual identity are the embodied ways to explore threshold, intermediality and synchresis.

Voice as presence and absence This section explores how both the presence and the absence of voice in its sung and spoken forms are the thresholds that allow a conjuring up of multiple and mirroring subjectivities, viewpoints and the fragility of their borders. Focusing on Francis Poulenc’s operatic monodrama La voix humaine, Francesca Placanica’s chapter explores how the body of a solo female protagonist becomes the channel for distributed subjectivities, on the threshold between the performer’s presence and the absence of the events and people with which the performer is in continuous dialectical contact. Placanica traces how iconic interpretations of the opera have moved increasingly towards presenting and enhancing the performer’s most distinctive

Introduction 9 characteristics, capitalizing on the singer’s vocal presence rather than on the represented character. The focus of Hayley Fenn’s chapter on Phelim McDermott’s production of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, an opera about Mohandas Gandhi’s 21 years in colonial South Africa, is on the use of puppets as threshold objects that suggest the porosity of the border between singers and scenery. Fenn explores how Glass’ insistence that the Sanskrit of the libretto not be translated pushes a significant part of the meaning-making onto the scenery, which McDermott animates by using puppets that not only formalize the complex audio-visual relations at work in the opera but also present a powerful postcolonial critique. The threshold manifest in the ambiguity of the performer’s body as the site of the voice is addressed in Laura Miranda’s chapter through an exploration of the folkloric musical that emerged in Spanish cinema during the Civil War period. Analyzing Florián Rey’s Carmen (la de Triana) (1938), Miranda shows how Argentinian actor Imperio Argentina used voice and gesture to embody Carmen – herself a threshold figure – in a way that successfully accommodated elements of the Republican era’s popular cultural forms to the emerging aesthetics of 1940s Francoist cinema, with its focus on the Catholic religion, the bullfighting world, Goyaesque Spain and the lost Spanish Empire overseas. Negotiating the ambiguities of the performer’s body in relation to the voice is central to the work of Jennifer O’Meara’s chapter on the mid-2010s post-­mortem “rockumentaries” on the lives of musicians Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Exploring how Amy (2015) and Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) incorporate unseen personal video footage that revises the negative images provided by other media, O’Meara argues that the films create a threshold space in their use of techniques more often associated with the music video such as combining superimposed lyrics and inserted texts with colour filters and animated sequences.

Beyond borders This section explores how an artistic form’s ability to transgress its own borders allows the migration from vision to sound and vice versa, in ways that may question the identity of the original form. Examining how opera can migrate from the traditional opera house into the city, Monica C. Chieffo’s “‘Uber Opera’: The Politics of Site-Specific Mobile Opera in Los Angeles” focuses on the intriguing case of experimental opera company The Industry’s staging of Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars in LA’s Boyle Heights neighbourhood in 2015. Probing the company’s attempt to repurpose the neighbourhood’s geography into a ludic, fantasy space of sound, voice and spoken word, she shows how intermediality operates in the presentation of the opera across urban space, live sound, and technologically filtered sound, becoming a conceit for the systemic territorialization of a marginalized residential area.

10  A. Cascelli and D. Condon Michael Lee’s chapter returns to the episode of Armide analyzed by Careri. Focusing too on Poussin’s painting at the Dulwich Museum, Lee highlights the moment in which Armida transforms from nemica to amante, channelled in Lully’s musical setting through moments of silence, which reveal a heightened sense of spectacle. It is indeed in the context of contemporary definitions of spectacle and its inherent intermediality that Lee sees the possibility of this event to be transferred from one medium to another. Marysol Quevedo’s chapter shows how Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1969) encodes Cuban revolutionary ideology that is represented, in particular, by Leo Brouwer’s score but which also provided a forum for such otherwise banned foreign musical forms as jazz, bossa nova and rock. She contends that intermediality manifests itself in the interplay between the film’s visual and sound elements that delivered to Cuban audiences a distinctly political message that would have been absent had “the carefully crafted soundtrack [been] stripped away from the visual component.” Pascal Vandelanoitte’s chapter offers an intermedial analysis of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974), an unconventional biopic of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, which is structured like a rondo and combines music and image to represent the associations and connotations that the music evokes in the listener. Vandelanoitte argues that its intermediality is present in the film in the way its illustrative translations tell the story behind the various sources of inspiration in Mahler’s music, in its adaptations of musical characteristics and topics to define filmic scenes, and in the use of music to define the dramatic flow. Jessica Shine’s chapter analyses the use of music in long-form television, concentrating on the use of pre-existing music in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad (2008–2013), exploring the consequences of what she calls “incongruent music.” She argues that the incongruence between the show’s images and the soundtrack’s pre-existing songs with which the audience has prior associations facilitates the complex psychological transformation of the series’ central character Walter White.

From silence to sound and back The chapters in this section explore how thinking about synchronization and synchresis illuminates the relationships between sound and image beyond the realm of sound cinema for which they are frequently reserved. This wider application of these concepts is apparent in “Music, Painting, Cosmos, Chaos: Flaying and Playing in Titian’s Marsyas,” Itay Sapir’s analysis of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. Moving beyond a traditional iconographic approach to show how this painting calls for a new aesthetics of music, Sapir contends that the general lack of outline in Titian’s painting serves to make music visible, creating a kind of synchresis avant la letttre. Similarly, seeking an approach beyond iconography, Antonio Cascelli’s chapter, “Armonia: Seeing and Hearing in Veronese’s La nozze di Cana,”

Introduction 11 examines how the representation of musicians in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana makes meaningful contact with the concept of perspective and how this is experienced in the refectory of San Giorgio in Venice, the venue for which the painting was originally conceived. Exploring how visual representation of music-making may cause synchresis, Cascelli focuses, in particular, on the way in which the instrumental ensemble in the foreground of the painting contributes to the meaning of what is experienced when there is no actual sound accompaniment. Susanna Pasticci’s chapter, “Listening to Space in Time,” looks at how Italian orchestral musicians at the beginning of the twentieth century used paintings as the channel to instigate musical forms and structure, to the extent that looking at a painting became listening to music. Pasticci shows how for these musicians, as for the German music theorist Theodor Adorno, “the relationship between music and the visual dimension is not just a matter of ‘musical representation’ of shapes and colours, but primarily an issue of form and temporality.” Denis Condon’s chapter, “The Allowable Voices of Silent Opera Films in 1910s Ireland,” focuses on the local exhibition of Cecil B. DeMille’s lavish adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen (1915) to explores why opera films were popular throughout the silent period, despite technical limitations that did not allow vocal performance to be recorded and successfully exhibited in synchronization with filmed bodily performance. Condon argues that while film such as Carmen offered the opportunity for exhibitors, musicians and audiences to test the possibilities of synchronization, the syncretic weld remained to be fully achieved for the feature film

Conclusion What we hope to have highlighted is a constant trans-historical journeying through different media/artworks and centuries. Yet, without conflating different periods into a “vague ahistorical flow,” the aim is to maintain a vivid historical awareness and contextualization for each artwork while probing new interpretative scenarios. The shared terminology does not aim to foreclose the complexity of the sensory web, where seeing and hearing constitutes our main focus. On the contrary, the shared terminology, on the one hand, emphasizes the possibility of a “unified” understanding of how the relationship between the sound and visual domains works; on the other hand, it does not shy away from discontinuities, both in historical and conceptual terms.

Notes

1. Claude V. Palisca, Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 179. 2. Ibid.

12  A. Cascelli and D. Condon









3. Ibid. Francesco dalla Viola, Letter of dedication to Alfonso II d’Este, 15 September 1558, in Adrian Willaert, Musica nova (Venice: Antonio Gardano, 1559). 4. See Antonio Cascelli, “L’Orfeo: Memory, Recollection, and the Tragedy of Choosing between Seeing and Hearing,” Philomusica on-line 17, no.  1 (2018), 301. http://riviste.paviauniversitypress.it/index.php/phi/article/view/ 1987/2079. See also, Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, L’Orfeo del Poliziano, con il testo critico dell’originale e delle successive forme teatrali (Rome: Editrice Antenore, 2000), 146. 5. On the myth and its debunking, see Stephen Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect’,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 2 (1999), 177–216. 6. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3-4 (1986), 63–70, and Gunning, “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art/Text 34 (Spring 1989), 114–33. 7. Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura, pt.1, ch. 41, according to A. Philip McMahon’s division of the text. Quoted in Emmanuel Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 205. See also Tim Shephard, “Leonardo and the Paragone,” in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 229–237: 234. 8. Leonardo, Trattato, Pt. 1, ch. 28. Winternitz, Leonardo, 205–206; Shephard, “Leonardo,” 235. 9. Leonardo, Trattato, Pt.1, ch. 39. Winternitz, Leonardo, 2010; Shephard, “Leonardo,” 235. 10. Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino, overo, Del fine della pittura (Mantua: Francesco Osanna, 1591). 11. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xxv. 12. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 103. 13. Matthew Fulkerson, “Rethinking the Senses and their Interactions: The Case for Sensory Pluralism,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014) https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2014.01426. 14. Miguel de Beistegui, Aesthetics after Metaphysics (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 2. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura, et architettura (Milan: Pontio, 1584), book 2, chapter 1, in Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi (Florence: Marchi and Bertolli, 1974), 95–96. translation is by Richard Haydocke, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Painting, Carvinge, Buildinge (Oxford: Ioseph Barnes, 1598), book 2: 1–2. ­Giovanni ­Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna: ­ Francesco Tebaldini, 1587, translated and cited in David Freedberg, The Power of ­ Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1. 17. Beistegui, Aesthetics, 3–4. 18. Ibid., 6. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. Ibid., 6. Beistegui indicates that he is taking the lead from Proust. See Beistegui, Proust as Philosopher (London: Routledge, 2012). 21. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, trans. Minou Arjomand (London: Routledge, 2014), 42.

Introduction 13 22. Ibid. 23. See Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Performance Theory, revised and expanded edition, (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960). 24. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 95. 25. Victor Turner, “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Rites, eds. Sally F. Moore and Barbara C. Myerhoff (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), 36–57: 40. 26. Fischer-Lichte, Routledge Introduction, 43. 27. Gabriele Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 1. 28. Beistegui, Aesthetics after Metaphysics, 6. 29. Below, 17.

Part I

Setting the scene

1

Synch: scenes of implication Alessandra Campana

A collective volume on the interactions of “Music and Visual Cultures” may appear to be a diplomatic affair, bringing around a negotiating table by way of that middle “and” scholars with complementary specializations: those trained in looking and those trained in listening.1 But that has not at all been the case here. If those famous Martian anthropologists were to find this volume, they would doubtlessly catch the enthusiasm and sophistication with which that “and” has been articulated by all the essays here. That middle “and” is crucially the terrain of encounters mediated by institutionalized discourses, such as, for instance, musicology and visual studies. Perhaps then the issue can be tackled by asking how musicology can make itself listened to. On the one hand, several disciplinary configurations within the humanities, more versed in the often-recondite discourses of theory, cannot or do not want to listen, especially to musicology. Visual studies in particular may still appear determined to keep their ears shut, impermeable even to sound studies’ recent contribution to theory. On the other hand, musicology’s eagerness to engage with theory and contribute to broader conversations in the humanities is often seen, both from within and without the discipline, as a kind of disciplinary envy, falling short of a viable interdisciplinary contribution because of its tendency toward a wide-eyed application of theoretical soundbites. This essay attends to the question of the “and” as the thematic core of this volume, and asks what musicology can do, still, for the study of “visual cultures.” More to the point, it asks how a discipline trained in, or that cultivates listening can contribute to the discourses of the visual, discourses that still largely shun aurality. In recent years several threads in the humanities have redefined the centrality of sound and of listening – its practices, histories and politics. This essay tries to activate these discourses on listening in the presence of theory, ever steeped in a silent glare. Can musicology listen or listen anew to the scenes of theory, retracing its metaphorical paths in order to open up relations between “figuring” and “sounding?” What if, in the way of an experiment, we attend to the scenes of theory for their theatricality, that is, as products of imaginaries and practices that are always already of/in sound, and not just as pantomimes, forcefully silenced by a

18  A. Campana scrutiny that endeavours to free the eye in order to see more, to see better. The task then is to unmute theory’s scenes and reinstate their sonorous dramaturgy. This essay’s opening section is therefore occupied with the “sounding” of a theoretical vignette – Althusser’s famous scene of interpellation – a vignette which in fact stages a precise dramaturgy of implication by way of listening and seeing. The connection of sound and image is enacted by way of a turning back, that uncontainable gesture that interpellates the subject-as-listener and -as-viewer. The rest of the essay will explore other famous scenes of sound-image synchronization: scenes that stage synchresis and synchronicity, the spatiality of music and the temporality of images, and where the turning back implicates “sounding” with the usual “figuring,” while it constitutes always already political spectators.

Interpellation/implication The second part of Louis Althusser’s much quoted 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” tackles the matter of the formation of the subject in ideology, what he terms interpellation, by way of a “theoretical scene” or “little theoretical theatre.”2 Here is the passage: I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by “guilt feelings,” despite the large numbers who “have something on their consciences.”3 The voice of authority uttering “hey, you there,” presumably heard and listened to above all and despite other sounds and voices on the street, is also a voice whose sound prompts one to turn. This turning around is precisely the gesture that for Althusser confirms tautologically how the individual is interpellated as subject in ideology.4

Synch: scenes of implication 19 But if not “explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’,” why would one feel compelled to turn? Or, to put it differently, isn’t this turning around but activated by sound, a sound that is attended to and that had already bound the hailer with the one hailed, before and besides the words uttered and heard? Like Orpheus, Althusser’s individual-as-subject is the one who cannot help but look at the source of the sound – who or what is hailing or whistling.5 To look back then is to trace the trajectory of the sound back to its source and cause; it is to map a voice onto a body, and to ascribe that body with an intention. Note the blocking of the scene: the sound arrives from behind, an elsewhere external to the field of vision, and it has always already happened. The gesture of recognizing oneself as the one addressed is instantiated in a particular spatio-temporal dimension: behind and in the immediate past, in a space inhabited just a moment before. The willingness to recognize oneself in that call is performed as an act of translation of that spatio-­temporal configuration of externality (behind/past) into co-presence (in front/­present). Hence the “‘transformation’ of the individuals into subjects” happens precisely in that spatial and temporal gap between the hailing and the turning back, and it happens as an act of matching of the sound of the voice with its source, or to put it otherwise, as an act that synchronizes listening with looking, the listened to with the looked at. The passage quoted above is followed by an afterthought of sorts, where the prose returns once again to the scene in an effort to clarify: Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: “Hey, you there!” One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/­ suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e., recognizing that “it really is he” who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.6 Preoccupied that his vignette aptly demonstrates the “always-already-­ happened” of interpellation, the author has to disavow the transformation staged by his primal scene. That is, by invoking simultaneity, this paragraph downplays that movement in time which made his theoretical scene a theatrical representation of the everyday eventness of interpellation. The last two sentences in particular, after that “but in reality,” ensure that the scene just described again, functions still as illustration of a theory founded on the very impossibility of a before and after. Like Medusa’s gaze, here the process of abstraction stops the “little theoretical theatre” dead, to safeguard the “reality” of theory. Before and after are folded into each other, into a still “one and the same thing,” while the space of the encounter (the square,

20  A. Campana the street) suddenly turns into a sort of green screen, abysmally nothing/ nowhere yet always already something. In an influential essay from 1993 entitled “Beyond Interpellation,” Mladen Dolar, with the intent of salvaging what was still crucially “uncomfortable” in Althusser’s work, observes that both the theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and the formula of interpellation are organized by the idea of “the clean cut.”7 Interpellation implies a break8 and so does the theory of ideology: If we take Althusser’s argument as a whole, it appears that there is also a clean cut between the two parts of Althusser’s theory of ideology. Roughly speaking, there is a break between his insistence on the materiality of state apparatuses on the one hand, and interpellation on the other – between exteriority and the constitution of interiority. How exactly would materiality entail subjectivation? Why would interpellation require materiality? … One could say that materiality and subjectivity rule each other out: if I am (already) a subject, I am necessarily blinded in regard to materiality. The external conditions of ideology cannot be comprehended from within ideology; the institution of interiority necessarily brings about a denial, or better, a disavowal of its external origin.  … Thus one must face an either/or alternative: either materiality or subjectivity; either the exterior or the interior.9 In response to the impasse of such either/or, Dolar performs a virtuosistic re-reading of Althusser with Jacques Lacan.10 He connects the end product of interpellation, the illusorily autonomous subject, with what psychoanalysis takes as point of departure, that is, precisely what the constitution of the subject leaves out. The remainder of subjectivation is in fact that residual, unprocessed trace of the external within interiority: “the point where the innermost touches the outermost, where materiality is the most intimate.”11 But, again, what if we pay attention to sound. Dolar’s response to the Althusserian impasse is reported here also because it is somewhat predisposed to listening. Its emphasis on the space of intimate materiality, where the external and internal touch offers a felicitous “opening to the register of the sonorous,” to put it in a recent beautiful formulation.12 It can be contended in fact that such a space of intimate materiality was already there, constituted by sound. Listening to the hailing is also always already contingent to the space and time of the encounter, as a resonance and co-vibration of self and other, of interior and exterior. Synchronization then is not just a technological trick, masking the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual and the aural.13 More than that, it is taken here as the articulation of implications, whereby the very constitution of audio-vision as a simultaneity of discreet streams is what hails ideological subjects. The following scenes dwell on this turning back as a way in

Synch: scenes of implication 21 which the aural and the visual are articulated: like a trope for that “and” of the book’s title, synchronization affords the opportunity to attend to the aesthetics and politics of subjects, implicated within that very conjunction and simultaneity.

Synchresis/synchronicity But what if the one turning around discovers something unexpected as the source/cause of the “hey, you there!”? Like in Dr. Mabuse’s Testament, the voice could as well be from a “master,” postmortem, and originate from a loudspeaker, generically addressed at anybody who cares to listen to it, to be interpellated by it. Or what if Orpheus turns around at the noise behind him to discover not Eurydice but, say, the very stage-hand in charge of producing that noise.14 That is to say, what if we take issue with that inevitability that is usually assigned to synch, with that unacknowledged presupposition that in audio-visual media the dash in between stands for a necessarily closed causal relationship. This argument is hardly new and has been promulgated with great flair over the course of the last 40 years by some of the founding fathers in the study of film sound.15 Almost as an homage, then, the first example here is a DIY experiment in what Chion calls “forced marriage,” or, less ominously perhaps, synchresis. Take the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), just the first minute or so, before the titles roll in, and strip it of its sound (just mute the volume). Then take, say, the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” and play the two clips simultaneously.16 How would one usually go about describing the result, at the most basic level? We may note how the song’s lyrics may be taken as enthusiastically endorsing the car’s travel along the winding stretch of road, across the vast beautiful landscape. Then we may presume the affective congruence of image and sound, especially since the sound stream is completely occupied by the song. We may even notice how specific expectations seem to emerge as to the relation between the two: we may expect to see, at some point further on, the car stereo, a shot customarily accompanied by the introduction of ambient sound.17 The song (as well as us) would then be anchored to the world of the characters. But even without that cut to the inside of the car, we may notice how the clip unequivocally foregrounds an effect of unity between the seen and the heard, so that the combination of the two creates a sense of a closed, autonomous world we are invited to enter. It is commonly acknowledged that the necessity and causality of the audio-visual connection are but an illusion, the very effect audio-visual media aspire to produce, their ideological work. Film and video give the impression that we look for what we hear and listen for what we see. And yet critical discourse about the audiovisual tends to remain entangled in the effect of complementarity of sound to the image, an entanglement testified by the recurring focus on what is deemed their mutual aptness – the persistent use of terms such as “enhance” and “amplify,” or, typically in film studies, a complementarity fixed onto a

22  A. Campana rigid distribution of labour, where the image gives access to knowledge and music to affect.18 The tendency still is that of buying into the very rhetoric of audio-visual media, that is, into the artifice of total congruence of the two, whereby the heard contains – indexically, metonymically, metaphorically, emotionally, etc., – the seen, and vice versa. Let’s return to the famous opening of Kubrick’s The Shining, now with its own soundtrack. A gateway into the film, the sequence exploits the very split between audio and visuals by placing Wendy Carlos’s reworking of the Dies Irae over that journey across the innocence of an American landscape.19 A small remnant of Carlos’s discarded original score, this cue works by way of an overdetermined “anempathy”: the “Dies Irae” arrives here with a 400-year-old funereal baggage, and Carlos’s distortions and timbral fervour add to that baggage another layer of lugubriousness. The soundtrack, also completely filled by the music, has already initiated that work of production and accumulation of sound matter that by the end of the film will amount to the very psychic matter that takes over the halls of the Overlook Hotel. The value added here is therefore far more than just affect and encompasses also what Chion calls “vectorization”: the soundtrack suggests from the start that there has to be and there will be more than meets the eye, as it were, and the car’s leisurely journey across the beauty of the landscape already coexists with an intimation of death. At issue here is the way Carlos’s musical cue makes us look for clues of “god’s wrath” in the visuals. The varying speed with which the camera approaches the VW from above now seems evidence of “surveillance” (a term dear to Visual Studies of a decade ago), and the camera’s gaze manifests agency and intention, menacingly attentive to the car’s journey. That is, and to restate a point made previously, the simultaneity of the two streams constructs an experience leading to the discovery of the mutual implications of music and image. And the discovery is what implicates the subject. Here again the impression is that of a tautological, autonomous system of signification where one looks for what is heard and listens for what is seen. Incidentally, the search for a causal link between image and sound will be the very motor of this film’s plot, reaching its denouement only with the group photograph at the very end. This capacity of sound and image to be always mutually implicated is notoriously described by Chion as synchresis: “the spontaneous and irresistible mental fusion, completely free of any logic, that happens between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time.”20 By foregrounding the arbitrariness of the match, Chion’s famous neologism emancipates the discourse on audio-vision by guaranteeing that the dash is not just one inevitable connection, one necessary semanticization, but rather the site for almost infinite potential significations. What is more, as the experiment above shows, synchresis brings out how the space of the image always already encompasses aurality, whatever that may be. But also, as I have been arguing, synchresis takes heed of the in-between temporality of turning back, of the gap that allows for an always different spatialization of sound, reactivating

Synch: scenes of implication 23 recognition and implication. Therefore, the idea of synchresis also suggests, more broadly, that what we can do for theory is mobilize its “figuring” by way of the contingency of “sounding”: the causal closure between the listened to and the looked for is but an artifice, masking the open-ended series of possible matchings. Always already interpellated by sound, the ideological subject illusorily constituted by the simultaneity of audio-vision can match its resounding with ever different images, every time it turns around. A bit like Althusser’s afterthought quoted above then, audio-visual media articulate that “and” of this volume’s subtitle as a closed simultaneity, as well as a packaged bundle. But, especially now, accessible editing software allows one to undo, detach, reattach the two streams and thus to mobilize the image from its sounding, emancipate the sound from its visual semanticization.21 And in fact, the proliferation of mash-ups, vidding and so forth can be seen as a display of enthusiasm for the creative possibilities afforded, especially when the synchronization of two distinct artefacts serendipitously generates felicitous results, as if of their own accord. And this brings me to a special case, that of so-called synchronicity. In his brilliant book Occult Aesthetics, one of the very few monographs devoted to synchronization, film scholar Kevin Donnelly argues that there is something “occult” in sound-image synchronization, both in the process and in the result: “synchronization of sound and image has to be hidden as a process to allow for sound cinema’s function as an engaging medium that appears to render a coherent world on-screen and in sound.”22 One example that turns up several times throughout the book is The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the so-called “synchronicity” resulting from the simultaneous playback of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz and of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. The fortuitous mash-up of such distant objects had already become one of those fast spreading phenomena of American popular culture by the late 1980s, crossing over from orality to internet newsgroups, then websites, blogs, YouTube – and also from analog playback (VHS and audiotape or vinyl) to digital editing. Quoting from one of the many sites, Donnelly describes it as “a phenomenon” in that it was and continues to be discussed in the way of an exceptional natural event. The match in fact is said to reveal new aspects of the film as well as of the album, or even to reveal meanings that were always there, ready to be discovered. Like a ultravoilet light on invisible ink (or indeed, a ray of light through a prism), the two streams once synched seem to reveal their “real” content, a truth presumably lying under the surface of these two disparate cultural signposts. What I find interesting is how this experiment (and many others that followed it) foregrounds the very medial economy of synchresis, the “spontaneous and irresistible” attraction of image and sound, an attraction that is both ineluctable and yet infinitely negotiable. The effect and success of the mash-up has little to do with the precision of the matching. There are several versions online, and discussions as to which synch points ought to be privileged, with instructions as to where the music should be placed – the

24  A. Campana favoured version with music starting at the third roar of the lion, named the “Third Roar Theory.”23 As Donnelly points out, there appear to be synchronizations, and they appear to hold together a loose structure of sound and image in an astonishingly coherent fashion. … Elements seem to gel, and synch is less a matter of consistently precise “hits” of notable elements than more a sense of flow being met by similar dynamics and notable portals of development being matched, as well as the words to songs appearing to comment on the screen action. So, there is some magic in Oz.24 None of the fans seem interested in describing more precisely what deeper meanings are presumably brought forth. The two objects, also two “places” and two temporalities, are discreet yet parallel streams, which just brush against each other, their visible and audible gap guaranteeing the aesthetic pleasure of producing always seemingly new implications and resonances. The Dark side of the Rainbow then allows savouring in amazement the uncanny coincidences, to take pride in the recognition of what emerges out of the seemingly spontaneous aligning of songs and images – for instance, the sound of the cash register from the intro to “Money,” right when the door opens to the technicolour world of Oz. But such synch points are few and far between: the two tracks for the most appear to float over each other, and the muted image track is only indirectly voiced by the songs in a kind of multitrack audio-visual economy, where the two streams also bring forth the ghosts of their other previous sounds and images. And much of the satisfaction of recognizing gleams of signification is that they appear to be generated besides and beyond any authorial intention: it is about recognizing anew, a new that was there all along.

Spatialization Well before the first stupefied Pink Floyd fan in LA discovered The Dark Side of the Rainbow, in a short article entitled “The God of the Ears,” originally published in 1982 and recently republished in English, Friedrich Kittler prophesized the return of the god Pan “behind the mask of our amplifiers and sound systems,” and more precisely as Pink Floyd’s song “Brain Damage,” also from The Dark Side of the Moon.25 Described with the usual inspired and compelling opaqueness as “a short story about ears and madness in the Age of Media,”26 the song’s lyrics for Kittler outline a progressive dissolution of borders. Kittler remarks on the progressive moving closer traced by each stanza: first “on the grass,” “in the hall” and “in my hall,” the lunatic ends up “in my head (laughter),” to conclude that “there is someone in my head but it is not me.” Each step, Kittler contends, corresponds to a historical phase in technology of sound reproduction: monaural at first, then stereophony, to end with the Azimuth Coordinator, a device that manipulated the

Synch: scenes of implication 25 perception of sound’s origin on a quadrophonic system.27 For Kittler then the song enacts a threefold movement inward, from the externality of sound reproduction to a production of sound that seems to originate directly in our heads. And this is explained in terms of a similar movement away from the symbolic of language, of song, of music even, as socially and culturally circumscribed “places,” and towards the Real of sound, a sound delivered directly to our ears, like madness, bypassing representation and reality. Crucial to all this for Kittler is of course a technological device, the Azimuth Coordinator, capable of conjuring up a unique un-representable space, of generating what he calls an “event in absolute sound space.”28 But one may wonder if Kittler’s enthusiastic “sounding” of “Brain Damage” is not actually mostly a “figuring”: its metaphorical inward path away from reality and into The Real is an image outlined by the lyrics that would then be literalized by the sound spatialization tricks afforded by the quadrophonic system with the Azimuth Coordinator. And these after all may just amount to a representation of space through speakers – spatialization techniques well pre-dating the Pink Floyd and with a long-standing history in the Symbolic of western art music. What if the song’s process of deterritorialization of sound is an effect not just of “technology in the Age of Media,” as Kittler relentlessly advocates, but instead of the very possibilities afforded by the un-matching of sound with its presumed origin. By disrupting the conventional spatial coinciding of sound and source, the machine celebrated by Kittler (Azimuth Coordinator) just positions the sound elsewhere, unsettling the sense of placed-ness and oriented co-presence with the music. To return momentarily to Althusser’s scene, it is as if, every time the hailed subject turns around to look at the source of the “hey, you there!” discovers that it originates not from where it seemed. Now without the defined proxemics of here and there, and by eliding the recognition of sound’s cause, interpellation becomes a matter of co-vibration, impinging on that “junction of the contingent exterior and the intimate interior [that] is essential to the concept of the subject.”29 The question then pertains to spatialization: the “and” of this volume’s title is also, after all, a sort of mise en scène of the one over the other. Film has developed a specific device to deal with space and place as audio-visual event: the long take. My next example is the famous long take opening Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. The film comes with a well-documented fraught history: just prior to its release in 1958, Universal Studios abruptly dismissed Welles and took control of the film’s final cut and postproduction. Then, after an intermediary version in 1976 that reinstated some of the omitted footage, the film was completely restored and reissued in 1998. In 2008, Universal issued a 50th anniversary 2-DVD set including all three versions: a sort of “critical edition” that memorializes the struggle of Welles the artist against the industry, even including in the slipcase a facsimile of Welles notorious 58-page memo with his plan for the film’s final cut.30 The 1998 restoration involved not only the reinstatement of previously

26  A. Campana omitted scenes, but also, more radically, the overhaul of the soundtrack, that was remixed in Dolby Digital.31 The protagonist of this operation was none other than Walter Murch, one of Hollywood’s most influential editors and legendary creator of sound design. Murch wrote about the painstaking work of reconstruction of the soundtrack in light of Welles memo, describing how they had to lower the level of Henri Mancini’s score to make the sound effects audible again.32 Amongst the sections that were most affected by the studio’s takeover of the final cut was the initial sequence: a 3-minuteand-20-second crane shot that has since become a much-quoted reference and model for many long takes. According to Murch, the Studios superimposed the sequence with the opening credits and with Mancini’s credit music. His description of the restoration of Welles’s soundtrack resembles that of an archaeological discovery. When we removed the Mancini title music something was revealed which had been hidden for forty years: the sound effects track for this opening scene. It was a complete surprise to us that it even existed, buried as it was under the score. … …Anyway, the sound effects for this opening scene had been fully prepared and premixed on the E[ffects] track of the D[ialogue] M[usic] and E[ffects]. And if Welles’ original intentions had been followed, they would have been heard. But in 1957, when Universal made the final optic track for Touch of Evil, Mancini’s music so dominated everything that the sound effects were played at near inaudible levels.33 Mancini’s score represents a sound diegesis by encompassing the sequence from without, accompanying the tightly choreographed camera movement almost in the way of dance music. The restored version foregrounds instead source music, turning the scene outside in, as it were. It presents an aural spectacle of difference, that insists on the movement across a broad variety of musical idioms (Afro-Cuban jazz, Rock “n” Roll, etc.). The area covered by the crane shot, the border between US and Mexico,34 is here endowed with cultural and political depth of field by the complexity of the soundscape, filled by the overlapping dissolves of layered timbres and tunes, all precisely defined as for spatial as well as sociocultural origin. In her insightful and carefully researched essay on the film’s soundtrack, Jill Leeper points out that the restored soundtrack “is a thematic analogue of border crossing.”35 Indeed the effect is that of aural métissage, of a dense sound-charting of a “free zone.”36 Moreover, Murch’s signature “dense clarity”37 of sounds caught in motion demands a kind of listening focused on distinguishing and identifying, on assigning visual sources and cultural identities. Border crossing is here an act of synchronization of the eye and the ear, and more than that, the matching of an audio-visual space with a geopolitical place. In these two versions, then, the mise en scenes enacted by the two mixes outline the contours of different ways of imagining politics of space. About

Synch: scenes of implication 27 15 years ago, in her path-breaking book For Space, Doreen Massey impassionedly and relentlessly denounced the last half century of theoretical thinking for its “failure of spatial imagination”: Failure in the sense of being inadequate to face up to the challenges of space; a failure to take on board its coeval multiplicities, to accept its radical contemporaneity, to deal with its constitutive complexity.38 She advocated a rethinking of space as event, to be conceived precisely in terms of temporality and contingency. Her trenchant and still relevant critique of the spatial bias underlying dominant historiographical accounts of modernity closes in on the “geographical imagination” of modernity’s outset, made up of multiple regional, local units where culture and society would coincide with place. According to this story then the onset of nation states is justified as the necessary overcoming of fragmentation and differences in the name of progress. And more recently therefore, some of the responses to globalization ask for a return to the local as a restoration of that coherent, “authentic” unity between culture and place. This for Massey, [It] is a response which takes on trust a story about space which in its period of hegemony not only legitimized a whole imperialist era of territorialization, but which also, in a much deeper sense, was a way of taming the spatial. This is a representation of space, a particular form of ordering and organizing space which refused (refuses) to acknowledge its multiplicities, its fractures and its dynamism. It is a stabilization of the inherent instabilities and creativities of space; a way of coming to terms with the great “out there.”… What was evolved within the project of modernity, in other words, was the establishment and (attempted) universalization of a way of imagining space (and the space/society relation) which underpinned the material enforcement of certain ways of organizing space and the relationship between society and space. And it is still with us today.39 To return to Touch of Evil and its opening sequence, the story of the soundtrack now appears to pursue a similar trajectory: from an original “space of places” to a “space of flow” warranted by Mancini’s synthetic score, and back to that original and authentic space of localities.40 But an actual “sounding” of these two versions is far more complex and may provide yet other ways to think of the event-ness of space. Murch’s restored sound mix foregrounds the variety of source musics in order to render the material reality of the place, a cacophony presumably “unreadable” to some of the characters. Space here seems precisely what Massey advocates: an event, in its multiplicity and contingency. And yet, this restored mix relies for its dramaturgy of (mis)recognition on music’s overdetermined cultural baggage, its single components fixed, reified in their stylistic, generic, and

28  A. Campana market determinations. Music, that is, is used as a kind of sound tag, for its capacity to identify – and “a way of taming the spatial” against which Massey argues. Mancini’s score takes charge of the operation of mixing by narrativizing the movement across and its precise temporality, in a sort of complex act of musical métissage. The tunes are surely appropriated and transformed by a master utterance similar to that of the crane shot, but precisely for that reason Mancini’s score may be said to foreground the instability and mutability of identity on the border.

Turning back (without regrets) Indeed, it may be said that Touch of Evil’s plot unfolds by way of reiterated assertions and equivocations of identities, all in a world endowed with overdetermined yet shifting aural legibility. As Walter Murch’s account of the restoration signals, moreover, this sounding of the border was, and is, neatly separated into two tracks, corresponding to two distinct categories of sound: sound effects (E), where the tunes distortedly emanating from the storefronts were located, and music (M), inhabited by Mancini’s cues. Such division (and hierarchy) has informed till very recently not just the conventions of audiovisual editing, as well as the very practices, status and profiles of the respective labour forces, but also the critical discourses that account for film sound and music, their institutional borders and specialized concerns. In the last 20 years however, as Buhler eloquently puts it, digital processing has brought together sound effects and music into a convergence not just of technological devices: The digital soundtrack, in other words, has resulted in a shift as profound and threatening to established ontologies of music and sound as with the image, even if the disruptions to theories of the soundtrack have not been so overt.41 In the way of a conclusion, then, these last lines will briefly attend to a different kind of border crossing: the soundtrack of Inception (2010) was a celebrated instance of such convergence, authored by two of the most influential names in Hollywood, composer Hans Zimmer and sound designer Richard King. The full integration of music composition and sound design generates the effect of a hyper-composed, ever-present yet tightly controlled effusiveness of sound.42 Because of the film’s high profile, accounts of “the making of” have quickly proliferated, also on specialized press about sound production. But how the final mix was made, how it integrated the work of both music and sound departments, still remains a bit of a mystery, and most accounts preserve the neat separation between the two processes, in line with the industry’s conventions, awards categories, and so forth. Such rhetoric of discreetness is solidly validated by references to the usual nuggets of modernist aesthetics: on the one hand, a still somewhat indexical sound mix,

Synch: scenes of implication 29 anchored in “reality” by sound’s origin in a space corresponding or contiguous with the set, despite the extent of minutely complex manipulations.43 On the other, a musical “composition” preserving creative autonomy and authorial intentions, as well as claiming narrative agency from within the diegetic space.44 And yet, music underscoring appears somewhat diluted, seldom congealing into “thematic” units, and thus following a general trend of recent blockbusters’ scores, much to the chagrin of music theorists.45 In fact the most notorious trait of the music is that it masterfully dilutes a song: several of the cues are made out of a 1960s recording of Edit Piaf’s song “Non, je ne regrette rien”: fragments are quoted, slowed down and serialized, knowingly reflecting the manipulation of time in the plot.46 The convoluted plot builds on the very possibility of spatializing time, of precisely marking and then expanding some crucial moment, in order to transform it into an object of study and exchange, to control repercussions and contingencies. The film lures in with its mazes, its luscious cinematography and ambitious world making interspersed with ciphers to be interpreted. And the soundtrack, despite its overt liminality as always both sound effect and music, functions like a red thread: the occasional emergence of the song’s fragments from its thick and menacing stream functions as an aural analogue to the little objects the characters carry in their pockets to find their way out. But more than a red thread, “music as music” is here a massive safety rope, or better like amber it encases the labyrinthine world of the characters simultaneously from above and within, ensuring its legibility and precise placement.47 Eventually then, the irony is that “music” is relegated to the function of aural index, and that as such it systematically attends to “regret,” enclosing the mix of dreams and reality in a melancholic sameness of semanticization. It is as if that poor ideological subject were to turn around at the “hey, you there!” to discover the same policeman, over and over. Perhaps the reorganization of the sensorium operated by films such as Inception intimates the need for a shift in the very idea of implication, a term recruited here at the outset to bridge synchronization and interpellation. Implication is the work of simultaneity, and it encompasses the “discovery” of looking for what is heard and listening for what it is seen. As these vignettes presented here have explored, by attending to the very interval between audio-vision, implication is both a trap and a source for serendipitous discoveries. The problem with Inception is that there is no way out of the forcedly closed economy of the senses, where hearing and seeing are but vehicles to a subjectivation of immersion, multisensorial and all-encompassing. But Hollywood’s “integrated” practices of total legibility do not need to be dealt with in a critical practice pursuing the same hermeneutic anxieties, seeking similar semantic closures. Rather, we may want to turn back to discover that we can (always, already) mobilize the spatiality of the audio-visual, multiplying their implications. Musicology could offer an ear that is trained and alert to the potential for radical re-temporalization of images, and resists the tendency toward pre-ordained, pre-mediated semanticization of sounds. In

30  A. Campana other words, musicology could provide a discourse that is capable of making room for that “and,” as a space of re-sounding.

Notes 1. This essay stems from a keynote at the 2016 Conference “Music and Visual Cultures” at Maynooth University. I want to acknowledge with much gratitude Antonio Cascelli who inspired the extraordinarily rich conference and shaped the present collection, in collaboration with Denis Condon. This version presents issues developed at some length in a current book project on the aesthetics and politics of synchronization. 2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118. Evidence from the original. 3. Ibid, 118. 4. The question and critical history of Althusser’s work has once again returned to the critical limelight after about 20 years of (embarrassed) silence. Amongst the literature more closely connected to the present reflections are: L ­ aurence Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002), 25–52 (esp. 29–34); and the special issue of Differences 26, no. 3 (2015). I have explored the trope of “turning back” in relation to interpellation, Orpheus and opera studies, in “2059: A Utopian Turning Back,” The Opera Quarterly Vol. 35 (2019), 118–129. 5. On the turning back, the present essay was inspired by the beautiful collection Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); on Orfeo’s turn in particular, see Peter Szendy’s chapter “The Auditory Re-Turn,” 18–29. 6. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 7. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1993), 75–96: 75. 8. “There is a sudden and abrupt transition from individual … into i­deological subjects …. One becomes a subject by suddenly recognizing that one has always been a subject …. A leap – a moment of sudden emergence – occurs.” Ibid., 76–77. 9. Ibid. 10. He posits that “the junction of the contingent exterior and the intimate interior is essential to the concept of the subject”; Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 81. 11. “Extimacy” is the term coined by Lacan, in the English translations; Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 78. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. C. Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 12. 13. James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 14. For an interesting discussion of this kind of displacement, see Giorgio Biancorosso, “The Harpist in the Closet: Film Music as Epistemological Joke,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 3 (2009), 11–33. 15. Rick Altman, Michel Chion, Mary Ann Doane, to name a few. The history of the study of synchronization and its status within film studies is elegantly and succinctly discussed by James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack, 11–16. 16. Clips mentioned in this essay may be found on YouTube. 17. A well-frequented convention; a similar gesture is for instance in the opening sequence of Funny Games (2007), directed by Michael Haneke, with its ominous play on recognition.

Synch: scenes of implication 31 18. An early instance of this, in an otherwise groundbreaking contribution opening film study to sound editing: “sound and image are used as guarantors of two radically different modes of knowing (emotion and intellection)”; Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 50. 19. In her liner notes to the second volume of collected film music cues, Wendy Carlos so describes the first cue: “1-Shining Title Music. We’ll start off volume two with orchestral and studio music composed for The Shining. The brassy introductory Fanfare is adapted from a Polymoog piece (on volume 1, #19), here performed by large orchestra. It leads directly into this more powerful arrangement of the title music heard in the film: a blend of the Latin ‘Dies Irae’ plainsong, musical textures featuring Rachel’s electrifying vocals, low Moog drones, metal plectrum on autoharp, some delicate high-pitched Danny Bells,’ and an enveloping cross-delay ambient wash. The ‘Dies’ theme is not the original, but comes from an adaptation Berlioz wrote for his ‘Symphonie Fantastique’.” http://www.wendycarlos.com/+rls2. html#notes. 20. Chion, Audio-Vision, 63. 21. On digital audio-visual technologies as means for mobilization, see James Tobias’s editorial introduction to a recent special issue of Music and Moving Image, in particular his considerations on the isolated track as a mobile unit of sound, ready to be recombined: James Tobias, “Isolated Tracks and Media Clouds. Surveying Problems of Positions in Music, Sound, and the Moving Image before and after Digital ‘Convergence,”” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 2 (2015), 101–114. 22. Kevin J. Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 23. One early description was on the blog “The Synchronicity Archive” still viewable here: Archiver, http://web.archive.org/web/19970706112353/; http://www. xnet.com/∼arkiver/dsotr.shtml See also Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics, 7. 24. Ibid. 25. Originally published in EuropaLyrik 1775-heute. Gedichte und Interpretationen, ed. Klaus Lindemann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982), 467–477; then reprinted in an expanded version in Das Schwinden der Sinne, eds. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1984), 140–155; now available in English in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 45–56. 26. Kittler, Truth of the Technological World, 47. 27. Designed by Bernard Speight expressly for Pink Floyd’s live concerts on quadrophonic system, it consisted of a box with 90 degrees potentiometers that could be manipulated by joystick-like levers. One of the original devices is now at the V&A: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O76817/ azimuth-co-ordinator-sound-equipment-speight-bernard/. 28. Kittler, Truth of the Technological World, 49. 29. Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 81. 30. Touch of Evil, dir. Orson Welles, 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2008). 31. Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. 32. See for instance Walter Murch, “Touch of Silence,” in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001, eds. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 83–102. 33. Ibid., 86–87.

32  A. Campana 34. See the diagram of the crane shot in Steven Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis Part I,” Screen 16, no. 1 (Spring 1975), 7–77: 36. 35. Jill Leeper, “Crossing Musical Borders: The Soundtrack of Touch of Evil,” in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, eds. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 226–243. 36. On this vastly complex issue here for brevity’s sake, I shall simply refer to Françoise Lionnet’s formulation: “The global mongrelization or métissage of cultural forms creates complex identities and interrelated, if not overlapping, spaces. In those spaces, struggles for the control of means of representation and self-identification are mediated by a single and immensely powerful symbolic system: the colonial language and the variations to which it is subjected under the pen of writers who enrich, transform, and creolize it” Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations. Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 7. 37. Walter Murch, “Dense Clarity, Clear Density,” https://transom.org/2005/ walter-murch/#part-2. 38. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 8. 39. Ibid., 65. 40. Ibid. 41. Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack, 260. 42. The sophisticated aural texturing of the opening sequence is described in Buhler’s book, in a page of exemplary ekphrastic virtuosity; Buhler. 270. 43. See for instance interviews to Richard King in Designing Sound (http://designingsound.org/2010/08/18/inception-exclusive-interview-with-richard-king/) and SoundWorks Collection (https://vimeo.com/13396749). 44. In Zimmer’s words: “I’m a huge Star Wars fan and I’m a huge John Williams fan, but if you think about the music in a Star Wars or Superman film, the function of it is to be sort of ‘above’ the film: that theme nearly is on top of the movie as opposed to being inside it. In this one, it became much more interesting that all of [the music] was inside it. I’m going to tell you one thing [about the film]: the first thing you hear over the logos – later on you realize – is already telling the story. We tell a lot of story with the music of the film.” Evan Sawdey, “We Built Our Own World: Hans Zimmer and the Music of ‘Inception,’” ­Popmatters July 15, 2010, https://www.popmatters.com/128323-we-built-ourown-world-hans-zimmer-and-the-music-of-inception-2496167094.html. 45. Buhler again aptly summarizes the debate: Theories of the Soundtrack, 279-84. See also Frank Lehman for a thoughtful critique of Zimmer’s compositional practice in “Manufacturing the Epic Score: Hans Zimmer and the Sounds of Significance,” in Music in Epic Film, ed. Stephen Meyer (London: Routledge, 2017), 27–55. 46. For an account of the semiotic work of the song, opening up to considerations of the multisensorial effect of contemporary practices of underscoring, see Jacqueline Waeber, “What’s in a Song: The Case of Christopher Nolan’s Inception,” Sound Effects 3, nos. 1–2 (2013), 45–63. 47. In Zimmer’s own words: “If you were to see this movie a second time, you realize the last note you hear in the movie is the first note in the movie. It’s a Möbius band. But the next thing you hear over the logos [sic!] is actually telling a story. You realize that the elements that we’ve extracted from the Piaf song are the way you get from one dream level to the next. When the movie starts, some action has already happened.” Todd Martens, The LA Times Music Blog, July 27, 2010, https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/07/hans-zimmeron-manipulating-edith-piaf-for-inception-its-how-you-get-from-one-dreamlevel-to-the-nex.html.

2

Armida in-between: the translation of the affetti Giovanni Careri

Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) has been an important source for painting, music, theatre and ballet.1 In this chapter, I propose, however, to leave out the traditional notion of source and wonder how and why “something” of this poem is transposed in music, painting and ballet. This “something” is at a first glance quite easy to describe as characters and narratives, but, if we consider the spreading of the poem beyond the frontier of verbal text as a theoretical problem and the huge dimension of the phenomenon as historically and anthropologically relevant, we will be obliged to elaborate the question in a different way. The love stories of Rinaldo and Armida run through the entire poem, taking on such an important role that Tasso feared they might be considered the poem’s main action to the detriment of the conquest of Jerusalem.2 The macro-structural motivation underlying Tasso’s decision to make them so central stems from the sorceress’s prominent role in the fundamental ideological opposition between love and war. In this protracted episode, as in the entire poem, this opposition is elaborated through all sorts of contaminations. The magician’s entry into the narrative is framed by a diabolic council, her exit by a promise of marriage under the condition that she converts to Christianity. Between of these two extreme poles of the narrative, Armida twice undergoes a process of amorous conversion that turns her from an enemy into a lover. Her character, thus, constitutes the richest and most complex field of experimentation for the representation of affect as force and pathos. In Armida’s story, the force of seduction of beauty and the pathos of love as an ordeal undergone by the abandoned lover are the two opposing forms of an affective phenomenology that is strongly interlinked with the power of images. Taking cues from Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic philosophy of love, Tasso, in fact, constructs an extremely original interplay of mirroring between love and war. In the Rinaldo and Armida episode, the reflection of the self in the image of the other becomes a device of transformation or of conversion: Armida conforms to Rinaldo, becoming like him, languid and pleasure-seeking, although her original intention was to kill the young knight. Rinaldo likewise conforms to Armida and,

34  G. Careri becoming like her, is feminized. At the end of the episode, which takes place on the island of Fortuna, Rinaldo conforms to his knightly ancestry, losing his resemblance to Armida and exhuming his warrior’s virility. This connection between love, resemblance, and gender identity is unique to Tasso and brings into the field of literature the eminently visual device of mirror reflection, establishing a particularly powerful bond between image and affetto: the reflected image not only plays the role of narcissistic gratification or self-awareness but also has the power to induce its viewer to resemble it. Figures of this love/war mirroring are manifested at two different levels of the poetic text: in the literary or aural register of the metrical composition and the rhyme, in particular, and in the narrative elements that describe the process of conformation. A great number of painters have used this complexity, furthermore restoring through painting the visibility of the mirror device. Let me begin with the text. The first figure of the mirror in the episode that interests us can be found in Canto XIV when Armida, determined to kill the hero, becomes his lover. The narrative begins with a description of the trap the magician has laid for Rinaldo. An inscription on a column invites him to come to a little island in a river where he is “softened” and made to fall asleep by the gentle summer breeze and by the song of a nymph who emerges from the river. An emanation of Armida’s magical powers, the nymph is an exemplary embodiment of her combination of nature and erotic magic. The gurgling and rippling of the water compose an acoustic and visual representation of vigour and beauty continuously regenerated by nature in motion. The nymph’s flowing hair mingles with the wavelets, indistinguishable from them. The emergence of this new Venus leads the viewer’s gaze from her hair to her face to her breasts and finally to her “forbidden parts.” Her song invites the listener to enjoy the pleasures of youth without hesitation, toppling principles and values; honour becomes an illusory idol. It seems surprising that the nymph/siren’s stirring song puts Rinaldo into such a deep sleep that his appearance evokes that of death. This deathly torpor represents the fatal effect intended by Armida’s trap. But his sleep also prefigures the state of sensual languor and moral apathy in which Rinaldo will find himself upon reawakening on the island of Fortuna. The hero is under a spell, and Armida, seeing herself in the “mirror” of his languid face, is captured in her own snare “like Narcissus at the spring.” Ma quando in lui fissò lo sguardo e vide come placido in vista egli respira, e ne’ begli occhi un dolce atto che ride, benché sian chiusi (or che fia s’ei li gira?), pria s’arresta sospesa, e gli s’asside poscia vicina, e placar sente ogn’ira

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 35 mentre il risguarda; e ‘n su la vaga fronte pende omai sì che par Narciso al fonte. E quei ch’ivi sorgean vivi sudori accoglie lievemente in un suo velo, e con un dolce ventillar gli ardori gli va temprando de l’estivo cielo. Così (chi ‘l crederia?) sopiti ardori d’occhi nascosi distempràr quel gelo che s’indurava al cor più che diamante, e di nemica ella divenne amante. XIV.66–67 “But when she fixed her gaze upon him and saw how calm of countenance he breathes and how charming a manner laughs about his lovely eyes, though they are closed (now what will it be if he opens them?), first she stands still in suspense, and then sits down beside him, and feels her every wrath becalmed while she gazes upon him; and now she bends so above his handsome face that she seems Narcissus at the spring. And those trembling drops of sweat that welled up there she softly takes off into her veil and with a gentle fanning temper for him the heat of the summery sky. So (who would believe it?) the slumbering warmth of his hidden eyes dissolved that frost that had hardened her heart even more than adamant, and from his enemy she became his lover.”3 By removing his helmet and exposing his forehead to the pleasant waft of a light breeze, Rinaldo has armed his face with the enchanting power of Eros. Even while sleeping, the young knight seems to hint at a sweet smile beneath the veil of his eyelids, a “passive action” that expresses the somatic imprint of pleasure stimulated by the appearance and the song of the nymph. Modulated by the double veil of sleep and closed eyelids, the flame is nonetheless still strong enough to melt Armida’s icy wrath. In the mirror offered by the hero’s sleeping face, the sorceress finds not an image of herself as a murderer in action, but an “other self” rapt with somnolence and pleasure. The return of the “ancient gesture” of Narcissus at the spring here marks the fulfilment of a process of conformation provoked by the encounter with a male body that has succumbed to sleep and pleasure. In his dialogue entitled Il Cataneo, overo le conclusioni amorose (1590), Tasso wrote that love “presupposes as a necessary condition the lover’s resemblance to the beloved.”4 This argument entails the notion of affective conformity developed by Marsilio Ficino in his Libro dell’ Amore. In this seminal Renaissance work on love, the desire of a similar for a similar is linked to the theory of spirits and humours.5 Elaborating the mirroring dimension of Armida’s amorous conversion Nicolas Poussin’s interpretation of this scene declares his belonging to this tradition.6 In a painting from the Pushkin Museum (Figure 2.1), the

36  G. Careri

Figure 2.1 Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, ca. 1628, oil on canvas, 95 × 133 cm. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

sorceress leans over Rinaldo like Narcissus over the spring.7 The painter has introduced four little Cupids into the scene. Hidden behind a tree, the first one is watching the couple like a voyeur, mimicking the role of the viewer who would chance his or her first look upon the painting, before becoming more deeply immersed in contemplation by sharing Armida’s state of mind. Two other Cupids are shooting the sorceress with invisible darts, which mark the trajectory of the force that emanates from the sleeping knight’s body and immobilizes the woman. The diagonal vector of the arrows is reprised, charged with new energy, and re-semanticized by the irrepressible desire of the high-spirited horses rearing on a cloud. Armida’s infatuation and the imminent abduction of the sleeping knight are, thus, arranged along a single line of force ascending in a sort of affective diagram that registers the intensity of the passage from immobility and enthrallment to movement brought about by the awakening of amorous yearning. Associated with the impetuously rearing horses – a traditional image of man’s animal passion – the ballooning red skirt of the attendant obeys the impulse of the invisible force of the Cupids’ darts rather than the natural force of the wind, creating an extraordinary dynamic and chromatic composition of blossoming desire as an irresistible ascending force.8 Armida’s amorous conversion is crystallized in the “mirroring” of two profiles. “What shining power emanates from this unarmed body, its waves

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 37 pervading the adverse soul and inviting it to love?” asked Louis Marin in a fine essay on Poussin’s sleeping figures. The enchantment transmitted by Rinaldo’s sleeping body holds an invisible mirror to Armida the infidel’s magical power, capturing it and subjugating it to the bonds of Eros. The painting from the Pushkin Museum offers the viewer an exact mirror-image comparison of two profiles, of which the one with closed eyes is the male response to the other’s enchanted gaze: a mysterious mirror that invisibly outlines the diameter of the ellipse delineated by the two figures.9 According to Marin, Rinaldo’s face is a magic-thwarting mirror capable of allowing the natural power of love to triumph over the artificial power of magic. We can complete this observation by suggesting that the resemblance between the two profiles is the effect of the amorous conformity generated by blossoming desire. Linking golden yellows to oranges to vermilion-reds in a continuum that pervades the entire surface of the canvas, the panting chromatically develops the intensity of Armida’s absorption into her beloved. The unfeeling coldness of her anger is tossed away and left on the ground with her turquoise-blue mantle, and Armida takes on Rinaldo’s yellow and orange colours. Like the hero’s closed eyelids in the poem, the young man’s golden body in the painting transmits its ardour to the woman, red like the cloth on which it rests, as if atop another body. The viewer, along with Armida, absorbs the warmth of the painting’s hues, transported by the intense wave of colour extending from the centre and reaching the sky through the chariot taking flight. This first interpretation of the scene by Poussin consummately demonstrates the intensity of amorous enthrallment, making absorption the dominant form of experience for viewers of the painting as well. In Poussin’s London version of this episode (Figure 2.2), a significant number of elements has been suppressed or transformed: the river god has become a rivulet of water running along the bottom of the canvas and reappearing behind the island; the four Cupids have been replaced by a winged Cupid steadying the sorceress’s arm before she strikes with her weapon; the little wind-blower putto, the ship, the column, the chariot, and Armida’s attendants are gone, leaving a landscape limited to three trees and a hill; light and colours are no longer fused into a single glowing material, but are clearly distinct from and in contrast with one another. In the first version, the depiction of Armida’s hatred is represented solely by the blue of her tunic on the ground, while here the sorceress is lunging at Rinaldo armed with a long knife. Restrained by Cupid, her aggressive movement is progressively transformed into a gesture of love – while her right arm is poised to strike a mortal blow, her left hand lies limply upon that of the sleeping hero. While the first version develops the intense movement of a single affetto, in this second version two contrary passions clash and culminate in a mutation of affetti.

38  G. Careri

Figure 2.2  Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, oil on canvas, 82.2  ×  109.2  cm, DPG238. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

To better understand what is at work in the grafting of affetto into the image in the London painting, we must return to the verbal construction underlying the process of conversion in the poem. The critical moment of Armida’s conversion to love lies enfolded within the storyline and its tempo. The relevant ottava begins with a Ma (“But”), which introduces a series of adverbs of time that slow and suspend the sorceress’s murderous impulse. This is followed by the adverb quando (when), and it is within the suspension of this Ma quando that Tasso introduces a new segmentation of time, a second halt: pria s’arresta sospesa (“first she stands still in suspense”) followed by a pause, e gli s’asside poscia vicina (“and then sits down beside him”). Then we return to the time prior to the first interruption, to the time of Ma quando … e placar sente ogn’ira mentre il risguarda (“But when … she feels her every wrath becalmed while she gazes upon him”). At this point, however, Armida’s gaze is no longer the same, having been modified by the halt of the pria (“before”) and the pause of the poscia (“after”). In fact, Armida is no longer looking at Rinaldo, but “relooking” at him, in a literal translation of risguarda: E ‘n su la vaga fronte pende omai sì che par Narciso al fonte (“and now she bends so above his handsome face that she seems Narcissus at the spring”). After the two suspensions of the Ma quando and the pria, which delay the execution

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 39 of the murderous act, omai (“now”) indicates that the critical moment has already been overcome, so Armida converts from hatred to love in the imperceptible temporal interval between Ma quando (but when) and omai (now). The temporality of the verbs concurs with the mode of the adverbs to lend form to this mutation of affetti. The past tense of completed action is incessantly re-opened by the present, the tense of duration and process. The past time returns only at the end of the second verse to fix the transformation of Armida into a lover. First, the sorceress’s syncopated action is modified by a series of modal adverbs: she “softly takes off into her veil” (accoglie lievemente in un suo velo) the droplets of sweat from Rinaldo’s face and “with a gentle fanning tempers for him the heat of the summery sky” (con un dolce ventilar gli ardori gli va temprando de l’estivo cielo). Aggressive impulse is transformed into a delicate gesture. Armida is overcome by the languor of the calm and charming knight. Her actions assume the gentle manner of her beloved’s actions: the sopiti ardori (“slumbering warmth”) of Rinaldo’s veiled gaze melt “the frost that had hardened her heart even more than adamant” (quel gelo che s’indurava al cor più che diamante). The transformation of an affetto into its opposite takes the form of a conflicted sensorial process marked by an increase of heat and a transition from hardness to softness. The syncopated dilation of time, the modulation of the action and the passage from ice to heat describe Armida’s transformation as a tensional process, punctuated by pauses and accelerations that culminate in her physical and emotional assimilation with Narcissus at the spring. Poussin also introduces syncopation and skips to delay the completion of Armida’s homicidal act. Behind the sorceress, her white veil twists and knots, continuing her movement, but less forcefully. Armida’s impetus is, thus, granted a metaphorical expression in the wave of fabric that stops at a knot and then picks up its movement again, having lost some of its energy. The interruption is confirmed and reprised on another figurative level by the gesture of Cupid who restrains Armida’s arm. Arranged alongside one another, the two figures involved in the thwarted action complete and enhance one another reciprocally: Cupid gives a name to the force that opposes Armida’s impulse to attack the knight, and the veil is the manifest translation of the little Cupid’s gesture, which makes it flow and reverberate. The impact of this subsiding wave of cloth comes to rest behind Armida’s left shoulder in a second zone of stasis delimited by the shadow cast upon Armida’s left arm: a subtle visualization of the delayed action conjured in the poem through the suspension of temporality between Ma quando and omai. When the forearm re-emerges into the light, it is omai laying atop Rinaldo’s, almost merging with it, thus suggesting an extreme case of conformity whereby a part of the lover’s body is shared with the beloveds. The progressive movement that leads Armida’s body to conform with Rinaldo’s ends in their grazing hands, the woman’s hand is abandoned on the man’s hand who bends it and gives it his own shape by contact.10 This mirroring

40  G. Careri arrangement of the hands is a striking transformation of the two mirroring faces in Poussin’s earlier version of the scene: the optical model of reflection is replaced by a tactile one. The depiction of the projective power of love as immobile mirror-like enthrallment is substituted with a production of resemblance imprinted by contact. This new image of affective conformity conveys the “mystery of passivity” in the scene as a result of loss of control. As in contemporary mysticism, amorous resemblance appears to be the passive reception of the other’s soul, a bending of the lover’s soul in concurrence with the bending of the beloveds. The arrangement of colours is a second form of translation of the modal verbs of the poem into paintings. The passage from the blue of Armida’s veil to the reds and oranges of Rinaldo’s trousers and cuirass describes the mutation in terms of heat; white signals a suspension between these two chromatic poles. By the same logic, the light that violently strikes the left half of the painting becomes more diffused on the right. The dazzling whiteness of Armida’s body reddens slightly on the left, beyond the central axis traced by the tree, particularly her face and the fingers of her limp hand. Her bust, thus, takes on the aspect of a sculpture, the limbs of which are beginning to lose their marble rigidity and become flesh. The orientation of the perfect profile of Armida’s face facilitates the circulation of light and the syncopated development of the action. Just where we would expect an intense expression of pathos, we find instead a new form of suspension. The inclination of her head follows that of her bust, but its momentum is arrested by the barely suggested opening of her mouth. The neutralization of her expression serves to highlight the distribution of the affetti throughout all her body; they spread in waves and leaps which, marking the tempo, mode, and tension of the action, represent them as the progressive mutation of her attitude and colouring rather than as an immobile look on a face. The musical score of this scene composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully on a libretto by Philippe Quinault (first performed in 1686) was criticized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1753 Lettre sur la musique françoise, and later defended by Jean-Philippe Rameau in his 1754 Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe. As Starobinski underscores, Rousseau bases his criticism on a detailed analysis of the affective implications of every word of Quinault’s libretto.11 Lully, Rousseau asserts, did not incorporate the interruptions, the réticences and the transisitions intellectuelles present in the text, but contented himself with a modulation that was “regulated but childish, by that same didactic, without energy, without sensitive affection.” Rousseau bristles at the flattening of the poem’s affective ambivalences, and criticizes the use of the basso continuo “in a situation where all the powers of music must be deployed.”12 In his riposte, Rameau dedicates 56 pages to analyzing Lully’s Armide monologue, defending the expressiveness of the harmony and its superiority to the melody. For example, he observes that modulation to the subdominant and the use of flats

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 41 serve to express pain and sorrow, while modulation to the dominant and the use of sharps serve to express joy. In his Armida (1777), Gluck also uses Quinault’s libretto, but applies the corrections suggested by Rousseau to his music. Hence, as Herbert Schneider has demonstrated, the orchestra comes in with two contrary motifs, “the first which represents the wrath of Armida (the sixteenth notes of the ascending scale) and the other a static figure, which depicts its uncertainty.” This important dispute between critics and composers testifies to the centrality of the episode of Armida’s assault in connection with the modulation of the musical representation of the affetti.13 It is, particularly, interesting to note the recurrence of analytical terms regarding tensional effects that are entirely comparable to those we have been applying to painting. Like a musical score, the mutation of the affetti presented in Poussin’s painting effectively hinges on a carefully developed rhythm in the relationship between figures and background, and on a coloritura based on both the principle of chromatic contrast and the idea of one colour mutating into another. The trees set the cadence, while the curve of the hill maps out the descending melodic line of the action. However, while it encourages the left-to-right reading we have just done, the painting remains an assemblage of simultaneous and contradictory elements: it recounts an amorous conversion without neglecting the ambivalence of the affetti. Armida’s refined hairstyle and bared breasts bring the efficacious weapons of seduction used by the nymph who lulled Rinaldo to sleep in preparation for the sorceress’s assault into the scene, while the knight’s erect helmet contrasts with his languorous state. The sorceress yields to love, but is still armed with her graces, as well as her long knife – the lover of her enemy remains her lover’s enemy. Rinaldo is already the knight held prisoner on the island of Fortuna, the hero who has abandoned war to enjoy the pleasures of the senses, the effeminate man whose sword – a “fierce military instrument” – has become a “useless ornament.” The left arm on the shield between his helmet and sword, his long, tousled hair, his red mouth and his legs open before the unsheathed knife combine to generate a far more feminized figure than the one in Poussin’s earlier version at the Pushkin Museum. But the helmet, with its threatening bird-of-prey shape, denotes the persistence of Mars lying beneath the languid features of Venus.14 While in the first version, Poussin associated amorous enthrallment with the moments prior to and following the encounter; in his second version, he condenses the action in a more complex manner that involves the entire episode. On the one hand, Rinaldo’s situation on the river isle is superimposed upon the one he will come to know on the island of Fortuna. And, the painting itself, set on water that runs right into the bottom of the frame, is presented as an island, a reification that reinforces the association with the island in Canto XVI. On the other hand, as we have seen, the composition also suggests a potential reversal of affetti and actions.

42  G. Careri Here we see how Poussin’s work profits from the limitations of painting, a static art certainly capable of suggesting movement, in which all elements must necessarily be fixed and simultaneously share the space. Hence, what came earlier in the narration remains present before the viewer’s gaze, so the amorous encounter does not cancel out the image of aggression but incorporates it. It is important to note that this ambivalence not only applies to this initial contact between the lovers but also constitutes the affective key to the entire episode. We may, thus, conclude that the London painting is simultaneously able to interpret a single passage of the poem and to visually comprise the entire story of Rinaldo and Armida. Impatient to enjoy her lover’s company, she takes him in her chariot to her palace on the island of Fortuna. Armida’s island is a locus amoenus in which the sorceress’s enchantment has pushed nature beyond its limits: “by enchantment, she makes its flanks and shoulders snowy, and leaves the head verdant and lovely without any snow; and there she builds a palace beside a lake, where in perpetual April her lover is leading a soft and amorous life with her”.15 The palace is protected by “an inextricable labyrinth that twists on itself in a thousand confused windings.” At the centre of this labyrinth of love, the garden is a manifold reflection of Armida’s beauties, the place where her power to induce resemblance is exercised without limit. Reclining there, Rinaldo is reflected in her eyes as she looks at herself in a mirror he holds for her. Around the pair, animals and plants replicate the lovers’ kisses and caresses: “it seems as if Love breathes from every bough” (par che da ogni fronde amore spiri). All of nature is enchanted, to the point that the changing of the seasons has been halted and remains an eternal spring under a spell: “On the same tree and among the selfsame foliage, above the nascent fig the fig grows old: from a single bough hangs down new apple and matured” (Nel tronco istesso e tra l’istessa foglia/sovra il nascente fico invecchia il fico;/pendono a un ramo, un con dorata spoglia/l’altro con verde, il novo e ‘ l pomo antico).16 Sent by Goffredo to free Rinaldo from Armida’s powers, Carlo and Ubaldo must deal with the ferocious beasts, the labyrinth and the beautiful swimmers.17 The good wise man of Ascalon has provided the two knights with the necessary weapons: a magical wand to paralyze the wild animals, a map of the labyrinth that hides the palace gates, and advice on how to prudently resist feminine charms. He has also given them a shining shield, in which Rinaldo, seeing his own reflection, is to realize his state of subjugation and feminization. In order for the suspended time of pleasure and love to yield to the time-in-motion of history and war, one mirror must replace another, and the resemblance between the lovers must be replaced by the resemblance of the man with his ancestors of which the two knights are examples. Having overcome all of the obstacles, the knights stop before the gates of Armida’s palace to contemplate the gold bas reliefs depicting famous tales of heroes dominated by women: Hercules and Iole, Antony

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 43 and Cleopatra.18 Then they enter the garden and, hidden amid the foliage, spy on Armida and Rinaldo. Fra melodia sì tenera, fra tante vaghezze allettatrici e lusinghiere, va quella coppia, e rigida e costante se stessa indura a i vezzi del piacere. Ecco tra fronde e fronde il guardo inante penetra e vede, o pargli di vedere, vede pur certo il vago e la diletta, ch’egli è in grembo a la donna, essa a l’erbetta. Ella dinanzi al petto ha il vel diviso, e ‘l crin sparge incomposto al vento estivo; langue per vezzo, e ‘l suo infiammato viso fan biancheggiando i bei sudor più vivo: qual raggio in onda, le scintilla un riso ne gli umidi occhi tremulo e lascivo. Sovra lui pende; ed ei nel grembo molle le posa il capo, e ‘l volto al volto attolle, E i famelici sguardi avidamente in lei pascendo si consuma e strugge. S’inchina, e i dolci baci ella sovente liba or da gli occhi e da le labra or sugge, ed in quel punto ei sospirar si sente profondo sì che pensi: “Or l’alma fugge e ‘n lei trapassa peregrina.” Ascosi mirano i due guerrier gli atti amorosi. X VI.17–19 Amid so tender a melody, among so many alluring and deceptive beauties, that pair proceeds; and rigid and unswerving they harden themselves against the charms of pleasure. Now lo, their vision pierces ahead among the leaves, and sees, or seems to see; it sees for certain the lover and his beloved, how he is in his lady’s lap, she is on the lawn. She has her veil open at her bosom and her hair she looses in disarray to the summer air: she is languishing under his caress and her face, all flushed, is made more radiant by the silvering of lovely drops of sweat; like sunlight on the water a tremulous and wanton smile glints in her glistening eyes. She bends above him and he lays his head on her soft lap and lifts his face to hers; And avidly feeding on her his ravenous gaze is consumed and destroyed. She leans down and now from his eyes repeatedly drinks in sweet kisses, and now sucks them from his lips. And at the same moment he is heard to sigh so deeply that you would think “Now his soul is leaving him and makes

44  G. Careri a pilgrimage into her.” Hidden away, the two warriors watch the amorous interplay. The couple’s position and the “drinking” of kisses reveal the hero’s subordination to the sorceress through a combination of role-reversal gestures that evoke Mars abandoning himself to Venus’s embrace at the beginning of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (a text reprised by Angelo Poliziano in the first book of the Stanze). The return of the literary gesture expressing the temporary victory of love and poetry over war and the course of history is associated with the evocation of Ficino’s concept of the incorporation of the lover’s soul into that of the beloved. Dal fianco de l’amante (estranio arnese) un cristallo pendea lucido e netto. Sorse, e quel fra le mani a lui sospese a i misteri d’Amor ministro eletto. Con luci ella ridenti, ei con accese, mirano in vari oggetti un solo oggetto: ella del vetro a sé fa specchio, ed egli gli occhi di lei sereni a sé fa spegli. L’uno di servitù, l’altra d’impero si gloria, ella in se stessa ed egli in lei. “Volgi,” dicea, “deh volgi,” il cavaliero “a me quegli occhi onde beata bèi, ché son, se tu no ‘l sai, ritratto vero de le bellezze tue gli incendi miei; la forma lor, la meraviglia a pieno più che il cristallo tuo mostra il mio seno. XVI.20–21 “From the lover’s side hung down (strange armour), a crystal mirror shining and clear. He rose and held it up for her between his hands, the chosen vessel for the mysteries of Love. He with enkindled, she with laughing eyes, in varying objects gaze on one object only: she makes herself a mirror out of glass, and he makes himself mirrors of her limpid eyes. One of the glories in his servitude, the other in her power, she in herself and he in her. “Turn, oh turn to me those eyes (the knight was saying) by which in your happiness you make others happy; for (if you are not aware of it) my flames are the true portrait of your beauties; their shape, their marvellous qualities my breast sets forth in full, more than your mirror.” Rinaldo does not ask Armida to look at him, but rather to use his heart as a more truthful mirror than the real one he is holding for her. This interplay of gazes and reflections replicates, ad infinitum and to the heavens, “a single object” (un solo oggetto): the sorceress’s face. This time, the couple’s

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 45 position and Rinaldo’s jealous words define Armida’s narcissistic posture in terms of domination. Armida laughs in response to Rinaldo’s jealousy of the mirror (Ride Armida a quel dir, ma non che cesse) and her pleasure in self-contemplation is manifested in both a graphic and aural way: dire (say) is the anagram of ride (laugh), and Armida’s name is present in this anagram a+dir+ma. As Beatrice Rima pithily noted, the verses we have cited comprise mirroring phonetic and semantic structures, particularly in the development of the lemma volto (face, but also the participle of “to turn to”) in the verb forms volgere (turn to) and ri-volgere (to address).19 The visual device Annibale Carracci concocted to represent this scene in his painting dated of 1601 entails the production of tension and competition between two forms of resemblance (Figure 2.3). On the one hand, the hero relates to Armida through a relationship of likeness, while on the other hand he is in a relationship of unlikeness with regard to the two knights hidden among the foliage. The gleam and rugged hirsuteness of the concealed knights’ few visible traits – their helmets and beards – convey a form of masculinization as extreme as Rinaldo’s feminization. This polarization corresponds to the convergence of two mirrors: the knights’ mirroring shields are presented as the emanation of their plan to remasculinize the young hero, in opposition to the conformant power of the Venus-like mirror

Figure 2.3   A nnibale Carracci, Rinaldo and Armida, 1600–1601, oil on canvas, 166 × 237 cm. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Napoli, © Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano.

46  G. Careri of Armida’s face for Rinaldo. Placed closer to the couple than in any other of the long series of paintings that illustrate the scene, the two knights seem to press upon them, threatening the imminent end of their idyll. This conflict of resemblance is at the very core of the court ballet La delivrance de Renault danced by Louis XIII in 1617 during the carnival. Margaret McGowan divides it into five main scenes marked by set changes.20 The ballet was based on Estienne Durand’s libretto and on the five engravings by an anonymous artist illustrating it. The first scene represents a mountain in which a number of grottoes are dug, the resting places of Rinaldo, Armida and her demons. The king dances the role of the fire demon, and his gentlemen are demons of water, air, hunting, gambling, war and vanity, with others representing madmen, misers, peasants and moors. Some are the personification of Armida’s moral defects or the evil effects of the vices she embodies, yet others interpret natural elements she controls with her magic. These demons, as stated in the libretto, were to stand in for Armida near Rinaldo “with the task of making him pass the time in every imaginable delight.” The king and his gentlemen are, thus, initially associated with both Armida’s powers and Rinaldo’s state of captivity and feminization. The dramatic vicissitudes of the ballet on the one hand – Rinaldo seeing himself in the mirror, stripping his clothes, and following the knights who have come to liberate him – and its conclusion on the other hand – the hero’s return to the ranks of Goffredo’s knights – confirm the triumph of virtue and masculinity over vice and femininity, but as Mark Franko underscored, the king’s two roles are not independent.21 In keeping with the model we have illustrated, at the end of the ballet the king/Goffredo captures the strength that characterized him as the king/fire demon. The continuity between the king/demon and the king/Goffredo is essentially based on the effects of light produced by the two costumes. The fire demon costume is a fragmented mirror of gold and silver flames, while the Goffredo costume and its mask, in particular, are of precious stones. In both cases, the light reflected from the torches around the stage dazzles the audience, to the point that spectators are literally bewildered during Goffredo’s appearance: “It was not clear whether the masked participants were immobilized by the wonder of seeing so much beauty, or whether the beauties themselves remained still for fear of moving even a tiny distance away from the pleasant view of the masked participants.”22 Louis/Goffredo and Louis/regenerated demon are the demoniacal forces of fire transformed and intensified into the shining light of the Sun King. The regeneration of the primary energy of fire and light is one of the fundamental anthropological functions implicit in the rite of carnival. In this ballet, we see a carnival twisted to serve the aims of power, but the rebirth it brings about has all of the effects of a rite of renewal: “All together they felt the power that His Majesty had over their minds at that moment, because those who did not have good luck at all acquired it, and those who had

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 47 perfected it to the point that they could no longer lose it.”23 The efficacious ritual of the king’s dance is based on his grace: the gracefulness of his steps, which the other dancers imitate, and above all the grace that emanates from his luminous presence.24 The ballet confirms the efficacy of the model of conformation underlying our analysis and allows us to observe that this model is not just a matter of poetry and painting but concerns dance as well.25 This application of the poem to the political body of the king allows me to come back to my question about “this something” trespassing the arts: what passes between the arts is a device capable of making visible the tensions and oppositions of values that govern the relationship of power between genders. This polarization between resemblance and dissimilarity as forces have been masterly formalized by Tasso and then transformed and enriched by two generations of poets, painter, musicians and dancers.

Notes 1. This chapter summarizes and reworks some elements of my book Gestes d’amour et de guerre. La Jérusalem délivrée, images et affects (XVIe XVIIIe), published by EHESS in 2005 and in Italian by Saggiatore in 2010. The English translation is announced for 2021 by the publisher Harvey Miller with the title: The making of the affetti. Jerusalem Delivered from Carracci to Tiepolo. 2. Letter dated July 29, 1575, in Le lettere di Torquato Tasso disposte per ordine di tempo ed illustrate da Cesare Guasti, ed. Cesare Guasti, (Firenze: Monnier, 1854–1855), 1:104. 3. Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered. An English Prose Version, translated and edited by Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). All following translations of Tasso’s text are taken from this edition. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, a cura di Lanfranco Caretti (Torino: Einaudi, 1971). 4. Torquato Tasso Il Cataneo overo delle conclusioni amorose, in Torquato Tasso, Prose, ed. Ettore Mazzali (Milano and Napoli: Ricciardi, 1959), 298. 5. Marsilio Ficino, Il libro dell’Amore (Firenze: Olschky, 1987). In particular, in Chapter VIII of Oration Seven entitled Come può l’amante diventare simile allo amato (“How the Lover Can Come to Resemble the Beloved”), 201–202. 6. On the relationship between G. B. Marino and Nicolas Poussin see Graziani Françoise, “Poussin mariniste: la mythologie des images,” in Bonfait Olivier, Poussin et Rome, (Roma-Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996), 367– 385; Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chap. IV; A partial list of depictions of the episode was published by Andor Piegler, Barockthemen. Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17 und 18 Jahrunderts (Verlag der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Budapest, 1971), 467. 7. The chronology of Poussin’s paintings drawn from Tasso’s works is still under discussion. The first version of Rinaldo and Armida is from 1624 according to J. Thullier, and from 1630 according to Youri Zolotov’s group. The date of the version in the Dulwich Picture Gallery is set by Thullier at around 1624, while Pierre Rosenberg and most specialists propose 1628-1630. Rosenberg dates at 1628-1629 the Tancredi and Erminia at the Hermitage, generally set around 1631, while he accepts the dates proposed by R. Verdi for the Birmingham version (1634 circa), which Thullier dates to 1639–1640.

48  G. Careri 8. On the symbolic value of the figure of the horse, see, among others, Wind Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Yale: Yale University Press, 1958). 9. Marin Louis, “À l’éveil des métamorphoses: Poussin, 1625-1635,” in Sublime Poussin (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 161–174: 161. 10. As in the first version of this scene, the joining of the two lovers is echoed by the joining of two trees. 11. See Jean Starobinski, “Rousseau et l’expression musicale,” in Carlo Ossola, Parigi-Venezia. Cultura, relazioni, influenze negli scambi intelletuali del ­Settecento (Firenze: Olchski, 1998), 137–171. 12. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique française, Paris 1753, “régulière mais puérile, par cela même scolastique, sans énergie, sans affection sensible […] dans une situation où toutes les puissances de la musique doivent être déployées,” in Ouvres Complètes de J.J. Rousseau avec des notes historiques, vol. 13 (Paris: Chez Furne, Libraire-Éditeur, 1835), 541. 13. See Starobinski , “Rousseau,”; Herbert Schneider, “Rameau et la tradition lulliste,” in Jean-Philippe Rameau (Actes du colloque de Dijon), ed. by Jérôme De la Gorce (Paris-Champion/ Genève-Slatkine 1983), 240-297; Jean-Philippe Rameau, Musique raisonnée (Paris: Editions Stock,1980); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Dictionnaire de musique. Barcarolles,” in OEuves complètes (Paaris: Gallimard, 2000), Vol. 2, 605–1191; Mario Armellini, Le due Armide. Metamorfosi estetiche e drammaturgiche da Lully a Gluck (Firenze: Passigli, 1991). Page numbers ?? 14. This analysis harmonizes with one of the Mars and Venus form the Boston Museum by Cropper & Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, chpt.6. 15. Jerusalem Delivered, XVI, 11. 16. Gerusamme Liberata, L XIV, 70 and 71 17. The knights are taken to the island on a flying ship piloted by a woman who, like the island, is called Fortuna; on the tension in Tasso between the figure of Fortuna and that of Providence see Stefano Prandi, “Dal mare della fortuna al porto della Provvidenza: appunti su un’ossessione tassiana,” in Torquato tasso e l’Università, edited by Walter Moretti and Luigi Pepe (Firenze: Olschky, 1997), 433–450. 18. A few observations on these bas-reliefs in Giovanni Careri, “L’ecfrasi tra parole e pittura,” in Ecfrasi: modelli ed esempi dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Roma: Bulzoni, 2004), 391–404. 19. See Beatrice Rima, Lo specchio e il suo enigma. Vita di un tema intorno a Tasso e Marino (Padova: Antenore, Padova 1991), 59. The dominant affective note of the poem, according to Giovanni Getto, Nel mondo della Gerusalemme, (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1968); for Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti the end of the idyll is a crucial element in Tasso’s approach to epic, see Fine dell’idillio. Da Dante al Marino, (Genova: Il melangolo, 1978), 175–221. 20. Margaret McGowan, L’Art du ballet de cour (1581–1643) (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1963), 101 and 115. 21. Mark Franko, «Jouer avec le feu: la subjectivité du roi dans la Délivrance de Renaud», in La Jérusalem délivrée du Tasse. Poésie, peinture, musique, ballet, edited by Giovanni Careri (Paris: Klincksiek-Musée du Louvre, 1999), 159– 177:162. My interpretation of the ballet owes much to my readings of this article and to conversations with its author, who I thank for having introduced me to a sphere of research of which I had minimal knowledge. 22. “Il fut douteux encore si les masques paroissoyent immobiles pour l’estonne ment de voir tant de beautez ou si les beautez mesmes ne se mouvoyent point de peur de se divertir tant soit peu de l’agreable veuë des masques.” Paul Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades de cour d’Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652), (Genève: Slatkine, 1968), vol. II, 100–135.

Armida in-between: The translation of the affetti 49 23. Lacroix, Ballets, 100–135. “Tous ensembles se sentirent de la puissance que sa Majesté eust alors sur les esprits: car ceux qui n’avoyent point de bonne fortune, en acquirent, et ceux qui en avoyent les mirent en point de ne pouvoir estre perduës” 24. On the description of the erotic effects produced by the dancing king on his courtiers, see Mark Franko, “The King Cross-Dressed: Power and Force in Royal ballets,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Sara E. Melzer Sara and Norberg Kathryn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 64–84:74–75, footnote 52. 25. My analysis of the ballet is largely based on Franko’s. However, I have integrated it with an application of the model of conformity to or imitation of the steps danced by the King.

Part II

Voice as presence and absence

3

La voix humaine (1959–2016) and the “epiphany” of the performer’s identity Francesca Placanica

This contribution originated as a reflection on Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s view of opera as the product par excellence of a culture of presence.1 However, whereas Gumbrecht’s analysis focused on multi-character opera, in musical monodrama, where there is no interaction between the dramatis personae, a single performer is responsible for recreating an equivalent to the dramatic “events” in a constant dialectic between presence and absence, silence and “vocal apparitions.”2 In rejecting the epiphany of sonic substance and meaning conveyed by the libretto as elements determining a successful production, Gumbrecht’s definition of opera suggests that an ideal operatic production will support and deliver “the epiphany of a synaesthesia of musical substances” through the complexity and intensity of the interplay of voice and instruments, the filling of the space on stage and the choreography of bodies over the mimetic play of costumes, gestures and facial expressions.3 For example, the various singers’ entrances and exits, and how their voices alternate between sound and rest create strong event effects. These various aural and visual event effects are experienced simultaneously by the spectator as a revelation triggering all the senses. At its core, the operatic production is the result of a collective synergy devoted to recreating the authoritative will of a heavily structured hierarchy which, through the commitment mainly of a director and a conductor, works in combination to deliver the composer’s voice.4 In this overcrowded multi-authorial process, performers are relegated to the role of mere vessels, acting functionally to recreate event effects, yet devoid of their own authorial voice. In musical monodrama, however, the flow is governed by the soloist in action on stage and, in the case of pieces with orchestra and heterogeneous productions, by the soloist’s exclusive rapport with the conductor and director. Tensions between all the dramaturgical elements of opera are heightened, as they are projected through a one-to-one negotiation that shortens the distance between the singer’s body and the text on the one hand, and the soloist’s technique and dramaturgy on the other. Intriguingly, the embodiment of a single character on stage accentuates its “present-ness” more than any other operatic form. It is, therefore, necessary to relocate the “epiphany of synaesthesia of musical substances” to the much more prosaic yet no

54

F. Placanica

less ephemeral realm of materiality, positing that the bodily synaesthesia incarnated by the soloist becomes the work as performed itself. More than in other musical form of representation, the “carnal” quality of such synaesthesia depends entirely on the performer’s vocal embodiment. As I argue elsewhere, monodrama offers an extraordinary opportunity to become an arena for the performer’s persona in ways unparalleled in other forms of music theatre.5 A solitary performer single-handedly challenges the stage, and how her manifestation embodies this challenge necessarily has to do with her identity. Moreover, producers feel compelled to compensate for the dramaturgical shortage in works for solo performer by radicalizing the protagonist’s identity. Rapport between the soloist’s image and the personage may also emerge as a discrepancy when the singer’s corporeality does not match the image of the character being played.6 It is, thus, impossible to establish an idiomatic correspondence between the performer’s persona and her performative self without taking into account the multilayered nature of identity, intended not as a “single construct” but as a combination of interdependent elements, often based on both verbal and non-verbal communication systems.7 By and large, identity should be appraised in terms of a multi-faceted and changing combination of elements developed in relation to each other. Its construction draws on verbal and non-verbal discourses that structure our social interactions. In the music business, personal characteristics and social frameworks are intertwined with the music and the performance context.8 As Philip Auslander puts it, “To be a musician is to perform an identity in a social realm”; hence, “what musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae.”9 Multiple “patterns of behaviour and personality traits,” such as the characters of those performing and their iconic roles as stars, annexed with stage etiquette, come together in the construction of identity. This is ultimately a complex negotiation drenched in all elements comprising the “social realm,” in which their personalities are projected, and the spectacle’s consumers play an active part as receivers of a sophisticated communication act. In the current music business scenario, the performer’s persona is the intermediated result of a multi-agential construction that often owes its entire raison d’être to commercialization. This is especially true for opera, as a highly packaged form of entertainment. As Morris states, opera’s “highly public, official, ur ban cu ltural fo rm” is “m aterially ov er-determined,” ch aracterized by an overload of resources that depends on practical contingencies and technicalities, as well as skills, and the capacity to distribute and communicate the work to a larger audience.10 In most cases, the soloist’s identity is constructed in response to the demands of a marketplace that increasingly relies on the star system to augment the public exposure of productions.11 Although the engagement of international operatic stars has been ingrained in modes of operatic production since the birth of market opera in Venice in the seventeenth century, it was an even more peculiar characteristic of the twentieth century,

La Voix humaine and the performer’s identity 55 facilitated by modern, cheaper transport. The hiring of entire casts or specific soloists often follows a logic similar to sponsored televised sports, where the season’s success depends on the combined capacity of the team to be excellent while on show. Managers buy into the audience’s demands to access both the private and public personae of their favourite divas, capitalizing on opportunities for interaction provided by current social media technology, which allows unprecedented proximity to their favourite stars.12 In Davidson’s analysis, “both media promotion and a compliance with the social tastes of a particular time” are seen as tangible factors in the performer’s success.13 These are often more-or-less known subjective features of their off-stage personae. Whereas specific casts often headline the most financially successful productions, the multilayered authoriality of the operatic process gets in the way of the self-carved projection of an individual performer, who will usually describe her/his presence in the production as an utterly unexpected honour bestowed on their undeserving performance personae by a Pantheon of patrons. Consequently, even in monodrama, the performer’s sonic self remains an artefact, the mediated self-projection of a performer. It is ultimately the epiphany of an identity constructed according to the dictates of the “distributed subjectivities” involved in the production and reception processes, in which the performer’s individual voice is easily lost.14 This is because in the staging of a monodrama, traditionally a battlefield for a female performer, the female protagonist triggers a different set of expectations, dependent on her persona and personage. As Abbate puts it: When we watch and hear a female performer, we are observing her, yet we are also doing something for which there’s no word: the aural version of staring. And looking and listening are not simply equivalent activities in different sensory realms. Seeing a female figure may well more or less automatically invoke our culture’s opposition of male (active subject) and female (passive object), as Mulvey describes it. But listening to the female singing voice is a more complicated phenomenon. Visually, the character singing is the passive object of our gaze. But, aurally, she is resonant; her musical speech drowns out everything in range, and we sit as passive objects, battered by that voice. As a voice, she slips into the “male/active/­subject” position in other ways as well, since a singer, more than any other musical performer, enters into that Jacobin uprising inherent in the phenomenology of live performance and stands before us having wrested the composing voice away from the librettist and composer who wrote the score.15 Mulvey’s encompassing reading applies to the wide range of women’s representations in performance, where their image appears to be shaped to satisfy the male receiver.16 Her understanding of the power dynamics regulating

56  F. Placanica performance processes and determining the objectification of women’s bodies, as sexual representations fashioned to satisfy the male spectator, may apply to monodrama; yet so does Abbate’s understanding of the performer’s vocal agency, able to whisk away the composer’s voice, or at least add another layer of authority. In any case, Mulvey’s reading fully applies to the subtle marketing conventions of the current classical music scenario, where female performers’ appearances are meticulously packaged to meet the cultural canon of beauty and youth as essential factors for greater success. Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, premiered on February 6, 1958 at the Opéra-Comique and based on Jean Cocteau’s text for his 1928 play, offers a luminous synthesis of all these factors. This one-woman opera has been a testing ground for both rising stars and established sopranos and mezzo-­ sopranos. Poulenc’s text is a powerful work to sing and a fascinating work to write about, given the diverse scholarship on the topic over the last 30 years. In recent times, following the 50th anniversary of Poulenc’s death in 2013, the monodrama has experienced a true performance renaissance, often programmed in festivals and opera seasons owing to its limited resource demands. It is performed with either full or chamber orchestra or piano accompaniment, with one set, no scene changes, no sophisticated lighting, and only one interpreter. In addition, at 35 to 40 minutes long, La Voix humaine fits well into the second half of a chamber music recital and can easily be staged in concert halls as well as opera houses. It is often paired with works with similar content, such as Menotti’s The Telephone, or similar structure, such as Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle. A work meant as much for the ear as for the eye, it features a solo female protagonist – anonymous in that she is named generically Elle in Jean Cocteau’s libretto.17 The woman’s torment is caused by an imaginary telephone conversation during which the lover is bidding her farewell. Although we never see or hear the imaginary interlocutors, the performer re-enacts the conversation, interspersed with interruptions, intrusions, lies and revelations, all materializing through Elle’s reactions and responses. During the conversation, we learn that the woman has attempted suicide. As the monologue unfolds, more characters come progressively to populate the imaginary scene that we construct through her broken lines and silences. For instance, in addition to her former lover at the other end of the line, we picture the presence of the other woman at his side, as we gradually become aware that he is lying about his whereabouts. Most importantly, the domestic and intimate atmosphere, prompted by the representation of a woman in distress in her own bedroom, clashes with the invasive interruptions of a telephone operator, who eavesdrops and even judges the conversation. In essence, the woman is bidding her long-standing lover goodbye while falling victim to the machine, in the midst of wrong numbers, party-line interruptions and abrupt disconnections. This disrupted communication diminishes the pathetic tone of the telephone call and enhances its drama, thereby infusing it with a quasi-grotesque quality. The discontinuity in the interaction

La Voix humaine and the performer’s identity 57 between the former lovers, and their use of the telephone as their ultimate connection, becomes a metaphor for the loss of communication and intimacy between the couple, whose relationship has reached an inexorable end. In his preface to the literary edition of La Voix humaine, Cocteau explains his conception.18 As he had so often been reproached for resorting to mechanical effects in his plays, here he wanted to employ the simplest of forms – one act, one room, one character in love – and the most modern of props, the telephone.19 Furthermore, he felt it necessary to depict an anonymous woman, and to avoid the usual repartee of the “language of lovers,” which he found “as unbearable as the language of children.” In short, he wanted to write “un unreadable play that would be a vehicle for an actress.”20 Berthe de Bovy created the role of Elle at the Comédie-Francaise, and the play soon launched the triumphant worldwide careers of many actresses delivering bravura solo performances. The theatre role was played by Jo Ann Sayers (in French on a New York stage), Lillebil Ibsen (in Norwegian on stage in Oslo), and Simone Signoret (in French, on Vinyl).21 The movie industry also devoted constant attention to it throughout the century. The Italian adaptation, Una voce umana, formed part of the 1947 two-episode film L’amore by Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, and featured an award-winning interpretation by Anna Magnani. Most notably, Rossellini describes his film as “the investigation of the actress, not the portrayal of the character,” and defines Magnani as the object of his “experiment.”22 The film might, in fact, be read as a documentary of Magnani interpreting the role, in which the representation of the character never emerges over Magnani’s presence.23 In 1966, Ingrid Bergman played the role under the direction of Ted Kotcheff (in English, on record and television).24 While composing his opera, Poulenc corresponded with Cocteau and maintained the main plan of the work, as its motivic ideas fit the different phases – the dog, the lie, the overdose – that Cocteau had originally conceived in the play. In addition to Cocteau’s lengthy prescription for the play, Poulenc added a few lines on the performer’s musical interpretation.25 In short, the singer is in charge of the dramatic tempi and of the dialectic between silences and musical passages, her interpretation being hierarchically the most significant driver in the performance. In addition to Poulenc’s musical prescriptions, Cocteau closely monitored the premiere’s mise en scène, giving Poulenc suggestions about costumes and scene:26 […] The appearance of the character must not be tragic. It must not be frivolous. No studied elegance. The young woman has simply put on what she has to hand but she is waiting for that telephone call from her lover and believes she will be visible to him. In spite of her lie about the pink dress, there is natural elegance about her that of a young woman used to looking elegant.

58  F. Placanica The tragic touch will come from a shawl, or a trench-coat, or a loden, which she will throw over her shoulders without a trace of coquetterie – because she is cold, “cold within.” This is how I will show her inner coldness on stage.27 The opera was created by Denise Duval at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, then sung at La Piccola Scala in Milan in 1959. Its huge success was unanimously attributed to the collaborative relationship between Poulenc and his lifetime collaborator Duval, who influenced the conception of the vocal role. After the premiere, she suggested a cut to the so-called “scene of the dog,” because she thought the scene detracted from the intimate drama being lived by the woman. In addition to fully staged performances in the years following the premiere, Duval gave various public performances accompanied by Poulenc at the piano. Their interaction made an authoritative statement in the performance tradition of the work and kept alive the original performance essence of the opera.28 In 1970, director Dominique Delouche started work on the film La Voix humaine, with Denise Duval as a protagonist.29 The singer’s serious vocal illness had forced her to give up the role in October 1965. Nevertheless, Delouche, who had witnessed the opera’s premiere at the Opéra-Comique, pursued his plan, using the 1959 recording conducted by Georges Prêtre as the musical substance of the movie. Delouche’s film version deliberately renounces Cocteau’s stylization of the set and costumes, instead creating a luxurious setting that nearly drowns the actress, whose solitude appears as intensely as ever against the opulence of her surroundings. The director looks for ways to parallel the orchestral motion and rhythm through the camera, with numerous close-ups scrutinizing Duval’s face in an exemplary performance. Delouche’s film is faithful to Cocteau’s first edition of the work; and indeed, by the end of the movie, Duval’s languishing interpretation seems to recall the “bleeding animal” and its slow haemorrhage described in the preface to the play. The scenes respect the timing provided by the original recording, thereby authoritatively denoting agreement between the author of the play, the composer and the performer. In 1999, the 100th anniversary of Poulenc’s birth, Delouche returned to the opera and made a proposal to the music label Muzzik to film a documentary on its making.30 The interpretation he proposed on this occasion takes the shape of a masterclass given by Duval to the young performer, Sophie Fournier and her coach and accompanist, Vincent Leterme, during preparations for staging the work. In the course of the conversation, Duval reconstructs the main phases of the creation and the meaning of the opera. From time to time, the conversation with Duval becomes a moving confession of the personal dramas during the making of the opera in the lives of both composer and performer, who were both dealing with the loss of a lover. Duval defines the collaborative work between herself and

La Voix humaine and the performer’s identity 59 Poulenc as “the journal of their tears.” But of course, there is more to it. The masterclass sets up a direct link between the 1958 compositional process, the 1958 and 1959 musical and performance staging processes and the way in which Duval structurally affected the performance. Furthermore, the demands made by the older singer on the young interpreter are probably very similar to those that Poulenc exacted from the former, as are her own creative responses to them. Delouche’s documentary, therefore, provides a testament and a fundamental legacy to the staging of the work throughout the twentieth century. Most importantly, Duval highlights some important points for the performance of the opera, particularly the attention to prosody, the need not to make the acting too piteous, respect for the timing of the drama, and the key role of the telephone, the dehumanized objective correlative of the drama. For Poulenc, achieving a credible “true time” was more than an exigency: it is vital to keep up with the timing of the silences when the imaginary interlocutor speaks at the other end of the line. In trying to deliver these true tempi, Denise Duval asked Fournier to invent her lover’s answers and make them understandable. In the same year, Sophie Fournier took on the role of Elle directly from Denise Duval, performing at the Opéra de Lyon. In 2011, she returned to the opera at the Festival Musiques au Pays de Pierre Loti at the Citadelle du Château d’Oléron. Renaud Machart of Le Monde praised this performance and concluded: Sophie Fournier has a powerful voice, a medium without flaws that allows her to be really lyrical in the sung passages and at ease with the acted sequences. She has such a natural diction, a pronunciation, that allow her to be both a perfect musician and a diseuse, and she places her voix humaine at the exact boundaries between theatre and opera. She never sings, she always speaks and delivers La Voix humaine even better than if she sang it for real.31 Diapason magazine defined Sophie Fournier as “an almost ideal reincarnation of Denise Duval.”32 Fournier was indeed the vehicle for a historically informed performance and a link between the agents involved in the creation of the role. However, her performance might be termed a re-­enactment rather than an original exploration. Nowadays, the opera appears increasingly to flaunt its presentness to the audience, leaving almost nothing to theatrical illusion. La Voix humaine is more and more often staged as a chamber work, in which a piano or an orchestra are interlocutors of the scene, pairing up with, wrapping up, or in some cases even drowning the performer. In a production by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra during Operadagen Rotterdam 2010, the presence of non-diegetic elements on stage was monumental: a full orchestra almost shielded the scene, which

60  F. Placanica was relegated to a corner. In return, the action was projected in black and white on a screen hanging above the orchestra, clearly recalling Delouche’s 1970 movie. The performance stage seemed almost to be an accessory to the music, which certainly played an equal if not predominant role, both visually and acoustically. The production starred Dutch mezzo Cora Burggraaf, known as a specialist in trouser roles, and the staging was tailored to her specific features: Elle relinquished her nightgown and instead wore trousers and a male shirt, and the androgynous quality of her appearance was mirrored in the freshness of her movements and delivery. Setting the scene to suit the performer’s “marketable” features again makes the opera a unique cameo for the distinctive qualities of emerging young singers. The performer’s body and synaesthetic vocal eroticism is radicalized in the performances of sopranos Carole Farley and Julia Migenes, who capitalize on the role’s sensuality in both their live performances and subsequent video transpositions.33 In a staging by Opera Auckland in 2011, a statuesque and sensual Camille Zamora is surrounded by the orchestra on stage, thus completely abandoning the theatrical illusion of the piece and losing the effect of its penetrating solitude. Zamora’s black nightgown links with the tradition of black lingerie, which infringes Cocteau’s prescription of the “shiny cloth” but was initiated by Metropolitan Opera soprano Carole Farley and continued by other significant performers such as Julia Migenes. The character delineated by Zamora is fierce and confident, while the coquette narrative of her body language takes the audience almost abruptly, though not convincingly enough, to her final desperation. Perhaps, because she is not entirely comfortable with the “absence” of her interlocutors, Zamora stresses her presentness, possibly overacting and producing an extremely energetic rendition of the mediocre victim of love stipulated by Cocteau. Her interpretation is far from being “anonymous,” and indeed irony frequently appears in her facial expression. This staging is basically about the performer’s body, which also appeared in all advertising materials for the production. This trend in production seems to be telling of a virtual “impasse,” as the empowerment of a performer’s operatic prowess responds to the limited breadth of the work and its shortage of melodramatic action.34 Most recently, this attitude seems to have invaded the theatrical structure of the work, denaturalizing its solipsistic nature through the juxtaposition of “artificial” characters on stage. The same effect is realized by Krzysztof Warlikowski in the 2015 double-bill production starring Barbara Hannigan in the role of Elle, alongside Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók. Lui, the invisible male character supposed to be evoked only in Elle’s singing, appears in the background and, though deprived of any sonic utterance, heavily intrudes and interacts on stage until the final coup de théâtre, when the stage is shaken by the appearance of a revolver and subsequent blood.35 These performative excesses seem to result from a sort of deadlock. The

La Voix humaine and the performer’s identity 61 question is whether the sources of this virtual “impasse” arise in response to the limited breadth and non-conventional musical language of these works, or whether they are dictated by the soloist’s unique gendered utterance. Monodrama presents all the challenges of staging the dialectic between presence and absence, which, according to Gumbrecht, is the foundation of operatic production. Indeed, monodrama, as the performative arena of a soloist alone, uniquely represents the epiphany of synaesthesia springing from the solo performer’s body. As we have observed, productions of La voix humaine emanate from a burgeoning oral subtext assembled by composer and librettist, which then radicalize the performer’s credentials, becoming an agenda for her constructed identity. Through numerous available manifestations, La Voix humaine absorbs an endless spectrum of legitimate appearances with the complicity of the performers’ embodiments, which often respond to particular marketing strategies. Raising awareness of the singing body and its vocal agency may illuminate individual performers’ embodied potential, bringing forth the vocalists’ unique utterance, and encouraging them to project their own voices within the full spectrum of materiality, beyond commercialization purposes. Delivering the findings of this subjective immersion through sharing and interconnections with production partners, without bending to the needs of marketability, may engender authoritative layers of intertextuality that may enliven the production of these pieces, away from the reiterated patterns of consumerism that hinder appreciation of the work by both performers and audiences.

Notes





1. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence: A Modernist View on Music, Libretti, and Staging,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, ed. Karol Berger & Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 343–56. 2. Michal Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. Gumbrecht, “Production of Presence,” 343. 4. Christopher Morris, “‘Too Much Music’: The Media of Opera,” in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 95–116: 109. 5. Francesca Placanica, “The Unsung One: The Performer’s Voice in Twentiethcentury Musical Monodrama,” Journal of Musicological Research, 37(2)(2018), 119–140, DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2017.1381522. 6. Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Die Oper als ‘Prototyp des Theatralischen’: Zur Reflexion des Aufführungsbegriffs in John Cages Europeras 1 & 2,” in Musiktheater Heute: Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel, ed. Hermann Danuser & Matthias Kassel (Mainz: Schott, 2001), 283–308: 295. 7. Jane W. Davidson, “Performance Identity,” in Handbook of Musical Identities, ed. Raymond MacDonald, David J. Hargreaves & Dorothy Miell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 364–82: 365. 8. Jane W. Davidson, “The Solo Performer’s Identity,” in Musical Identities, 97–113, 97.

62  F. Placanica







9. Philip Auslander, “Musical personae,” The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006) 100–19, 102. 10. Morris, “Too Much Music,” 97. 11. Tom Sutcliffe, “Technology and Interpretation: Aspects of ‘Modernism,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, ed. by Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 321–40: 322-3. 12. Davidson, “Solo Performer’s Identity,” 111. 13. Davidson, “Solo Performer’s Identity,” 97. 14. Anahid Kassabian. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2013) 15. Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 225–58: 254. 16. Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”, Screen, 16 (3), 1975, 6–18. 17. Lydia Goehr, “The Domestic Diva: Toward an Operatic History of the Telephone,” in Technology and the Diva: Sopranos, Opera, and Media from Romanticism to the Digital Age, ed. Karen Henson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 104–23: 116. 18. Jean Cocteau, “Préface,” in La Voix humaine: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (Paris: La Pochothèque, 1995), 1090. 19. Ibid., 1093. 20. Ibid., 1093 21. Id. 22. Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions, 125. 23. Ibid., 126. 24. Pamela Karantonis. Forthcoming. “The Remediation of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine (1930): Uncovering Opera’s Story in the English-Language Film Adaptation The Human Voice (1966),” I am indebted to Karantonis for allowing me pre-publication access to her article on Bergman’s interpretation of Elle. 25. “Notes for the Musical Interpretation: The one role of La Voix humaine has to be performed by a young and elegant woman. It is not about an old woman abandoned by her lover. / The length of the held notes will depend on the performer’s interpretation. They are so important, in this score. The conductor will decide on these in advance with the singer with accuracy. / All the sung passages, without accompaniment, have a very free tempo, and are functional to the staging. One has to quickly shift from anguish to calm and vice versa. / The whole work must be immersed in the greatest orchestral sensuality.” Francis Poulenc, La Voix humaine (Paris: Ricordi, 1959), 1. 26. Cocteau, “Préface,” 1089. 27. Francis Poulenc, Echo and Source: Selected Correspondence 1915-1963, trans. & ed. Sidney Buckland (London: Gollancz, 1991), 254-5. 28. Denis Waleckx, “Poulenc et ses interprètes,” in Francis Poulenc et la Voix: Texte et Contexte, ed. Alban Ramaut, (Lyon: Symétrie, 2005), 1–10 29. Dominique Delouche, La Voix humaine (Doriane Films/Les Films du Prieuré: 1970, released on DVD in 2009). 30. Dominique Delouche, La Muse et son Poète: Une Evocation de Denise Duval et Francis Poulenc et “La Voix humaine” de Jean Cocteau et Francis Poulenc, Video documentary, Les Films du Prieuré, Muzzik, 1 hour 12 minutes. 31. Renaud Machart, “La Voix humaine,” Le Monde, (November 4, 2003), https:// www.theatreonline.com/Spectacle/La-Voix-humaine/29129 (accessed September 4, 2019)

La Voix humaine and the performer’s identity 63 32. Diapason, December 11, 2003. https://www.theatreonline.com/Spectacle/ La-Voix-humaine/29129 (accessed SEptember 4, 2019) 33. Carole Farley, La Voix humaine. Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conductor Jose Serebrier, DVD; Julia Migenes. 2009. La Voix humaine, a film by Peter Medak, Orchestre National De France, conductor Georges Prêtre, DVD; Camille Zamora. 2011. La Voix humaine. Auckland Chamber Orchestra, conductor Peter Scholes, director Raymond Hawthorne, Auckland Opera. https:// www.youtube.com/results?search_query=camille+zamora+voix+humaine (accessed 1 June 2017). 34. Placanica, “The Unsung One.” 35. Francis Poulenc. 2015. La Voix humaine, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, stage direction Krzysztof Warlikowski, soprano Barbara Hannigan, Opéra National, Paris, trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=­SBPGCymHS_w], full recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KMByAEPL0k; interview with Hannigan at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO8k7PQTlz0 (all accessed 1 June 2017).

4

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes: Phelim McDermott’s Satyagraha Hayley Fenn

Puppets and opera: such a meeting of performative and aesthetic modes might, at first glance, seem outlandish and counter-intuitive. What, after all, is a commercial entertainment with folkish roots doing embroiled in a serious, high-brow artistic enterprise? Yet puppetry and opera have a long shared history. There is, of course, the pragmatic appeal of puppets. They can help bring to life the fantastical creatures and impossible scenes of opera: the serpent’s pursuit of Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, for instance; the Wolf’s Glen scene from Weber’s Der Freischütz; and Alberich’s transformation into a toad, to name but one example from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. But puppets aren’t only useful for their material versatility and magical associations: they are performers in their own right. All three of the operas mentioned above, and many more besides, are performed in miniature theatres throughout Europe, entirely by puppets. In marionette opera, puppets are cast in the main roles, relegating human singers to the wings or, more often today, the sound system. And not only do puppets wander into staples of the operatic canon, but composers since Joseph Haydn have deemed them worthy performers of their own works. As the star of the show or a visual aid, puppets usually serve a clearly defined representational purpose directed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the operatic text. This chapter, by contrast, concerns an instance where puppets grace the operatic stage with an agenda of their own, in Phelim McDermott’s 2007 production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha for the English National Opera and later the Metropolitan Opera. As Daniel J. Wakin, the critic for the New York Times, observes, “the word puppet does little justice to the fearsome large human figures and ragged, yet delicate newspaper creatures in Satyagraha.”1 Indeed, “puppet” tends to connote miniaturization, subservience, a certain crudeness or lack of nuance – rarely gigantification, autonomy, and critical or aesthetic depth. And yet, any number of puppeteers will tell you that someone or something is always gigantic in a puppet relation, be it the puppeteer or the puppet; that they respond to the whim of the puppet as much as it responds to them; and finally, that a puppet, whatever its particular mimetic relationship to the human, is a fertile site of reflection and meditation on the human condition. All of which is to

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 65 say that when puppets pop up in productions of opera, they have the potential to reframe certain central tenets of the art form. Satyagraha conjures the discriminatory experience and non-violent protest efforts of the lawyer and activist Mohandas Gandhi during his time in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. This subject may not immediately suggest puppetry as the appropriate medium for representation. In fact, it has been tried and failed: puppet theatre pieces based on three episodes from Gandhi’s life commissioned for the National Shadow Puppetry Festival at Dharmasthala, Kárnãtakã in 1996, fell completely flat. The storytelling practices of Indian shadow puppetry well-disposed to the Sanskrit epics of the Rãmãyana and the Mahãbhãrata failed to adapt to a real-life historical subject.2 But the retelling of Gandhi’s South African years by Glass and his collaborators presents quite a different proposition, since transposing that history into an operatic medium, by virtue of music, of singing per se, has already moved the history in question so far from literalism that puppets are simply one additional fantastic element among many. From its inception, moreover, Satyagraha has always been a hybrid work, straddling theatrical and compositional modes to produce what Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon describe as a “para-opera,” a musico-dramatic work that aims to “counter expectations of Western operatic audiences.”3 This is not some quasi-realist documentary theatre piece. The libretto is in Sanskrit, fourhour-long performances are denied surtitles and a non-linear vignette-style structure subverts expectations of narrative teleology. Consequently, “the weight of ‘meaning’,” as Glass himself describes it, is “thrown onto the music, the designs and the stage action”; “the weight of meaning,” that is, in the retelling of the life of a man who is not the national hero of the predominantly Western creative team.4 As Hutcheon and Hutcheon have observed, Satyagraha is not a straightforwardly exoticist opera, as the quintessential “Othering” inflicted by such work is, in this case, directed not at the Indian protagonist and his entourage but at the white South Africans. Nevertheless, the story is one about racism and one man’s bid to overcome it. The story-­ telling techniques of European opera are traditionally unsuited to such a task, and therefore, Glass’s vision of Gandhi through the prism of Western musico-dramatic convention requires some careful parsing. The opera’s collage-like structure, the deliberate distancing of language, the “weight of meaning” conveyed by the music and the visuals: this is where I want to insert my reading of McDermott’s puppetry, which, I suggest, gives voice to the challenges of this project by drawing together the critical threads of language, voice and temporality through material experimentation. The production creates an emergent continuum of puppet expression from raw material to clearly defined figuration. To explore this continuum, we need to consider a range of “raw materials,” from the performers themselves, everyone from singers to aerialists to stage-hands, to inanimate objects, such as wicker baskets and clothes hangers, and the cruder construction materials of corrugated iron, sticky tape and, most extensively,

66  H. Fenn newspaper. Indeed, newspaper is everywhere in this production: it is pasted onto the floors; it provides makeshift projection screens; it forms a whirling vortex that engulfs Gandhi in the middle of the second act; it is read by the chorus; it is even the skin of the giants. These raw materials and their manipulation through various modes of puppetry shine a spotlight on the ways in which representation and transparency work within a multi-­media, biographical, para-operatic spectacle. To begin, I outline the critical parameters by which puppets are defined by practitioners and scholars, homing in on the question of voice. After an overview of Satyagraha – its dramatic and musical style and forces – I examine key moments in McDermott’s production. We will start with Act 2’s giant puppets. Then, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s ideas about the role of print in establishing so-called “imagined communities,” I examine the ways in which newspaper is put to work in the production, materially and ideologically.5 Finally, I address the matter of sticky tape and its potential as a visual metaphor for transparency and community. The puppetry in Satyagraha makes visible the “invisible” forces of oppression; it fights mythical and metaphorical battles; it reflects the world around it, as projection screens, a printing press and solemn ritual, and it obscures the world around it, as giants, as walls, as disguise; it demands reciprocity and imagination; and it bridges the gaps between music and action, singers and scenery.

So what makes a puppet? Puppetry mirrors opera’s oscillation between the deep-seated materiality of performance and the potential for transcendental expression through its negotiation of what I term “the performance network.” The paradigm of the performance network accounts for the various performers, performative modes, and material realities of a particular puppet performance, charting the dispersion of creative agency and the generation of characteristic aesthetic effects. At the heart of any network of puppet performance is the basic model that defines what makes a puppet. Contrasting definitions of the model proliferate across the puppet literature. Puppeteer Paul McPharlin, for example, suggests that a puppet is “a theatrical figure moved under human control.”6 For another puppeteer, Bil Baird, “a puppet is an inanimate figure that is made to move by a human effort before an a­ udience.”7 Theatre scholar Eileen Blumenthal is rather more poetic: “Whenever someone endows an inanimate object with life force and casts it in a scenario, a puppet is born.”8 All three outline a similar tripartite model: an object, a human animator and an audience. Though identified explicitly only by Baird, the audience is contained within the “theatricality” of McPharlin’s figure and implied by Blumenthal’s “scenario.” The particular quality of the object of the puppet is more complicated: McPharlin and Baird specify a “figure,” but Blumenthal identifies an “inanimate object.” The positing of an inanimate object as the

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 67 essential material component of the puppet encourages the idea that a puppet need not be an anthropomorphic creature, but perhaps something altogether more abstract. The Polish puppet historian and theoretician Henryk Jurkowski draws a distinction between “synthetic” and “plastic” conceptions of puppet theatre: in the former, the puppet displaces the human actor; in the latter, the puppet is a “vehicle of visual art.”9 Jurkowski’s categorization opens up the possibility of non-representational puppetry, such as the abstract music visualizations of Basil Twist, which involve water, cloth and various lighting effects. By taking the representational dimension out of the puppet equation, questions of object manipulation, interaction and tangibility come to the fore. Through this lens, a theatrical prop might be considered a puppet. Even the non-representational “object-puppet” needs to live, however.10 According to Basil Jones, co-founder of Handspring Puppet Company, this is the essential work of the puppet, “the quest for life itself.”11 Blumenthal captures this imperative with her term “life force,” which is provided by an ambiguous “someone.” “Someone,” I suggest, encompasses the puppeteer and the audience members. Both are responsible for the puppet’s “life force,” simultaneously and at different times, through the reciprocity of manipulation and imagination, which means that the object of the puppet must also appear as both an object and a puppet simultaneously. For puppet scholar Steve Tillis, this perceptual mode is a kind of “double vision,” where “the puppet is perceived to be an object, while imagined to have life.”12 For most puppeteers, the imagination of life must start with the illusion of breath. When reflecting on their work with opera singers, Jones and his co-founder Adrian Kohler (creators of the West End hit, War Horse) observe that “if the audience doesn’t see the puppet breathing, isn’t aware that there is breath in the figure, they hold their breath for the puppet. And after a while [they] get tired of doing that, so the image of the figure dissolves to a degree” and becomes an object again.13 The work of breathing depends very much on the material attributes of the puppet. For Joey, the equine star of War Horse, Kohler and Jones developed an up-down mechanism that required the puppeteers to “breath with their knees.” Although, as Jones’ puts it, the up-down is “anti-naturalistic…it feels like real breath,” which is what’s important.14 This brings us back to the question of representation. It is widely acknowledged that a puppet can represent the human condition, in a broad, metaphorical sense. But when tasked with a specific role, and here I am talking about representational or anthropomorphic puppets, they rarely have to “get into character”: it is built directly into them. In her work on the Japanese awaji ningyō tradition, Jane Marie Law identifies five perspectives on the appeal of puppets, including the idea that “puppets are more convincing because they remain what they are – they do not “represent” their part and then revert to someone else when they walk off stage.”15 As Law observes, there is no circumscribed representational moment in puppetry: rather, there is an absolute identification between the object of the puppet and its character. In a marionette version of Die Zauberflöte, to give but

68  H. Fenn one example, Papageno is not played by a generic marionette. Papageno is played by a Papageno marionette, the Papageno marionette of that particular company. There may even be several Papageno marionettes, each specially modified to enable full realization of a multi-dimensional character. The built-in nature of a puppet’s character ensures that they exert their will over their animator and their audience, just as much as their animators and the audiences exert their will over them. As puppeteer and scholar John Bell puts it, puppeteering involves “playing with a certain lack of control, and experimenting with the different possibilities of the puppet while constantly being aware of how the puppet’s structure determines movement.”16 The essential top-down power dynamic through which the figure of the puppet proliferates metaphorically in newspapers, novels, cartoons and many other facets of popular culture, it turns out, is just one dyad within a whole network of performance relations, across any number of bodies and objects, human and non-human, with all of their material attributes, ideological leanings and aesthetic potential.

When puppets (don’t) sing opera Beyond the central tripartite model the inanimate object, human animator and audience the performance network of marionette opera includes, in addition, a unique backstage architecture centred on an elevated bridge; opera singers (or rather, their voices); and, more often than not, a sound system. There is a sense in which this art form – the displacement of an opera singer by a wooden string puppet – ought not to work. But the phenomenological paradox at the heart of marionette opera is exactly where the affinity between the art forms lies. For both puppetry and opera play with the relationship between body and voice, albeit from different starting points. In all forms of puppetry, body and voice are necessarily disconnected. A puppet’s voice is provided by a third party, the puppeteer, an actor, or a singer, live or recorded. Steven Connor argues that puppets materialize “vocalic bodies,” the plausible bodies conjured up by listeners when they experience sourceless or disembodied voices.17 The resultant connection forged by the coincidence of puppet body and human voice may be described as a process of what the theorist of film sound Michel Chion terms “syncresis…the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.”18 Crucially, though, this fresh unity of body and voice does not supplant the original: whilst the voice becomes part of the puppet’s identity, it remains the possession of the puppeteer, actor or singer and, therefore, fundamentally disembodied. For literary scholar Kenneth Gross, it is exactly this capacity of the operatic voice, to be embodied and disembodied simultaneously, that secures the affinity between opera and puppetry. Drawing on Carolyn Abbate’s reading of Orpheus’s severed singing head, Gross asserts that opera, “with its extreme, heightened use of voice – voice that seems to carry its life so far

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 69 outside the singer’s body, and yet takes the body within itself … lends itself to translation into the puppet theatre.”19 If constant fluctuation between almost otherworldly disembodiment and deep embeddedness within the body is a condition of the operatic voice per se, then certain of opera’s most distinctive techniques and modalities can only heighten the effect. Offstage voices, trouser roles and shifts into the diegesis for musical moments that are perceived as such by the characters within the fictive world of the action: in these instances especially, voice is, as Martha Feldman writes, “boundless, furtive and migratory, sometimes maddeningly so.”20 The paradigm of the performance network makes explicit the voice’s propensity to roam between and amongst bodies, distancing itself from its source in predictable and random ways. The (dis)connective tissues between body and voice are determined by the particular mechanism of the puppet (strings, rods, hands-in, hands-on), the style of puppeteering and its relationship to the sounding or musical parts, and the make-up and sensibility of the audience. Such dispersion of creative agency lends itself to greater narrative and dramaturgical variation, dominant characteristics of Glass’s operatic endeavours. In her study of operas by Glass and Louis Andriessen, Jelena Novak argues for their designation as “postoperas,” a genre in which “the relationship between music and drama is reinvented.”21 Postoperas are characterized by non-linear structures, non-narrative libretti, the import of new media, and a collapse of any hierarchy amongst the components of operatic representation (music, text, staging, etc.). In postopera, therefore, Novak suggests that “what assumes the foreground…are such concerns as the relationship between the singing body and the voice itself.”22 And such concerns are intrinsic to puppetry as well. Let us review: a puppet emerges from a complex negotiation of material realities and performance modes. The representation of life is their essential work, which starts with the impulse of breath through movement. Caught between the manipulation of the puppeteer and the imagination of the audience, the puppet can take many forms, human, non-human or abstract, but it must be understood to be in some sense alive. Through the motions of breathing, a voice may be acquired, but this voice will be located outside of the body of the puppet. The connections between sound and source, perceived and actual, are forged, tightened, loosened, dissolved, and rebuilt time and again as agential forces are concentrated and dispersed variously across the network. As we shall see, even when they are not “singing” the main parts, puppets find a way to tell their story, through sound, movement and material expression.

Gandhi meets Glass Satyagraha is the second of Glass’s so-called “portrait” trilogy. Each opera conjures the life of a visionary man: Einstein in the field of science, Akhnaten in religion and Gandhi in politics. Brought up in a Hindu merchant caste

70  H. Fenn family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi was educated in London to become a lawyer, until, after a brief return to India, a legal contract brought him to South Africa in 1893. Appalled by the racial discrimination experienced by Indian workers who, having been brought to South Africa as indentured labour by the authorities of the British Empire, were now suffering in the aftermath of the Boer war, Gandhi established himself as a practitioner of nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1904, Gandhi founded the newspaper the Indian Opinion intended as a medium through which the Indian population in South Africa might educate the Europeans as to their needs, ambitions and expectations. Together with his involvement in the overturning of the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, also known as the Black Act, the Indian Opinion is central to the Satyagraha (“truth-force”) movement. “Good people,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “rarely make good subjects in opera.”23 Without the formal convention of tension, created by bad people and events, in need of resolution, there is “nothing for the characters to do.”24 Accordingly, it is necessary for the audience of Satyagraha, in the words of another critic, “to adjust expectations. Not much happens.”25 It is less a question of “not much happening” and more that the arrangement of what happens works against its perception as action. Events are not presented in chronological order. From a mythological starting point, the subsequent scenes of Act 1 then work backward in time, Act 2 goes forward from Gandhi’s return to South Africa after a visit to India in late 1896 and in Act 3, time stands still as Gandhi and his Satyagrahis march to Newcastle in 1913. Non-linear, as Mendelsohn observes, does not mean disorganized, however. Acts 1 and 2 stage what Mendelsohn describes as “a kind of equation” through their scenes. Both acts start with the depiction of a “violent confrontation,” then move through Gandhi’s “cooperative efforts,” before reaching a state of “nonviolent conflict,” both “forceful” and “peaceable.”26 Glass’s minimalist musical style reflects the immersive, cyclical quality of this dramatic structure. The textural complexity associated with much minimalist composition, including techniques such as phase shifting, is largely absent from Satyagraha. Instead, each scene is based upon a chaconne, which gives rise to clear melodic units and regular phrasing, with strong delineation between different lyrical sections.27 Interlocking ­ patterns  – potentially suggestive of certain non-Western compositional styles, such as Indonesian gamelan – rarely cross the barline, containing subdivisions within the beat. While the orchestra is comprised of “instruments familiar to both East and West” – triple winds, full strings and an electric organ, recalling the instrumentation of the Philip Glass Ensemble – Glass acknowledges that he treats voices not as instruments, as he would for his Ensemble, but in a “truly vocal way.”28 This is all the more feasible because in Satyagraha, the linguistic content of the text gives way to sound. The novelist Constance DeJong selected passages from the Bhagavad Gita to create, not a libretto

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 71 exactly, but more of a commentary, because, as Glass explains, “the action of each scene was so simple and self-explanatory that support by a text would have seemed redundant, even awkward.”29 Although the Bhagavad Gita, a 700 verse Hindu scripture, deals with a predicament highly resonant with Gandhi’s – Prince Arjuna seeks counsel from Krishna as he grapples with conflicting feelings about his duties as a warrior – the meaning of the text is obscured to (most of) the audience as the Sanskrit, the creative team insists, should be left untranslated in performance. Glass describes this as “further separating the vocal text from the action,” creating a “kind of international language for the opera” so that “the listener could let the words go altogether.”30 How are we to interpret this separation of sound and meaning? On the one hand, this is a text beloved of the opera’s protagonist, thus to leave it untranslated bespeaks a certain authentic striving. Conversely, by maintaining the opacity of the text to the majority of Satyagraha’s audiences attending performances in European and North American opera houses, Glass and his team implicitly acknowledge their own (and their audience’s) “Othered” relationship to the subject. But on the other hand, Glass himself confesses that “one of the most irresistible reasons… for using Sanskrit was the sound of the language itself.”31 Glass’s casual semantic pillaging of this ancient language for its aural properties evokes the well-worn and highly problematic equation of Eastern cultures with sensuality and superficiality and Western ones with rationality and depth. Either way, the singers on stage produce sounds that, in performance, almost no-one understands, rendering them vessels of something like “pure” voice: idealized, immaterial, universal – almost the exact opposite of the puppet.

Satyagraha’s giants At the beginning of Act 2, the scene is set in January 1897, Durban, South Africa. Gandhi waits on board the S. S. Courland. “As the Courland entered the bay,” writes the Reverend Joseph Doke, Gandhi’s first biographer, “all eyes were on the look-out to see what form the Demonstration was taking. A row of people, tending from the south end of the main wharf to some distance along the north pier, could be perceived, but they seemed to take matters very calmly.”32 In McDermott’s vision of these events, the demonstrators, European South Africans dressed garishly in flashes of pink, green and purple, appear positively relaxed. They sit comfortably, reading their newspapers, whilst shoe shiners crouch at their feet. Their music, though, seems to tell a different story. As the ship glides into view, projected upon a corrugated iron wall, the demonstrators spit out their Sanskrit lines on determined offbeat quarter notes. As one, they turn the pages of their newspapers, the rustling

72  H. Fenn

Figure 4.1  ENO Satyagraha Toby Spence ENO Chorus (c) Donald Cooper.

loud and deliberate. Syntactic voids are filled with repeated exhalation, “ha.” There is barely a chance to breathe. Then a coup de théâtre: the ship dissolves into a jagged skyline and a jigsaw cut-out ascends to reveal Gandhi himself, dressed completely in white. As he makes his way downstage, an oversized bird crosses his path, with newspaper feathers and a long pointy beak. The chorus crescendos into a sudden silence and the bird teeters on its spindly stilt legs, retreating to the back of the stage where Gandhi first appeared. Frenzied high-register scales burst forth once again from the orchestra and iron panels shift to suggest a dense cityscape, whilst the chorus hastily folds their newspapers. From amongst the corrugated iron, more giants appear, people this time (see Figure 4.1). They trundle out from the wings, their heads bobbing, and form a semicircle around Gandhi. They raise their hands in a gesture of exasperation before turning to the audience to repeat the shrug-cum-plea. And then, they leave. Crucially, these aren’t the first giants the audience encounters in McDermott’s production. In Act 1 Scene 1, on the mythic Kuru Field of Justice, two colossal battle-ready figures are constructed on stage, in front of the audience. In the reflections of one critic, the diverse group of performers that comprise the Skills Ensemble, part of the Improbable Theatre Company, started doing things with their bits of paper and humble baskets, twisting the former into rolls, manipulating the latter into clusters; and before you knew it, the paper had coalesced into a gigantic,

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 73 vaguely arachnid monster, reaching nearly to the top of the proscenium, doing battle with an equally towering knight-like figure made entirely of baskets.33 Representing opposing sides – the Whites by the newspaper monster adorned with a crown, presumably to signify the British monarch, and the Indians by a wicker man – neither is victorious. Both giants crumble to the floor, “hinting at the futility of all armed conflict.”34 Their magnificent wholes are really nothing more than the sum of their parts. In contrast to the life cycle enacted by these unwieldy configurations of everyday objects, the monstrous humans of Act 2 do very little. Not only do they enter the stage already fully formed, but they are unable to be disassembled. In one sense, then, they are just there, without any apparent effort of their own, “corrupt politicians, rapacious businessmen.”35 They are the forces of oppression against which Gandhi is fighting: their stature is equated to power, their totality to its self-perpetuating nature. But as puppets, the contingent nature of these “oversized capitalist goons” is made explicit.36 Their physical disposition, somewhere between magisterial and uncertain, makes it possible to believe in their autonomy, but it is impossible to surrender the knowledge that somewhere inside the papier-mâché skin is a constant collaborator. In fact, the concealment of the animators to varying degrees within the colossal puppets makes the tension between autonomy and contingency all the more palpable. Inverting the conventional relationship between puppet and puppeteer, the huge puppets make their puppeteers miniature, consumable and invisible; but without them, the puppets would be powerless. They would not exist without those on which they feed.

Reading the newspaper There is another way to read these giant puppets: by focussing on their newspaper skins. Act 2, Scene 2 depicts the founding of Gandhi's newspaper Indian Opinion. Throughout the scene, strips of newspaper traverse the stage horizontally to represent the printing press. With a ritualistic tone, these strips are brought together in a knot at Gandhi’s back to evoke outstretched wings or ceremonial ribbons. When Gandhi cuts the knot, the streams are lifted as vertical banners and projected Sanskrit text scrolls down them to suggest the printing process. In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to the nation-building role of newspaper with his notion of “print capitalism.”37 Newspaper crosses geographical and physical boundaries, and, in so doing, unites dispersed readers to create a readership. Members of that readership imagine others in their number, others they have never met and never will, and they imagine those about whom they have read, those who have succeeded, who need, who threaten. Newspaper can be used as a tool for cementing opinion, both positive and harmful. In McDermott’s production,

74  H. Fenn newspaper is used as a prop and as a realistic representation of the historical event of the Indian Opinion. It is also, however, used functionally, as makeshift projection screens for text, both Sanskrit and English. Even when the writing is legible – and mostly in English – it is rarely visible to everyone; I heard several complaints from audience members when I attended a live performance of the London revival in February 2018. The variously accessible “surtitles” and the conceptual, if not exactly experiential, layering of languages, through the projections on top of newspaper print, encapsulate the potential for newspaper to explicate and obfuscate. Before the giants of Act 2, Scene 1 enters the stage, the chorus line read their newspapers, which presumably tell of Gandhi’s activities in India, where he had been to canvass support for his South African endeavours. According to the Reverend Joseph Doke, the news agency Reuters had concocted a cablegram for London, which painted Gandhi as “a rabid agitator…a menace to the Empire.”38 When Natal later received the report, all hell broke loose. Meetings were held; Gandhi was denounced. When Gandhi comes into view at the back of stage, having disembarked the ship, there is a short silence. The wall of newspapers across the laps of the South Africans collapses as the music resumes, only to be rebuilt in the form of giant puppets. It is almost as though the newspaper has come to life. As the now mute chorus line fold their papers away, the puppeteers mobilize the figures of their newspaper-addled imaginations. The puppets’ enormous size conveys the burden of representation: larger-than-life, more powerful than reality. When the puppets leave, silence once more reigns. These framing silences articulate the fullness, the completeness, of the puppets’ expression. The act’s opening theme rises again from the orchestra and as the chorus turns to face Gandhi, the homogeneity of the human chorus and the puppet chorus is cemented.

Sticky transparency Act 3 is set in 1913. The Newcastle March. Enclosing the stage are the familiar sheets of corrugated iron. Six figures dressed in white sit at intervals around the semicircle, each bathed in a spotlight. The spaces between them are occupied by sleeping figures. The pulsating murmur of offstage voices seeps in from the wings, melding with the steady quavers of the orchestral strings floating up from the pit. Voices and instruments become indistinguishable from one another. Whilst the music penetrates our consciousness acoustically, lyrically, it resists contact, and visually, it is outof-reach. The ridges of the iron backdrop make the projected English text difficult to read. Sombre, tired, distant, ungraspable: the stage itself is silent. These opening gestures – almost-illegible text, almost-incomprehensible words, almost-inaudible orchestra, a static scene, statuesque characters, light infused with meaning – encapsulate the theatrical language of the

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 75 production. And then, as the Satyagrahis gather in the footlights, the backdrop begins to glisten. Members of the company stretch rolls of sticky tape, creating horizontal channels across the stage, and consequently, displacing the newspaper of previous scenes. Where newspaper comes from Gandhi’s world, sticky tape, another of the production’s raw materials, comes from McDermott’s. Sticky tape is a favoured material of Improbable, the theatre company McDermott directs alongside three others including Julian Crouch, the designer on Satyagraha. Tape, Crouch explains, “has enormous outdoor potential…like a net: it doesn’t catch wind, the rain doesn’t affect it and it lights beautifully.”39 Where newspaper walks a fine line between opacity and transparency, on

Figure 4.2  ENO Satyagraha Nicholas Folwell Anna-Clare Monk Charlotte Beament Toby Spence Clive Bayley Stephanie Marshell (c) Donald Cooper.

76  H. Fenn both material and ideological planes, tape is fiercely robust and yet compellingly transparent. It binds together and can fashion repairs, while it shimmers in the light and ripples with music and song. Like newspaper, it is itself noisy too: it stutters as it unfurls and creaks towards the end of the roll; it speaks of its own materiality. If the Act 2 giants make visible the invisible forces of oppression, these sticky tape channels make visible the invisible forces of truth, Satyagraha.

If puppets could talk, what would they say? From figuration to raw materials, these are just some of the ways in which puppetry in McDermott’s Satyagraha appears to bridge the gap between music and action, singers and scenery. As critical imports of his own devising, McDermott’s puppets are well-positioned to draw on and combine both the visual and vocal capacities of puppetry, their contingent nature and disaggregation across materials and performers. A puppet comes into being when a puppeteer and an audience bring it to life, at the same time. While the objects of puppetry can be almost anything, the acts of puppetry are more prescriptive: movement, material contingency, reciprocity and imagination. The puppet’s construction through and out of the performance network makes it a compelling addition to operatic representation, where the complex dynamics of voices and bodies, instruments and scenery are being constantly forged and transformed. Glass’s Satyagraha is a particularly rich candidate for realization with puppetry, as its subject, formal structure and musical style throw issues of representation, voice, language, and temporality into relief, all of which are central to the art of puppetry. In his production, McDermott demonstrates the adaptability of puppetry to critical endeavours by exploring its dramatic, material and metaphorical potential. Puppets may be silent, but in McDermott’s hands, they are never short of something to say.

Notes

1. Daniel J. Wakin, “Opera about a Giant’s Life, Complete with Giant Puppets,” The New York Times, April 11, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/ arts/music/11saty.html. 2. For a detailed discussion of these pieces, see Salil Singh, “If Gandhi Could Fly…: Dilemmas and Directions in Shadow Puppetry in India,” in Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects, ed. John Bell (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 144–58. 3. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Philip Glass’s Satyagraha: Para-­ Colonial Para-Opera,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 718–730. 4. Philip Glass, Opera on the Beach (London: Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc., 1987), 101. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

Puppets that sing or scenery that breathes 77 6. Paul McPharlin, The Puppet Theater in America: A History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 1. 7. Bil Baird, The Art of the Puppet (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 13. 8. Eileen Blumenthal, Puppetry: A World History (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 2005), 11. 9. Henryk Jurkowski, Aspects of the Puppet Theater, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 84. 10. I use this term after Penny Francis, Puppetry: A Reader in Theatre Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18. 11. Basil Jones, “Puppetry, Authorship and the Ur-Narrative,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 62. 12. Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Act (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 160. 13. National Theatre, “Choreographing Breath,” June 2011, video, 6:36, accessed January 22, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiFGATFzgfU. 14. Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, “Handspring Puppet Co.: The Genius Puppetry behind War Horse,” filmed March 2011, TED video, 17:56, accessed January 24, 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/handpring_puppet_co_the_ genius_puppetry_behind_war_horse?language=en#t-781780. 15. Jane Marie Law, Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ningyo Tradition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 22–23. 16. John Bell, “Playing with a Lack of Control” in The Puppet Show, eds. Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008), 17. 17. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 18. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 61. 19. Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 78. 20. Martha Feldman, “The Interstitial Voice: An Opening,” contribution to the colloquy “Why Voice Now?” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 3 (2015), 653–59: 656. 21. Jelena Novak, “From Minimalist Music to Postopera: Repetition, Representation and (Post) Modernity in the Operas of Philip Glass and Louis Andriessen” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, eds. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann and Pwyll Ap Siôn (London: Routledge, 2013), 129–140: 134. 22. Ibid., 140. 23. Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Truth Force at the Met,” The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/06/12/the-truthforce-at-the-met/. 24. Ibid. 25. Corrina Da Fonseca-Wollheim, ‘A Double Shot of Glass at Lincoln Center with a Belted NY Philharmonic Debut,’ The Classical Review, November 6, 2011, http://theclassicalreview.com/2011/11/a-double-shot-of-glass-at-lincolncenter-with-a-belated-ny-philharmonic-debut/. 26. Mendelsohn, “The Truth Force at the Met.” 27. Glass, Opera, 115. 28. Ibid., 114.

78  H. Fenn 29. Ibid., 100. 30. Ibid., 101. 31. Ibid. 32. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: Indian Patriot in South Africa (London: ­London Indian Chronicle, 1909), 47. 33. Mendelsohn, “The Truth Force at the Met.” 34. Ibid. 35. Wakin, “Opera about a Giant’s Life.” 36. Charles T. Downey, “Ionarts at Large: Satyagraha at the Met,” Ionarts Blogspot, April 21, 2008. https://ionarts.blogspot.com/2008/04/ionarts-at-largesatyagraha-at-met.html 37. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 38. Doke, Gandhi, 42. 39. Quoted in Karen Fricker “Meeting a sticky end,” The Irish Times, October 22, 2003. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/meeting-a-sticky-end-1.385726.

5

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary Jennifer O’Meara

Musicians and bands have long been the focus of the music documentary or “rockumentary,” a sub-genre of non-fiction filmmaking dating back to Dont Look Back (Pennebaker, 1967), Woodstock (Wadleigh, 1970) and Gimme Shelter (Albert and Maysles, 1970). In certain ways, music and documentary are natural bedfellows: popular musicians have a ready-made audience eager to gain insights into their idol, as well as a pre-existing musical soundtrack for the film in the form of the artist’s back catalogue which can be reworked to serve the narrative and emotional arc. Music documentaries can magnify certain issues associated with documentary, including the question of who has the right to represent whom, something that can take on greater importance when protecting a musician’s legacy after their death. Yet, as Michael Saffle notes in the edited volume The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop, despite “tremendous interest in documentaries of other kinds, music documentaries have received little attention.”1 In order to partly address this gap, continuing the progress made in the aforementioned collection, this study will use Amy (Kapadia, 2015) and Cobain: Montage of Heck (Morgen, 2015) as testaments to the enduring appeal of music documentaries that explain, revise and/or romanticize the lives and star images of troubled musicians. At a narrative level, both documentaries foreground events leading up to the deaths of, respectively, British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the US-band Nirvana. I explore how the filmmakers’ incorporation of personal video and audio footage both humanizes the sordid details of their subjects’ lives and raises ethical questions about whether this is reason enough to subject the deceased musicians to further public scrutiny. The subjects of Amy and Cobain: Montage of Heck (hereafter, Montage of Heck) share much in common, as do their documentaries’ formal design, which seems grounded in the accelerated intermedial culture of the twenty-­ first century. By also considering the audiovisual aesthetics employed in both films, the chapter aims to demonstrate the enduring links between the music documentary and the image-driven music video. Ever since the opening sequence from Dont Look Back was used as a promotional video for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the line between music

80  J. O’Meara documentary and video has been blurred. Since the launch of MTV in 1981, music television has complicated this further, with a long-running show like Behind the Music (1997–2014) providing music channel VH1 with 243 documentary-style episodes on a range of musical artists. The scale and importance of the music video has continued to expand in tandem with the rise in digital streaming sites. In relation to Amy and Montage of Heck, techniques such as the use of colour filters, superimposed images and lyrics and animated sequences will be related to the documentaries’ complementary use of sound to provide the kind of heightened sonic and visual connections that Carol Vernallis details in Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital Cinema.2 Lastly, this chapter’s consideration of responses to these documentaries by the Cobain and Winehouse families will be my third angle for arguing that, when it comes to producing contemporary music documentaries, manipulating images (in both senses of the word) can be crucial.

Image reconfiguration over recreation There is no denying that sound and music play an important part in both these films, as they do in most if not all rockumentaries, with the subject matter leading to expectations that the audience will hear the familiar music of the musician or band in question, even if such audio material is remixed in new ways. Less conventional is the crucial role attributed to images, as signalled even in the production histories of the documentaries under focus. With Amy, director Asif Kapadia has said that part of his mission for the film was to change the dominant images circling of Winehouse, generally those taken by paparazzi. As he explains in an interview discussing the origins of the project, “when I Googled her I saw horrible images.”3 The director also describes the importance of a collage of images to his research, and to convincing those close to the singer that he could be trusted with telling her story. Kapadia and editor Chris King assembled a huge collage of Winehouse’s life on the wall of their editing suite.4 Seeing this was crucial to getting Nick Shymansky, Winehouse’s former manager, to talk to them and supply his own digital video footage of the singer.5 A collage of this nature, which combines a multitude of tiny images of Winehouse, was subsequently recreated in the film trailer – albeit with the collage layered over a close-up of her familiar face. Furthermore, although Kapadia interviewed over a hundred people about Winehouse, we only hear their voices: he avoided the kind of “talking head” format commonly used in documentary interviews, in order to keep the visual focus entirely on the singer. The only time we see the interviewees on screen is if they happen to be appearing in a scene with Winehouse. Both the Amy and Montage documentaries serve to revise the dominant public images of their subjects – as mentally unstable drug addicts – which circulated in the popular media both before and after their deaths. Amy includes a number of tabloid style shots that highlight Winehouse’s

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary 81 dysfunctional behaviour, and it makes a point of showing us her clear discomfort with the ever-present paparazzi taking these pictures. Cobain’s fame preceded the intrusiveness of paparazzi in the digital era,6 but Montage of Heck equally shows his discomfort with media attention. Significantly, the film withholds discussion of his death, as well as the image of his corpse which circulated distastefully in the media. This is in contrast to several other films focused on Cobain – Kurt & Courtney (Broomfield, 1998); Last Days (Van Sant, 2005); Kurt Cobain: About a Son (Schnack, 2006); Soaked in Bleach: A Film about the Death of Kurt Cobain (Statler, 2015) – in which the circumstances of his alleged suicide tend to overshadow his life. The closest Montage of Heck comes to showing his corpse is some repeated use of two images of Cobain pretending to be dead in videos for Nirvana’s “HeartShaped Box” (1993) and footage from the Nirvana Live at Reading (Fura, 2009) DVD documentary, capturing the band’s 1992 concert at Reading Festival. Showing these shots, which were intentionally produced and/or disseminated by Cobain during his time with Nirvana, could be seen as giving him back some control over his own lifeless image. The images could also be read as knowing, intertextual references to the shots of his corpse in the popular media, as well as in Last Days and Soaked in Bleach – both of which recreate the leaked crime scenes photos of his body. Instead, in Montage of Heck, the second time one of Cobain’s intentional, faux-corpse images is shown it is accompanied by Cobain saying in voice-over that people seem to want him to die because that is the classic rock star story. In this way, his voice appears to speak from beyond the grave, predicting the way his death would be commemorated to the point of being a cliché. This revealing moment signals the degree to which the image and sound tracks work together to give Cobain some posthumous control over his public image. One of most insightful analyses of the Cobain’s public and cinematic image comes from Charles Fairchild’s study of Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a difficult to classify semi-bio-pic of the end of Cobain’s life.7 Contextualizing the film in relation to biopics about musicians more generally, Fairchild argues that the writer-director “sharpens our understanding of the ways in which biographic films routinely claim to overcome distance between what we think we know about musical celebrities and what we can actually know about them.”8 To do so, Van Sant creates a fictionalized character, named Blake (Michael Pitt), who is uncannily similar to the memory of Cobain in the public domain. As Fairchild notes, this effect is established “through a specific series of visual simulacra, many unmistakably based on the bestknown photographs of Cobain.”9 These visuals emphasize Blake’s hair and Cobain-like clothes, while concealing actor Michael Pitt’s face. Blake also speaks very little – potentially in an effort to prevent unfavourable comparisons to Cobain’s well-known voice. Fairchild explains that while biographical films tend to chronicle wellknown events from a musician’s life, Last Days avoids this by including long scenes which show the Blake/Cobain character doing mundane activities like

82  J. O’Meara making food or sorting through his closet. He describes these as serving to “flatten out” Blake’s life,10 implying that they do not prioritize the reproduction of publically known highs and lows from Cobain’s life. Somewhat similarly, Montage of Heck and Amy incorporate images and personal footage of their larger-than-life subjects doing mundane things. For example, in Amy, we see a teen-aged Winehouse socializing with friends, as well as footage of her performing an amusing tour of a holiday apartment while pretending to be a Spanish man. Many of the last images we see of Cobain are of him playing with his young daughter Frances, who served as a producer on the documentary, and whose mother Courtney Love supplied most of the personal footage when giving Morgen full access to Cobain’s belongings. These shots complement those we see of Cobain as a child playing music, or on his birthday. We also see footage of him lying around, and petting and videoing cats – the kind of everyman footage now ubiquitous on the internet. Given their expressive range, these images add dimensionality to Winehouse and Cobain when compared to the familiar images of their blank or pained expressions in publicity or paparazzi shots. Sequences such as these can thus help to humanize their subjects and rehabilitate their images in the public memory. But, more so than Montage of Heck, Amy does not attempt to hide the troubling images associated with Winehouse’s addictions and eating disorder. At points, Kapadia seems to intentionally shock the viewer by cutting between personal footage which indicates Winehouse’s recovery, as when she is attending rehab on a remote island, and paparazzi shots of her and her partner Blake Fielder, bloodied, several days later. The jarring edits capture the precariousness of Winehouse’s well-being, but also seem to implicate the viewer by forcing us to (re)view the shocking images, ones we may already have seen at the time.

Private footage made public While popular media images of musicians like Cobain and Winehouse can create a false sense of intimacy for fans, the kinds of personal video clips described here can create a more intense kind of intimacy. Providing this, however, involves replacing the original audience for the footage (generally a family member or close friend) with one that is much larger and completely unintended. Although the footage (as well as audio clips such as voicemail messages) has been willingly supplied by people close to the musicians, it ultimately circulates without the subjects’ permission. This seems especially problematic since it diminishes Cobain’s and Winehouse’s already very limited privacy, while opening their most private selves up to further media scrutiny. In this way, both films could be accused of contributing to the problem which they partly aim to critique. Jaimie Baron considers the issue of unintended audiences for personal recordings as part of The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History.11 Writing on the appeal of “appropriated” home

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary 83 movies, in particular, to audiences, Baron describes how they “hold out the promise of an ‘uncorrupted’ view of the past,” with their private nature “endow[ing] them with an added aura of unmediated ‘truth’.”12 At the same time, in order to discuss the transgressive nature of appropriating “private documents in a public text,” she uses the metaphor of “trespassing” to describe the way an audience can enter a private space uninvited.13 In terms of the music documentaries under focus, it is worth noting Baron’s discussion of the particular kinds of private footage that might create a feeling of transgression in the viewer. If, as Baron suggests, the recording of social rituals (such as birthday parties) feels relatively innocent,14 then what kind of private footage might feel “transgressive” for audiences who have likely already seen explicitly transgressive footage of Cobain and Winehouse, in the popular, public media, such as Cobain’s corpse, or Winehouse taking drugs and covered in blood? In these cases, I would argue that it is precisely the mundane and “innocent” home recordings and voicemail messages that become the most ethically problematic; in that these are relatively rare moments when Cobain and Winehouse believed they were not being recorded for a public audience. In each instance there is a sense of trust towards the person holding the camera or receiving the voicemail, as evidenced by their expressions, ones in notable contrast to the kind of resentful glares or silence they understandably directed towards journalists or paparazzi. Baron uses the term “a ‘higher’ purpose” to describe how the appropriation of a private source into a public text might be legitimized by the filmmaker or audience member.15 In the case of Amy and Montage of Heck, the purpose may be the pursuit of a “fuller picture” of the respective musicians, but this comes at a cost for the non-consenting subjects. At points, Kapadia seems to indicate his awareness of this conundrum by manipulating the private footage of Winehouse in such a way that some of her privacy remains. For example, in a sequence in which St. Lucia is described as a safe haven for Winehouse, the personal footage is shown in grainy black and white (Figure 5.1). This is presented as in contrast to the intercut footage by professionals whom Winehouse’s father brought with him when visiting the island, in order to capture footage for his reality TV show (one indirectly about his daughter). At the same time, we might consider Kapadia’s literal manipulation of Winehouse’s personal footage to be a kind of contrived disavowal in that Amy is equally engaged in ethically questionable practices: continuing to circulate and profit from Winehouse’s image and voice after her death. Indeed, writing on the relationship between documentary filmmakers and their subjects in the digital era in particular, Jerry Rothwell asserts that “In late capitalism, the promise of access to the private is a currency, the trade in which is central to all media forms, from YouTube to tabloids and celebrity magazines.”16 Although there is no mention of documentaries, the comment extends well to Montage of Heck and Amy, since privacy was an ongoing issue for both subjects – precisely due to the trading of their image in the listed media forms.

84  J. O’Meara

Figure 5.1  Protecting elements of Winehouse’s privacy via grainy images in Amy (Film 4; On the Corner Films, 2015). Screenshot.

Employing a mixing board aesthetic Aesthetic manipulation via digital technology is one feature which Carol Vernallis considers in her in-depth study of contemporary media aesthetics, albeit not in relation to documentary. Writing in Unruly Media, Vernallis describes how “[w]e’re in the midst of an international style that has heightened sonic and visual features; they’ve been intermedially reconfigured and accelerated.”17 Music videos are one of Vernallis’s main subjects of focus, and we can consider the way that Montage of Heck and Amy, as post-MTV rock documentaries, reflect these changes. Documentaries about musicians, particularly those made for television, often incorporate the artist’s music videos. But excluding a few shots from Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” neither of the films under focus does this. Morgen instead chooses to show us out-takes from the famed video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” (1991), and to play the audio from a version of the song recorded in 2006 by the Belgian Scala & Kolacny Brothers women’s choir. The sequence is emblematic of contemporary remix culture, with its clear disjuncture between sound and image in alignment with Vernallis’s description of today’s media relations as “malleable and volatile in a ‘mixing’ board aesthetic.”18 The sequence is one of many which serve to defamiliarize certain iconic images around Cobain and his distinctive singing voice, as part of the documentary’s broader aim of demythologizing the subject. The mixing board aesthetic has long been a feature of the documentary mode of filmmaking, since the form often pieces together fragments of real-world events and evidence, by combining footage from an array of sources. This is especially the case in Montage of Heck, which takes its subtitle and kaleidoscopic style from one of the hundred

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary 85 or so cassette tapes that Morgen found among Cobain’s belongings; thus translating Cobain’s own audio montage into one befitting the audiovisual rockumentary format. In fact, popular media coverage of the film can read like a passage from Vernallis’s book. In the New York Times, Mike Hale summarizes that the documentary is “more than anything, an editing tour de force,” both of sound and image.19 He even uses the same word as Vernallis – “swirl” – to describe the way that sounds and images from a wide variety of sources intermingle as they flash by. Although focused on the audiovisual, Vernallis identifies certain visual techniques associated with unruly media, including the implied over-preening of images: “The image acquires a sense of speed and flexibility: the image’s contents can seem as if they have been poured from one shot into the next.”20 This can be identified in the frequent use of layered shots in both Montage of Heck and Amy, a feature they share with music videos such as Beyoncé’s “Video Phone” (2008). Montage of Heck uses superimpositions expressively to signal Cobain’s subjective experiences, for example, by suggesting his loneliness as a boy by combining two images of him by himself on a beach. Amy generally uses superimpositions when the audience is provided with important information (via voice-over) for which there is no related footage of Winehouse, as when an image of the singer is layered over a document of a signed agreement for her to accept hospital treatment for her addiction. While this technique is in keeping with Kapadia’s aim of prioritizing images of Winehouse above those of anyone or anything else, the voice-over nonetheless plays a crucial role in guiding the audience through the volatile mix of audiovisual elements. Not all of the imagery shares this over-preened quality, however, with much of the found footage noticeably poor in quality: grainy, blurred and badly lit. Although this can serve to signal the so-called “realness” of the images, the manipulation of these and other shots in both documentaries is so overt as to make them inherently unreliable. Consider Montage of Heck’s incorporation of animation, for example. Though the use of animation has a long history in non-fiction media, Montage of Heck mostly relies on digital technology to create motion graphics of Cobain’s own artwork.21 Here, software was used to manipulate the angle, grain, light and texture of Cobain’s drawings after they had been photographed. As a result, his still images come to life, much as his still body starts to move in the corpse-like shots discussed previously. The effect in both cases is potentially ­disorienting – a term critic David Fear uses to describe the film’s presentation of fame more broadly,22 – but perhaps less so for those familiar with the kind of “unruly media” practices which Vernallis describes. Morgen is not the first documentary maker to animate pre-existing or “found” imagery in this way, and with this and various other techniques both Amy and Montage of Heck channel the aesthetic style of Errol Morris. Since the late 1970s, Morris has been crafting documentaries using frenetic editing and a malleable relationship between sound and image. As Ira Jaffe

86 J. O’Meara describes, in Morris’s work superimpositions and optical effects “transform the subject in front of the camera while foregrounding the medium.”23 For example, Jaffe notes that speed, colour, grain, focus and exposure shift unpredictably in Morris’s films. This is also the case in Amy and Montage of Heck, with both directors using filters somewhat at random, either washing a shot in unnatural colours or desaturating selected images to black and white. Both documentaries also experiment with speed to signal their subject’s experience of events. Montage of Heck’s opening sequence, for example, rapidly alternates between nightmarish film footage and stock images of domestic bliss. The sequence is accompanied by the sound of Cobain half-singing, half-screaming, so that it seems like a visual extension of his sister’s comment that “Kurt’s brain was constantly going.” The foregrounding of text in Amy and Montage of Heck seems particularly reminiscent of Errol Morris’s style. In both films, we are shown streams of magazine covers with certain text highlighted through quick zooms or changes in colour. There are also certain similarities between the way the on-screen text functions in Amy and in technically experimental digital cinema, like Zombieland (Fleischer, 2009) and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright, 2010). Each of the productions departs from the established practice of using text as subtitle to instead embed it as an important part of the mise-en-scene, as in Amy when, at one point, Winehouse’s lyrics are superimposed onto the image at an angle, so that they run parallel to the fretboard of her guitar. According to Kapadia, he used Winehouse’s song lyrics as “clues” into her experiences, and so as a kind of guide to her life.24 By selectively displaying them on-screen, he seems to encourage audiences to pay them increased attention. Even if the technique can be a bit distracting or redundant, in certain ways it seems to anticipate and address fans’ passive consumption of these familiar songs. Like in the reflexive, zombie-comedy Zombieland, wherein the “meta” rules for characters’ survival are numbered and displayed on-screen, displaying Winehouse’s lyrics serves to compress meaning and direct our attention to certain lessons that can be learned from them. The lyrics also serve to unite cross-cut footage of several of Winehouse’s performances; further strengthening the relationship between the heavily manipulated sound and images Another of Amy’s obtrusively manipulative formal devices is the use of camera flashes as a tool for structuring. In the second half of the film, segments are increasingly connected by footage of paparazzi overwhelming the singer. The flashes create overexposed images which aptly mirror her more general overexposure in the media at this time (Figure 5.2). Although such moments certainly happened, Kapadia again alters the images so that we, the audience, gain a better sense of how it may have felt for Winehouse to experience this. At various points, the editing itself emulates flash photography through the use of jump cuts and an artificial lighting of the screen (seemingly in post-production). In another sequence in which Winehouse walks through a crowd of paparazzi, the camera pauses on a shot for ten

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary 87

Figure 5.2  Visually rendering Winehouse’s over-exposure in Amy (Film 4; On the Corner Films, 2015). Screenshot.

seconds as she stares into the camera before walking on. Like a deer caught in headlights, her stare and stillness seem designed to make us viewers aware of our culpability as consumers of these images, both at the time and again now: she couldn’t escape this experience and for ten seconds neither can we.

Contested images The analysis in this chapter has mostly foregrounded similarities between Amy and Montage of Heck, but they differ in one crucial way: while the Cobain documentary is the only film about the musician to be made with his family’s support, Winehouse’s father, Mitch, has been openly critical of Amy. While he initially gave approval for Kapadia to direct the film, Winehouse later accused the filmmaker of having an agenda: turning Mitch Winehouse into the film’s anti-hero.25 Though Kapadia made changes to the film at Winehouse’s request, Mitch Winehouse continues to express an interest in making another documentary about his daughter, or even a biopic, thus recalling the long-contested history of films about Cobain. What differs here, of course, is that – unlike the earlier Cobain films – Amy has generally been well-received as a relatively “official” version of events. The inclusion of personal footage, as provided by the singer’s oldest friends, seems crucial to this “officialness” – even though this too was incorporated selectively and, as argued here, problematically. Cobain’s family was also a key focus in media discourse around Montage of Heck’s release. Frances Cobain and Courtney Love demonstrated their support for Montage of Heck by posing for photo with Morgen at a number of public screenings. This is in marked contrast to Love’s supposed

88  J. O’Meara interference with the making of Nick Broomfield’s earlier documentary on Cobain, Kurt & Courtney (1998), which became as much about her as about him. Frances Cobain’s support may be even more significant, given that she allows us to see so much footage from her limited time with her father. Indeed, popular media accounts which highlight the demythologizing nature of Montage of Heck tie this directly to her.26 It was Frances Cobain rather than Love who had creative input into Morgen’s project, and her aims for the documentary were understandably linked to her struggle to establish an independent identity while living in the shadow of Cobain’s iconic image. She describes how “I told [Morgen], ‘I don’t want the mythology of Kurt or the romanticism’.”27 Indeed, Morgen alludes to the idolizing of Cobain’s star image when he describes how “I thought I was going to meet a rock star who got tired of his fame, because that’s the narrative that has settled around him […] but there was also this loving and funny and warm guy who enjoyed parts of his life.”28 Given that this narrative has been circling for so long, since well before Cobain’s death in 1994, it seems to have taken personal footage in Montage of Heck to amend it: images showing someone who did experience happiness with his daughter and with cats. As this chapter has aimed to show, both music documentaries are concerned with revising the unofficial and negatively skewed accounts of their subjects’ lives by altering their public images. In addition to incorporating personal footage, which is put forth as a relatively truthful account of the subjects’ private lives, both filmmakers digitally manipulate pre-­existing imagery and audio recordings of their respective musicians. As such, they produce music documentaries that are emblematic of contemporary audiovisual aesthetics and remix culture. In these documentaries, familiar images, sounds and voices are overlapped or altered to defamiliarizing effect. The impression is that, despite the intense media focus on Cobain and Winehouse, much of their famous lives remained unseen and unheard – until now, when those closest to them decided it was worth sacrificing their private moments to create a fuller, more realistic picture. Although the documentaries highlights certain discrepancies between Cobain’s and Winehouse’s personal experiences of their lives, and the sordid accounts that circulate publically, the films can be critiqued for opening the musicians’ most private selves up to further media scrutiny, and thus of contributing to the problem of media over-exposure which they partly aim to critique.

Notes 1. Michael Saffle, “Retrospective Compilations: (Re)defining the Music Documentary,” in The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop, ed. Benjamin Halligan, Robert Edger and Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs (NY: Routledge, 2013), 42–54: 43. 2. Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Manipulating (public) images in the contemporary music documentary 89 3. “Telegraph Reporters,” “Oscar-winning Amy is a ‘negative, spiteful and misleading’ film, says Mitch Winehouse,” The Telegraph, February 29, Accessed April 24 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/amy/oscar-winnerspiteful-mitch-winehouse/. 4. Paul MacInnes, “Asif Kapadia on Amy: ‘The drinking, the bulimia, the drugs – nobody stopped it,’” The Guardian, 27 June 2015. Accessed April 25 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/27/asif-kapadia-amywinehouse-doc. 5. Ibid. 6. See Kim McNamara, “The Paparazzi Industry and New Media: The Evolving Production and Consumption of Celebrity News and Gossip Websites,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 5 (April 2011), 515–30. 7. Charles Fairchild, “Revealing What We Can Never Know: The Problem of Real Life in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days,” Popular Music and Society, 36, no. 4 (2013), 523–539. 8. Fairchild, “Revealing,” 523. 9. Ibid, 523. 10. Ibid, 527. 11. Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Abington; NY: Routledge, 2014). 12. Ibid, 81. 13. Ibid, 95. 14. Ibid, 95. 15. Ibid, 91. 16. Jerry Rothwell, “Filmmakers and Their Subjects,” in Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives and Practices, edited by Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Berkshire, UK: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 156. 17. Vernallis, Unruly Media, 5. 18. Ibid, 4. 19. Mike Hale “Review: ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,’ a Documentary by Brett Morgen,” The New York Times, 23 April 2015, https://nyti.ms/2pVA1Mx. 20. Vernallis, Unruly Media, 5. 21. Shipra Harbola Gupta, “From Audio to Animation: How ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ Captures Cobain in All His Contradictions,” IndieWire, 4 May 2015, http://www.indiewire.com/2015/05/from-audio-to-animation-howkurt-cobain-montage-of-heck-captures-cobain-in-all-his-contradictions62394/. 22. David Fear, “Sundance 2015: Intimate ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ Doc Stuns at Premiere,” Rolling Stone, January 15 2015, https://www.rollingstone. com/movies/movie-news/sundance-2015-intimate-kurt-cobain-montage-ofheck-doc-stuns-at-premiere-60461/. 23. Ira Jaffe, “Errol Morris’s Forms of Control,” in Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch, edited by William Rothman (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 19–42: 21. 24. Tara Brady, “Amy Winehouse: “The clues were in the songs. The songs tell you everything,” The Irish Times, 27 June 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/ culture/film/amy-winehouse-the-clues-were-in-the-songs-the-songs-tell-youeverything-1.2262670. 25. Kaleem Aftab, “Amy director Asif Kapadia defends himself against Mitch Winehouse criticisms,” The Independent, 19 June 2015, http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/amy-director-asifkapadia-on-the-heartbreaking-compelling-film-that-introduces-a-new-sideto-amy-10331520.html.

90  J. O’Meara 26. See: Brooks Barnes, “With ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,’ Brett Morgen Demythologizes a Legend,” The New York Times, 15 April 2015, https://nyti. ms/2pckr16. See also: David Fricke, “Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt’s Death: An Exclusive Q&A,” Rolling Stone, 8 April 2015, http://www. rollingstone.com/music/features/frances-bean-life-after-kurt-cobain-deathexclusive-interview-20150408. 27. Fricke, “Life After Kurt.” 28. Barnes, “Morgen Demythologizes a Legend.”

6

A new Carmen for a new Spain: nationalism and cinema during the Spanish Civil War Laura Miranda1

The arrival of sound films in 1930s Spain meant that the overwhelming majority of zarzuelas (Spanish operettas) and operas had to adapt to this new medium. As a continuing model, a new kind of genre emerged, inspired by an Andalusian style of folklore that drew on the emerging stars of the time (Imperio Argentina, Estrellita Castro and Concha Piquer, among others), usually dressed in flamenco attire, who performed popular numbers that became commercial hits. The main architects of the genre, directors Benito Perojo and Florián Rey, had started their careers in silent film with zarzuela adaptations, and now took on the potential of this new genre. While still adapting género chico2 and opera works, they also garnered enormous folkloric success in Spain and elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. The height of popularity of the Spanish folkloric musical was reached during the Civil War (1936–1939). Given the impossibility of shooting in Spain, Perojo and Rey filmed at the Hispano-Film Produktion studios in Berlin. After the war, Franco had no objections to a genre with considerable popular support. The new regime adapted the folkloric musical to the new “needs” of the state, thus going beyond the limits of previous films and creating an obvious situation of conceptual ambiguity that continued to reap success well into the 1950s.3 The most successful work filmed in Berlin was, undoubtedly, Rey’s Carmen, la de Triana (1939), starring his second wife and muse, the Argentine-born Imperio Argentina. Curiously, she played the “authentic” nineteenth-century Spanish woman: a dark-haired, whimsical, moody, warm-blooded “white Gypsy” woman who conquers the heart of the Spanish soldier Navarro with her on-stage performances.4 The film is set in Triana, the purest gitano (Gypsy) neighbourhood in Seville, which at the time of filming was the prototype city for Spanishness and modernity on screen. The film retains the main features of the earlier republican years, such as the primacy of the female protagonist and her genuinely “Spanish” performances, while adapting those “modern” features of the 1930s to the new and conservative Francoist state of the 1940s. In this chapter, I analyze how this Carmen was necessary to export a new Carmen myth as a symbol of Spain to the world. In addition, I study how Imperio Argentina’s on-screen performances, based on her distinctive voice

92  L. Miranda and movement, foreshadow some main characteristics of Francoist cinema in the 1940s: the Catholic religion, the bullfighting world, goyesco Spain and the lost overseas Spanish Empire.5

Carmen, la de Triana, quintessence of Spain Carmen, la de Triana was not the first film adaptation of the Carmen story. Despite the major success of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent version in 1915, Jacques Feyder’s Carmen (1926), and Raoul Walsh’s The Loves of Carmen (1927), these films had not gone down well with Spanish audiences, who saw them as unrealistic interpretations, far removed from true Spanish tradition.6 In short, they considered them to be foreign products invested with a certain pejorative picturesqueness that stressed the Spanish orientalist imaginary.7 Florián Rey was one of the critics of these so-called españoladas (from the French espagnolade), foreign films with a Spanish setting that were unpopular with Spanish audiences but of interest abroad for their exotic idealization of Spain. With a clearer idea of what “authentic” Spanish cinema should look like, Rey set out on various projects with the Argentineborn actress, singer and dancer Imperio Argentina, all of them folkloric musicals, all of them enjoying a success that went beyond Spain and reaped remarkable success in Ibero-America.8 Sister San Sulpicio (La hermana San Sulpicio, 1934), Nobleza baturra (1935) and Morena clara (1936) allowed the couple – both business and romantic partners – to travel to Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War to make more folkloric films. At the UFA studios in Berlin, under the auspices of Hispano Film Produktion (HFP), directors Florián Rey and Benito Perojo, leading figures of Spanish film in the Second Republic (1931–1939), made five films with a folkloric setting starring Imperio Argentina and Estrellita Castro: Suspiros de España (Perojo, 1938), The Barber of Seville (El barbero de Sevilla, Perojo, 1938), Mariquilla terremoto (Perojo, 1938), Carmen, la de Triana (Rey, 1938) and Song of Aixa (La canción de Aixa, Rey, 1939).9 It was well known that Nazi Germany was interested in competing with the USA and in entering the international Spanish-speaking market of the 1930s, and Imperio became the prime weapon in achieving this. Her Argentine origins and her work under Rey for the Spanish studio Cifesa from 1934 to 1936 represented for the German film industry an opportunity to make headway in Spanish America. Imperio was the great star of Spanish-language film and her Spanish films had also been highly successful in the Americas.10 Although at first both Goebbels and Hitler were interested in making a film about Lola Montez, Rey and – above all – Imperio talked them instead into filming Rey’s version of Carmen, in which he furthered his vision of Spain as an extension of the Orient, which he then complemented with Song of Aixa, in which Imperio plays a woman of mixed heritage who wins the amorous attentions of two Muslims from feuding families.11

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 93 Many contemporary Spanish critics were disparaging of the films HFP made in Germany: They are … a downright embarrassment for Spain. We live off cliché, especially the Andalusian cliché, taken to its most embarrassing extreme. And it appears that now we are forever going to be capable only of exalting in our cinema the most plebeian conditions of a stereotypical Andalusia that is picturesque and gypsy-like, working-class, jokey and decadent. One comes out of this film … with an irrepressible sorrow … for what is and was not and could have been the work of Spaniards in this illustrious new function.12 Andalusian critics were kinder to Carmen, stressing the veracity or falseness of the Andalusian model used in the film.13 In fact, where critics valued its authenticity, they did so in mentioning that the film is based on Mérimée’s novel, not Bizet’s opera, even though the former “deformed the symbols and customs of Spain at that time.”14 Unlike the Spanish press, most foreign criticism lamented the absence of the melodies from Bizet’s opera, which were strongly tied to the legend.15 However, on October 1939 the critic Felipe Sassone published an article on Carmen, la de Triana in the Spanish national newspaper ABC, in which he alluded directly to critics who considered the film “an inadmissible españolada, and besides, it doesn’t have Bizet’s music.”16 The españolada is not in the novel, because the novel is truth, because Mérimée was a prodigious storyteller, a writer of great colour who was in love with Spain; the españolada is in the opera where, in the middle of the street, the cigarette girl dances nothing less than an habanera, before the corps of dragoon guards, among the passers-by and around a chair upon which Don José sits, of whom we do not know how he earned his title of Don.17 Although originally from Cuba, the habanera we know today is the result, above all, of non-Cuban authors, especially the Basque Sebastián Iradier, author of “La paloma.” In fact, the habanera “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from the opera Carmen is a copy, with some variations, of Iradier’s habanera “El arreglito.” As an example of the Spanish colonial past in the Americas, the habanera was an essential element of the Spanish film imaginary in the 1940s, a symbol of Spanishness, of brotherhood with the Americas and, above all, of the Spanish colonial past, appearing in association with the old Spanish empire in Hispano-America in essential films of the period, such as Correo de Indias (Neville, 1942) and Los últimos de Filipinas (Román, 1945). Benito Perojo himself briefly used the famous habanera “La paloma” in his Suspiros de España when the male lead, of Cuban origin, tries to win over the leading lady’s godfather. Although Spanish film’s insistence

94  L. Miranda on habaneras, associated above all with the cinema of the first wave of Francoism, had its origins in the folkloric film of the Second Republic, at this time the “Spanish” musical imaginary of the coming era was still taking shape, which was why critics railed against Bizet’s habanera for representing precisely the contrary. Bizet became the antithesis of all things Spanish, and in this sense Rey’s films fulfilled the audience’s expectations. From his first sound film with Imperio, Sister San Sulpicio, Rey had begun to create a particular film universe in which music played a lead role in communicating “Spanish” identities and representation. For this, he used musicians such as his brother Rafael Martínez del Castillo and José Muñoz Molleda, who created the musical score, using elements of the folklore of Andalusia and Aragon, which the audience interpreted as typical sounds of Spain. As folkloric musicals were derived to a great extent from adaptations of Spanish lyrical theatre, on many occasions pre-existing songs with which the audience identified were reused. Rey gradually broke with this format, so that Sister San Sulpicio and Nobleza Baturra include pre-existing songs from popular tradition performed by Imperio, while Morena clara is conceived on the basis of three new songs composed for Imperio, which became major hits. Creating new songs for a new actress whom the audience enjoyed and celebrated freed Rey’s musicals from the stasis and conservatism typical of popular music and the zarzuela in the cinema, and lent his films a conservative modernity that the audience identified with, accepting his work as “authentic” and contemporary. Furthermore, Imperio required songs that fit her vocal range, to be explored further below, and Bizet’s Carmen was deemed a bad fit. So it was that Rey could not use Bizet’s music for reasons of great importance to the film’s commercial success: 1) his strong aesthetic and ideological convictions, with clear popular roots, combined with his belonging to a socio-intellectual Spanish elite; 2) Bizet’s music, which lacked authenticity for Spanish critics; 3) the custom of including new songs performed by Imperio with each new folkloric work; and 4) Imperio’s vocal qualities, which lacked the operatic range that Carmen demanded. The premiere of each HFP film in Spain, a country still at war, was a major event in the growing number of Franco-controlled cities. Their uninterrupted presence on Spanish screens between 1938 and 1940 made it possible for the good relations between Spanish cinema and its audiences that had been established in the previous Republican period to continue.18 Carmen, la de Triana premiered in Zaragoza on November 25, 1938, and subsequently in Barcelona and Madrid in October 1939, distributed by UFilms.19 Half a year after its premiere, it was shown four times a day at the Pathé cinema in Seville, with the ticket office opening from 11 in the morning.20 It appeared in the listings of leading national periodicals like ABC uninterruptedly from its premiere in 1938 until 1944, and even continued to appear intermittently in other years, such as in 1945 and 1947, coinciding with the release of Imperio’s latest films. Some screenings of Carmen, la de

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 95 Triana, such as the one in Madrid’s Panorama Cinema, were made from 1942 with a “new copy,” which gives some idea of how many screenings the film had been through in Spanish cinemas until then.21 This shows the decisive importance of Carmen in the post-war Spanish imaginary. The film was also a major success in Portugal. It was shown twice a day in a leading downtown theatre in Lisbon for 23 consecutive weeks in 1942.22 Its songs were the “nightmare of the city.”23 Never before has any spectacle of any genre achieved comparable success. It is normal for everyone to go as many times as necessary to learn all the songs in the film. (…) People no longer want to see but hear, no matter how or where, the voice and the grace they find in Imperio Argentina.24 Argentina was Spanish cinema’s port of entry to Hispano-America and Imperio’s Argentine origins helped her productions garner unprecedented success. Carmen, de la Triana, originally advertised as Carmen,25 was released in an atmosphere of heightened expectation in Buenos Aires. The film’s premiere in Argentina was brought forward at Imperio’s express wishes, as she wanted Buenos Aires audiences to be the very first to see the film, which was premiered the next day in Havana and Montevideo.26 Imperio was introduced as “the greatest actress of Spanish film,” because “the film is Imperio Argentina’s, all the spectator’s attention is focused on her, hanging on her looks, her songs and dances, and her captivating smile.”27 Imperio Argentina was vital for Rey’s Carmen to become an authentic mass phenomenon. Her dual identity, half way between Spanish and Argentine, would play an important part in this process of appropriation of national identity, making both Carmen and Imperio two women on the threshold.

Imperio and Carmen, two myths joined by an armed conflict Imperio was the absolute and undeniable star of the film, eclipsing even the director. She was the “new Carmen” of the 1930s, on the cusp of the Civil War and Francoism. In the incipient autarchic process, this film is a clear example of myth-generating self-sufficiency that avoided foreign music at any cost to enhance the essence of Spain through songs created for Imperio, a singer and dancer now turned actress: Bizet’s music is admirable, French, and universal (…); but being French, it was not necessary for this Spanish film, which never set out to be a reproduction of the opera and much less become a zarzuela. And it has not become a zarzuela because there are no duets, nor trios, nor quartets, and only the leading lady sings and dances, without ever losing the dynamism and effectiveness of the action, and she dances and sings because her trade is that of the singer and dancer.28

96  L. Miranda However, Imperio was not Spanish. Born in Argentina to Spanish parents, she first performed as a child prodigy on Hispano-American tours as a singer and dancer performing Spanish and Spanish-American popular songs (always under the close watch of her parents). Unlike other Hispano-American legends of the era, such as Carmen Miranda, who found international fame by working in the USA, Imperio looked to Europe. She went to Spain as a singer and dancer (she could not get papers as a silent film actress) before moving to the Paramount studios at Joinville outside Paris, where she starred in various films, including Suburban Melody (Melodía de arrabal, Louis J. Gasnier, 1933), as leading lady to the Argentine star Carlos Gardel.29 Ambition and years of training and experience on stage explain how Imperio became the stereotypical Spanish woman in Rey’s films. Her success was founded on a working method that was well ordered and academic but had a popular touch, typical of the Second Republic. Like Rey relied on his brother for musical support, Imperio spent long hours with her sister-in-law Guadalupe Martínez del Castillo, a notable Aragonese folklorist, creating the character of Pilar in Nobleza baturra.30 From 1934 to 1936 Imperio not only made the characters she played her own but also forged her unique media persona thanks to cinema, recorded music, and live performances in all the media at her disposal, with the exception of radio, which she did not work in until the late 1940s in Argentina, Portugal and Uruguay. Despite including notable recordings and performances of tangos and other Hispano-American songs in her repertoire, Imperio showed off her Spanishness to the full, performing Spanish songs (coplas), Aragonese jotas and songs from diverse flamenco palos related to her films.31 As far as the critics were concerned, Imperio was above all a singer, then a dancer, and last of all an actress, curiously.32 Both Spanish and foreign critics name Imperio as the film’s main attraction: Imperio Argentina stands out from the rest, making a superb creation of the Carmen type as a singer and as an actress, deeply Spanish, deeply Andalusian, and deeply human. (…) As in Mérimée’s admirable novel, there remains intact the human type, profoundly Spanish and true, which Imperio Argentina performs prodigiously, to the extent that we do not believe that there is anyone capable of surpassing her among our film and theatre actresses.33 Spanish critics praised Imperio’s work and did not hesitate to proclaim that her character “while not exactly matching the Spanish woman’s quirks of mood, is at least fairly stripped of the falseness with which Prosper Mérimée adorned – so to speak – his Carmen. (…) The dancer this time is a thousand times preferable to the cigarette girl of yore.”34 In the eyes of the press and the public, Imperio bore the standard of the Spanish woman. She and her characters formed a coherent whole attractive to the public thanks first to

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 97 her songs and second to her dancing; the songs that she performed on screen and stage were the same songs that appear on her records.35 Imperio was the voice of Spain in the 1930s. It was the voice of a woman strengthened by the musical exchanges between cinema, variety theatre, and teatro frívolo (frivolous theatre), where Imperio had made her name.36 Imperio’s persona evolved from the 1920s and early 1930s, when she was synonymous with cosmopolitanism with an Argentine touch, to 1930s Spain, when the public appropriated her as a symbol of national identity, a game in which she willingly participated. This “appropriation” of Imperio, which came into being between 1934 and 1936 as a result of Rey’s trilogy reached its climax in Carmen and continued up to her participation in the autarchic film Goyescas (Perojo, 1942). This film marked the end of Imperio’s most successful period and her return to Argentina under Perojo’s direction orders in the San Martín Studios, her “Spanish characters” in evident decline.37 Imperio and Rey gave new life to the myth of Carmen with a highly personal project in which Imperio’s style, voice and dancing were decisive. The aesthetic differences between her previous films, befitting the Second Republic, and these German films, are essential for understanding the process of change that the folkloric musical was undergoing, and which established the foundations for post-war cinema. The actress was maintained, along with part of her characteristic Gypsy wardrobe, but musical and visual elements such as goyesco-style clothing and chiaroscuro games were added in the film – to be explored further below – that promoted the preponderant role of Imperio and foreshadowed the autarchic cinema of the 1940s. Imperio’s voice was not the most potent, but it did have a “great expressive strength, with a great deal of grace and impeccable pitch,” something that could not be said of many of her contemporaries.38 She also changed vocal register with great ease, and her transition from mixed voice to head voice apparently occurred quite naturally, in contrast to other folklóricas like Estrellita Castro, who had notable differences between both registers. Her solid classical vocal training under such outstanding teachers as Joaquina Ortiz, a student of Julián Gayarre’s, who taught singing to Imperio for 38 years, is another notable difference between Imperio and her contemporaries.39 This delicacy in her pitch and in the changes of register combined with the intense formation of her repertoire from her beginnings as a child prodigy in Argentina, which was broadened enormously by her HispanoAmerican tours, her theatre work in Spain, and her early days making films in Joinville, where she frequented the leading musical circles that included Carlos Gardel, a personal friend of her father’s. The success of her folkloric films in Hispano-America allowed her to make frequent concert trips to countries in the Americas, which she took as an opportunity to offer a mix of songs from her broad repertoire, adding Latin American songs to her Spanish catalogue. For example, Imperio opened the Teatro América in Cuba singing the Argentine zambra “Sanjuanino de mi amor” by Pérez

98  L. Miranda Freire, the tango “Inocencia” by Simone and the tango-canción “Rocío” by Quintero, León and Quiroga.40 The other major trait that characterized Imperio was her exquisite taste when singing. She could turn a song into an elegant, stylized product without losing its popular character. Far removed from the stridency and grandiloquence of many fellow singers, Imperio stood out with her vocal performances, which included “her art and ancestry,” perfect pitch, an ideal voice, and many hours’ preparation with major professionals, including her then husband Rey and her in-laws, Guadalupe and Rafael Martínez del Castillo.41 She was undoubtedly supported in her most successful years by the Martínez del Castillo family, who taught her how to improve her performance, guided her professional career, and were missed in her subsequent work. Carmen, la de Triana was, for the specialist Spanish press, a domestic product: despite having been made in Germany at the UFA studios; despite the existence of a wholly German-language version, Andalusische Nächte (Nights in Andalusia, Herbert Maisch, 1938), with Imperio singing Spanish songs in German for the German audience; despite using German finance and personnel; and despite the fact that, as far as Germany was concerned, the German version is considered a German product.42 This new version of the myth of Carmen, who falls in love with the Spanish brigadier José Navarro, who becomes a bandolero, presents a protagonist who decides to leave José because she believes his life is in danger with her. Carmen then flirts again with Antonio Vargas Heredia, who is killed in the bullring by a savage bull. In turn, José decides to prevent smugglers from attacking a military detachment and also loses his life. In the end, Carmen is left alone and cannot take her leave of José, whose coffin she sees from the railings of the cemetery.43 The film presents a more uniform soundtrack than Rey’s previous works, and it is clear that the war years in Germany helped him to broaden this aspect. The narrative music, which in previous works played a merely structural role, takes on a life of its own here, with Carmen’s theme of love/loss developing over the course of the film and combining with other diegetic and extradiegetic themes. Rey had the help of a young José Muñoz Molleda, a noted Spanish film composer in the early years of Francoism, to compose the musical illustrations, characterized by the search for orientalising and army sounds, which swim in the collective subconscious. Muñoz Molleda was also responsible, along with Juan Mostazo Morales and Francisco Merenciano Bosch, for the film’s songs, with lyrics by “Kola” (Padilla) and Rey, Perelló and Joaquín de la Oliva. Rey also had Ramón and Carlos Montoya as outstanding guitarists on screen and his brother Rafael as conductor. The use of oriental music was not a new element in Rey’s folkloric imaginary, but it is true that in the German years he used it with relish. From a few simple structural blocks composed by the maestro Turina for Sister San Sulpicio, Rey increased the alhambrista sounds of his films up to Morena Clara, which reaches its climax in the film with Trini (Imperio) singing “El día que nací yo” dressed as a bourgeois Sevillian girl.44 The

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 99 exotic aspect had been evolving in Rey’s cinema and now elaborated a vision of Andalusia as an extension of a distant, dream-like Orient. The film abounds in on-screen and background music in a military style on brass instruments. The background music plays a very interesting role in foreshadowing events, and in this sense, the music of the bugles foresees the deaths of José and the bullfighter. In the bullring, the two male characters, José and Antonio, are presented as men of honour before a Carmen who, attired in goyesco style, joins their fates. Just at the denouement of the Spanish Civil War, this story presents again the inability of the Gypsy world to adapt to the law and to payo (non-Gypsy) customs. The abundance of military music helps to configure in the collective subconscious the idea of order and indicates the differences between Nationalists and Republicans, with Carmen as the mediator in the conflict. The Carmen that is presented to the audience in the first scene, when she goes to the prison to visit bullfighter Antonio Vargas Heredia, is reminiscent of Trini in Morena clara.45 She is dressed as a Gypsy, in a shawl and polka dot skirt, her hair with Spanish bow and loops, long art deco-style earrings, necklace and cross at her neck. Her outfit is a symbol that is sought as a joining point between Imperio’s two major films, the climax of her film career. As occurs in Morena clara, her character in this version of Carmen evolves at the same time as the aesthetic of the film. In this case, she evolves towards goyesco-style clothing that would be the dominant note in her next film in Spain, Goyescas. Imperio performs four songs in the first half hour of the film, leaving no doubt as to her position as star and lead. People flocked to the cinema to enjoy her performances, especially her songs, so it is easy to see why Rey included more and more songs on screen for his lead female characters and moved them to early on in the films. Imperio performs five new songs, always as solos, anticipating Carmen’s sad end. For the first time, a critic casts into doubt the purity of Imperio’s performances and albeit in a veiled way, alludes to her Argentine origins. Sassone makes room in his ABC review for Imperio’s songs (see Figure 6.1). From “Carceleras del Puerto,” which he describes as “delicious in character and rhythm,” although underappreciated by the audience, or “Los piconeros,” which “has grace, character and fine rhythm,” Sassone focuses on the romance “Antonio Vargas Heredia,” especially the verse “and from your mouth a carnation,” which he considers “an unfortunate rhythm, from the Argentine milonga,” given that in 1835, the date in which the film is set, the “invasion of this adulterated and returned pseudo-Spanish music” had not yet occurred.47 The film’s musical climax is presented in the cantina when Carmen performs two iconic songs in the space of ten minutes: “Los piconeros” and “Antonio Vargas Heredia.” Carmen sings this second song for José, boosting the payo/gitano dichotomy, given that Carmen presents Antonio (gitano) as an emblem of manliness (“the most arrogant and best-groomed”) to José (payo). However, the second performance of “Antonio Vargas Heredia”

100  L. Miranda

Figure 6.1  Imperio’s songs in the film46

presents José as a brave man facing up to the “bull”: in this case, the smugglers who attempt to kill “the dragoons,” his true military family. The copla puts across numerous ideas that would be expressed repeatedly throughout the 1940s: Spanishness, manliness, the pride of the Spanish race, native ­customs and the intrinsic rationality of the Spanish woman. The Spanish song, the copla, is the essence of Spain and is presented visually with Carmen at the bullring dressed in the goyesco style to see Antonio fight the bull. A tragic end awaits both men. Antonio is killed by the bull in the bullring, under Carmen’s watchful gaze. Carmen’s farewell song is tied together with a rejuvenated version of this copla, “Lamento por Antonio Vargas Heredia,” which presents the religious component with a goyesco-style Carmen grieving before the cross. Many elements come together in this scene that foreshadow the characteristics of 1940s Francoist cinema: the Catholic religion in Carmen’s song (“Give me faith to suffer my sorrow and my grief and my solitude”), the bullfighting world (the cuadrilla, the matadors, death by bull), the Empire (great artists, the great Spanish territory, Carmen dressed in the goyesco style) and flamenco as symbol of identity (flamenco guitar interweaved with Antonio’s two-step and Carmen’s song of lament). Railings form an important visual element in scenes connected to the deaths of both men, Antonio’s death in the bullring and José’s funeral. In these scenes, Carmen remains on the other side of the railings as she does not go through them to accompany Antonio’s or José’s dead body. The Gypsy woman is the element of exotic otherness and, consequently, she represents what is different. While in the films prior to the Civil War the element of exotic alterity was to some extent assimilated by the dominant culture, in

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 101 the films during the conflict, foreshadowing the arrival of Francoism, the element of otherness is negated through the difference. This final scene of the film, in which Carmen watches from the railings as the army bestows its honours on José’s coffin, has been pointed out on various occasions as a metaphor for the division of Spain in the Civil War. Carmen, la de Triana, without losing the freshness of republican cinema in Imperio’s performances, becomes denser, darker, more tragic; it is, in short, the symbol of a folkloric cinema befitting the new post-war politics.

Conclusions Carmen, la de Triana was a major success of 1930s Spanish film and confirmed the ascendancy of both its director, Florián Rey, and his muse, Imperio Argentina. The film presents new characteristics that foreshadow Francoist cinema, such as the Catholic religion, the bullfighting world, goyesco Spain and the lost overseas Spanish Empire. The imminent new Francoist regime saw in Carmen, la de Triana the possibility of closer ties with Hispano-America through Imperio, the Argentine-born actress, singer and dancer, who had undergone a process of appropriation by the Spanish audience. The suppression of her cosmopolitanism and her reconstruction as authentically Spanish developed at the same time as the early film musical in Ibero-America, adopting and adapting various kinds of live performance between Latin America, Spain, France and Germany. Carmen and Imperio share not only incredible voices and movements on-stage/screen, but a dual identity that identifies them as threshold characters and provokes in the audience a desire to possess them. This longing to possess Imperio, in parallel with her fictional character, was palpable on both sides of the Atlantic. This led not only to the incursion of Spanish cinema into the Spanish-language market in the Americas but also to national identity in the Americas being negotiated through cinema and the nostalgia for Spain of many exiles far from the mother country.

Notes 1. This work is part of the project “Música en conflicto en España y Latinoamérica: entre la hegemonía y la transgresión (siglos XX y XXI)” [MINECO16-HAR2015-64285-C2-1-P], coord. by Celsa Alonso González (University of Oviedo). 2. Género chico is a subgenre of the zarzuela, a brief format usually in one act as opposed to larger zarzuela works of greater duration. 3. Jo Labanyi, “Race, Gender and the Disavowal in Spanish Cinema of the Early Franco Period: The Missionary Film and the Folkloric Musical,” Screen 38, no. 3 (1997), 215–231. 4. Eva Woods, White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 5. Goyesco is an adjective that makes reference to the painter Francisco de Goya and the aesthetics of his time in the eighteenth century.

102  L. Miranda 6. For a more in-depth review of Carmen versions on-screen, please see Chris Perriam and Ann Davies, eds., Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005); and Phil Powrie et al., eds., Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). 7. Marta García Carrión, Por un cine patrio: cultura cinematográfica y nacionalismo español (1926-1936) (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2013), 167–172. 8. Laura Miranda, “Imperio Argentina, Florián Rey y Cifesa: el éxito de los musicales folklóricos españoles en la Argentina de los años treinta,” in Diálogos cinematográficos entre España y Argentina: música, estrellas y escenarios compartidos, eds. Laura Miranda and Lucía Rodríguez Riva, vol. 1 (Santander: Shangrilá Textos Aparte, 2019), 40–73. 9. For a detailed analysis of the relevance of HFP and its films, please see Manuel Nicolás Meseguer, Hispano Film Produktion: una aventura españolista en el cine del Tercer Reich (1936-1944) (Santander: Shangrilá Textos Aparte, 2017). These and other sources mentioned in this chapter may be available on the Internet. 10. Manuel Nicolás Meseguer, Hispano Film Produktion, 66–67. 11. Ann Davies has analyzed the differences between Imperio Argentina’s Carmen and Penélope Cruz’s La niña de tus ojos (The girl of your dreams, Fernando Trueba, 1998). The second film deals with Spanish productions in Nazi Germany and Cruz’s character is supossed to have put herself in Imperio’s shoes. Ann Davies, “Singing of dubious desire: Imperio Argentina and Penélope Cruz as Nazi Germany’s exotic other.” Shaw, L., Stone, R., Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 17–29. 12. Gabriel Espina, Vértice, 27 (November-December, 1939), cited in Manuel Nicolás Meseguer, Hispano Film Produktion, 248. 13. José Mª Claver Esteban, Luces y sombras: estereotipos españoles en el cine costumbrista español, 1896-1939 (Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2012), 506. 14. Miguel Ródenas, “Imperial: Carmen la de Triana,” ABC, October 14, 1939, 16. 15. Sr. Feliú, “Carmen, la de Berlín,” Documentitos de un indocumentado (blog), November 18, 2018, http://documentitosdeunindocumentado.blogspot.com/ 2018/11/carmen-la-de-berlin.html. 16. Felipe Sassone, “Carmen, la trianera,” ABC, October 20, 1939, 3. The emphasis is on Sassone himself, hinting at the importance of Bizet’s work in this context. 17. Ibid. Emphasis my own. 18. Manuel Nicolás Meseguer, Hispano Film Produktion, 112. 19. Sr. Feliú, “Carmen, la de Berlín.” 20. ABC, April 23, 1939, 19. 21. ABC, June 13, 1942, 2. Enrique Cerezo, Spanish producer and president of Atlético de Madrid FC remastered Rey’s Carmen in 2014 before the film was on sale in DVD format. “Film heritage has not been taken care of here [in Spain]. Only the Filmoteca Nacional has done an important job. From the same negative, instead of making a copy and saving the original, multiple copies have been made again and again until the negative itself has sometimes become unusable.” Words of Cerezo in Rocío García, “El cine renace de entre los escombros,” El País, March 7, 2014, https://elpais.com/cultura/2014/03/06/ actualidad/1394120430_733444.html. 22. Terenci Moix has noted 24 consecutive weeks. Terenci Moix, Suspiros de España (Barcelona: Plaza&Janés, 1993). 23. Marino Rico, “Un ídolo de Lisboa,” ABC, December 8, 1943, 43; ABC Sevilla, December 8, 1943, 16.

A new Carmen for a renewed Spain 103 24. Ibid. Emphasis my own. 25. “Carmen, la de Triana, título de la obra con Imperio Argentina,” Film 1212, July 15, 1938, 4. 26. “El Broadway estrenará mañana Carmen, la de Triana, con Imperio Argentina,” Film 1213, July 25, 1938, 2. 27. Carmen, la de Triana, Film 1214, August 5, 1938, 10. 28. Felipe Sassone, “Carmen, la trianera.” Emphasis my own. 29. Lucía Rodríguez Riva y Pablo Piedras, “De tangos y tonadas: Carlos Gardel se encuentra con Imperio Argentina en Joinville,” in Diálogos cinematográficos, 18–39. 30. Imperio Argentina (en colaboración con Pedro Manuel Víllora), Malena Clara (Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 2001). 31. The copla or canción española is a Spanish song with a poetic structure very similar to Spanish romance. Its theme is mainly love, with intrigues of jealousy and tragedy. Quintero, León and Quiroga are three of the main creators for this genre. 32. “Pathé Cinema: Carmen, la de Triana,” ABC Sevilla, November 12, 1938, 18. 33. Felipe Sassone, “Carmen, la trianera.” Emphasis my own. 34. “Pathé Cinema: Carmen, la de Triana.” Emphasis my own. 35. Complete discography of Imperio Argentina in Martín de la Plaza, Imperio Argentina. Una vida de artista (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003). 36. To review the relationships between music theatre, cinema and music in the Spain of the early twentieth century see Celsa Alonso, “Música y construcción nacional en España: teatro musical, cine y música,” Compassos, passos, espaços: os lugares da música, November 7, 2018, https://www.doity.com.br/ anais/trabalhos-completos-14musimid/trabalho/80265. 37. Vicente Benet has outlined the different stages of her film career in “The Creation of Imperio Argentina as Film Star,” in Identity Mediations in Latin American Cinema and Beyond. Culture, Music and Transnational Discourses, eds. Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño and Laura Miranda (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019), 10–27. 38. Felipe Sassone, “Carmen, la trianera.” Emphasis my own. 39. “Muere Imperio Argentina, mito del cine de los años 30 y la voz más universal de la copla,” ABC Sevilla, August 23, 2001, 47. 40. Daniel Pineda Novo, “Las folklóricas y el cine,” ABC Sevilla, August 15, 1984, 65. 41. Miguel Ródenas, “Notas teatrales,” ABC, March 27, 1942, 13. 42. The German version was registered as a film by the German company Froelich for UFA. Manuel Nicolás Meseguer, Hispano Film Produktion, 107. 43. Ann Davies has noted that “this rewritten ending stresses the masculine dedication to a noble Spanish patria above all things.” Ann Davies, “Singing of Dubious Desire: Imperio Argentina and Penélope Cruz as Nazi Germany’s Exotic Other,” in Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema, eds. Lisa Shaw and Rob Stone (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 17–29: 18. 44. Ramón Sobrino, Música sinfónica alhambrista (Monasterio, Bretón, Chapí) (Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 1999). 45. Jover Oliver has analyzed the different scenarios of this Carmen. Rafael Jover Oliver, “Andalucía desde Berlín: Carmen la de Triana,” Frame: revista de cine de la Biblioteca de la Facultad de Comunicación, 1 (2007) 162–177, http:// fama2.us.es/fco/frame/frame1/estudios/1.4.pdf. 46. Laura Miranda, Canciones en el cine español. Período de autarquía (19391950) (Santander: Shangrilá Textos Aparte, 2018), 87. 47. Felipe Sassone, “Carmen, la trianera.”

Part III

Beyond borders

7

“Uber opera”: the politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles Monica C. Chieffo

You slide into the cosseted depths of the limousine; the door shuts, closing out the fierce noise and buzz of the LA streets. But this sense of separation is a fleeting illusion – you now are more connected than you’ve ever been. Pulling out into the hot grind of downtown traffic, you and your fellow passengers are joining the wider pulse and flow of the city, but there’s something bigger here too. In the car, you’re suddenly immersed in music, by song, by a story that unfolds, that consumes your senses. A sense of deceleration brings you back to your seat. The limo is braking and suddenly you’re walking across hot tarmac to a new limo. There’s music here, a new song, another story, separate yet connected to the first. And this new car once more pulls out into the roar of LA downtown traffic…1

Introduction: Chamber opera in the twenty-first century The evocative vignette above is an excerpt from a 2015 promotional marketing release by Sennheiser, a leading manufacturer of audio equipment, explaining their key role in the Los Angeles opera scene. The work described, Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars, by the company, the Industry, is a prominent example of the larger trend in twenty-first-century opera toward a chamber aesthetic heightened by technological manipulations such as close-miked sound and the intimate acoustics of small concert venues. Other instances of this trend include LA Opera’s “Off Grand” series, in imitation of Off Broadway theatre; San Francisco Opera’s Soundbox theatre that uses an electronic sound system to control nuances like reverb; the UK non-profit Opera Helps, which sends professional singers into rooms of private homes, as well as The Metropolitan Opera, whose Director Peter Gelb reported in 2015 the experimentation of an “Opera Truck” in New York City.2 The year 2015 also marks the height of the “flash mob” opera phenomenon on YouTube.3 The Industry, founded in 2012 by Artistic Director, and now MacArthur fellow, Yuval Sharon, is an experimental opera company that has swiftly become one of the premiere groups for new music in America. The company prides itself on revivifying an enervated art form through hip,

108  M.C. Chieffo immersive presentations and wireless technologies that push the boundaries of traditional opera. For instance, their first site-specific endeavour, Invisible Cities (2013), featured Sennheiser wireless headphones that allowed audiences to wander freely around historic Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles. Indeed, Wired Magazine asks, “Is this the Opera of the Future?” as the production far surpassed the viral moment of flashmob style performances.4 However, as I present in detail in this chapter, the success of Hopscotch also brings to the fore the ways in which site-specific opera serves as a stage for local politics. While opera as a cultural practice has for centuries played with the threshold between politics, aesthetics, and spectatorship, as I show below, Hopscotch’s presence in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Boyle Heights mimics the very processes of material erasure, including sonic and visual erasure, often attributed to gentrification and urban renewal. Along these lines, opera enacts a tenuous relationship between looking and listening that, in this instance, is susceptible to its own disruption as an art form by the intrusion of local politics related to gentrification and the aesthetics of grassroots community. Relatedly, operatic spectatorship accrues a hardened layer of exclusivity when those privileged with the ability to listen and gaze impede upon the lives of residents who are unwilling participants in Hopscotch’s dramaturgical reach. The state of intermediality – that is, the presentation of the opera across urban space, live sound, and technologically enhanced sound, therefore becomes the conceit for the systemic territorialization of a residential neighborhood of Los Angeles. “The audience” is cast as urban tourists, inscribed in this role by the opportunity to choose to listen and watch amid those who do not get to choose. Furthermore, by virtue of opera’s increasing participation in “experience culture,” Hopscotch reinforces processes of gentrification already underway in marginalized neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, such as displacement by rental hikes. If Hopscotch heightens the already inequitable audiovisual fields of looking and listening to one’s native environment, an issue that I discuss in more depth below, we ought to consider whether site-specific opera could be a truly participatory, inclusive form of operatic production and political performance.

“Breaking the fourth wall with a vengeance”: Hopscotch’s reception history Hopscotch was met with virtually unchallenged, laudatory praise. One can read a sizeable archive of materials from what was in 2015 a constant stream of congratulatory press in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Guardian, as well as topic-specialized magazines like Wired, Sound and Vision, the Drive and others.5 Perhaps forged in the grandiose genealogy of opera in the house, Mark Swed, music critic for the

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 109 Los Angeles Times, viewed the work of Hopscotch as “reshaping opera” in “a transformative moment for an art form.”6 The Washington Post went so far as to say the project Hopscotch was “breaking the fourth wall with a vengeance.”7 In a nod to the Hollywood film industry, Alex Ross’s piece titled “Opera on Location” generously describes Hopscotch as “one of the more complicated operatic enterprises to have been attempted since Richard Wagner staged ‘The Ring of the Nibelung’ over four days in 1876.”8 For Ross, an authoritative voice in music journalism, Hopscotch was “a combination of a road trip, architecture tour, contemporary music festival, and waking dream.”9 Likewise, Achim Gleissner, the head of commercial management, broadcast and media of the Industry’s collaborator Sennheiser Audio, comments in a media release, “Hopscotch challenges our traditional notion of the operatic art form, enabling audience members to become active participants…. The Sennheiser AVX system – which is extremely easy to operate – is a key enabling technology, heightening the artistic experience for audience members and delivering pristine wireless audio to the Central Hub [emphases mine].”10 Hopscotch romanticizes the unfettered freedom of the city dweller in a “choose your own adventure” format of both looking and listening. In spite of all its monumentality, Hopscotch was promoted as a “mobile opera,” invoking the ritual all Angelinos share and love to hate: spending hours in the car. At the same time, Hopscotch sold to audiences the creative resistance of walking through the city. This aspect is reminiscent of mid-Twentieth-­ century social theorists who envisioned ways in which individuals could exercise agency in a highly ordered urban and social geography. Notably, Guy Debord, of the Situationist International movement, coined the term “psychogeography,” a concept tying emotions and memory to geographic place. His idea for creative resistance entailed making new, altered maps of well-travelled regions that would “clarify certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences.”11 Likewise, social theorist Michel de Certeau discusses the isolationist city walker as someone who challenges the hegemonic order of the urban landscape, inventing her own path by negotiating with the city’s firm lines.12 Yet what is at stake for the community when this new format of opera is unleashed on an “unsuspecting city,” “breaking the fourth wall with a vengeance?” This chapter considers the net effect of such performances by stepping past the old wreckage of the operatic cultural imaginary to contemporary thresholds of politics, community engagement, music, sound and space. I propose that the politics of space and sound that arise from a critical look at Hopscotch are strongly at odds with the opera’s virtually unblemished critical reception. In fact, given the choice of performance locale of Downtown Los Angeles and parts of Boyle Heights just over the 101 and 10 Freeways, Hopscotch is a demonstrative case of the ways in which site-specific opera may bear semblance to the visible – and audible – features of gentrification.13

110  M.C. Chieffo In addition to boasting stunning logistical feats and highly visible acclaim in the media, Hopscotch also ignited the formation and collective actions of radical grassroots coalitions in Boyle Heights whose members and allies were made unwilling participants in performances of Hopscotch. While the volatile nature of Hopscotch’s engagement with the local community, which I explain in detail below, was perhaps an unintended consequence of the performance, it nonetheless contributes to the work’s overall theoretical value in considering the politics of site-specific opera. With this in mind, the opera is a case study of “the theoretical implications of mobile and site-specific performance.” That is to say, the opera is produced for the people and the locales in which it is staged. I use the term “staged” purposely, as it connotes the material underpinnings of the ­voyeuristic gaze of the audience. Despite the opera’s effervescence and mobility, the audience’s gaze figured prominently as a means to fix and preserve Hopscotch, the work. This gaze figures prominently in a key scene in Hollenbeck Park, where local protestors and performers alike clashed. In support of this analysis, I will now turn to several interlocking pieces of evidence: “the historical context of disenfranchisement” and housing covenants of Boyle Heights, responses to the opera by Defend Boyles Heights members gathered both from their media sites and my personal interview with two members, and my first-hand interpretation while attending the opera.

Attending the “red route” In November of 2015, the Industry took to the streets with 24 cars for the performance of 36 “chapters” or scenes.14 Audience members, in groups of four, were driven from one scene to the next, each group beginning on a different point on the route so as to create scenes of a story unfolding differently. As the title suggests, Hopscotch re-frames Los Angeles as a ludic environment, taking as its stage famous locations in Downtown and East Los Angeles, including Mariachi Plaza and Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights, as well as the Bradbury Building, Million Dollar Theater, Chinatown Plaza and even the Los Angeles River trail. Additionally, scenes take place inside apartments, elevators, and rooftops of newly refurbished luxury condo buildings. White-gloved chauffeurs guide audience members from vehicle to location site. Perhaps for reasons of space and practicality, the Industry decided not to use cars in the strict sense of sedans, but instead to use black stretch limousines. Tickets ranged in price from $125 to $175 USD and ensured attendees a one-of-a-kind experience, seated shoulder to shoulder with professional singers and instrumentalists, who hopped on board and exited the limousines along the driving route. Sunday, November 8, 2015, was a bright, sunny morning. I ordered an Uber carpool service to drive me about 17 miles from West Los Angeles to arrive on time in Boyle Heights to begin the “Red route” version of Hopscotch. I arrived in an empty lot, where a limo was waiting for my three

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 111 opera companions and me. A cellist, already seated in the far corner of the car, begins to play soft, intermittent tremolos, warming up the space. Soon a male voice enters, reciting Spanish prose. We drive off, passing a woman sauntering about in a bright red dress with her face painted as a Mexican Day of the Dead face paint.15 Within minutes, we arrive at a corner bodega in Mariachi Plaza on East 6th Street near Whittier Boulevard. The Spanish prose continues and seems to toss about stereophonically, jumping from the dry acoustic of the limousine interior to the radio frequency of the wireless headphone against my ear, made possible by Sennheiser’s brand new AVX digital wireless microphone system which “discretely captures ambient audio” in the vehicle.16 The spoken words are meditations on Cervantes’ Don Quixote by director Yuval Sharon himself, as well as quotes from Spanish modernist and social theorist, José Ortega y Gasset: “We must try to find for our circumstance … its appropriate place in the immense perspective of the world[.] In short, the reabsorption of circumstance is the concrete destiny of man.”17 Hopscotch’s fragmented libretto is as unconventional as its itinerant stagecraft. Sharon initially wanted to set the anti-novel Rayuela by the Argentine modernist Julio Cortazar. However, after the Cortazar estate denied the Industry permission to use the source text, Sharon marshalled writers and composers to finesse a similar nonlinear libretto that could be experienced at random. Within the headphone audio, the voices fade out of my aural field as I pass a group of mariachi musicians warming up. For a few moments, source sounds and produced sounds were ambiguously mixed. Were the mariachi musicians preparing for a regular Sunday session? The locale, the historic Mariachi Plaza, has served as a haven for mariachi musicians since at least the 1950s. Or, were they part of the thinly veiled “theatre of life” conceit of the opera? Pierre Schaeffer, who famously theorized the soundscape, might call such sounds the “keynote” of the environment.18 Yet suddenly, the ambient sounds of the square – locals chatting, Chicano radio pumping from inside the corner store, are muted by the returned close miking of the words of Cervantes and Gasset in my headphones.

Sunday in the park: site-specific protest One scene, entitled “First Kiss,” transformed Hollenbeck Park into a Renoir-esque vignette of confessional love sung between the main characters, Lucha and Orlando. The staging was complete with a rented ice-cream vendor truck and costumed attendant, replacing the usual vendors of foods like fruit and tamales. The rented truck combined with the twee costumes of the singers in a vaguely 1950s-style imbued the otherwise ordinary park with a cartoonish presence. Local families lounged on the grass, often looking at the parade of opera-goers with curiosity and even confusion. After a guided stroll around the park, we were quickly ushered back to the limousine, where I found myself ensconced in the voices of two sopranos, one

112  M.C. Chieffo voice emanating live and the second seeping through an old phone receiver. Moments later, my fellow passengers and I are drenched in darkness by window coverings, which made the ambient, noisy music in the interior of the limousine more intrusive. At the next stop, we are plunged into blinding light, guided upward to the rooftop of the Toy Factory Lofts building, which are home to some of the Arts District’s newest and most exclusive luxury apartments. Here on the penthouse roof, we have a panoramic view of the skyline of Los Angeles at mid-distance, set to the soundtrack of more soprano coos accompanied by two violins. A Hopscotch attendant thrusts into my hands a smartphone attached to a selfie-stick, tacitly suggesting I do some filming for the live stream at the company’s central hub in the parking lot of the Southern California Institute for Architecture. I suddenly hear the distant call of a French horn and look to see a trumpeter and French horn player alternating long tones atop the neighbouring roof of the Biscuit Company Lofts, another newly renovated luxury apartment building. After this dizzying if not overwrought gesture of the urban sublime, we are escorted back to the east side of the Los Angeles River, looping through Evergreen Cemetery. A woman donning Mexican Day of the Dead make-up lurks just feet behind a real family visiting a lost loved one. My troupe of tourists is then invited to stop in an abandoned lot flanked by two empty, overgrown lots. This final scene dramatizes road rage between two vehiclists on the freeway. A beat-boxing harpist seated next to me fills in the spaces between the characters’ words and breaths being pumped through the limousine speakers. Cracked and abandoned with no adjacent buildings, the lot’s abjectness heightens my sense of theatre by allowing the eye and ear to focus on what might be the most traditional scene in the opera, carefully framed and removed from the immediacy of urban activity and infrastructure.

A “citywide assault”: displacement and contested spaces Hopscotch celebrates mobility and sound in a neighbourhood whose residents continue to be silenced by gentrification and displacement. Since the 1970s, Boyle Heights has been a haven for Latinos. Before World War II, neighbourhoods such as Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles were highly diverse enclaves, with Mexican, Japanese and Jewish immigrants. However, the Latino population grew, and red lining and discriminatory housing covenants promoted further homogeneity – Indeed, such laws restricted the sale of homes and property on the basis of race, religion and class in order to keep white neighbourhoods white. The 2010 US Census reports Boyle Heights as 95% Latino, one of the most racially homogenous neighbourhoods in the country.19 The striking visual resemblance of developers and urban tourists to the itinerant audience for Hopscotch, coupled with the above mentioned history of minority displacement amplifies the territorial nature of Hopscotch’s

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 113 cultural work. As site-specific performance, the opera is “a citywide assault,” perhaps, but in more ways than one.20 Viewed as a naïve form of community engagement, the project exemplifies what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor describes as “a colonialist discourse that produces the native as negativity or lack.”21 As such, local residents have reason to view visitors as agents of gentrification. As a matter of fact, members of Defend Boyle Heights summarize the phenomenon as “white artists and hipsters and gentrifiers and city council sellouts and city agencies” who do not care about the lived experiences of the community.22 Boyle Heights continues to be an attractive neighbourhood on the Los Angeles housing buyers’ market. The neighbourhood is adjacent to the latestage gentrified Arts District where developers renovated structures into billion-dollar loft buildings a couple of blocks away from Skid Row, home to one of the largest homeless populations in America. Boyle Heights is the next target for real estate developers in the Greater Los Angeles Area.23 Walking tours, or “house hunts,” are common in the area as property values west of the freeway have been expensive for decades. In light of these market conditions, the residents of Boyle Heights see a striking similarity between the “walking dream” of Hopscotch and the threatening sight of house flippers and developers strolling the streets to survey properties around Whittier Boulevard. The Hopscotch performances throughout the autumn season of 2015 serve as catalyst for the formation of the grassroots organization Defend Boyle Heights, which was officially established in December of 2015. As one member phrased it in an interview, “It is like the myth; it’s our creation story.”24 He is referring to the last performance in Hollenbeck Park outlined above on a Sunday when the most sonically combative and visibly confrontational episode of resistance against the opera occurred. Upon seeing a troupe of performers and attendees traipse through Hollenbeck Park, local residents immediately spread the word about what they viewed as threatening allies to gentrification. Soon, members of Serve the People LA gathered to protest amid the performance. Moreover, on that day, band students of Roosevelt High School of Boyle Heights were rehearsing on a hill in the park. In a quite literal battle of bands, they eventually joined the resistance and began playing music in direct opposition to the opera, brandishing loud instruments like trombones and trumpets in an attempt to drown out Hopscotch’s scripted vocal duet. The close proximity of Hopscotch tourists-­audience members to local protestors ignited a serious altercation between one attendee and a Chicana woman, in which park security and an administrator of Hopscotch intervened. A few community members, including one Latina woman, held up signs with homemade slogans which read, “No Artwashing,” “Boyle Heights says no to Gentrification,” and “your ART is displacing people of colour #antigentrification.” Nonetheless, the production continued. Hopscotch music director Marc Lowenstein then clashed with the student band. In an interview with the Guardian, Lowenstein commented, “I asked our own

114  M.C. Chieffo musicians to play along with [the melody of the band], to engage them.” Commenting on his disappointment at the young people’s volatile response, he said he viewed their protestations as “physically intimidating.”25 As is clear from this chapter so far, public claims to community space and its environmental sounds symbolically protects not only the physical property in East Los Angeles but also the claims to its soundscapes, which, in turn, involves claims over space for Art itself. Coalitions like Serve the People LA, a Communist party affiliate, as well as Defend Boyle Heights and Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, all contend that events that render their neighbourhood a “poverty zoo for wealthy people from West LA” like Hopscotch and new art galleries, take advantage of, and exploit the communities who call the neighbourhood home. By enforcing zero-tolerance policies on gallery owners and outside artists’ “colonizing arm,” they aim to reverse their own negation. Within this framework, even opera which breaks with bourgeois tradition still encourages the transformative conditions of gentrification that negatively impact residents, such as sudden rent hikes and eviction notices.26 The altercation in Hollenbeck Park also closely parallels the structural silencing of residents of Boyle Heights after decades of race-based zoning laws, discussed earlier. The creative resistance staged by Hopscotch, then, figures the audience member as privileged urban flâneur, as a proprietary co-creator, even co-owner, of the scopophilic and audiophilic fields of the operatic work. Certainly, the altercation resulting from contested sonic territories in Hollenbeck Park exposed the unanticipated struggle on the Industry’s part to position their audience as the dominant observer, the operatic voyeur par excellence. To this end, the interjections of local residents in protest disfigure rather than harmonize with Hopcotch’s audiovisual field – the intended dramaturgical context. It is crucial to note that the creators of Hopscotch articulated to both media outlets and to the Boyle Heights community during the protest that the project is a community endeavour. However, as outlined above, the artistic territorialization of the public park created a real material imposition to the shared cultural integrity of the local community. Therefore, I contend the opera augments reality for a select public, choosing one archive, to borrow from Diana Taylor, that of modernist performance art, over another, that of the local residents.27 In relation to sound, this work is twofold: first, in order to pull off the opera’s complicated aural logistics, complete with wireless headphone bandwidths and available radio frequencies, Sharon and team found the appropriate aural field in which to emplace the soundscape of the opera: a quiet, working class, residential neighbourhood on a weekend with several abandoned lots and buildings due to housing foreclosures. Secondly, with this effacing of the environmental sounds in place, Hopscotch then excludes through its production of new sound; its success rides on the tacit assumption that residents – the “accidental audience” – desire to listen to the acoustic leakage from a sound

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 115 experience audience members paid for, or, at the very least, trusted that they would peacefully ignore the intrusion over several weeks.

Public opera and privatization: is the Uber aesthetic the new Walkman Effect? All things considered, I suggest that the opera’s mechanisms of silencing and exclusion foreground the political materiality of sound, especially in relation to public art. Operatic sound is privatized, as evidenced by the close-mike approach to vocal production and the technological transfiguration of the limousine into a sound stage. In his cultural study of music and urban geography, Adam Krims gestures towards an abstract musical soundstage for urban musics that would displace the mimesis of performance, citing Los Angeles’s “jeep beats,” or hip-hop music intended for blaring at high volumes from a car stereo, as sounds contingent upon material circumstances in the history of rap music.28 Furthermore, by capturing operatic voices in audio technologies and recasting traditional forms of visual and acoustical space from the big house, Hopscotch follows neoliberal logics of privatization of experience and consumption that go back at least to “the Walkman effect” of the 1980s. As Michael Bull notes, mobile media in North America has proliferated a kind of “sensory gating,” as “automobiles increasingly fitted with an array of sonic technologies seal drivers off from the world beyond the sonic cocoon of the automobile, with its soothing invigorating sound system while the MP3 provides a more conceptual shield from others as users traverse city streets.”29 The Industry massages these now-commonplace cultural trends into a stunning inversion, perhaps, of what Siegfried Kracauer observed about use of the Walkman device. For him, the device engendered an “indispensable process of self-unification in singularity…. Through the Walkman  … the body is opened; it is put into the process of aestheticization, the theatricalization of the urban – but in secret.”30 As a cultural practice, value system and aesthetic, site-specific opera sits at the threshold of two audiences: those who are afforded the very opportunity to choose to listen and watch, and those who are not. On the one hand, we could easily write Hopscotch into a time-honoured genealogy of modern sound art that resists subjection to power by playing with acoustical spatial relations: Fluxus works of the 1960s, sound installations of Max Neuhaus, or Pierre Schaeffer’s ecologically inflected sound walks, all of which aim to fracture the object-status of sound and performance in order to transform the individual’s relationship to the material and socio-political environment. On the other hand, however, the dramaturgy of public private operatic sound conjures a false resistance to the opera of the proscenium theatre. Ironically, operatic singing rendered by mobile audio technologies and wireless headphones bolsters the atavistic power of the art form by serving its audiences a slice of experience closer to Renaissance courtly song than to grand opera or contemporary chamber opera.

116  M.C. Chieffo To summarize, Hopscotch participates in gentrification by – in the words of anti-gentrifiers – “artwashing,” and, we might add, “soundwashing,” the urban environment. I do not mean to suggest that all site-specific performance operates by, or engenders, gentrifying mechanisms; rather, I posit Hopscotch as a theoretical study that attends to the politics of aesthetic choices that seem to appropriate, in this case, Chicana and Mexican culture (Day of the Dead facial paint) and space (use of Mariachi Plaza and Evergreen Cemetery). Additionally, the opera protects the audience’s privileged use of space and gaze. More specifically, the performance negates the audiovisual field native to community life in Boyle Heights by attempting to control and, to privatize sound and vision for a chosen public. To invoke Henri Lefebvre, the construction and deconstruction of spatial practices do not unfold spontaneously or organically. Space is not abstract but is produced in concrete locations by specific social formations. To this end, the production of space is always tied to the social “‘order’ which those relations impose.”31 Through Hopscotch’s non-linear dramaturgy, the dominant participant, the proverbial bourgeoisie, actively produces and consumes urban space. One of the organizing concepts of this volume is intermediality, in which “meaning is possible only because one form depends on the other because one form transgresses its own limits to step into the other form’s field of perception.”32 Analyses of site-specific opera call for an expanded purview of intermediality in productive ways, by enlisting emotions of place, recalling Debord’s psychogeography, and of bodies as media, pitting the performativity of opera against lived experiences of community. Through their activism to protect and serve the local community, Defend Boyle Heights, and Serve the People LA members continue to wield the collective backlash against Hopscotch and other gentrifying arts organizations for the better. As one Boyle Heights resident has put it: “We have a real potential to re-shift the understanding of what validated cultural production really looks like.”33 To conclude, Hopscotch’s manipulation of audiovisual fields ultimately fails as a catalyst for a truly participatory form of opera. To be sure, the Industry team and artists attempted to rethink politics and political action by resembling sound installation traditions after 1950 that shift from emplacing sound in a kind of Euclidean space to more material, socialized spaces. Commenting on such traditions, musicologist Gascia Ouzounian suggests that as sound art moves from “articulating poetic to critical concerns, theoretical discourses must also reflect these shifts.”34 In the same vein, dance performance scholars Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik have observed that “engagement with place has its political consequences.”35 As I have shown in this chapter, thinking the audiovisual and the spatial, not in categorical isolation, but as particular instances of intermediality and political materiality can also reveal the ways in which the most revolutionary-facing operatic performance leans on the status quo. The ingenuity of limousines with state-of-the-art wireless audio combined with sublime walking tours and intermittent live singing seems also to reveal an anxious

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 117 solution to the perceived death of classical music.36 The Industry production team cheekily instructed guests to leave their “ball gowns and tuxedos” at home,37 thus tasking the larger-than-life dramaturgy and stagecraft to carry the cultural ceremony that is partially lost. Such crisis in opera traces back to the cautious materialist thinking of Theodor Adorno, about whose criticisms of the social role of opera in the 1960s scholar David Levin notes, the “primary locus of dramatic tension [was now] within the private sphere itself, a site less accessible to operatic dramatization.”38 Along similar lines, Lefebvre’s notion that “to rehabilitate the political is [but] one moment in a vast project” resonates here, especially when dealing with the audience’s fleeting authority as voyeur in Hopscotch and the director’s attempt to shut out community protestations.39 Taking the dramatic tension one step further into the private sphere, Hopscotch internalizes the drama for the Neoliberal subject. If the Industry succeeds in taking opera out of the house, the company then assigns that cultural capital to the twenty-­ first-century “experience economy,”40 placing good faith in the art form as a conduit for individual desire and commodification while proclaiming opera also as a public good. One line of inquiry that opera and performance scholars might consider, then, is what kind of inclusive performances and discourses of resistance are possible in public, site-specific opera and in twenty-first-century performance more broadly. Indeed, as Adam Krims argues, too often when we think forms of expressive culture are fundamentally resisting the power of a dominant culture, even the dominance and privilege of one’s own, it is the case that the critical work glosses over a more complex historical moment, “putting a smiley face over it.”41 Hopscotch’s critical success and political backlash betray as much about opera’s uneasy relationship to privatization, mobility and urbanity as they do about opera’s triumphs at the thresholds of genre, form and spectatorship.

Notes 1. Jeff Touzeau and Jacqueline Gusmag, “Stage Without Frontiers: Yuval ­Sharon’s Mobile Opera Hopscotch Opens Doors of Perception,” Sennheiser Press Release, 2015, https://assets.sennheiser.com/downloads/download/ file/8168/MOMENTUM_Story_Hopscotch_EN.pdf. 2. Michael Cooper, “San Francisco Joins the Growing World of Small Opera,” New York Times, April 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/arts/ music/san-francisco-joins-the-growing-world-of-small-operas.html. 3. A Google search for the term “flash mob opera” yields results including numerous articles and videos date marked 2011-2015 of singers performing in public streets and markets in major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Austin, and Paris. 4. Jeffrey Marlow, “Is this the Opera of the Future?” Wired Magazine, October 22, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-the-opera-of-the-future/. 5. Laura Dragan, “Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera and One Incredible Journey through Los Angeles,” Sound and Vision, October 27, 2015, https://www.

118  M.C. Chieffo soundandvision.com/content/hopscotch-mobile-opera-24-cars-and-all-losangeles#LVojwfpEYGtZcyt7.97. 6. Mark Swed, “Musical Ride-Along: Moving Around L.A., ‘Hopscotch’ Sometimes Can Transport,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2015. 7. Heidi Waleson, “‘Hopscotch, a Mobile Opera in 24 Cars’ Review,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ hopscotch-a-mobile-opera-in-24-cars-review-1447279539. 8. Alex Ross, “Opera on Location: A High-Tech Work of Wagnerian Scale is Being Staged Across Los Angeles,” New Yorker, Nov 8, 2015, https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/opera-on-location. 9. Ibid. 10. Senneheiser, “Stage without Frontiers: Sennheiser MOMENTUM, AVX, guidePORT and 2000 Series Wireless Systems Help Shape Artistic Perspective in Hopscotch, the World’s First Opera for Cars,” press release, October 25, 2015, https://en-us.sennheiser.com/news-stage-without-frontiers. 11. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb, (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 8–11. 12. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 91–110. 13. Rory Carroll, “Hope Everyone Pukes on Your Artisanal Treats: Fighting Gentrification, LA Style,” Guardian, April 19, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2016/apr/19/los-angeles-la-gentrification-resistance-boyle-heights. See also Sarah Goodyear, “Gentrification Backlash Has Inspired Its Own Backlash,” Citylab October 1, 2015, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/10/ gentrification-backlash-has-inspired-its-own-backlash/408388/. 14. The production is documented in images and other media at http://hopscotchopera.com/. 15. The face is painted to resemble a skull, or calaveras, with flowers around the eye sockets, in a mixture of Spanish Catholic and Aztec tradition. 16. Sennheiser, “Stage without Frontiers.” 17. Quote jotted down from personal notes of the performance on November 8, 2015. 18. Pierre Schaeffer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Simon & Schuster, 1993). 19. GPA Consulting and Becky Nicolaides, “SurveyLA Latino Los Angeles Historic Context Statement: City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning Office of Historic Resources,” September 15, 2015, http://preservation. lacity.org/sites/default/f iles/Latino%20Los%20Angeles%20Historic% 20Context%20FINAL%209-23-15.pdf. 20. Ross, “Opera on Location.” 21. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 64. 22. “Against Gentrification, Against Bourgeois Art,” Serve the People LA (blog), October 4, 2015, https://servethepeoplela.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/ against-gentrification-against-bourgeois-art/. 23. The median home value in 2018 in Los Angeles is $939, 500 according to Pacific Union International brokerage. 24. Interview with two members of Defend Boyle Heights, November 2, 2017. 25. Carroll, “Hope Everyone Pukes on your Artisanal Treats.” 26. Carl Grodach, Nicole Foster, and James Murdoch III, “Gentrification and the Artistic Divided: The Role of the Arts in Neighborhood Change,” Journal of American Planning Association 80, no. 1 (August 2014), 21-35. See also Hillel

“Uber Opera”: The politics of site-specific mobile opera in Los Angeles 119









Aron, “Boyle Heights Activists Demand That All Art Galleries Get the Hell Out of Their Neighborhood,” LA Weekly, July 14, 2016, http://www.laweekly. com/news/boyle-heights-activists-demand-that-all-art-galleries-get-the-hellout-of-their-neighborhood-7134859. 27. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 28. Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York: Routledge, 2007), 159. 29. Michael Bull, “iPod Use, Mediation, and Privatization in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, eds. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103–17. 30. Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 170. 31. Gascia Ouzounian, “Sound Installation Art: From Spatial Poetics to Politics, Aesthetics to Ethics,” in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 73–89: 85. 32. As stated in the book proposal by the editors of the present edition. 33. Personal conversation in Boyle Heights, November 2, 2017. 34. Gascia Ouzounian, “Sound Installation Art,” 89. 35. Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, eds., Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009). 36. The article that sparked a series of think pieces in 2014 is Mark Vanhoenhacker, “Requiem: Classical Music in America Is Dead,” Slate, January 21, 2014, https://slate.com/culture/2014/01/classical-music-sales-decline-is-classicalon-deaths-door.html. 37. Official email invitation from Hopscotch’s box office, November 7, 2015. 38. For an analysis of Adorno, see David Levin, ed. Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 110. 39. Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible ­(London: Bloomsbury Press, 2004), 242. 40. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business Is a Stage (Brighton, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 41. Krims, Music and Urban Geography, 128.

8

Quel trouble me saisit?: the arrested gaze of Armide in Poussin, Quinault and Lully Michael Lee

In February of 1753, at the height of the Parisian dispute of taste between Italian and French opera that came to be known as the Querelle des Bouffons, the philosophe Denis Diderot published a pamphlet that proposed a possible means of resolution.1 Putting aside the broader political and cultural ramifications of the argument, he suggested comparing the end of the second act of Lully’s Armide (1686) with a similar situation in Italian opera, for which he nominated the corresponding scene in the recently composed Sesostri, Rè d’Egitto (1751) by Domenec Terradellas, to decide simply which is better: French or Italian opera.2 Rather than damping down the argument, however, it stimulated a range of responses, forming the spur to JeanJacques Rousseau’s notorious condemnation of French music and, in turn, its defense by the aging Jean-Philippe Rameau. While neither party came out of this dispute well, the published analyses of the relevant moments in Lully’s Armide that it occasioned nevertheless make it a landmark in the early history of public musicology.3 Moreover, the scene in Lully’s opera that Rousseau and Rameau argued over presents a moment of theatrical and psychological ambiguity that arguably marks an important transition in the baroque imagination. To summarize the original episode, Armide, the Saracen enchantress Armida from Tasso’s crusader epic Gerusalemme liberata, has used her spirits to entice the knight Renaud, or Rinaldo, to an island standing in the river Orontes, and there put him into an enchanted sleep. Now alone, she approaches him to exact her revenge on him, as he has foiled her plans by releasing her prisoners and frustrating her magical power. But when she looks at him something extraordinary, and mysterious, happens. She cannot kill him. The normal explanation is to say that she falls in love, and there is certainly an atmosphere of heightened sensuality, but this is a moment that even Armida, with all her wisdom, cannot articulate, as it is without precedent for her. At this point in the original text, in the Liberata, canto XIV, the story is being related second-hand by another character, a device that perhaps allows Tasso the excuse to avoid analyzing the moment too closely, and so it seems brushed over,

Quel trouble me saisit?  121 a poetic sleight-of-hand – a quick snap and it is done. To quote the early seventeenth-­c entury translation of Edward Fairfax: But when shee looked on his face a while, And saw how sweet he breath’d, how still he lay, How his faire eies though closed seeme to smile, At first she staid, astound with great dismay, Then sat her downe, so loue can arte beguile, And as she sate and lookt fled fast away Her wrath, that on his forehead gazde the maid, As in his spring Narcissus tooting4 laid; And with a vaile she wiped now and than From his faire cheeke the globes of siluer sweat, And coole aire gathred with a trembling fan, To mittigate the rage of melting heat, Thus (who would thinke it) his hot eie-glance can Of that cold frost dissolue the hardnesse great, Which late congeald the hart of that faire dame, Who late a foe, a louer now became.5 Fairfax’s one failing as a translator is that he likes things perhaps a little too cut and dried, so we miss something of the looseness with which Tasso originally invests these lines, but one gets the idea, and it gives a feeling for the period.6 Elsewhere in his epic Tasso is perfectly able to anticipate, introduce and then fill a scene with as much detail as one would wish, but here the moment, for all its later significance, appears as if from nowhere and vanishes as quickly. That last line “a lover now became” is a fait accompli, an after-effect of something unutterable. After this, Armida summons her winged chariot, gathers up Rinaldo, and they fly off to her enchanted island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where readers catch up with them in canto XVI. For most contemporary readers, the moral point of the romance came in what follows, as Rinaldo’s eventual realization of his own indolence and incipient sense of shame and conscience return him to the path of honour and glory and back to the great conflict of the crusade. Most pictorial depictions of Armida and Rinaldo from both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries present the emblematic moment of suspended rapture as Rinaldo and Armida gaze transfixed into each other’s eyes.7 The degree to which this romance n ­ arrative proved so compelling and attractive to both visual artists and music theatre practitioners through the seventeenth and, even more so, the eighteenth centuries is indeed notable.8 The extent and meaning of this absorption is an enormous topic in itself. Nevertheless, one especially important narrative pivot  – as Diderot spotted – is Armida’s passionate

122  M. Lee moment of conversion, to which we return, so slight in Tasso and yet one which drew some fascinating responses. Philippe Quinault’s libretto for the second act of Lully’s Armide broadly follows the narrative sequence outlined in Tasso. The magical scene of the enchanting spirits drawing Renaud onto the island forms the divertissement of the second act, danced and sung by the chorus, accompanied by an orchestra of muted strings. Then, the chorus disappears, the mutes come off and Armide re-enters the stage during a prelude that conductors nowadays make as noisy and dramatic as possible. Renaud is asleep, she holds a “dard” or dart, usually understood to be a dagger, in her hand, and approaches him with the fateful words “Enfin, il est en ma puissance” (“At last, he is in my power”). However, this proves to be anything but the case, as her récitatif breaks off, more than once, in a dramatic series of sudden pauses, partly indicated by the ellipses inscribed in both the original score and the libretto, as follows: Quel trouble me saisit? Qui me fait hesiter? Qu’est-ce qu’en sa faveur la pitié me veut dire? Frappons… Ciel! qui peut m’arrester? Achevons… je frémis! vangeons-nous… je soûpire! Est-ce ainsi que je doy me vanger aujourd’huy! Ma colere s’éteint quand j’approche de luy. Plus je le voy, plus ma vengeance est vaine; Mon bras tremblant se refuse à ma haine.9 This is a scene where the very suspension of expression is itself written into the music, and a sense of metrical indeterminacy is underlined by the frequent shifts during the recitative between duple, triple and quadruple metres. With only continuo accompanying, at the pauses (indicated by ellipses) the singer playing Armide is at liberty to depart from strict time and hold these gaps for as long as necessary. Though not a common effect in opera, both Lully and Quinault would each have been aware of the rhetorical possibilities of this effect – ­aposiopesis – in spoken drama: that moment when a character suddenly breaks off in mid-stream, whether or not by choice, unable, or refusing, to finish what they began.10 The French theorist Bernard Lamy describes ellipsis and aposiopesis in his work La Rhétorique ou l’art de parler (1675) as signifiers of passion so intense that the subject cannot articulate words.11 Contemporary examples from spoken theatre include Phèdre in Racine’s tragedy, unable to confess to her confidante her love for Hippolyte, or, to comic effect, Agnès in Molière’s L’école des femmes, keeping everyone on- and off-stage in suspense until she finally admits what it is her lover had taken from her. In Armide this ironic reversal of the merveilleux – sheer gasps of silence after so much spectacle – creates for critic Downing Thomas a moment where this theatre, as he puts it, “presents a moment of jouissance that turns around an object that is forever being lost… consubstantial with the singer’s

Quel trouble me saisit?  123 voice.”12 Those wanting to encounter the strangeness of opera need look no further; this sense of incomprehension opens a gap for the imagination that correlates well with the contemporary French aesthetic of the je-ne-saisquoi, and with it returning ideas of the sublime.13 Armide is restrained by something she has never experienced before, and it precipitates the crisis that unwinds through the remainder of the opera. Normally fully secure in her sense of agency, control is seemingly lost, and she finds herself divided to the extent that in the following act she confesses “Hélas! c’est mon coeur que je crains” (“it is my heart that I fear”).14 This sense of internal division or, more pointedly, binary tension, suggestively echoes something of Tasso’s broader poetic schema. Binaries abound in the Liberata on many levels, in terms of form, theme and narrative – it is, after all, a Christian epic containing, and propelled by, pagan romance.15 This was also, moreover, not the first time that Armida’s moment of internal conflict drew Philippe Quinault’s imagination. His earlier metatheatrical comedy of 1655, La Comédie sans comédie, with its overarching narrative of actors vying to demonstrate the moral virtues of theatre, contains four short plays within a play. The last of these is “Armide et Renaud,” envisioned as a tragicomédie en machines.16 Focusing entirely on Renaud’s gradual enchantment, it culminates in the moment when Armide, intending to kill him, is quite literally held back by the allegorical figure of l’Amour, a stark contrast to the wordless hesitation of the later opera.17 The difference between these two depictions of the same moment is telling and reflects the degree to which Lullian operatic dramaturgy was able to emulate the nuanced psychological dramas of late neoclassical tragedy. If the embodied presence of l’Amour in this scene between Armide and Renaud in Quinault’s La Comédie sans comédie seems familiar to art historians, it is not surprising. The encounter evokes nothing less than a staging of the well-known painting of this scene by Nicolas Poussin, shown in Figure 8.1, created in Rome in the late 1620s and now held in London.18 In this picture, the figure of Amor provides an important anchoring point for what is a highly minimalist, yet complex, composition, which is discussed further below. Poussin is celebrated for his many paintings on allegorical, biblical, and classical subjects, but it is notable that the only non-ancient source he made use of for his works was that of poet Torquato Tasso. This has not escaped the attentions of art historians, and indeed Poussin’s close interest in not only Tasso’s poetry but also his literary theory has been the subject of extensive and valuable enquiry.19 This is not the only work in which Poussin depicts Rinaldo and Armida – there is the probably slightly earlier painting, held in Moscow,20 of the two of them in the same scene, just as Armida is about to spirit him away, as well as the later Abduction of Rinaldo.21 In addition, there is a depiction of the Companions of Rinaldo painted in 1633,22 now in New York, and a sketch for a possible painting of the Abandonment of Armida, now in the Louvre, from about 1648.23 Add to this the depictions of Tancredi and Erminia (one each in St Petersburg and

124  M. Lee

Figure 8.1  Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, c.1628-30, oil on canvas, 82.2 × 109.2 cm, DPG238. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Birmingham (UK)), and it is easy to see that Tasso’s Liberata meant a great deal to Poussin, which he, in turn, repaid with some of his best work. Returning to the Dulwich Poussin, we see Armida’s internal self-division made explicit, even emblematic. Comparable with other “abridged landscapes” Poussin adopted in this period,24 one notes the lack of distracting detail: the trees are without foliage, the hills in the background are simple greens and browns, the focus on the foreground figures is absolute and almost abstract. As Phillippa Plock describes, in her discussion of Poussin’s painting, the viewer is faced with a vision of doubleness or simultaneity, an axis of physical contradiction that runs back and forth across Armida’s body.25 Her right hand, violently clenching the phallic knife, is restrained by Amor, seemingly crying with the effort, while her left hand reaches Rinaldo’s, mirroring it in what looks like a gentle, even maternal, caress. It is something to marvel at, and marvel is very much the subject here. The drapery of her white garment billows as if caught by the wind, yet no-one’s hair is out of place, and Armida’s blue skirts lie undisturbed on the ground beneath Amor’s feet. Armida the foe is in active motion, while Armida the lover tenderly awaits, a figure simultaneously active and passive, “masculine” and “feminine,” destroying and gazing. The question of hidden agency,

Quel trouble me saisit?  125 of the play between surface and intent, is central to depictions of Armida. In the poetic source, when she is introduced in the fourth canto of Tasso’s epic, she is described as one “who under golden hair and outward beauties… keep concealed a manly heart and grey-haired wisdom.”26 She is also described in the same stanza as one who will “weave the web,” in Italian “tessi la tela.” Tasso used this image elsewhere to symbolize the writer’s craft of generating narrative, exploiting the pun with “tessuto” or text.27 The alliterative possibilities of the phrase possibly even point to Armida’s authorial significance, as a strangely symbolic counterpart to Tasso, the tale-spinner, himself. Seen in this context, the irony of this painting is that it depicts the very moment when her influence is suddenly, albeit briefly, suspended. How could such a suggestive play of meaning work in a visual medium? As Plock argues, Poussin’s work seems to present “an image of someone being radically altered through the activity of seeing.”28 The very nature of Armida herself is in flux, being transformed as she gazes upon Rinaldo so that what Poussin is presenting is no less than the moment of metamorphosis itself. Her arrested gaze, curiously likened by Tasso to that of Narcissus (a figure characterized by ambivalence29), appears here problematic and mysterious. Perhaps the most curious feature in this painting is the depiction of her face, “mask-like” as Richard Wollheim describes it, suggesting a hint of late mannerism, or even incipient expressionism.30 There is an unusually stretched, even deformed quality to it and, as contrasting examples of anatomically competent female heads by the artist from the same period suggest, this style of depiction appears to have been a conscious choice. Interestingly, it is this very feature that is “corrected” in the later engraving of this painting, done sometime in the 1680s by Girard Audran, as shown in Figure 8.2.31 In the original painting, Poussin evokes the complexity of the literary source material, while the work’s fluid visual imagery seems intended to provoke and possibly discomfit its audience. Is the very idea of “the binary” itself – the sequential pairings of male and female, enemy and lover, active and passive, dreaming and waking – blurred by the simultaneity possible in graphic art? Another element in Poussin’s stylistic approach is the interest in re-­ exploring particular visual themes throughout his work. The figure of Rinaldo was, notably, not the only sleeping or otherwise prone figure to have attracted the artist’s attention. At about the same time – the late 1620s  – among other similar pictures, he also produced his Apollo and Daphne,32 with the sleeping god Peneus in the foreground and, even more poignantly, his Echo and Narcissus.33 These emblematic moments share an affinity with images of the dead Christ or the martyred St Erasmus,34 also produced by Poussin at this time, of life silenced and suspended in a moment of unconsciousness and metamorphosis, the potential sleep of death.35 The Dulwich Rinaldo and Armida is clearly linked with these works, a connection that makes its subject, an unusual choice of material from Tasso’s poem, all the more interesting.36 For the philosopher Louis Marin, such depictions of mystery and silence in Poussin’s work, drawn

126  M. Lee

Figure 8.2  Girard Audran, Rinaldo and Armida (after Poussin), engraving made in Paris c.1684–1690 (image source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

together through movement, gesture, form and expression, engage not only the bare subject matter but also raise questions about the mute nature of the painted surface itself, and the agency of painterliness, the nature morte. Can painting, in this light, offer more than the visual distillation of a narrative construct or religious devotion? Can painting be a discourse, and perhaps describe the indescribable? Horace’s famous maxim ut pictura poesis – “as is poetry, so is painting” – presupposes the primacy of interpretation, that visual and literary texts each present problems that call for, and benefit from, reasoned critical discourse, whilst offering viewers moral instruction. This text-centred model is made problematic in Poussin’s work (indeed, in this very painting), and furthermore came under increasing pressure in literary, aesthetic and philosophical discussion throughout the seventeenth century, most especially in France, with the growing awareness of the opportunities of language, knowledge and representation. Links between artistic presence and sensory experience in this period reflect shifting ideas of the aesthetics of the sublime in not only literary contexts but also, more broadly, in the performance and function of spectacle.37 Grounded not so much in the text as in the captivating image, spectacle in this sense takes in such performative concepts as magnificence, the divertissement, the merveilleux, even the

Quel trouble me saisit?  127 je-ne-sais-quoi, whether emerging in political propaganda, the theatrical stage or the painted surface. Claude-François Ménestrier’s Des répresentations en musique (1681) reflects on the ability of painting and music, in particular, to transcend or blur representational limits and amaze audiences so that, as Oostveldt and Bussels argue in relation to music theatre, “more important than the coherence and concentration of the dramatic plot is the purely sensuous effect of [the] multimedial.”38 Far from asserting fixed systems of coherence within disciplinary and medial boundaries, notions of spectacle drew on the overlapping possibilities of all the literary, visual and performing arts and, above all, the imaginations of spectators. An early sense of this comes from Blaise Pascal, who in the course of his Pensées puts forward a model of mind and its ways of knowing that divide between forms derived from reason, natural instinct, and what he described as the “esprit de finesse,” knowledge of the ineffable revealed through the heart.39 This latter form of knowledge contradicts the mimetic model of representation and presents instead an open form of understanding apparent only through its effects. Discussing the work of Pierre Corneille, Pascal drew on the playwright’s use of the phrase “je ne sais quoi” (as the inexpressible cause of passion) in the second act of his tragedy Médée (1635): “[t]hose who wish to know fully man’s vanity need only consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is the je ne sais quoi.… And the effects are devastating. This je ne sais quoi, such an insignificant thing that it cannot be recognized, disturbs the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world.”40 This idea of the ineffability of certain kinds of knowledge, which present as effects as opposed to – or outside of – content, was developed further by Dominique Bouhours, with his discussion of the possibility of a creative work, the ouvrage d’esprit or “work of spirit,” that is both a knowable, fixed object and a gateway to the inexpressible.41 Bouhours’s conceptualization was also partly spurred on by the social reading practices and textualities engaged in by the female-centred ruelles or salons of the marquise de Rambouillet, Madeleine de Scudéry and others.42 These vital centres of discussion and creativity also proved valuable to aspiring male writers, including the young Philippe Quinault and his mentor Tristan l’Hermite.43 It would be wonderful to say that Quinault’s fascination with Armide’s arresting moment of self-doubt was precipitated by his gazing upon Poussin’s great picture, but such a neat formulation cannot be proven. Nevertheless, the appearance of Audran’s engraving sometime in the 1680s does suggest the work’s arrival in Paris by that time at least, as well as its apparent appeal. Whatever be the motive for choosing it, the scene of Armide’s suspenseful silences – her own je-ne-sais-quoi – as well as what followed, left audiences vividly affected. Writing in the early eighteenth century, Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, who probably saw the role’s creator Marie le Rochois perform it in her final appearance on stage in 1697, argued that a spectator after seeing this tragédie en musique would “[return] home captivated despite himself, distracted, upset by Armide’s unhappiness.”44 To re-write Horace, in this

128  M. Lee case perhaps we can tentatively offer “as is painting, so is opera,” creating moments that communicate directly with audiences’ imaginations even as they defy reason. Read within seventeenth-century ideas of spectacle, such engagement gathers not only in the content of the work but more especially in its performance and mediality: the meeting between the object of spectacle and its beholder. Whether experienced through rhetorical effect, painterly expression, or physical – or musical – gesture, this function is inherently intermedial, its self-conscious incompleteness encouraging transfer across different forms. Lightly treated in the texture of Tasso’s poem, the idea of Armida’s hesitation offered Poussin the opportunity to present her reaction as a subject in itself. In Quinault and Lully’s staging, this same moment prompted an approach to subjectivity that, looking seventy years later to the Querrelle des Bouffons, could still offer something remarkable, and difficult to resolve.

Notes









1. Denis Diderot, Au petit prophète de Boemischbroda, au Grande Prophète Monet (Paris, 1753). 2. The context of this dispute is discussed in Geoffrey Higgins, “Old Sluts and Dangerous Minuets: or, the Underlying Musical Tensions of the Querelle des Bouffons,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 2 (2012), 549–563. For an examination of the political climate reflected in the discourses of the querelle, see Elizabeth Cook, “Challenging the Ancien Régime: The Hidden Politics of the Querelle des Bouffons,” in La ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ dans la vie culturelle française du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Andrea Fabiano (France: CNRS Editions, 2005), 141–160. 3. The debate, along with its connection to aesthetic discourses of the period, is discussed in Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Rameau and the Philosophes in Dialogue, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 833. The relevant essays are available in English translation: JeanJacques Rousseau, “Letter on French Music”; and Jean-Philippe Rameau, “Observations on Our Instinct for Music,” in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. and trans. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 141–196. 4. “Tooting” here takes its meaning from the older sense of “spying” or “gazing upon.” 5. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XIV.66-67, in Godfrey of Bulloigne: A  Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Together with Fairfax’s Original Poems, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T.M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 426-427. Spelling and punctuation are as in the original. 6. C.P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of His Contribution to English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 242–246. In his study, Brand takes exception to Fairfax’s style of translation, which he characterizes as “sententious.” 7. For early examples of the “garden scene,” see Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 99–101. 8. For a useful listing of the numerous operatic adaptations of the Armida romance, see Tim Carter, “Armida,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 196–197.

Quel trouble me saisit?  129 9. Jean-Baptiste Lully & Philippe Quinault, Armide, ed. Lois Rosow and JeanNoël Laurenti (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 179. ‘What confusion seizes me? What makes me hesitate? / What will pity say to me on his behalf? / Strike… heavens! What holds me back? / End it… I tremble! Avenge myself… I sigh! / Is this how I must avenge myself today? / My anger abates when I approach him.  / The more I behold him the more futile my revenge. / My trembling arms withstands my hatred.’ (trans. Derek Yeld, in notes to Jean-Baptiste Lully, Armide, with Collegium Vocale and La Chapelle Royale, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe, recorded May 1993, Harmonia Mundi HMC901456/7, compact disc.) 10. The rhetorical implications of this phenomenon are explored in Robert G. Dimit, “‘Why you… I oughta…’: Aposiopesis and the Natural Language of the Passions, 1670-1770,” Studies in Seventeenth-Century Culture, 35 (2006), 161–176. 11. ‘Une passion violent ne permet jamais de dire tout ce que l’on voudrait dire. La langue est trop lente pour suivre la vitesse de ses mouvements…’ [‘A violent passion never allows one to say whatever one would like to say. The tongue is too slow to follow the speed of its movement…’], Bernard Lamy, La Rhetorique ou l’art de parler (Paris, 1675), 117. 12. Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125. 13. Associated especially with the work of Dominique Bouhours (1628-1702), this aesthetic concept forms the subject of Richard Scholar, The je-ne-sais-quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and is discussed in Ann T. Delehanty, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France: From Poetics to Aesthetics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 54-63. 14. Lully and Quinault, Armide, III.ii. bars 30–32 [line 23]. 15. The dualistic nature of the Liberata is a well-established aspect of Tasso criticism; for further discussion see David Quint, “Epic and Empire,” Comparative Literature 41, no. 1 (1989), 1–32 (especially 21–22); Sergio Zatti, “Christian Uniformity, Pagan Multiplicity,” in The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso, ed. Dennis Looney, trans. Sally Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 135–159. 16. A sub-genre derived from neo-classical tragicomedy and the ‘machine play’, which exploited the spectacular effects of stage machinery (a speciality of the Théâtre du Marais, where this work was performed). For discussion of machine plays see Jan Clarke, ‘Machine plays at the Guénégaud: the twilight of the gods’, The Seventeenth Century, 12.1 (1997), 85-110. 17. Quinault, La Comédie sans comédie (Paris, 1660), V.vii.1 (L’AMOUR: ‘Arreste, arreste, Armide…’). 18. Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, c.1628-30, oil on canvas, 82.2 × 109.2 cm, DPG238. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. 19. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), 48–56; Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 8–37. 20. Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, c.1625-1626, oil on canvas, 95.25 × 133 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow. 21. Poussin, Abduction of Rinaldo, 1637, oil on canvas, 116 × 146 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 22. Poussin, Companions of Rinaldo, c.1633, oil on canvas, 118.1 × 102.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 23. Poussin, Abandonment of Armida, c.1648, drawing, Louvre, Paris. 24. Alain Mérot, “The Conquest of Space: Poussin’s Early Attempts at Landscape,” in Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, ed. Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–71: 58.

130  M. Lee 25. Phillippa Plock, “Visual Agency in Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida,” in Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Tauris, 2007), 25. 26. Translation of Gerusalemme liberata IV.24 from Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered: An English Prose Version, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 74. 27. Michael Sherberg, Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso (Saratoga, CA: AMNA Libri, 1993), 117n32. 28. Plock, “Visual Agency,” 26. 29. In Ovid, Metamorphoses, III.352, Narcissus is described as seeming “both man and boy” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 61. 30. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 195. 31. Girard [or Gérard] Audran, Armida and Rinaldo (after Poussin), c.1684–1690, engraving, 43.5 × 54 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 32. Poussin, Apollo and Daphne, c.1625-1626, oil on canvas, 97.2 × 130.9 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 33. Poussin, Echo and Narcissus, c.1628-1630, oil on canvas, 74 × 100 cm, Louvre, Paris. 34. Poussin, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1628, oil on canvas, 102.7 × 146.1 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; The Martyrdom of St Erasmus, 1628, oil on canvas, 99 × 74.3 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and various drawn copies of each in reed pen from the same period. 35. This comparison is discussed in Louis Marin, “Awakening Metamorphoses: Poussin, 1625-1635,” in Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 152–170: 159. 36. Plock, “Visual Agency,” 29, and Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 87-89, among others, also suggest that the choice of this scene reflects the influence of Poussin’s patron, teacher and collaborator Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). His epic poem L’Adone (1623) includes a comparable encounter between Venus and the sleeping Adonis, effectively reworking and extending the equivalent scene in Tasso. 37. Bram van Oostveldt and Stijn Bussels, “The Sublime and French Seventeenth-Century Theories of the Spectacle: Toward an Aesthetic Approach to Performance,” Theatre Survey 58, no. 2 (2017), 209–232. 38. Oostveldt and Bussels, “Sublime,” 225. 39. Delehanty, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France, 36. 40. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and other writings, trans. by Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10. 41. Delehanty, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France, 64–65. 42. Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005), 41–44. 43. Patricia Howard, “Quinault, Lully, and the Précieuses: Images of Women in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 71–72. 44. Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (Brussels, 1705), 2.16: “Il s’en retourne chez lui pénetré ­malgré qu’il en ait, rêveur, chagrin du mécontentement d’Armide.” Translation from Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 121.

9

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema: musical experimentation in the service of revolutionary ideology Marysol Quevedo

Released in 1968, the Cuban revolutionary film, Lucía, chronicles three seminal moments in Cuban history: the 1895 War of Independence, the 1932 revolts leading to the toppling of President Gerardo Machado, and the beginning of the Revolution, subtitled “196….” The film makers created a historical narrative of Cuban revolutionary tradition presented through the struggles of three Lucías. Each section of the film portrays Lucía and her relationship to national political events, her community and family, and romantic love interests. Through his musical score, Leo Brouwer (b. 1939) provided the historical backdrop and psychological subtext not entirely apparent through the visual and dialogic elements. The combination of the screenplay and direction by Humberto Solás and Leo Brouwer’s musical score resulted in an iconic work that encapsulated the utopian vision of 1960s Cuba. The intermedial relationship between the visual and the sonic elements created for audiences a web of meaning that brings forth a subtext that would be nearly absent if the carefully crafted soundtrack was stripped away from the visual component. This interplay between sound and visual image presented audiences with the contemporary Cuban realities of the 1960s as the fulfilment of previously thwarted attempts to bring freedom, justice, and equality to Cuban citizens, imbuing the film with an overtly political message that can only be perceived due to the intermediality between sound and image. After a brief overview of the origins of the state film institute and a discussion of Leo Brouwer’s published writings on the role of the composer in a revolutionary society, I delve into a close analysis of how visual and sonic elements’ intermedial relationship lead audiences to read certain scenes from a political point of view that celebrates the revolution and condemns anti-revolutionary attitudes and behaviours as remnants of the capitalist and imperialist past. The Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Film Institute, ICAIC) was the first cultural organization created by the Revolutionary government. The law establishing the ICAIC (24 March 1959) emphasized the “power” of film as an artistic, educational, and ideological tool, stating “[film is] an instrument of opinion and the formation of individual and collective conscience, and it can contribute to making deeper

132  M. Quevedo and more transparent the revolutionary spirit and to sustaining its creative impetus.”1 The ICAIC’s overt objective was to shape a new revolutionary society and the hombre nuevo (new man). Film was an ideal medium for educating the masses because it could travel and be reproduced with relative ease, and it was consistent from presentation to presentation. Film scholar Julianne Burton classifies Cuban film from this period under the umbrella of New Latin American Cinema, characterized by the directors’ use of film “as a tool for consciousness-raising (concientización), as an instrument for research and social analysis, and as a catalyst to political action and social transformation.”2 As part of this wider movement, Cuban filmmakers intended to engage with reality and social issues, problematize them and become part of the dialectical process.3 Because film became a powerful and ubiquitous part of Cuban society after the revolution – the government dispatched film brigades to remote locales throughout the island, and films were sent to international film festivals – writing film music was one of the most effective ways through which composers could ensure the dissemination of their music while at the same time serving the revolution.4 The ICAIC was one of the few state organizations with sound recording studios where composers could experiment with electroacoustic composition and acoustic new music. While they benefited from the technology available at the ICAIC, composers also guided the aesthetic direction of the music used in the films. These composers were influenced by European music circles, specifically the Polish avant-garde and the electroacoustic works of Paul Schaffer. Consequently, ICAIC films were accompanied by sound tracks featuring avant-garde and experimental compositional techniques the composers considered revolutionary. Additionally, writing film music provided composers with job security and financial stability within the new socio-economic system. Therefore, film music composition benefited composers in four ways: it allowed composers to work for the state to promote socialist and revolutionary ideology, provided technological infrastructure to experiment with new techniques, facilitated dissemination of their works to a mass audience, and secured financial support. These benefits overlapped with the purported values of the revolution – ­egalitarianism, hard work, and collectivism – since their compositions were part of collective projects that took great effort to complete and reached the people through mass dissemination.5 The music section of the ICAIC flowered under the directorship of Leo Brouwer, appointed to the music section of the ICAIC in 1960 upon returning from musical studies in the United States. Brouwer’s interests and experiences proved seminal to the aesthetic direction of film music composition and to the professional development of younger composers who used these opportunities to experiment with new and avant-garde techniques. Almost all of the active composers of this generation contributed in some way to ICAIC productions. The scores can be characterized as eclectic, sometimes using leitmotifs to develop characters and ideas, at other times using folk and

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema 133 popular music as diegetic and non-diegetic background music, and, as we shall see, sometimes employing experimental techniques to highlight particular scenes. The use of compositional techniques associated with music circles in the United States and Western Europe could be interpreted as an affront on the part of the Cuban composers to the Cuban state. However, when we examine Brouwer’s essays on music’s role in a revolutionary society, in particular the composers’ obligation to innovation, we can begin to understand how musical aesthetics closely associated with Western, capitalist decadence were reframed to serve a socialist-revolutionary agenda.

Leo Brouwer’s advocacy for musical innovation Brouwer’s artistic formation informed how he positioned himself and his contemporaries both within Cuba and on a global scale. After the 1959 Revolution, he became involved in several state cultural institutions. He showed a commitment to the revolution through his music and writings and positioned himself and other like-minded composers at the helm of the Cuban music scene. With a scholarship from the Cuban government in 1959, Brouwer studied composition at the Hartt College of Music of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, and the Juilliard School of Music. Additionally, in 1961, Brouwer travelled to Poland to attend the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival.6 Influenced by these encounters, Brouwer’s compositions during the 1960s were marked by experimentation.7 In 1970, Brouwer published two articles in which he justified Cuban composers’ use of experimental techniques.8 He addressed the incorrect division between “popular and classical” music, the problems with cultural production in capitalist societies, the importance of innovation and the role of the composer in communicating with audiences through mass media. He criticized the division of music into “popular” and “classical” as problematic because these were determined by their modes of consumption, which do not describe the actual music product.9 Brouwer argued that the bourgeois, capitalist system was controlled by a minority consumer elite and a creative elite that provided “conservative” music that maintained the consumer elite’s status quo, by consequence ignoring the masses. Brouwer praised the socio-economic socialist framework as superior to capitalist ones in regards to music production and consumption because the state does not need to impose itself in art since the people and the art they produce reflect the state.10 Brouwer also emphasized innovation as a key feature of socialist and revolutionary art. He argued that “to innovate is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult things to achieve in a moment of great richness of means as is our century. It is also, radically, one of the conditions of revolutions.”11 He tied vanguardismo (which had political connotations) to avant-garde and experimental approaches to music compositions. He identified his trip to the 1961 Warsaw Autumn Music Festival as the “birth” of Cuban vanguardia,

134  M. Quevedo stating that “listening in Warsaw was a vital impulse, a definitive point of departure of the Cuban vanguardia,” where he encountered the works of Penderecki and Stockhausen.12 Brouwer chronicled 1960s performances of experimental and avant-garde music that employed serial technique, aleatoric and open forms, and electroacoustic means as examples of Cuban composers’ engagement with the most “up to date” techniques. Finally, he extolled the socialist model because composers were fully immersed in the social realities of the people and the non-prejudiced audience accepted this new experimental music as a point of departure for shaping a “cultura propia” (one’s own culture).13 He identified film music as one of the ways in which composers were meeting the demands of the public and the revolution. He added that their avant-garde compositions responded to society’s current needs better than “‘standardized’ products” because they served social functions.14 Brouwer’s music for Lucía In 1968, Brouwer created the score for one of the most critically acclaimed ICAIC productions of the 1960s, Lucía. In three parts, it follows the lives of three women named Lucía, during three specific moments in Cuban history, with each section showing how the political and historical circumstances affected their private lives. Brouwer explained his approach when creating the musical score in an article for Cine Cubano, titled “Lucía en tres movimientos” (“Lucía in three movements”), where he included an outline of his compositional process, transcribed in Table 9.1. Brouwer’s score for most of the film features clear tonal melodies in a lush orchestral setting reminiscent of Romantic tone poems and symphonies; indeed, he indicates the first two parts are based on themes by Schumann and Chopin. In some instances, it evokes Cuban genres, such as the contradanza and the danzón. He reserves avant-garde techniques for scenes fraught with political tension, focusing on the uncomfortable realities of uncertain times. The plot of the first part of the film revolves around a Lucía from a wealthy family that is involved in the independence movement. However, she falls in love with a man who fights on the Spanish side. Without realizing it, she provides her lover with details about the location of her brother and other independence fighters, betraying her family and the Cuban independence movement. An excerpt [5:10] from this part of the film juxtaposes the private and secluded life of high-society women with the public reality of the war. Inside the house, a group of upper-class women sews clothing for the Cuban revolutionaries, the mambises. Dressed in late-nineteenth-­century attire and sitting in a parlour full of expensive furniture, they gossip and joke. Their work is interrupted when they hear a commotion in the street. Outside the windows of the private home, the scene provides a dramatic visual contrast to the well-kept interior and female space of the upper-class home by focusing on the public space, the street, and the men returning from battle. Some

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema 135 Table 9.1  Compositional process for the film music for Lucía15 Order of composition

Historically representative instrument

Lucía 196…

Guitar

Lucía 1932

Flute

Lucía 1895

Piano

Thematic treatment Leitmotiv: La guantanamera, by Joseíto Fernández (the final, symphonic version) Secondary themes –popular forms (original themes): bossanova, shake, march, go-gó, altered rhythm Leitmotiv: [based] on a prelude by Chopin (with variations) Secondary themes: a original themes: within the most stylish current style b epic theme in the style of nineteenth-century overture c juxtaposition of old popular tunes with aleatoric music in the form of a collage Leitmotiv: [based] on a theme by Schumann (with variations) Secondary themes: a original themes that combine elements in the style of Schumann, Dvórak b concrete elaboration [music] (surreal scenes) c aleatoric elaboration [music] d juxtaposition of b and c in various tracks

of the wounded soldiers drag the bodies of the dead ones, while a dishevelled vagabond woman interacts with them. The woman screams, while one of the soldiers sings. The non-diegetic music combines electronic sounds with a small chamber ensemble playing dissonant melodies. The visceral visual elements are enhanced by Brouwer’s use of sound clusters in the strings, along with angular, fragmented atonal lines played by the woodwinds, highlighting the chaos and decline of living conditions for Cuban citizens. As indicated in the table for Cine Cubano, Brouwer created a soundscape where he combined acoustic instruments performing indeterminate passages with electronic music elements to accompany scenes he labelled as “surreal.” Avant-garde music framed the scenes it underscores as distinct from others where Brouwer evoked nineteenth-century musical styles. Brouwer also emphasized the historical distance and “universal” themes of “Lucía 1895,” allowing viewers to connect with the main themes of this portion of the film: “loneliness, love, sentimental betrayal (for whatever reason), and death.”16 By engaging with what Brouwer considered the “universal” musical language of the 1960s avant-garde, he highlighted the universality of the surreal moments of this portion of the film: the clash between the external world (the violent and disturbing reality of the war) and the interior one

136  M. Quevedo (the well-guarded private lives of affluent families). Brouwer’s use of avantgarde and experimental idioms fulfiled both aesthetic and political goals: he heightened the visually surreal scenes using atonal and electronic techniques associated with an international musical avant-garde while also condemning colonial imperialism and the struggle between criollos (Cubans born in the island) and peninsulares (Cubans born in Spain or the peninsula, who had a higher political and class standing than criollos) in a war-ravaged country. In the middle portion of the film (“Lucía 1932”), Brouwer continues with a Romantic score but also inserts popular music genres from that decade, as well as some brief avant-garde moments. The middle Lucía is involved with Aldo, a man who belongs to a group that opposes Gerardo Machado’s regime and partakes in armed attacks against the police. The lovers participate in demonstrations against the regime, while the music reflects the changing times in Cuban society. Unlike her 1895 counterpart, this Lucía is not limited to the private realm of the home but appears in public as a working woman. She leaves her middle-class family to join Aldo, supporting him financially by working in a cigar factory. Consequently, the social conditions resulting from the policies of the repressive regime affect all aspects of her life, and the distinction between the “interior” and “exterior” worlds is blurred. Brouwer uses the flute as the principal solo instrument in the musical context of a danzón to distinguish this period from the other two. The danzón gained popularity within and outside of Cuba in the early twentieth century, but it was supplanted in the 1940s and 1950s by other dances that gained international popularity: mambo and chachachá. However, through the 1960s several musicians and scholars, most notably Odilio Urfé, began to revive the danzón as a national Cuban dance. In this part of the film, the danzón underscores scenes with little or no dialogue and as transitions between scenes. Like the visual elements, such as historically accurate vehicles and clothing, Brouwer’s non-diegetic use of the danzón and the flute (one of the main solo instruments in danzón orchestras) provides an audible chronological marker for the 1930s. Avant-garde musical idioms appear after Lucía leaves her family to be with Aldo and support him in his fight against Machado. Machado is overthrown, but the new regime does not offer the anticipated change. Aldo becomes disillusioned with the new government. One evening, he attends a party where people are drinking and dancing, first the Charleston, then jazz, and eventually tango. Aldo observes from the sidelines as the party becomes more decadent; the tango dissolves into dissonant, percussive, atonal, and angular music, similar to the music used in the first part of the film. Brouwer’s use of avant-garde music in the 1932 party scene aurally connects the decadence of another failed revolution to the decline of colonial society. In both instances, avant-garde music accompanies scenes in which the consequences of mismanaged revolutions are presented to viewers through raw and uncomfortable situations; the atonal, angular, percussive music highlights these jarring realities. Brouwer employed avant-garde

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema 137 music selectively, reserving it for scenes depicting the social decline in colonial and neocolonial Cuban society. In the last third of the film, “Lucía 196…,” Lucía is a young newlywed mulata whose misogynistic husband does not allow her to leave their house, even though she yearns to be with her family and work in the fields for the revolution. The marriage is disrupted when a young male teacher from Havana is assigned to their house to teach Lucía to read and write as part of the revolution’s literacy campaign. Tomás, Lucía’s husband, refuses to let another man spend time with Lucía, but the leader of the community tells him it is an order from the government and Lucía must learn to read and write because her illiteracy is a remnant of “yanqui imperialism.” Through the lessons, Lucía’s teacher helps her realize she is being treated like a slave, so she leaves Tomás to work in the salt fields. In this portion of the film, there are no instances of avant-garde, music. Instead, Brouwer uses gogo, shake, bossa nova, Cuban dance genres, and a leitmotif based on the son guajiro “Guantanamera” by Joseíto Fernández.17 In “Lucía 196…,” Brouwer resorts to gogo and shake – genres the Cuban regime deemed inappropriate in 1960s socialist society for their associations with US consumer, commercial, pop culture – to underscore moments of conflict. While the jarring sounds of avant-garde music are reserved for the decadence of colonial and neocolonial Cuban society, the decadent sounds of commercial pop music signal decadence in the present (1960s) society. In the two scenes in which Tomás violently attacks other men because of his jealousy, Brouwer uses gogo to underscore the roughly shot and edited footage that characterized what Julio García Espinosa labelled “imperfect cinema.” In the first of these scenes, Tomás and Lucía attend a community party where Cuban music plays (danzón, son, and chachachá) [2:00:22]. A group of foreign visitors arrives, gogo music begins to play as they start dancing, and the Cuban crowd stops to gawk at the visitors’ peculiar movements, each dancer moving independently from his or her partner with jerky movements. Gogo-dancing interrupts the Cuban dance music, leading Lucía to dance with another man and Tomás to react irrationally and violently by attacking Lucía’s dance partner. Foreign dance music is presented as an interruption to the Cuban dance and modes of behaviour, but it also accompanies Tomás’s loss of control. There is a paradox in this particular scene. Compared to the Cuban music and dance protocols (predating the 1959 revolution), in which men and women dance as couples in a tight embrace and with measured and standardized steps, gogo presents a liberation of the female body from the embrace and control of a man. Although the foreign dance seems to present an interruption to the local dance gathering, through it, Lucía asserts her independence from Tomás, by dancing with another man, but at a safe distance, without touching him. Tomás’s jealous reaction, not Lucía’s dancing, is what is presented as problematic. Foreign intrusions and new ways of conduct are not necessarily anti-revolutionary, as long

138  M. Quevedo as they do not lead to modes of thinking and behaviour associated with pre-Revolutionary bourgeois culture. Later in the film, the teacher arrives at the couple’s home. In an accurate portrayal of the literacy campaign of the early 1960s, the teacher is supposed to live in their house and work in the fields with them [2:25:10]. During one of the lessons, thinking they are alone, Lucía shares with the teacher her frustrations regarding Tomás’s jealousy and possessiveness. The teacher urges her to leave Tomás. She is torn because although she loves Tomás, she admits she cannot continue living in her current situation. The camera shows Tomás eavesdropping on their conversation until she reaches her conclusion: she must leave him. At this point, Tomás bursts through the door and picks a fight with Lucía and the teacher. The conversation between Lucía and the teacher had no musical accompaniment, but as Tomás enters, we are also sonically assaulted with gogo music. What we had heard as diegetic gogo dance music in the previous community dance scene, now becomes non-diegetic underscoring to Tomás’s violent fit of jealousy as he attacks the teacher and Lucía screams for him to stop. By using gogo in both instances in which Tomás loses his temper, Brouwer connects both scenes and codes gogo as a musical signifier for Tomás’s loss of control. His loss of control is tied to values, behaviours, and beliefs associated with imperialism and pre-revolutionary Cuban culture: machismo, chauvinism, and women’s lack of agency and participation in the work force. Tomás’s outdated attitudes and actions threaten the new, socialist ideals that sought to improve gender equality. Gogo-music represents violence motivated by values that go against the revolution. As a foreign music genre, it threatens national and local musics and values. During the late 1960s and mid-1970s, the Cuban media suppressed such foreign dance music as gogo, rock, and shake, which originated mainly from the US and Britain. This was congruent with one of the Cuban Revolution’s fundamental tactics that sought “to free the country from foreign control” by using “national music and culture…as weapons in the struggle to reorient public opinion and also as a means of resisting ‘the penetration of the enemy’.”18 National folk music served as an antidote to foreign, commercial, popular music. By using gogo in scenes where characters engaged in morally questionable activities, Brouwer linked foreign musical styles suppressed by the state to behaviours that were seen as counter-revolutionary. Paradoxically, although the state suppressed foreign popular music in other media (radio and television), it was through the government-funded film institute that Cuban composers found a safe space where they could experiment with musical styles that were otherwise censored. Cuban composers and musicians used the recording studios of one of the most prestigious and successful cultural institutions funded by the Cuban State to record musical styles and genres state officials deemed anti-revolutionary because of their capitalist and commercial origins. Even if the foreign popular styles were used for ideological purposes within the ICAIC films, the act of producing

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema 139 veritable carbon copies of the foreign originals legitimized the Cuban composers and musicians as modern, urban, and cosmopolitan in the eyes and ears of both local and international audiences. This film score shows that in spite of the economic and political embargo, Cuban musicians were aware of international popular music trends and that these musics were heard by Cuban and international audiences in the context of revolutionary film. Ironically, the ICAIC, and by consequence the state, funded the education of these young composers in the most current foreign popular music styles. At the same time, by accompanying visual and dramaturgical content that celebrated revolutionary and socialist ideals and criticized imperialism and capitalism, these very styles and sounds acquired new meanings for revolutionary artists and viewers. The sound of Cuban revolutionary film and ICAIC productions became inextricably linked to the music styles of a broader international popular music scene. Contemporary (196…) Lucía is underscored exclusively with the styles of international popular music, with one exception, the son guajiro “Guantanamera.” Like the wise voice of an elder, the “Guantanamera” provided commentary on Lucía’s and Tomás’s dysfunctional relationship. Each time we hear the “Guantanamera,” it accompanies a visual montage of the characters engaging in various activities, and the lyrics are tailored to comment on the specific situation the characters are undergoing. In the first occurrence, the lyrics address the land and how man and woman have the duty to work hard and take advantage of its fruits and its potential, while the visual montage shows various agricultural activities featuring new farming equipment and men and women wearing the post-revolutionary farming uniforms [1:56:40]. In the last of these montages, the footage shows Lucía rejoining the farming brigades after leaving Tomás, who passes his time drinking alone, while the lyrics emphasize the dangers of unfounded jealousy. The “Guantanamera” functions as a Greek chorus, commenting on and interpreting the plot. The use of the Cuban son conveys to the audience that this is the Cuban/revolutionary perspective that values hard work and respect and equality between men and women, critiquing Tomás’s outdated views. The conclusion of the film is perplexing because it does not offer a clear resolution to the couple’s issues. In this last scene, the camera shows Tomás walking by the beach, clothes dishevelled, possibly drunk. The camera turns to show Lucía walking towards him. He falls at her feet hugging her and telling her he knew she would come to her senses and return to him. She explains that she cannot go back to living under the same conditions and tells him she needs to feel like she is worth something and continue to work. Tomás lashes back at her, exclaiming, “this is the kind of nonsense that you came to me with?” They fight one last time, the dialogue fades as the camera turns to a little girl who watches them from a distance; she seems confused at first, but then she smiles and giggles. The music abruptly changes from a slow, minor andante featuring a guitar solo accompanied by

140  M. Quevedo sustained strings to an orchestral version of the “Guantanamera” arranged in a shake style [2:36:19], a final return of the leitmotif that leads into the closing credits. This ending is ambiguous but may be read as a nuanced commentary on contemporary Cuban politics and culture. For Brouwer, the new Cuban society will never rid itself entirely of foreign influences, in spite of foreign-imposed embargos or national suppression of foreign culture. The new socialist and revolutionary ideals coexist alongside old ones, resulting in a heterogeneous blend of values, culture, and music that may seem paradoxical but is now the norm for the younger generation. It is through this perspective that we end the film; with the little girl’s view of a married couple fighting over old and new social and political codes. Unlike the other moments in the film where the “Guantanamera” appears, there are no lyrics to help the viewer interpret the situation, adding ambiguity to an already confusing ending. In this orchestral setting, Brouwer blurs the musical divisions he criticized: he fuses the local (the son) with the foreign (gogo), through the means of the classical film score (orchestral music). In his writings, Brouwer encouraged fellow composers to ignore categorizations and classifications of music based on modes of production and consumption and to employ a variety of new compositional techniques. He justified his stance by arguing that any style or technique was appropriate as long as it served the composer’s goal and the work’s function. Brouwer led by example, crossing and ignoring the divisions between national and foreign, popular and classical, offering an approach to music composition that made him one of the most successful Cuban composers of his generation. Brouwer had a keen understanding of the ways different musical styles would lead audiences to read specific scenes, and he employed every style, technique, and genre with precision. Brouwer’s polystylistic approach to the score for Lucía positioned him as one of the leading avant-garde composers in Cuba, as well as an artista comprometido, a politically and socially committed artist. His use of genres closely associated with Cubanness in scenes promoting revolutionary and socialist values further connected national identity with the political ideology of the socialist revolution. As Brouwer argued in several essays from this period, function (plot, dialogue and political message) dictated which musical styles or genres composers chose to employ.

Notes 1. 10 años de cine cubano: publicado por el Departamento de Cine de “Marcha” en homenaje al Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) en su X aniversario (Montevideo: Marcha, 1969), 8. 2. Julianne Burton, “The Camera as ‘Gun’: Two Decades of Culture and Resistance in Latin America,” Latin American Perspectives 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1978), 49–76: 50 and 51. 3. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, “Apuntes de filmaci6n,” Hablemos de Cine (Lima), 54 (July-August, 1970), 17–19 quoted in Burton, “The Camera as “Gun,’ 51.

Music in Cuban revolutionary cinema 141

4. The existing literature on the ICAIC has focused on the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (GES) in 1969, giving birth to the Nueva Trova movement. For more on the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora see Tamara Levitz, “Experimental Music and Revolution: Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 180–210; and Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 5. Sujatha Fernandes, Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 26. 6. Constance McKenna, “An Interview with Leo Brouwer,” Guitar Review, No. 75 (1988), 10–16. 7. Brouwer also served as music advisor for Radio La Habana and as composition professor at the Conservatorio Amadeo Roldán. His work as mentor and educator extended beyond formal education institutions. Through the GESI, Brouwer guided the young generation of Cuban singer-song writers who led the Nueva Trova Movement, including Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés Vladimir Wistuba Álvarez, “Lluvia, rumba y campanas en los P ­ aisajes cubanos de Leo Brouwer y otros temas (una conversación con Leo Brouwer),” Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana 10, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1989), 135–47: 135. 8. Leo Brouwer, “La música, lo cubano, y la innovación,” Cine Cubano 69 (1970), 28; Leo Brouwer, “La vanguardia en la música cubana,” Boletín Música no. 1 (1970), 22. 9. Leo Brouwer, “La música, lo cubano, y la innovación,” Cine Cubano (1970): 28. 10. Ibid., 33. 11. “Innovar es, sin duda, una de las cosas más arduas de lograr en un momento de gran riqueza de medios como el de nuestro siglo. También es, radicalmente, una condición de las revoluciones.” Ibid., 32–33. 12. “La audición en Varsovia fue un impulso vital, un punto de arranque definitivo para la vanguardia cubana.” Leo Brouwer, “La vanguardia en la música cubana,” Boletín Música no. 1 (1970): 22 13. Ibid., 24. 14. Ibid., 24–25. 15. Brouwer worked on the music for each of the three sections backwards, starting with “Lucía 196…” and finishing with Lucía 1895. This is a transcription of the table published in the Cine Cubano article, and I have chosen to maintain the order presented by Brouwer. Cine Cubano, no. 52–53, 1968. Reprinted in Leo Brouwer, La música, lo cubano y la innovación (Ciudad de La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), 61–63. 16. “La soledad, el amor, la traición sentimental (por cualquier motivación) y la muerte.” Ibid., 60. 17. Taking into consideration Pete Seeger’s recording of the tune in 1963, which was meant to encourage peace and reinforce ties between Cuba and United States, and the astonishing international success of the version recorded by The Sandpipers in 1966, one can speculate that Brouwer’s use of the tune was meant to play on its international recognition as an iconic Cuban popular song. 18. Partido Comunista de Cuba, 1997: 57 quoted in Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (California: California University Press, 2006), 103.

10 Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria Pascal Vandelanoitte

Mahler (1974) by Ken Russell is an atypical biopic.1 The blurring of facts and imagination along with the rapid changes in narration, image and/or music create a fascinating assembly – a phantasmagoria. The film is also remarkable for its intermedial use of classical music. This essay will investigate the link between the music and the film. The music not only blends with the scenes, it becomes a revealer of meaning. Through the use of about 40 different cues, mostly from Mahler’s symphonic oeuvre, Mahler is a film as much about the composer’s music as it is about the composer and his relationship with Alma Mahler. Before elaborating on the different modes of intermedial use of music, we will shed light on Russell’s path leading to this particular film, his admiration for Mahler’s music and some parallels between Mahler’s music and Russell’s films. It is no secret that Russell was a music lover. He started his career for the BBC arts program Monitor in 1959. Of the 34 films he shot for the BBC until 1970, nine concern music and/or composers. Amongst them are important documentaries as Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965) and Delius, Song of Summer (1968), which are notable for their innovative use of the documentary form. They also constitute the foundation of Russell’s experimentation throughout his career. Once Russell left the BBC to devote himself to feature films, his interest in music and composers endured. This is most apparent in his filmic biographies of composers, but even in films as Savage Messiah (1972) or Altered States (1980), while working with film composers rather than with pre-existing music, his musical sensitivity remained prominent.2 His first feature film about a composer was The Music Lovers (1970), a personal take on Tchaikovsky’s life and music. For his next composer biopic, Russell turned to Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). After Elgar, Mahler was Russell’s favourite composer, and Russell knew much about his life and music.3 He highlighted his approach to the Mahler film in the following words: As is my custom when approaching a film on a composer, I donned my Sherlock Holmes outfit and searched for the soul of the man in his music, while also keeping the facts of his life in mind. And just

Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 143 as I had with Tchaikovsky, I found a lot of bombast on that way – the sound and fury of a tormented artist. I also found music that was brutal, vulgar, grotesque, macabre – and was inevitably pilloried for reflecting these elements in the film. I found joy, poetry and magic too and included them as well.4 This quote stresses that in his composer films, Russell puts his own interpretations of Mahler’s music before biographical facts. It also accentuates some characteristics present in both Mahler’s music as well as in Russell’s film, as we will illustrate in the next paragraph.

Russell and Mahler: experiment and innovation Russell’s composer biopics are far from conventional. They involve no romanticizing of the subject, avoiding “the longstanding association between musical romanticism and diegetic love-interest.”5 Russell transcends the traditional image of composers as solitary, unhappy, fragile figures and turns them into headstrong and persistent individuals.6 Their emotional struggles are not the only issues that pull them through life: Russell’s biopics primarily “emphasize the associations and connotations the music itself evokes in the listener.”7 While analyzing films on Mozart, Guido Heldt observes that composer biopics not only re-invent their subjects in the stories they tell but also through the use of their music.8 In the case of Mahler, this is even magnified by the large number and the specific way Russell uses musical cues from all of Mahler’s symphonies except the Eighth. Music is present throughout the film, and the few scenes without music are brief. The film uses at least 40 musical fragments, often short parts of several compositions used seamlessly, all Mahler’s, apart from two fragments of Wagner, one song by Dana Gillespie and the marches and folksongs in the “inspirational” sequence. Some fragments are used several times, but often, when using the same composition and movement, we hear other parts. Both the quantity and the combination of fragments are unusual, exceeding the more common practice of fewer and longer musical cues, as exemplified by Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice some years earlier. One could say that Russell plays with the film’s music and the common practice when using pre-existing music as much as Mahler surpassed the boundaries of symphonic music. Mahler’s most productive period falls right in the turnof-the-century period between 1890 and 1910, when Modernism saw itself as a new direction.9 He continued to make innovations along the lines of Anton Bruckner’s enrichment of harmonic language and lengthening of symphonies and Johannes Brahms’s exploration and extension of melody and tonality. Beyond these contributions, Mahler expanded musical language by, for example, inserting elements from real life, such as instrumentation based on natural sounds or melodies from popular music. Another

144  P. Vandelanoitte of Mahler’s distinctive characteristics is his use of motifs, which sometimes are not heard again, as would have been traditionally expected, or which evolve into something completely different, as if they echo a natural course of evolution. He also experimented with the symphonic form and moved away from the dominant schedule of four movements with fixed rhythms and patterns. Vocal parts, often based on popular melodies, became an integral part of most of his symphonies. In short, he radically transformed the symphony into something that reaches beyond its own boundaries. Mahler’s impressive achievements and yearning to extend the boundaries of musical language find their filmic equivalence in the work of Russell, who continued throughout his career to test the limits of documentary and fiction film. Russell’s experimentation is visible in his play with anachronisms, such as the references to Nazism in Mahler and Lisztomania, his homages to other films, such as Visconti’s Death in Venice, Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton in Mahler, his adoption of popular culture, such as in Tommy, or Roger Daltrey from the rock band The Who playing Franz Liszt as a pop star in Lisztomania. Concerning film form, his narrative experiments are visible, for example, in the metafilmic approach of The Debussy Film as well as in his regular merging of genres, such as a historical drama with plenty of violence and nudity referring more to exploitation film in The Devils, horror and science-fiction in Altered States. The almost cult-like figure of Ken Russell, respected by some critics but often lambasted by others,10 also matches the public figure of Mahler, who during his lifetime was lauded as a conductor but struggled to have his symphonies performed and/or understood.11 Furthermore, parallels exist between Mahler’s eclecticism and Russell’s contrasts and variety,12 as they both tend to assimilate influences from a variety of sometimes unlikely sources and make use of sharp contrasts.13 Russell often jumps from one scene or mood to another; in Mahler’s symphonies, atmosphere and cadence can rapidly shift within the same musical movement, often bringing elegy and drama, joy and sadness into close proximity. In both their work, “opposites like life and death” co-exist.14 The unconventional structure of Mahler is the first sign of musical influences. Russell wrote that he organized the film in the musical form of a rondo.15 The principal narration is provided by recurrent dialogue scenes on the train as Gustav and Alma Mahler are returning to Vienna at the end of the composer’s life. Alternating longer episodes are devoted to topics related to his life, love, children and work. Russell, however, does not limit himself to an interplay between the historical and the filmic figure of Mahler, nor to hyperlinks between Mahler’s musical innovations and his own filmic phantasmagoria. He also uses the music in an intermedial way: from illustrative translations, telling the story behind various sources of inspiration in Mahler’s music, to adaptations of musical characteristics and topics to define filmic scenes, or even using music as a central symbol, defining the dramatic flow.

Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 145

Translation: music as inspiration In several scenes, Russell illustrates the influence on Mahler’s music of ambient and natural sounds, showing how the composer integrated them into his work. As intermedial reference, these scenes function as translations and visual illustrations of extra-musical influences on Mahler’s music. The inspiration of environmental sounds is quite literally demonstrated when in response to Mahler’s demand Alma tries to silence everyday noises. Therefore, she runs from one source of noise to another, silencing them one by one. Russell makes the noises blend into fragments of music: the rattle to silence their child blends into the rhythm and high notes at the very beginning of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony; the cowbells into  the brass section of the end of the last movement of the Third Symphony; the church bells into the opening of the fifth part of the Third Symphony; the shepherd’s flute and its melody into a short flute solo of the first ­movement of the Fourth Symphony; the folk dances into the second movement from the First Symphony. As such, the sequence, firstly, ridicules Mahler who wanted absolute silence while composing. Secondly, it illustrates that Mahler did find much inspiration in folk tunes and everyday sounds, and brought unusual instruments into the symphonic orchestra, such as cowbells, post horn, mandolin, guitar, celesta and glockenspiel. The nature sequence is another section where Mahler’s music is translated into Russell’s images and narration. After a young Mahler talks with the tramp Nick about sensitivity for nature, we see Mahler as a child strolling through the woods. These scenes symbolize the growth of Mahler from childhood into an innovative composer, taking Nick’s advice to heart: closely listening and observing nature to achieve the potential of giving sound sonorising not only to the world but also to the cosmos. The first three musical fragments come out of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony. It is regarded as his most “neo-classical” symphony,16 and although Mahler had abandoned programmatic descriptions for his symphonies, he referred in a letter to “lamenting, stifled bird voices” in the first movement.17 The first movement moves between sombre and bright feelings, and it is this contrast that Russell uses: the slower trumpet fanfares while he slowly walks around the shore of the lake, throwing stones into the water; the preceding hastier section with solo violin when he walks through the forest; the subsequent part of the fanfares once he sits down and observes nature around him. Here Russell switches to a montage of stock images of forest animals – not as the young Mahler is observing them directly, but as he is imagining them. Even if one could call this fragment a “nearly didactic and hairsplitting, manner of visual-photographic parable,” it clearly “shows the heart of Mahler’s style as … brilliant and unpredictable.”18 When Mahler’s eyes begin to tremble, Russell cuts to the final part of the third movement of the Third Symphony. The last part praises the love of God (not in a strict religious but rather in a humanistic sense) and ends in an apotheosis where “nature in its totality

146  P. Vandelanoitte rings and resounds.”19 At the most triumphant moment of the music, we see the young Mahler galloping into his future on a white horse – referring to Russell’s Elgar (1962). The triumphant closure of the symphony is translated into a “moment of visual and aural breakthrough, a glimpse of an ‘other’ world.”20 The figure of Nick also embodies the influence of popular melodies. In a sequence devoted to Mahler’s youth, Nick is playing on his concertina the melody of “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” a folk song dating from around 1700 that found its way into children’s songs. As a child, Mahler witnessed several painful scenes between his parents, and one time when he ran out into the street, a hurdy-gurdy was playing “Ach, du lieber Augustin.”21 During the funeral sequence, we see Nick again playing his concertina as the music changes to the third movement of the First Symphony, a symphony that focuses on the power of the will against fate.22 This part of the symphony is a death march and begins with a melody based upon the French nursery melody of “Frère Jacques” (“Are You Sleeping?”). In the song, a monk is urged to wake up. In the film, Mahler lies in a coffin and is about to be buried alive. For film audiences unfamiliar with Mahler’s music, the following funeral procession might appear to be a fantasy devised by Russell, but the scene’s unusual elements are all present in this movement of the First: the abrupt changes of rhythm and atmosphere, the dances next to marches, the toylike fanfares next to elegiac oboes. As such, the funeral parade starts tripping when the clarinets add an unexpected timbre and both a melodic and a rhythmic counterpoint. Russell plays with the music too; he skips some measures to let the crossing of the funeral parade by a marching band coincide with banging cymbals and drums: blows that are present in the actual music but are louder and more extravagant in the film than in recordings of the First. Moreover, it is no coincidence that Russell uses the last part of the first movement, because “in the first part of the movement, the gloomy canon alternated with the happy tune; now they are heard simultaneously to illustrate how the tragic and the trivial coexist in the world.”23 This fits perfectly with Mahler’s nightmare of being buried alive by Alma and her lover. Russell presents it as a hallucination whose exaggerations on the soundtrack and in the mise-en-scène stress its grotesque character. Conversely, the presence of Alma and her lover amplifies its tragic character.

Adaptation: music as topic Where in the preceding section elements of the music are mainly visually illustrated in the film, here we focus on how several musical cues are adapted into the narrative of the film. Specific musical fragments and their stylistic qualities implement certain narrative effects. These are not or not mainly visualized, but above all generate dramatic impact. As intermedial reference, these scenes function as adaptations of intra-musical characteristics of Mahler’s music.

Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 147

Figure 10.1  Opening of the film: Mahler’s composing hut going up in flames.

At the very opening of the film, starting with the composing hut catching fire (Figure 10.1), we hear a thrilling part out of the Adagio of the unfinished Tenth Symphony. Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony during the summer of 1910, a summer in which he was confronted with Alma’s affair with the young architect Walter Gröpius.24 Even if their marriage was already problematic, this revelation shook him heavily. The Adagio might be referring to this with its sharp contrasts in and between its three themes: a motif of a lonely and sad character, an expressionistic and colossal motif, and a third theme, once again more elegiac, featuring dance-like trills. At the end of the movement, the second theme disappears, and only the closely related but different lonely themes remain.25 Russell uses a fragment from this last section: a climax with mainly strings and brass players, followed by a charming dance-like melody. The composing hut going up in flames, thus, not only refers to Mahler’s devotion to his work but also expresses that this dedication went hand-in-hand with neglect of his marriage. At the same time, it can be heard as an explosion of Mahler’s anger, as we see him screaming through the flames in the following shot. Two other forebodings are shown as a short vision in this sequence. The vision of his two children alludes to the loss in 1907 of their eldest child Maria Anna at the age of five. The second vision is one of Anna von Mildenburg, a soprano with whom Mahler had his first serious relationship in 1895–1897. Although this affair predated his acquaintance and relationship with Alma, which started at the end of 1901, Alma was jealous of Mahler and his contacts with female singers. The figure of von Mildenburg is used as an emblem for other women in Mahler’s life, as Max is for Alma’s men,26 although Mahler is supposed to have been loyal to Alma. This vision also provides a visual link to the

148  P. Vandelanoitte subsequent dream sequence of Alma as a chrysalis, accompanied on the soundtrack by the Third Symphony, written in 1895–1896, while he was in love with Anna von Mildenburg. The thematic genesis of this symphony is widely covered by letters from Mahler to friends, in which he describes the Third as “a musical poem, ascending step-by-step, encompassing all steps of evolution. It begins with lifeless nature and rises up to the love of God.”27 Although he later omitted the programmatic names and description, the first movement was called “What the Woods Tell Me.” Mahler once stated in a letter to his friend Nathalie Bauer-Lechner that the first movement could have been called “What the Rocky Mountains Tell Me” (“Was mir das Felsgebirge erzählt”),28 and Russell referred to the movement on the back of the soundtrack LP as “What the Rocks Tell Me.”29 The theme of this first movement is “the awakening of Pan, the creation of life out of lifeless matter,” which matches quite literally the filmic image of Alma’s birth, bursting out of her cocoon.30 Furthermore, Mahler constructed this symphony as an evolutionary, cosmological poem, and Alma, crawling towards the rock in the shape of Mahler’s figure, is reaching for something she will not be able to grasp. The symphony develops towards a heavenly joy, reached through a cosmological love, not an earthly one.31 These enriching relations between Mahler’s music and the film take up an even more central role in several places. Some themes are used repeatedly and become symbols of specific aspects. In a study devoted to the use of Mahler’s music in fiction films, Jeremy Barham writes that Mahler’s often heavily association-laden music, at whatever traditional diegetic level it is situated, can operate in screen works rather like a character who for purposes of emphasis or sympathy suddenly turns to the camera and addresses us directly with either a look, a gesture, or even spoken words, momentarily rupturing the diegetic etiquette, breaking through the narrative frame, and giving us privileged insight.32 The specific and multiple uses of both “Alma’s theme” and the Death March from the Fifth Symphony provide them a symbolical character. “Alma’s theme” out of the Sixth Symphony’s first movement is first used when showing one of the only signs of affection between Alma and Mahler at the composing hut. Here too, Russell clearly knew which piece to choose. Mahler called the Sixth his “Tragic” symphony, being his only symphony that offers no reconciliation. He started the composition in the summer of 1903, while on holiday with Alma and their first child. The symphony was finished the following summer, shortly after Alma gave birth to their second child. This symphony is regarded as his most personally inspired and in the sweeping theme of the first movement, used here by Russell, Mahler tried to capture his vision of Alma in what is called “Alma’s Theme.”33 Later in the film, the same measures are used when Alma walks into the forest to bury her

Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 149 compositions, almost. Alma seems to be concealing her own theme. Alma’s feeling of being hampered explicitly by Mahler from pursuing her own ambitions as a composer did have a negative impact on their relationship.34 However, Russell transcends the romantic image of Alma as Mahler’s muse and portrays both partners as strong-willed individuals whose egos lead to a clash of personalities. This is symbolized using the same composition in the last train sequence. Mahler’s desperate declaration of his love for Alma, saying “As long as my music lasts, our love will last,” is matched with a fragment containing “Alma’s theme.” His music may live forever, but his love and his life are slipping through his hands. “Alma’s Theme” is used similarly earlier in the film, when Mahler is confronted with Max, one of Alma’s lovers. When after a visit to the bathroom on the train Mahler gets back to their compartment, Max is cozily waiting there, supposedly for Alma to arrive. By using once again this specific musical movement in which Mahler tried to evoke his beloved Alma, but employing the following section that unfolds both a climax and a descending motif that activates contrast and evokes fear, both Mahler and Russell emphasize that “Alma’s Theme” is a burdened one. This heavy load that rests on his earthly love is stressed additionally in the subsequent scene, where Mahler confronts Alma with a love letter from Max, by the use of the “Death March” from the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. Both his love and his life will soon be carried to the grave. The same march is used in the beginning of Mahler’s hallucination of his own funeral. This “death sequence” starts with Mahler in the train having a mild stroke, and at that moment, we hear the famous nine-tone chord from the Tenth Symphony. This chord is built of nine notes, which makes it dissonant, and “constitutes a kind of scream: a thoroughly vocal gesture to be sure but one that marks an outer limit of the ability to speak at all.”35 The Tenth Symphony remained uncompleted; hence the hint at the so-called” Beethoven’s curse”: after nine symphonies, a composer is supposed to die. When Russell cuts to the bust of Beethoven, we hear the trumpet call at the beginning of the Death March. It is not only his love and his life that will end, but in this dream sequence, his love will lay him to rest while he is still alive, which is additionally accentuated by letting Max blow the trumpet (Figure 10.2). The curse is intensified by making Alma perform a sexually explicit dance on the glass top of the coffin, and by showing this mostly from the viewpoint of Mahler, locked in the coffin, right at the instant a can-can-dance appears in the third movement of the First Symphony. Once the doors of the crematorium are closed, the Ninth Symphony dominates the soundtrack, a symphony in which “death is confronted on a naked existential plane and is seen as omnipotent.”36 Mahler is doomed to be burnt alive by Alma and Max, while we hear fragments of the first movement, and more precisely, fragments of the part indicated with the instruction “like a solemn funeral march.” The subsequent scene where Alma dances provocatively before a portrait and a bust of her “burned” husband is edited to parts of the third

150  P. Vandelanoitte

Figure 10.2  Max blowing the death march for Mahler before a bust of Beethoven.

movement of the Seventh Symphony. Where the first movement, used in the natural sequence, oscillates between joy and dullness, this central part continues this oscillation between dance scenes and frightening passages. Russell mainly uses the end of this piece, where an introspective trio, mostly cello and woodwinds, alternates with a wild waltz. At the end of the scene, when the camera dives into the horn of the gramophone, two measures with low cello from the first movement of the Ninth are used repeatedly. The doom cannot be denied nor avoided. In conclusion, it is apparent that Russell’s use of music transcends the music’s mood and programmatic ideas, as well as its production context and biographical details. Russell illustrates and adapts the music precisely and in detail, not only referring to elements of the specific context in which Mahler created the cited works but also enriching the film with explicit and implicit meaning present in the music. Film music, even when using pre-­ existing (classical) music, is mostly dramatically motivated, with the interaction dominantly focused on the narration and/or heightening the emotional impact.37 Russell transcends this and uses the music not only as an inspiration, but also as a central topic, thus not only influencing the overall form and individual scenes of the film but also multiplying its possible interpretations. He achieves this not only because “classical music in film, instead of communicating solely with the other cinematic elements, brings and binds vast portions of history, as well as the art and thought and life associated with them,” but first and foremost through its diverse, well-­informed and precise placement.38 The multiplying effect of Mahler’s music in Mahler is not present only because of “Mahler’s eclecticism parallels Russell’s in its bewildering contrasts and astonishing variety” or because of their mutual

Ken Russell’s Mahler: a musical phantasmagoria 151 theme of “the close proximity of the tragic and the trite, and the awareness that the trivial world is indifferent to the misery of the individual.”39 Through the rich and conscious use of Mahler’s compositions as a structural narrative force, the music unveils many cues, connotations and additional interpretations. The interaction between music and film opens up a complex and fascinating interaction, thus creating an enlightened portrait of both the composer and his music and of Russell’s musical fascination and imagination.

Notes 1. These aspects have already been expounded by such authors as Joseph A. Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator (London: Muller, 1976), John C. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005) and William Verrone, “Fact, Fiction, Fever, Fantasy: Ken Russell’s Mahler and the Bio-Film,” in Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist, ed. Kevin M. Flanagan (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 2. John C. Tibbetts, “‘Il Parait Que C’etait Un Musicien’: Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film,” in Flanagan, Ken Russell: Re-Viewing, 109-30: 110. 3. Ken Russell, Directing Film: From Pitch to Première (London: B.T. Batsford, 2000), 32. 4. Ken Russell, A British Picture: An Autobiography, rev. ed. (London: Southbank Publishing, 2008), 141. 5. Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 429. 6. Michel Chion, La Musique Au Cinéma (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 265–66. 7. Verrone, “Fact, Fiction, Fever, Fantasy: Ken Russell’s Mahler and the BioFilm,” 139. 8. Guido Heldt, “Playing Mozart: Biopics and the Musical (Re)Invention of a Composer,” Music, Sound & the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2009), 21–46: 21. 9. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, California Studies in 19th Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 334. 10. On the controversy surrounding the release of The Devils, see, for example, Julian Petley, “Witch-Hunt: The Word, the Press and The Devils,” Journal of British Cinema & Television 12, no. 4 (2015), 515–38. 11. Leon Botstein, “Music of a Century,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­ Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51. 12. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies, 194. 13. Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator, 184. 14. Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85. 15. Quoted in Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator, 187. 16. Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 89. 17. Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, ed. Reinhard G. Pauly (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 191. 18. Arved Mark Ashby, Absolute Music: Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 244. 19. Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music, 65.

152  P. Vandelanoitte 20. Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction, Routledge Research in Music (New York: Routledge, 2014), 122. 21. This refers to the much-cited conversation between Mahler and Sigmund Freud in August 1910. Donald Mitchell, Paul Banks, and David Matthews, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, Rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 20. 22. Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 29–32. 23. Ibid., 42-43. 24. Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 620–647: 63. 25. Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 301-04. 26. Joseph Lanza, Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007), 186. 27. Gustav Mahler, Briefe, ed. Herta Blaukopf, rev. ed. (Wien: Zsolnay, 1982), 166, cited in Floros, Gustav Mahler, 89. 28. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: E. P. Tal Verlag, 1924), 40. 29. Gustav Mahler, Original Soundtrack Album from Ken Russell’s Film “Mahler,” with the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, conducted by Bernard Haitink, Charisma CAS 1088, 1974, 33⅓ rpm. Mahler’s composition was never called by this title, but it was used in most of the literature on the film. 30. Floros, Gustav Mahler, 96. 31. Fischer, Gustav Mahler, 276. 32. Jeremy Barham, “Plundering Cultural Archives and Transcending Diegetics: Mahler’s Music as ‘Overscore,’” Music and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2010), 24. 33. Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music, 84-87. 34. Fischer, Gustav Mahler, 366–369. 35. Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87. 36. Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music, 114. 37. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 13–15. 38. Dean W. Duncan, Charms that Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 183. 39. See, respectively, Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies, 194, and Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 43.

11 There’s meth in the madness: music and incongruence in AMC’s Breaking Bad Jessica Shine

AMC’s hit US television series Breaking Bad (2008–2013) tells the story of Walter H. White, a quiet, unassuming chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose diagnosis of terminal cancer prompts him to make decisions that change his life dramatically. Presented in the early seasons as a dedicated father to his disabled son and loyal husband to his rather overbearing and unexpectedly pregnant wife, middle-class Walt embodies the American everyman. When it becomes apparent that the cost of his treatment far exceeds his family’s financial means, Walt decides to “break bad” by redirecting his chemistry skills into the illegal production of methamphetamine. Walt seeks out his former student, a hapless drug user named Jesse, to be his liaison to the drug scene. Out of place in the criminal underworld, Walt initially tries to create a barrier between his position as a family man and his new status as the best meth cook in town by creating an alternate persona with the nom de guerre Heisenberg. He manages to successfully maintain this divide for two seasons, keeping his wife Skylar in the dark about his drug-dealing. Walt maintains the façade for a longer period of time with his in-laws, only being discovered by his brother in-law, DEA agent Hank, midway through the fifth season. However, in a Frankensteinian twist, Walt actually becomes the monster he has constructed. Music, and, in particular, song, is central to this character transformation. Throughout the five seasons of Breaking Bad, songs are consistently applied to scenes where there is a noticeable rupture between the “feel” of the music and the onscreen action, but where the song lyrics are simultaneously reflective of it. In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between song and incongruence throughout the series with reference to three forms of incongruity. Firstly, I will use the definition from the field of psychology, based on Carl Rogers’ classification of congruence as “the matching of experience and awareness” and incongruence as lacking congruence, or having feelings not aligned with one’s actions.1 Secondly, I will explore a mode of incongruence based on the incongruence between the music and image/action which Dave Ireland defines as a “lack of shared properties between concurrent film and music.”2 He argues that this definition “minimizes more loaded ideas of value that labels that are synonymous with

154  J. Shine ‘congruence’ and ‘incongruence’ (such as ‘fit’ and ‘misfit’, or ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’) may connote.”3 Building on the work of Lipscomb and Kendall,4 Ireland further argues that two implicit processes … influence overall judgements of (in)congruence: accent alignment between the auditory and visual components of a film–music pairing; and an association judgement based on the semantic content of these components.5 Thirdly, for a show predominantly about a chemist, I take the principle of an incongruent transition from chemistry, which is defined as mass transition between two phases that involves a change in composition, as a metaphor for the fundamental shift from good to evil in Walt. The show itself pointed towards this incongruent transition in its opening episode where Walt states: “Technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change. It is growth, then decay, then transformation.”6 Throughout the seasons, song underpins and emphasizes these incongruities as its use changes in relation to the change in Walt’s perspective and the erosion of his veneer of respectability and plausible deniability.

Incongruence In her seminal Unheard Melodies, Claudia Gorbman argued that for music to work in cinema it must be congruent in mood, atmosphere and tone with the onscreen action, thus effectively making it unheard.7 Incongruence, then, takes the position that the onscreen action contradicts, contrasts or jars with the accompanying soundtrack and that this influences the audience’s psychological perception of the scene. It is important to note that Gorbman herself has updated most of the content of this seminal book in a recent chapter entitled “Heard Music.”8 However, the ideas she put forward in that original book still hold some weight in film music composition and practice, and many of the film scores composed today, especially for big budget Hollywood films, adhere to that principle of supporting, rather than jarring with, the onscreen images. Two recent proponents of the idea of incongruence open their essay by using Gorbman’s theory of “unheardness” as a framework for their definition of incongruence. Willimsen and Kiss argue that Gorbman notices a sense of irony arising from the music’s unawareness or indifference to the unfolding dramatic developments. In this way the incongruent music comes to function as a kind of authorial ironic comment that expounds the narrative action.9 However, the question that recurs with this mode of defining incongruence is whether the intentional use of this type of music image combination is

There’s meth in the madness 155 truly incongruent. This gives rise to a subsequent problematizaton of the term because if incongruence is intentional then it cannot really be considered unaware or indifferent to the onscreen action. However, for the purposes of this chapter, incongruence is still the most appropriate term. Chion’s related concept of “dissonant harmony,” for example, focuses more on fleeting moments or harmonic discord between image and music and not so much on the psychological ramifications for character or reception of characters and their motivations and actions when music is incongruent to the image.10 Chion himself recognizes the limitations of his own musical term, writing: “the term harmony doesn’t take into account the specificity of audiovisual phenomena either.”11 In contrast, incongruence, as it is used in this chapter, takes into account the simultaneity of the visual, the sonic and the meta-narrative planes implicit in audio-visual texts and the fluidity and lack of defined borders between the planes in the narrative, audiovisual presentation. One of the examples of incongruence cited by Willimsen and Kiss in their discussion of the baptism scene in The Godfather (1972) highlights a tension between definitions and interpretations of incongruence. Initially, the piece of organ music may simply be perceived as church music, but it is actually Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582), a particularly tense work that is highly complex (a fugue being an intricate composition of polyphonic textures), reflecting the many layers of meaning, action and thoughts occurring simultaneously in the onscreen action. The point of the sequence is to reveal the duplicitous character of the protagonist: his family self, on the one hand, and the murderous Mafia leader he has become, on the other. There is also the issue that the priest’s voice overlays the entire piece, which stands in contrast to the actions onscreen, but at the same time makes a significant point about the hypocrisy of the entire culture surrounding the Mafia. The music helps weave the two dissonant narratives together, therefore, rather than being incongruent, Bach’s tense and complex work is a fitting match. Bach’s religious music has also been used in other Italian gangster films and his St Matthew’s Passion accompanies the explosive opening to Casino (1995). While Willimsen and Kiss are correct to point out that this type of sequence is a “means of ironic comment,” it is not clear that the music is truly incongruent with the onscreen action. Rather, it is the continuity of the priest’s voice and the music that helps to tie the sequence together and produces the ironic comment. Their arguments highlight a tension between two separate but related forms of incongruence: structural and associational. Despite a long history of cinema using classical music alongside violent imagery, classical music is often perceived as being incongruent simply for being classical. Our preconceived assumptions about classical music lead us to make visual associations with it, and these often do not extend to violence. Thus, classical music is still one of the most consistently used musics for audio-visual incongruence. Annabel J. Cohen argues that structural

156  J. Shine incongruence means “the direction of attention will shift from the audiovisual pair and associative information from the audio source will not be transmitted further.”12 Katherine Spring asserts, however, that structural incongruence “should be distinguished from associational incongruence, which may be used intentionally to convey irony and invite intellectual processing.”13 It is this form of “associational incongruence” that forms the subject of this chapter. Music that has strong associations is, therefore, often paired with images that contrast with and clash with these associations. Associational incongruence is also indexically linked to the notions of intermediality, as it inherently implies that the audience has some prior knowledge of the music’s genre, style, cultural context or performer and that it is the viewer/listener’s associations with the music that is incongruent with the onscreen image. Perhaps the most famous use of “incongruent” music, and the most often cited, is the now infamous ear scene in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Due in part to the success of Quentin Tarantino’s films, almost all film and television viewers are now familiar with the concept of musical incongruence, particularly where violent scenes are paired with jaunty or upbeat pop tunes, to provide an uncomfortable comic effect or simply to be funny. This aesthetic continues to make its way through myriad different genres of film and television from The Punisher (2004) to The Umbrella Academy (2019). This style of cartoonish violence presented alongside an incongruent backing track is ubiquitous. Dave Ireland writes that these “Tarantinoesque pairings of violence and popular song or classical music represent just one type of incongruence, albeit a frequently discussed one that arguably focuses on notions of semantic and emotional difference.”14 Ireland argues that the conception of fit and misfit are largely dependent on our expectations that we have ingrained expectations about cinematic depictions of violence, romance, and other emotions. Thus, when the music overturns these expectations, it becomes incongruous. Of course, the problem is that we are now becoming so accustomed to incongruent pairings that we actually expect them. Vulture writer Scott Meslow, for example, criticized The Umbrella Academy for its use of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” to underscore a violent scene because the song is too familiar and has been used prominently elsewhere.15 Renditions of Simone’s song have been used to underscore violent scenes in Lucifer (2016), Moriarty’s trial in Sherlock (2010–2017), and the infamous painting theft in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). As a result, there is an increasing resistance to the term incongruence, and the effect, rather than being incongruent, is seen as being a deliberate ironic counterpoint to or commentary on the onscreen action.16 Nonetheless, there is still value in the idea of associational incongruence, particularly where the audience is expected to notice the rupture between the meanings of the visuals and the audio and to, as Spring argues, intellectually process it, and this forms the cornerstone of the arguments presented here about Breaking Bad.

There’s meth in the madness 157

Breaking Bad: songs and incongruence Breaking Bad’s soundtrack was both an integral part of its storyline and its aesthetic. Over the five seasons 235 songs were used, with a staggering 60 songs used in the show’s final season of 15 episodes. Music became a talking point amongst critics and fans alike, there are innumerable fan-made Spotify playlists and it eventually became a significant part of the show’s marketing. In 2018, a limited edition run of five thousand box sets containing five double-sided LPs was released to mark the show’s 10-year anniversary.17 Indeed, the focus on the cool aspects of the box set in the NME review indicates how integral coolness is to the way music operates in Breaking Bad.18 Throughout the show music, particularly music that is associationally incongruent, is used to monumentalize moments and draw attention to character’s inner emotions and the incongruity between their perception of themselves and others’ – including the audience’s – perceptions of them. This use of music requires a certain degree of music literacy from the audience who need to recognize artists, genres, and musical feel to get the most from the scene. Miguel Mera notes that “the ability to identify and generate links between apparently incongruent materials is the ultimate manifestation of mashup culture’s geek chic.”19 This concept of “geek chic” is, in some ways, related to Jeffrey Sconce’s discussion of “smart films.” However, “smart films,” as Sconce discusses, produced a them versus us attitude between those who “got” the film and those who did not. This resulted in the films and audiences of this cinematic mode looking down upon those unversed in the ironic language of these smart films with derision.20 In contrast, in Mera’s discussion, mashup culture and the pleasures within it, is less about intellectual superiority over those who do not “get it” and instead focuses on the individual’s enjoyment of making associations and understanding the links themselves. As Mera highlights, Shiga’s discussion on “cool listening” hinges on links between disparate genres of music that are brought together by mashup artists, but this type of listening can be extended to see “cool listening” in the application of apparently incongruent music to the on-screen action.21 Mera extends this idea of mashup listening into cinema in his discussion of Tarantino’s use of music and argues that [t]he approach taken in Inglourious Basterds exemplifies the aesthetic sensibilities of mashup in which appropriation, re-invention and re-signification are fundamental goals. Tarantino adores the liminal space and places the audience at its center in order to celebrate multifarious resonant, provocative and problematic associations.22 Many of the music/image combinations used throughout Breaking Bad also fit this definition of “cool listening.” As with Tarantino’s fans, music is an integral part of the Breaking Bad’s fan reception, and the audience’s

158  J. Shine ability to draw links between the music and the image to recognize songs and, indeed, to associate these songs with Breaking Bad rather than their original context is part of the enjoyment for fans.23 Mera also notes how Tarantino’s pairings of image and music extend beyond the traditional limitations imposed on music in cinema as having a supporting or contrapuntal role, and, in fact, Mera argues that “neither image nor music are set and that meaning emerges as a result of the interaction between the various components in a work.”24 Mera’s arguments chime with Gabriele Rippl’s discussion on intermediality. Rippl argues that “meaning is generated in/by inter-, multi- and transmedial constellations and cross-medial references.”25 The use of pre-existing music in film and television, especially when it is used to create moments of incongruity, relies heavily on the audience knowledge (whether explicit or implicit) of musical genres, styles and artists and the cultural implications of these. Breaking Bad’s use of music is particularly suited to this discussion, as not only is the music image combination important to the understanding of a scene, knowledge of the genre, artist, cultural context and understanding of the lyrics all combine to allow potentially richer interpretations of the individual scenes. However, there is often some transformation of the music to make it “fit” with the image, whether this involves editing the music, blending it with diegetic sounds or fading the music in or out etc. In her book Cinema and Intermediality, Ágnes Pethő discusses the implications of moving text to screen, she writes Text is always subjected to violent de-contextualization and re-­ contextualization as it enters the screen: it is torn out of context, and broken down to words and letters, these pieces, in turn, are often re-arranged and multiplied.26 Much the same process happens to pre-existing music when it is transferred to a new audio-visual context. In Breaking Bad, music may be, as Pethő describes, fragmented into its component parts, used in a scene because of the resonance of its musical tone or lyrics, it may be cut up into relevant segments and pieces or music are rarely used in their entirety. These songs, then, take on new meanings that cannot be separated from the visuals and narratives to which the songs are now bound. In this sense, the use of pre-existing songs in Breaking Bad relates to Pethő’s discussion of intermedial ekphrasis. She writes: “the multiplication of media layers ‘opening up’ towards each other and remediating each other, produc[es] a kind of vertigo of media.”27 Moreover, there is an intermedial dimension in the development of the show’s own musical style, its relationship to other cinematic and televisual productions that have dealt with similar themes in a comparable fashion, and the fan’s engagement with the music from the show which is evidenced in the multitude of various internet playlists that have appeared on several platforms and fan sites. In other words, the music

There’s meth in the madness 159 informs the onscreen action and the show’s aesthetic, but later that same onscreen action informs the music’s consumption and allows for the recollection or re-experience of Breaking Bad’s aesthetics even when one is not watching the show. Throughout the show, songs are used that have lyrical significance with the onscreen action but whose timbre and tone often jar with the narrative. Similarly, music that often has very particular cultural resonances and associations is also integrated into the show, which highlights the ability of music to play several roles within the one image or scene. This extends it beyond a facile description of music as mere narrative support or counterpoint. In the early seasons, incongruent music underpins Jesse’s drug dealing with the light-hearted 1950’s tune “Peanut Vendor” by Alvin Red Tyler which does not reflect the horrific consequences of using meth, something that is starkly evident in the faces of those to whom Jesse is selling. The presentation of these montages with light-hearted music often makes the onscreen action appear much “cooler” than it would be in real world as the music purges the images of their grittiness. However, these early scenes rarely directly involve Walt himself, which highlights the literal disconnection between Walt and the consequences of his actions. Nevertheless, as the seasons progress the distinction between the two worlds, that of the chemist and the distributor, is increasingly blurred. However, music and song are not always incongruent in Breaking Bad. Songs are also used as a poignant undercurrent to the harsh reality of Walt’s cancer or to highlight his increasing menace. The Be Good Tanya’s version of Townes Van Zandt’s country lament “Waiting Around to Die” overlays footage of a solitary Walt on a bus to the hospital. Both the music and the lyrics capture the tone of the scene. The lyrics’ sombre focus on doing anything at all to take one’s mind off the inevitability of death rings true for Walt’s situation. Other instances include irony where, for example, Alexander’s song “Truth” overlays footage of a victim of Walt’s lies and deceit, fellow chemist Gale Beneke, as he lies dead in his apartment surrounded by police who are investigating the scene. Here, both the lyrics and the music embody the emotions of the scene and connect Walt’s deception of his wife to his betrayal of Gale while simultaneously pointing to Walt’s growing inhumanity as the song’s narrator talks about being filled with darkness. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bryan Cranston states: “I think Walt’s figured out it’s better to be a pursuer than the pursued. He’s well on his way to badass.”28 The show demonstrates how “cool” or “badass” Walt has become in the scene where he confronts a new drug cook in the car lot of a shopping mall. As TV on the Radio’s “DLZ” plays on the soundtrack, Walt’s jealousy prompts him to return to making meth rather than have two inept meth cooks and “wannabe” gangsters ruin his reputation.29 The lyrics’ reference to illness and to needing a doctor, albeit metaphorical, and the emphasis on the word “crystalized” all reflect themes within Breaking Bad. The musical feel of the song, on the other hand, with

160  J. Shine its swelling synth background, driving bass and rhythmic vocals all confirm Walt’s newfound confidence and vigour. These songs clearly point to Walt’s frame of mind and their musicality adds to the empowerment and growing boldness in the show’s central character. The music image combination, in particular, during the shopping mall scene, prompts us share Walt’s newfound boldness, which, in turn, is invoked by our perception of the music/ image relationship as “cool.” It is more noticeable, then, when the song genres and musical styles do not point sympathetically towards Walt’s reactions. Chung and Hyland write that in psychology there is a discussion about incongruence between the objective data (what everybody is saying about you or actual facts) and your perception of yourself.30 Rogers argued “that when there is an incongruence between experience and awareness, it is usually spoken of as defensiveness or denial of awareness. When the incongruence is between awareness and communication, it is usually thought of as falseness or deceit.”31 In Breaking Bad, Walt’s character displays such incongruence between his perception of himself and the reality of his actions. Vince Gilligan states that “Walter White is a brilliant man and an accomplished liar who lies best to himself.”32 However, as the show progresses, the original objective data of people’s statements, which Walt still believes, begins to change as characters tell Walt he is horrible, and the facts show him being responsible for several murders in addition to cooking meth. However, Walt’s opinion of himself is that he is still the family man. He genuinely believes that he is doing it for his family and so, for a time, does the audience. In many ways, the music in the early seasons supports Walt’s perception of himself rather the reality of his situation. Walt is continually presented by the show as being out of place in the world he now inhabits, surviving more by luck and necessity than skill or ruthlessness. In one particular scene, Walt arranges to meet Jesse in an abandoned breaker’s yard. Jesse tells him that real drug dealers meet in malls or fast food joints. Walt is also wearing his ridiculous pork-pie-hat and black sunglasses in an attempt to look “badass.”33 When the intimidating drug dealer Tuco Salamanca arrives to the yard to meet with Walt and Jesse, he grills them about why they are meeting in a breakers’ yard rather than a mall. The scene points to the fact that Walt is out of his depth, that the teacher does not belong in the criminal underworld; yet, his blue methamphetamine recipe is the best ever produced. Tuco, though, has become aggressive and volatile as a result of serious meth abuse and the scene quickly turns sour as Tuco beats his cousin to death in front of Walt and Jesse. Walt and Jesse stare on in sheer horror, both out of their depth and both terrified. Gnarls Barkley’s “Who’s Gonna Save my Soul” begins to play as the pair watch Tuco’s other henchman drag the badly beaten cousin to the car. As the camera zooms out, the absurdity of the situation is highlighted by how pathetic and at sea both men look. Gnarls Barkley’s song sets the tone for the entire series and initially seems completely congruent with the emotions we expect our

There’s meth in the madness 161 protagonist to have in this scene. One reading of the scene could be that the use of music is “badass” but this badassness is arguably undermined by the image of the horrified Walt and Jesse as Walt stands clutching his stash of money while the formidable Tuco drives away. In contrast to the later scene in the shopping mall, where Walt has truly become a legitimate member of the underworld, here he is revealed as a pretender as the musical feel does not match the character’s expressions; the music/image combination highlights the absurdity of the situation as Walt tries to be a gangster and fails. The second potential reading focuses on CeeLo Green’s gritty and soulful voice which is laden with regret and grief as he implores “who’s gonna save my soul.” The song focuses on receiving bad news and how the singer had lived his life through others, which reflects Walt’s situation prompting the audience to interpret his response as horrified. This, in turn, is framed by the audience’s belief in Walt’s own narrative that he is the good guy trying his best to earn money in the face of a flawed system that has left him unable to afford adequate health care. This response to the action is accentuated by how out of place Walt and Jesse seem when Walt removes his sunglasses and replaces them with his optical glasses. Season Two opens with the same scene but with an acoustic difference. In a marked shift in tone, there is no popular music to influence the audience’s perception of Walt as out of his depth. Gnarls Barkley is replaced by Dave Porter’s specifically composed sinister sound-design. This musical shift also results in a tonal shift, and with it, our perception of Walt’s reaction to the scene also shifts. Here, Walt and Jesse leave the scene in the same manner, but this time the camera follows them to the car where they sit in. Walt calculates how much money he has made, under the pretext of college fees for his family, without one reference to what just happened. Here, is the first glimpse of the sociopath in Walt. The two scenes, when watched side by side, produce a dissonance. Here another layer of incongruence is created by a lack of shared properties between what initially appears to be the protagonists’ reaction to the violent event and his now callous disregard for it. The incongruence is created between the character that Walt initially seems to embody and the man he is actually becoming. Far from caring about who is going to save his soul, Walt only cares about the money. Replacing CeeLo Green’s soulful singing with the sound-design augments this dissonance between the scenes and highlights the beginning of the rupture between Walter White the family man and Heisenberg the meth chemist. As the seasons progress, Walt receives information that his cancer has been successfully treated, yet he continues to work. Walt moves from supplicant cook to being the actual boss. This is epitomized by his declaration to Skylar when she worries for his safety after the death of his lab partner Gale Beneke. Walt replies “I am the danger. I am the one who knocks.” Skylar does not know, of course, that Walt actually ordered this killing. However, despite this declaration, Walt at this stage still tenaciously

162  J. Shine reiterates his belief that he is doing it for his family. Walt increasingly becomes more monstrous to his family forcing Skylar to remain with him against her will. Skylar even throws herself into their swimming pool in front of her sister and her brother-in-law. This is no longer the meek man who was under the control of his wife only a few months previously, and Skylar knows this. Having once tended to his every need, she now holds out hope for his death. Instead of trying to make things better for his family, Walt now sets to the task of seizing power from Gus Fring. He orchestrates the murder of both Fring and his head of security, Mike Ehrmantraut. Once Mike is out of the way, Walt coolly orders the murders of all of Mike’s men who are currently being held in prison. And this scene, perhaps more than any other, features the most incongruent use of music. The scene begins with Walt staring at a painting in a room filled with white supremacists. Walt is made aware of these men through his lab partner Todd. Todd’s uncle is their leader and Todd arranges for Walt to hire them to commit several acts of murder in a two-minute window to wipe out the last of Gus Fring’s gang who have all been imprisoned by Walt’s brother-in-law Hank. These men claim that what Walt wants is possible but not the way he wants it. Walt tells them it can be done exactly how he wants to do it. The scene then cuts to Walt standing alone in his own apartment waiting for his clock to tick to the right time. The ticking of the clock intertwines audibly with Nat King Cole’s “Pick Yourself Up.” The lyrics perversely mirror Walt’s frame of mind: his business-like approach to murder. They focus on American values of working hard despite your suffering and continuing that work in the face of defeat only to rise again. Having been knocked down, Walt is now rising again to take control, believing that it is his hard work, rather than his brutality and viciousness, that has got him to this point. As Cole’s silky voice croons over the soundtrack, the diegetic sounds of shanks and shivs (improvised weapons) perforating skin punctuate the music; the screams of the dying men and the sound of flames as one man is immolated collide with Cole’s dulcet tone. The extreme and graphic violence is not what one would traditionally associate with Cole. The music image relationship is deeply uncomfortable and, here, Breaking Bad confronts us with the fact that we can no longer deny that Walt is gone and that Heisenberg has consumed him. Unlike the Tarantinoesque pairings of music and outlandish or cartoonish violence, here the violence is raw and brutal, and the impact of the violence seems to be made even worse by the lack of shared properties between the music and the onscreen action, including the diegetic sounds. Through this use of music that associationally contrasts with the onscreen violence, music whose lyrics match, albeit perversely, Walt’s actions, the show highlights the psychological incongruence presenting in Walt as he continues to argue that he is still a “good guy.” Perhaps this scene is just included to be “cool,” and in many ways, like the TV on the Radio scene, it is cool. But I argue that it has significance for the

There’s meth in the madness 163 relationship between Walt’s transformation and the way music mirrors this transformation. At one point in the scene, Walt stares at his translucent and ghostly reflection in the window as if to indicate the change in his character, and the mere shadow of Walt that is actually left. Not only does this scene produce incongruence in the audio-visual combination, it is emblematic of the absolute incongruence between the man Walt is and the man he thinks he is by visually linking him with ruthless violence. Here Heisenberg, the persona, has gained the upper hand; the Walt of Season One has transformed. This scene shows the impossibility of Walt’s belief that he is still, in any way, the good guy. In the season finale, Walt finally admits to Skylar what he has become. The scene is shot in Skylar’s new kitchen. Walt is standing while Skylar is sitting and smoking. There is a huge pillar separating the pair, accentuating the impenetrable barrier between them. The scene is crucial as Walt finally admits who he is and gives her the coordinates of Hank’s burial site. I believe that Walt’s confession to Skylar that he did it all for himself because he liked it and that it made him feel powerful links this scene to the choice for the final piece of music used in Breaking Bad, Badfinger’s “Baby Blue.” Initially Golubić, the show’s music supervisor, did not want to use the piece. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Golubić admits that he kept picking alternate “blue” songs, all of which Gilligan rejected. Golubić states that When he said, “I think this is the right song for the closing of the finale,” I didn’t really hear it. I thought it was an odd little love song. But in came the dailies, with that wonderful crane shot moving over Walter White, and once we played the song, [we thought], “Oh, I get it now”…This is a love-affair story of Walt and his love of science, and this was his greatest product – his greatest triumph as a chemist. It was him ending on his own terms. It felt creatively right.34 The fact that Walter ends the show on his own terms, having just murdered eight people, the fact that Jesse refuses to kill him, the fact that it is his own plan that literally kills him shows just how much the composition of Walt has changed from Season One. He did not do it for his family; he did it for himself and science, his passion. Thus, the show ends with the final result of an incongruent transition. Breaking Bad put the figure of the family man and school-teacher through a five-series-long arduous process through which his composition entirely changed until Mr White was no longer there, having transformed into Heisenberg. And for this reason, the show’s rather triumphant final song, though tinged with sadness in its lyrics, doesn’t seem incongruous or odd or even comedic in any way. The Walter White to whom we were initially introduced totally contrasts to the figure of Heisenberg who lies dead in someone else’s lab, and the subsequent music/image combination seems all too fitting.

164  J. Shine

Conclusion Breaking Bad’s use of music throughout its five seasons consistently works with the narrative in a traditional sense. Music, both pre-existing and specifically composed, helps to drive the narrative forward to augment scenes and provide nuance to our understanding of characters. Through its clever use of musical incongruence Breaking Bad successfully reveals the psychological incongruence of its protagonist and also embodies his transformation from meek family man to drug lord. It also provides an ironic commentary on our understanding of such a monstrous transition. The intermedial relationship between the pre-existing music, the composed score, the narrative and the image discussed in this essay produce an inimitable and recognizable aesthetic for the show while also providing an engaging insight into the development of the show’s protagonist from the respectable teacher introduced in the first episode to the feared and monstrous drug dealer of the show’s final season. It is the blurring of the boundaries between the media elements and the reciprocal transformation that the music and image have on each other that facilitates the presentation of the psychological transformation of such a complex and well developed character as Walter White.

Notes 1. Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1996). 2. David Ireland, “Deconstructing Incongruence: A Psycho-Semiotic Approach toward Difference in the Film-Music Relationship,” Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 2 (2015), 48–57: 49. 3. David Ireland, “Great Expectations? The Changing Role of Audiovisual Incongruence in Contemporary Multimedia,” Music and the Moving Image 10, no. 3 (2017), 21–35: 21. 4. Scott D. Lipscombe and Roger A. Kendall, “Perceptual Judgement of the Relationship between Musical and Visual Components in Film,” Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition 13, no. 1–2 (1994): 60–98. 5. David Ireland, Identifying and Interpreting Incongruent Film Music (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2018), 33. 6. Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008), Pilot. 7. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: British Film Institute, 1987). 8. Claudia Gorbman, “Hearing the Music,” in Memory, Space and Sound, eds. Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson and John Richardson (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016), 201–218. 9. Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss, “Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 7, no. 1 (1 November 2013), 169–83: 173, https://doi.org/10.2478/ ausfm-2014-0022. 10. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36. 11. Ibid., 37.

There’s meth in the madness 165 12. Annabel J. Cohen, “How Music Influences the Interpretation of Film and Video,” in Perspectives in Systematic Musicology, eds. Roger Kendall and Roger Savage, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 12 (Los Angeles: Ethnomusicology Publications, 2005), 15–36: 27. 13. Katherine Spring, “Chance Encounters of the Musical Kind: Electronica and Audiovisual Synchronization in Three Films Directed by Tom Tykwer,” Music and the Moving Image 3, no. 3 (2010), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5406/ musimoviimag.3.3.0001. 14. David Ireland, “Great Expectations?” 23. 15. Scott Meslow, “The Umbrella Academy Recap: Just Desserts,” Vulture, February 15, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/the-umbrella-academy-recapseason-1-episode-3.html. 16. Erin Ben-Moche, “The Handmaid’s Tale Music Provides ‘Ironic Counterpoint’ to Show’s Dark Themes,” The Star, August 8, 2018, https://www.thestar. com/entertainment/2018/08/07/the-handmaids-tale-music-provides-ironiccounterpoint-to-shows-dark-themes.html. 17. Tom Skinner, “‘Breaking Bad’ Soundtrack to Be Released on Cool Vinyl Box Set to Mark Show’s 10th Anniversary,” NME, September 23, 2018, https:// www.nme.com/news/tv/breaking-bad-soundtrack-released-cool-vinyl-boxset-mark-shows-10th-anniversary-2382710. 18. The show’s musical supervisor Thomas Golubić, who worked for music supervision company Supermusic Vision, actually writes in the character palette description for Walt that he has not much interest in music and his perception of “cool” music is well out of date. http://supermusicvision.com/bb-­charactersound-palettes.html 19. Miguel Mera, “Inglo(u)Rious Basterdization? Tarantino and the War Movie Mashup,” in Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digtial Media, eds. Carol Vernallis, John Richardson, and Amy Herzog (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 437–64: 441. 20. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ’Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002), 349–369: 352, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/43.4.349. 21. John Shiga, “Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 2 (June 2007): 93–114, https://doi. org/10.1080/07393180701262685. 22. Mera, “Inglo(u)rious Basterdization?” 456. 23. On the importance of music to fans, see, for example, Dustin Rowles, “‘Guess I Got What I Deserve’: The 11 Most Perfect Song Selections in ‘Breaking Bad’ History,” UPROXX (blog), 31 July 2015, https://uproxx.com/tv/ breaking-bad-best-songs/. 24. Mera, “Inglo(u)Rious Basterdization?” 440. 25. Gabriele Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 2, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ cit-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1897866. 26. Ágnes Pethő, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 8. 27. Ibid., 9. 28. Merle Ginsberg, “‘Breaking Bad’ Star Bryan Cranston on Walter White: ‘He’s Well on His Way to Badass’ (Q&A),” The Hollywood Reporter, July 16, 2011, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/breaking-bad-star-bryancranston-212262. 29. “Wannabe” is urban slang for a person who is attempting to be a real “gangster” but failing; it generally refers to a person who is perceived to be pathetic and “uncool,” despite their efforts to contrary.

166  J. Shine 30. Man Cheung Chung and Michael E. Hyland, History and Philosophy of Psychology (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012). 31. Rogers, On Becoming a Person, 341. 32. David Thomson, Breaking Bad: The Official Book (New York: Sterling, 2015), 65. 33. Vince Gilligan has suggested that Walt’s determination to be the best meth dealer is, in part, related to his desire to “stick it” to his “badass” brother-in-law Hank; see Kimberly Potts, “‘Breaking Bad’ Turns 10: Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, and Aaron Paul Break Down the Pilot,” Yahoo Entertainment, January 21, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/breaking-bad-turns10-vince-gilligan-bryan-cranston-aaron-paul-break-pilot-142151768.html? guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHVmZnBvc3QuY29t L2VudHJ5L2JyZWFraW5nLWJhZC10dXJucy0xMC12aW5jZS1naWxsa Wdhbi1icnlhbi1jcmFuc3Rvbi1hbmQtYWFyb24tcGF1bC1icmVhay1kb3du LXRoZS1waWxvdF9uXzVhNjhhNDc4ZTRiMGU1NjMwMDc1N2Nh YT9ndWNjb3VudGVyPTE&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALSx-zwrOjDmh7n_ morDQ32_vLse9Qw9y4IFLrod4KETk4hP_X4FdohKVv78sGydLJ5PL0bIy1d VFSkvTiIsJ6Ioq27FILmt78r7CDDk_DqTPbCe1AdZ6ZoAnmFJH3OP5h4 KUicEuPIuqmWplYOLFlxh1yDMcTD3HY7Q37Ft0kVT.) 34. Steve Knopper, “Why ‘Breaking Bad’ Chose Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue,’” Rolling Stone, October 1, 2013, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/why-breakingbad-chose-badfingers-baby-blue-191097/.

Part IV

From silence to sound and back

12 Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas Itay Sapir

Among the striking coincidences of the history of European culture, one that is rarely studied or even mentioned by scholars is the exact contemporaneity of the revolution that gave birth to Baroque music and of the scandalous tabula rasa that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio made out of the Renaissance’s aesthetic norms in painting. Art historians, and presumably also musicologists, seem oblivious to the fact that around 1600, in Florence and Rome, two artistic media saw the partial collapse of the sumptuous edifices which were their pride and trademark for decades, even centuries – musical polyphony on the one hand, painted perspective and its narrative ramifications on the other – and the appearance in both cases, instead, of a bare and direct expressivity, or at least the ethos thereof. Beyond the geographical proximity and the chronological simultaneity, the two aesthetic turning points intriguingly show more specific similarities between them. Caravaggio’s concentration on a minimal number of elements of the narrative and occultation of any superfluous pictorial information through his extreme chiaroscuro can be compared to the emergence of monody in early seventeen-century Italian music. In the works of the likes of Giulio Caccini and Girolamo Mei or, yet more famously, in Claudio Monteverdi’s seconda prattica developed primarily for profane pieces, expressive efficacy required ensuring the maximal clarity of the sung text and, thus, a lighter musical texture than the intricate polyphonies previously prevalent. Music, like painting, lost in the process its mathematical infrastructure: the absence of a multi-layered texture precluded the complex play of proportions that had given Medieval and Renaissance music its lofty status as a liberal art. In painting, it was the elimination of the calculable space of linear perspective that made artworks a less “scientific” endeavour. The greater acceptability of the dissonance in some genres of nascent Baroque music is another characteristic with which anyone who knows Caravaggio would feel familiar: just as the harmonic anomalies were used to enhance expressivity and to create tension when contrasted with conventional, consonant harmonies, Caravaggio’s sometimes shocking details  – dirty feet, bloody splashes, swollen members – or his unusual compositional choices, cutting the scene in media res with no apparent justification, could

170  I. Sapir be considered visual dissonances, highly disturbing and unpleasant but precisely for that reason an important vector of expressivity. A yet more complicated issue is the respective relation of the Nuova musica and Caravaggio’s art to mimesis. Here, too, a similarity can be detected, although it might seem at first counter-intuitive. While early Baroque music can be said to faithfully imitate the sung text and its subtle moods, it excludes itself from the profoundly mimetic system that, in the polyphonies of the Renaissance, connected earthly music, the music of the spheres and cosmic structures more generally. Instead, it functions rhetorically, seeking to induce specific effects and affects in the listener’s mind. The “invention” of the opera, the first examples of which date from the years around 1600 (Jacopo Peri’s lost Dafne from 1597, his Euridice and of course Monteverdi’s 1607 Orfeo) is the epitome of the new view of music as a vehicle for human emotions and not, or not primarily, as a mirror of cosmic structures. Caravaggio’s paintings, while celebrated or decried for their virtuosic, but perhaps excessive “naturalism” and for local fits of painstaking mimesis, also distance themselves from a more systematic view of imitation, in which artworks are seen as a microcosm to the universe’s broader macrocosm. Precisely because of their epistemological shortcomings – the partial revealing of visual information, the decontextualization of narrative scenes in space and time – Merisi’s paintings problematize the very possibility of pictorial mimesis. Their more direct power is similarly rhetorical, evocative or even manipulative rather than based on fidelity to some pre-existent reality. While I have treated elsewhere in more detail the chronological coincidence of Caravaggio’s emergence and the rise of a new musical aesthetics around 1600,1 surprisingly absent from most art historical studies attempting to explain the “tenebristic” beginnings of Baroque painting, I would like in this essay to question an episode that can be considered as the prehistory of the events taking place in the early seventeen century. This case study, I contend, interestingly anticipates later developments concerning both the gradual disintegration of a whole pictorial system and the appearance of a new idea of music. It is the last years of Titian’s career that seem to give us a foretaste, as it were, of the upheaval that Caravaggio will trigger, more radically, a few decades later. Through very different pictorial means – briefly said, a saturated, granular texture in Vecellio’s late paintings compared to Caravaggio’s smooth surfaces and spatial emptiness – Titian abolishes, already in the middle of the sixteenth century, the perspectival treatment of space; he rejects both Florentine linear perspective and – which is probably more surprising – the Venetians’ preferred method of aerial or atmospheric perspective. Titian, thus, impedes the direct and limpid transmission of visual information on spatiality and bodies in space that can be said to be at the heart of the cultural enterprise that was the Italian Renaissance. While Federico Zuccari’s famous statement, quoted by Giovanni Baglione, according to which in Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew at San Luigi dei Francesi

Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas 171 in Rome he saw nothing but the thinking of Giorgione, seems today rather imprecise and hardly perceptive regarding Caravaggio’s veritable artistic project, one has to admit that at least in its contestation of Florence’s discursive, ostensibly rational painting, Venetian art announced an important aspect of the Caravaggesque crisis long before 1600.2 Titian’s artistic testament, and the work in which this deconstruction reaches its climax, is The Flaying of Marsyas, a painting created in the last years of the artist’s life, between 1570 and his death six years later, and left, according to some art historians, unfinished.3 Without reopening the debate on the state of Titian’s later works and the very existence of his “late style,” one has to say that the arguments in favour of a real aesthetic choice by the painter rather than a random state in which his death left dozens of paintings seem to be much more widely accepted nowadays. Indeed, if we accept as intentional the somewhat surprising appearance of works such as The Death of Actaeon or even the San Salvador Annunciation, we have no reason to dismiss The Flaying of Marsyas’ ground-breaking aesthetic inventions as the mere result of an interrupted creation.4 The hardly conventional aesthetics of this painting requires, on the contrary, a serious consideration as the result of a creative act and as adequate for its narrative content or, to use a somewhat reductive term, to its “message.” The episode depicted by Titian is well known, and, importantly for our topic, it is directly related to music. Ovid, whose Metamorphoses the painter could read in the rather free translation of his compatriot Ludovico Dolce, published in 1553, tells us that the satyr Marsyas “had lost to Leto’s son/ The contest when he played Minerva’s pipe,/And paid the penalty. ‘No! No!’ he screamed,/’Why tear me from myself? Oh, I repent!/A pipe’s not worth the price!’ and as he screamed/Apollo stripped his skin; the whole of him/ Was one huge wound, blood streaming everywhere,/Sinews laid bare, veins naked, quivering/And pulsing.”5 Music is, then, the starting point of this drama, but it seems to disappear from the narrative once Marsyas’ status as culpable is established. Contrary to the punishment of King Midas, incidentally visible here on the righthand side, it is not Marsyas’ ears that are sanctioned; his sense of hearing is not particularly aimed at. If any of the five senses is at the centre of the story, it seems to be touch, with Marsyas paradoxically losing the body part which serves as tactile interface – his skin – while becoming in the process more, rather than less sensitive to the horrors of bodily pain, arguably an exacerbated version of touch. The only sound element that is described by Ovid in this part of the tale is the satyr’s screams of horror, which belong even less to the category of musical sounds than his flute playing, already deemed unworthy of the noble art by Apollo. The old Titian’s interest in tragic and dark subject matter is well known and often linked to a literally dark palette and the style of the late works, foregoing the bright and ecstatic beauty of the artist’s early paintings. However, in the case of the Flaying, the combination of texture and chromatic spectrum

172  I. Sapir with the evidently tragic aspect of the scene can be described in much more specific terms; and such an interpretation cannot but have music at its ­c entre. Indeed, whereas Actaeon’s tragedy, for instance, is the result of visual excess, of having seen too much – the protagonist surprised Diana and her acolytes while they were bathing – and thus allows Titian to treat the issue of sight and its limits, the torture of Marsyas, while auditory rather than ocular in its source, is more directly related to an artistic activity, and thus to much more specific aesthetic questions. As we will shortly see, Titian combines here an apologia of his strange and subversive late manner, a reflection on the connections of music and painting and on that which separates them, and a prefiguring – a preview, as it were – of some aspects of modernity in painting, and arguably in music too. To be sure, the abundant literature on this work already addresses, on the one hand, the musical significance of Marsyas’ torture and, on the other hand, Titian’s unprecedented aesthetic choices that seem here to go beyond even the most audacious previous examples of his late style. The interpreters do not ignore the literally sensitive issue of the punishment itself either and discuss that which unites the interior of the body with its surface and that which tears them apart, the container and the contained, the spiritual and the material – all important aspects of the scene.6 However, while the two elements of music and pictorial texture are acknowledged as the foundations – respectively iconographic and formal – on which Titian edifies this work, very little has been said about their cohabitation, possibly uncomfortable; about the apparent contradiction between the triumph of rational, harmonious, Apollonian music, and visual chaos, the pictorial orgy encountered by the spectator’s eyes, whatever the viewing distance she or he chooses. Indeed, in spite of Giorgio Vasari’s and Palma il Giovane’s claim to the contrary, the painting does not seem “perfect” and its disorder is hardly pacified even when looked at from a distance.7 Scholars have often remarked on the musical, aesthetic and obviously also ethic contrast at the basis of the quarrel between the god and the satyr.8 Marsyas’ flute, a simple and rustic instrument, requires a visual sacrifice as the player’s cheeks are inevitably swollen and his or her face is temporarily deformed when playing a wind instrument. Indeed, the flute, savage, sensual, disorderly, was banished from Plato’s ideal republic.9 Worse still, the flute does not allow the simultaneous production of several notes, thus precluding a harmonious structure that is, on the contrary, the very aim of Apollonian lyre music. The latter reproduces, audibly and on a human scale, the cosmic harmonies idealized by Neo-Platonic philosophers in Antiquity and again during the Renaissance.10 The flute is a fundamental ingredient of bacchanals and other Dionysian festivities, but otherwise it has to be vanquished or at least restrained by the civilizing effect of string instruments – such a confrontation/combination is, famously, the allegorical focus of one of Titian’s early masterpieces – sometimes still attributed to Giorgione – the Concert Champêtre at the Louvre.

Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas 173 For many interpreters, these aesthetic principles mean that the flaying of Marsyas, rather than being the sadistic torture of an innocent creature, could, in fact, be considered a virtuous action. The double stripping of the satyr – first of his instrument, then of his skin, his ungraceful appearance – offers him access to an elevated spiritual state; catharsis is made possible through suffering. The message of this profane tale has sometimes even been Christianized – “moralized” – and the resemblance between Marsyas’ torment and the martyr suffered by some saints – notably Saint Bartholomew – has been used to legitimize the representation in painting of such crude pagan horror.11 Precisely such comparisons with Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive, or otherwise with Saint Peter, who was, like Marsyas, martyred upside down, remind us that, while the saints’ torture to death was part of a divine plan, their concrete tormentors were nonetheless representatives of evil. Here, however, the divine Apollo does not only verify and direct the implementation of his verdict; he concretely participates in the torture of his rival. One must admit that he does that with typically Apollonian calm and rigour; nothing, in his acts, betrays an impulsive outburst of hate and violence. Nevertheless, this serenity only underlines and makes even less comprehensible the contrast between the beauty that Apollo claims to defend and incarnate and the cold cruelty of what he is actually doing. Apollo is clearly identified here as the blond young man crowned with laurels, but a strange doubling of his person has always confused commentators and was also at the centre of an attributive controversy: the presence, on the left-hand side, of a figure playing a string instrument, another Apollo, as it were – some scholars identify him as Orpheus12 – triggered a debate on the work’s status as entirely autograph. While Augusto Gentilli’s position has often been criticized, the doubts of the great Titian scholar have created a certain uneasiness, an ambiguity, hovering above any attempt to explain The Flaying of Marsyas. Gentili has, in fact, denied Titian’s responsibility not only for the little dog lapping the satyr’s blood, the emblematic detail for all those who insist on the scene’s absolute horror, but also for the pseudo-Apollo playing the lyre on the extreme left.13 According to Gentili, this figure has been fundamentally – and erroneously – modified by Palma il Giovane after his master’s death: whereas Titian painted an acolyte of Apollo holding an antique lyre without playing it, Palma substituted the god himself playing, to add even more confusion, a modern lyre. For Gentili, who sees this period in Titian’s life as the theater of a general moral crisis in Venice, the very presence of music is contrary to the silent and stupefied mood that Titian wished to endow the work with. Other art historians argued, on the contrary, that Titian’s signature shows that the artist considered the work finished and complete and, moreover, that the coherence of the painting proves that the whole composition was of the master’s hand.14 Without trying to judge in this debate among venerable Titian experts, a circle to which I cannot pretend to belong, I would like to propose an

174  I. Sapir intermediary position concerning the musical practice of the person on the left. While it is true that this young man seems to handle the instrument with ease and energy hardly compatible with his identification as a simple porter, it is important to notice that he is not represented as actually playing. One could imagine, at most, that having produced a sound not long ago, or perhaps getting ready to accompany the events with beautiful, pleasant music, this person was stopped, paralyzed by the shock of the gruesome scene taking place in front of him. Instead, he stares, somewhat absent-mindedly, perhaps also visually taking in the other silent musical instrument, the one that caused the whole drama, Marsyas’ panpipes. Claudio Strinati, noticing that the mysterious figure is not playing, claims that the presence of the nonplayed instrument seems to allude to a dimension of “mancanza, carenza, attesa o tormento” (lack, anticipation or torment). Music, he says, was particularly related to lack in Titian’s culture because of the irretrievable loss of the classical musical practice from Antiquity.15 Once we notice this detail, the question of the figure’s identity seems to lose much of its importance. Whether he is a simple follower of Apollo or some sort of a Doppelgänger of the god himself, perhaps even, one would say today, Apollo’s unconscious, his bad conscience or his superego (but do gods have a superego?) – whatever the case may be, the situation would essentially be the same. It is clear that at the very moment in which refined, noble, harmonious music has triumphed, the consequences of that victory imply the impossibility of precisely that refinement and exactly that harmonious beauty. The paradox is bitterly stated: harmony and beauty must accept the savage, sensual element; contain it – in both senses of the word – in order to have it under control. Fighting the Dionysian using its own ferocious methods would not result in a victory of the beautiful, but, on the contrary, would create a terrible chaos, a world from which music, of whatever sort and nature, would be expelled – even if the savagery is hidden behind the delicate facial features of a young man using his knife as if it were a surgeon’s scalpel, an instrument of scientific precision, rather than as a weapon.16 I have promised to link these “iconographical” ideas (for lack of a better word) to Titian’s “late manner” and, perhaps somewhat imprudently, to nascent baroque music. Titian’s own connection with music making and musical theory is unfortunately no more than material for speculation.17 We do know much about the painter’s social milieu and the important role of music in it – Giorgione had a documented musical practice, for instance. But in order to link Titian’s painting to contemporaneous music, the only useful starting point consists of common aesthetical principles. A brief detour is necessary here, borrowing an idea from a fascinating interpretation of a later representation of Marsyas’ fate. In an article by Damian Dombrowski, the author analyzes Jusepe de Ribera’s version of the same tale.18 Dombrowski’s interpretation is as surprising as it is convincing. According to the author, Ribera is offering us here, through the mythological

Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas 175 scene, a review of his career in the form of a confession or an artistic mea culpa: the difference in style between the representations of the two protagonists reflects the catharsis of Marsyas, his artistic rebirth, thanks to the divine beauty he confronts, and thus alludes to the (arguably incomplete) aesthetic transformation of Ribera himself, from the “savage,” caravaggist style of his youth, devoid of beauty and refinement, to his later neo-Venetian “maniera” from the 1630s onwards – the Hispano-Neapolitan’s two versions of Apollo and Marsyas were created during that same decade. I would like to claim that Titian, who has followed almost a century earlier the opposite trajectory from a light, colourful brightness to a heavy, muddy style, uses the same mythological narrative for a similar kind of aesthetic apologia. Only that instead of considering – and forgiving – the sins of his youth through the demonstration of artistic “progress,” the Venetian painter refers to Marsyas’ aesthetic predicament in order to describe his own late style as a lesson of artistic truth. Titian’s pictorial style plays here a double role. First, through the disappearance of contours, the general blur that dominates the painting, the artist creates a trembling, vibrating atmosphere, as if music, unable to concretely, audibly materialize in that cruel world, has left behind its vibrations, now visible rather than sonic; the visual takes on itself the role that previously belonged to the auditory arts. Titian’s “late manner” is here relevant in another way. Its dark, untidy aspect plays an important role in the master’s aesthetic self-reflection too. Much has been said about the tragic character of the old Titian’s paintings and about the adequacy between their dark chromatics and the ­sombre existence they depict, between the chaos of human life and the disorder of the pictorial composition. But here, the disappearance of Titian’s previous luminous exquisiteness is more directly linked to that beauty’s ethical position and its implication in the worst imaginable horrors. While music has fallen silent, painting is not extinguished completely, but it renounces its dreams of colour and harmony in favour of an aesthetics reminiscent of silence – or rather of dissonance, the other afore-mentioned protagonist of the musical revolution that was just around the corner when Titian created this work. In 1570, artistic music is still considered the incarnation of cosmic order. This will change toward the turn of the century, with the emergence of baroque monody and the opera, and with the corollary collapse of the Renaissance’s ostensibly stable system of complex and harmonious polyphony. Titian, in an almost prophetic gesture, proposes a quarter century earlier a vision in which music fell silent, precisely because its reproduction of the music of the spheres became indecent in a rapidly disintegrating world. While Marsyas’ two torturers resemble sculptors or painters, with their knives reminiscent of both chisels and brushes, the story depicted here reminds us that music is the root of this evil and that Apollo’s revenge stems from a musician’s vanity. Titian could not know that music would

176  I. Sapir soon follow the same salutary crisis that he hoped to impose on painting; through Marsyas’ suffering the bitter old Venetian painter announced this crisis and demonstrated its inevitability, even its necessity. Still more urgent for him, an artist at the twilight of his life, was the denouncement of a certain concept of painting through the revelation of the vanity of harmonious music: Titian wished to defend here an art devoid of easy beauty but aspiring to deliver, somewhat like Paul Cézanne stated centuries later, “the truth in painting.” The old Venetian painter’s truth passes through a visual comment on another art, whose metaphysical prestige has been more ancient and, thus, more stable than painting: it is truth in music, in silenced sound, that Titian proposes to his spectators.

Notes 1. Itay Sapir, Ténèbres sans leçons: esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture ténébriste romaine 1595-1610, Bern : Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 230–242. The chapter includes analyses of specific paintings by Caravaggio showing how their aesthetic choices are comparable to those of contemporary composers. ­Elizabeth Cropper does mention the importance, for Caravaggio’s art, of the contemporary musical milieu: “Caravaggio and the Matter of Lyric” in Genevieve Warwick (ed.), Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. p. 51. Two general accounts by musicologists that mention such links are François Sabatier, Miroirs de la musique : La musique et ses correspondances avec la littérature et les beaux-arts, de la Renaissance aux Lumières, XVe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris : Fayard, 1998 and Philippe Beaussant, Passages : De la Renaissance au Baroque, Paris : Fayard, 2006. Cf. Peter Vergo, That Divine Order : Music and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, London and New York: Phaidon, 2005. Otherwise, most art historians who do study musical connections do that through concrete musical iconography. For our period, see Rossella Vodret and Claudio Strinati. “Painted Music: ‘A New and Affecting Manner’” in ­Beverly Louise Brown (ed.), The Genius of Rome 1592-1623 (exhibition catalogue), London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. For a general overview of the musical Baroque, including its social and political contexts, see Lorenzo Bianconi, Il Seicento (Storia della musica a cura della Società Italiana di Musicologia, vol. 5), Turin: E.D.T. Edizioni, 1991. The point of view of the “New Musicology,” particularly useful for interdisciplinary studies, is taken by Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987, and by Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 2. Gio. Baglione Romano, Le vite de’ pittori scvltori et architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano nel 1642, Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1995 (1642), p. 137: “... Federico ­Zucchero, mentre io era presente, disse. Che rumore è questo? e guardando il tutto diligentemente, soggiunse. Io non ci vedo altro, che il pensiero di ­Giorgione nella tavola del Santo, quando Christo il chiamò all’Apostolato; e sogghignando, e marauigliandosi di tanto rumore, voltò le spalle, & andossene con Dio.” For a more complete treatment on the commonalities and differences between Titian’s late style and Caravaggio’s innovation, see Ténèbres sans leçons, (as in note 1), pp. 35–64.

Music, painting, cosmos, chaos: flaying and playing in Titian’s Marsyas 177 3. For an excellent summary of the painting’s historiography, see the entry by Luisa Attardi in Giovanni Villa & Carlo Federico (ed.). Tiziano (exhibition catalogue), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013, pp. 266-271. I also commented on this work, but from a different point of view, in my article “Pain and Paint: Titian, Ribera and the Flaying of Marsyas” in Heather Graham and Lauren Kilroy (ed.), Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas, Brill, 2018, pp. 33–52. Maria H. Loh offers an illuminating, historically informed interpretation in her recent Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy, London: Reaktion books (Renaissance Lives series), 2019, ch. 6. 4. See below for some specific considerations on the work’s original state – c­ omplete or unfinished – and on the autograph status of some important details in it. 5. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 132. Dolce’s Italian version reads: “Ritrovavasi allora il biondo Apollo/ sotto un Lauro, ove fu quella contesa/ Prese Marsia, et a l’arbore legollo, / che non seppe, ne pote far difesa:/ indi poscia, ch’alquanto riguardollo,/ ben sei (disse) tu degno d’ogni offesa./ E con immensa e disusata noia/ al miser sonator la pelle scoia./ S’haurian potuto annoverar le vene/ del satiro meschin, ch’in darno langue./ Son nudi I nervi; e d’ogni parte viene/ stillando fuori in larga copia il sangue./ Egli mercè li chiede, e non l’ottiene;/ ma divenuto homai freddo et esangue,/ al fin converso in acque dolci e chiare,/ per Frigia corse a dar tributo al mare.” 6. Cf. Antonio Foscari, “Tra Giulio Romano e Tiziano. Il dupplice supplizio di Marsia e altre metamorfosi,” in Lionello Puppi (ed.), Tiziano:L’ultimo atto (exhibition catalogue), Milano: Skira editore, 2007, pp. 129–134 7. Vasari famously claimed that Titian’s late works, the products of his pittura di macchia, are “condotte di colpi, tirate via di grosso e con macchie, di maniera che da presso non si possono vedere e di lontano appariscono perfette” (the biography of Titian appears in the second edition of Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, 1568). On Titian’s last period cf. Gian Alberto Dell’acqua, « L’ultimo Tiziano » in : Rodolfo Pallucchini (ed.), Tiziano e il Manierismo Europeo, Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1978. 8. Stephen J. Campbell, “Bronzino’s Fable of Marsyas : Anatomy as Myth » in Victor I. Stoichita (ed.), Le corps transparent, Rome : “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2013, pp. 173-194; Edith Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance: an Inquiry into the Meaning of Images, Newark & London: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 9. See, for instance, Philipp Fehl, “Realism and Classicism in the Representation of a Painful Scene: Titan’s ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ in the Archiépiscopal Palace at Kroměříz” in Czechoslovakia Past and Present: Essays on the Arts and Sciences, The Hague: Mouton, 1969, pp. 1387–1415. 10. On wind and string music as, respectively, Dionysian and Apollonian see also Aristoteles’ Politics, VIII, 6. 11. Christian interpretations of Marsyas abound at least since the Ovide moralisé and Giovanni da Virgilio’s Allegoriae librorum Ovidii Metamorphoseos from 1322-23. 12. Among them David Rosand, “El arte narrative de Tiziano: sacro y profano” in Miguel Falomir (ed.), Tiziano (Exhibition catalogue), Madrid: Museo Nacional de Prado, 2003, pp. 60, 318, who speaks of an “Orphic figure.” 13. Augusto Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano: mito e alegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1988, pp. 225–240. 14. Numerous scholars disagree with Gentili and claim the work is wholly autograph and was completed by Titian. For a good account of the debate, see

178  I. Sapir ­ ylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Zur Ausstellung: Der späte Tizian und die SinnlichS keit der Malerei” in the exhibition catalogue Der späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Malerei, Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2008, pp. 18–19. See also Francesco Valcanover in Le siècle de Titien: l’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise, Paris : Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1993, p. 624. 15. Claudio Strinati, “Tiziano e la musica,” in Lionello Puppi (ed.), Tiziano: ­L’ultimo atto (as in note 6), pp. 117–122. 16. Gentili (as in note 13) also emphasizes Apollo’s cruelty. For the metaphor of anatomic dissection, cf. also Jodi Cranston, “Theorizing Materiality: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas” in Joanna Woods-Marsden (ed.), Titian: Materiality, Likeness, Istoria, Turnhout: Brepols, 2007, pp. 5–18. 17. Elena Biggi Parodi, “La musica in Italia ai tempi di Tiziano” in: Lionello Puppi (ed.), Tiziano: L’ultimo atto (as in note 6), pp. 111–116. On the same issue see also Claudio Strinati, “Tiziano e la musica,” as in note 15. Cf. Iain Fenlon, “Music in Titian’s Venice” in Patricia Meilman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Titian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 163–182, though the author concentrates on the social and political role of music rather than on its proper aesthetics. 18. Damian Dombrowski, « Die Häutung des Malers : Stil und Identität in Jusepe de Riberas Schindung des Marsyas,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte vol.  72 (2009), pp.215–46.

13 Armonia seeing and hearing in Paolo Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana Antonio Cascelli

What added value is there in a painting representing, among various subjects, a musical instrument or an actual musical performance? According to Michel Chion, [the] added value is the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression “naturally” comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself. Added value is what gives the (eminently incorrect) impression that sound is unnecessary, that sound merely duplicates a meaning which in reality it brings about, either all on its own or by discrepancies between it and the image.1 Is it possible to argue that the visual representation of music-making causes synchresis? In Chion’s words again, synchresis is “the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time. This join results independently of any rational logic.”2 In what way, therefore, does the instrumental ensemble at the forefront of Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana (Figure 13.1) contribute to the meaning of what is seen if there is no actual sound accompanying the visual element? Searching for historical examples of views that highlight the precarious boundaries between image and sound – instances of synchresis and added value – a letter by the sixteenth-century artist and writer Giorgio Vasari provides an intriguing case. In writing to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and Cardinal Luigi de’ Rossi, about Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X (ca. 1517; Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi), he refers to “the Damascus on the pope, that plays and gleams.”3 In Katherine McIver’s words: “In this instance, the painting becomes visual music (“suona”). Music and painting, here, had become one for Vasari – ­painting was music; music, painting.”4 If Vasari, thus, perceived Raphael’s painting to produce both sound and light, what can we say of Veronese’s canvas? The painting is exceptional in a number of ways: its physical dimensions – covering an area almost 70m2 – the vastness of the composition – on which

180  A. Cascelli

Figure 13.1  Paolo Veronese, Le nozze di Cana (The Wedding at Cana), Paris, Musée du Louvre, photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado.

Vasari had commented – and the presence of an extraordinarily high number of characters, some of them contemporaries of Veronese himself.5 The subject, from St John’s Gospel, is Jesus’s first miracle during a wedding celebration in the village of Cana. When the host runs out of wine, Mary asks her son to intervene. After an initial objection, Jesus orders the servants to fill six jars with water; following his benediction, the water is transformed into wine. Usually, depictions of this episode locate Jesus at their centre; the guests are placed around a table and the attention focuses on the gesture of the benediction or on the host drinking the new wine. The theme was quite rare in medieval paintings, but, along with the Last Supper, became a popular one for the walls of dining rooms from the fifteenth century.6 Taking a more contemporary perspective, Peter Greenway’s 2009 installation based on Veronese’s painting stretches the idea that the painting can create sound to its logical conclusion. The installation is part of the Classic Paintings Revisited Series, a project aimed at demonstrating connections and parallels between cinema and painting.7 Using the digital copy of the painting installed in the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore (now the site of the Fondazione Cini) where the original picture hung, Greenway employed music and created dialogues for the numerous characters present in the canvas. He produced a performance that highlighted different sections, zooming in and out of the painting.8 Giuliana Bruno describes Greenway’s installation as a way to “mobilize aesthetic forms of

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  181 art reception by filmically reactivating them, with surface effects.”9 Surface is the keyword for Bruno; in her theorising on the place of materiality in our contemporary world, an image is an object configured almost like a cloth, which materializes on a surface, and from which “it could [be] peeled off, like a layer of substance, forming a ‘bark,’ or leaving a sediment, a veneer, a ‘film’.”10 Surface, as the primary form of habitation for the material world, is the site of tension between media.11 This tension is then inevitably experienced in the body of the audience. Writing a few centuries earlier, Charles de Brosses described a comparable interaction between the viewer and the painting by referring to it in terms of a “machine,” suggesting the movement and action of a spectacle. It is worth citing his words in their entirety: Finally, in San Giorgio, at the back of the refectory, the Wedding of Cana by Paul Veronese, a painting not only of the first class, but of the first of this class. One could draw comparison with the Battle of Constantine against the tyrant Maxence, painted in the Vatican, by Raphael and Jules Romain, either for the greatness of the composition, for the infinite number of figures, or for the extreme beauty of execution. There is more fire, greater design, more science, more fidelity to costume in the Battle of Constantine; but in this one, what riches! What colour! What harmony in the colours! What realism in the fabrics! What arrangement and what an amazing machine in all the composition! The first of these tableaux is life-like, and the other is a spectacle. It seems that in this painting one passes right through the porticoes, and that the crowd of people who are assembled there keep you company.12 The tension of media on the surface is exactly what induces Vasari to say that the Damascus both “plays and gleams”; in Brosses, the tension invests the painting with the movement and action of a spectacle and creates the impression that the spectator is able to walk through the painted porticoes. For both, the body of the viewer/spectator is the recipient of the surface tension. Borrowing Amelia Jones’s description of 1970s performance art, we should reconsider the body in the reception of art and we can argue that the body starts to “put pressure on discourses, practices and institutions of the visual arts which, in turn, finally began to accommodate questions of embodiment and works that invoked the body.”13 One example of the pressure of the body on critical discourse in sixteenth-century Italy is Comanini’s treatise Il Figino (1591), in which three interlocutors (Figino, Guazzo and Martinengo) debate the purpose of poetry and painting in the context of post-Tridentine Italy. The arguments in support of the superiority of painting or poetry are enriched with a series of ekphrases and descriptions of figurative and literary examples (Biblical stories, epic poems and so on) centred on the manifestation of a body that gazes, listens and sheds tears.

182  A. Cascelli Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana has been the subject of a detailed analysis of the connections between music and architecture in terms of harmonic proportions; however, I am interested in a reading that more openly considers the active presence of a gazing and listening body.14 If in today’s digital world we need the filmic mobilisation of art to “peel” a painting like Veronese’s off the wall, to what extent might it have been conceivable to experience the picture in a manner that, Bruno would say, ­“vitalizes the surface that clothes the material of our objects” in the sixteenth century?15 The painting is linked to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and the refectory of the Benedictine monastery, a very spacious room planned by Andrea Palladio and built between 1560 and 1562 where it was originally housed (Figure 13.2). It became so famous that travellers from Europe flocked to Venice to see it, and kings and princes sought the monks’ permission to make replicas. Interest in the work grew so great that in 1707, the monks, annoyed by the continuous requests, decided not to grant further permission to make reproductions.16 But the painting’s fame continued to grow; Napoleon requisitioned it amongst his spoils of war and took it to Paris, where it has been part of the Louvre’s collections since 1798. In the last decade, thanks to highly specialized digital technology, a copy has been made of such high quality that it is extremely

Figure 13.2   Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Fototeca dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Arte.

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  183 difficult for the naked eye to distinguish the original from the replica, now located in the venue for which the painting was conceived, reinstalled as part of the restoration work on the monumental complex of San Giorgio Maggiore.17 The element that contributes to the vitalization of the surface in this painting is the inclusion of theatrical elements; indeed, the entire setting is reminiscent of theatrical scenography. In the commissioning letter written by Father Alessandro da Bergamo and Don Maurizio da Bergamo – monks from San Giorgio – Veronese was specifically requested to make a a painting in the new refectory. It is to be as wide and high as the wall and is to cover it completely. He is to represent the story of the Supper of the Miracle worked by Christ at Cana in Galilee. He is to paint that number of figures which will go into it comfortably, and which are necessary for the story. Master Paulo will paint the work and also provide all kinds of pigments at his own expense, and he will order the preparation of the canvas and bear the cost of anything else concerning it.18 Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels, however, argue that we should analyze the relationship between theatre and the visual arts beyond the “logic of influence,” in which the visual medium is seen to borrow elements from the theatre such as “costume, gesture or compositional feature.” Instead, their argument should “induce us to look at the painting as if we were watching a play.”19 Indeed, De Brosses’s words, suggesting the description of the viewer’s impression of walking through the painting, show an eighteenth-­c entury interactive relationship between the viewer and the image beyond the traditional engagement with visual art, supporting van Eck and Brussels’s argument. Similarly, for Marc Bayard, one should “try to grasp the structure of the viewer’s gaze in front of the work of art.” He highlights how artistic representations triggered in the viewer a chain of reactions that can only be understood in relation to his cognitive environment.… The spatial construction of painting, the place of the viewer, his physical and mental progression inside the work of art, all pave the way for the assimilation of painting to a scenic space. The pictorial work unfolds in a physical space and like a theatrical production, plays on this space to unlock a multiplicity of meanings.20 What role did the musicians play in the “chain of reactions” within the “cognitive environment” of the everyday viewers, i.e., the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore? Particularly when the musicians occupy the space in the painting usually inhabited by figures such as saints, donors or patrons who function as mediators between the sacred element of the representation and the viewer? Is it possible that they added an extra layer to the surface effects and to the mobilization of the aesthetic experience?

184  A. Cascelli The wedding at Cana is a subject that comes to be associated with musical performances in several paintings. For example, Jan Cornelisz Vermejen (1530  – Amsterdam, Rijkmuseum) and Marten de Vos (1597 – Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady) include musicians in their representations of the biblical story, like Veronese.21 However, in Vermejen’s and de Vos’s works, the miracle is at the centre of the pictorial narrative and the musicians are only one element among many in the frame, placed either on one side or in the background, whereas in Veronese’s work the story provides the opportunity to represent a sumptuous and luxurious banquet in which the musicians are positioned in front of Christ, at the centre of the symmetrical perspective. Arranged around a table with sheet music and an hourglass, there is a viola da gamba player on the left, and a violone on the right. Behind them, we can distinguish a second viola da gamba player on the left, a cornetto player in the middle, and a violetta da braccio player on the right. In the background, on the left, we can see a trombone player and a jester. A long-standing tradition identifies four of the six musicians as the painters Veronese (in white) and Tintoretto (both playing the viola da gamba), Jacopo Bassano (playing the cornetto), and Titian in red (playing the violone). Luigi Beschi, however, reminds us that the first writer to spread the idea of the “Concerto dei pittori” (Concert of the painters) was Boschini in 1674, a hundred years after the painting was completed.22 While in 1771 Anton Maria Zanetti appeared to confirm this iconographic reading on the basis of documents he claimed that he had found in the monastery, to date there has been no trace of these documents and their existence remains quite dubious. To summarize succinctly Beschi’s detailed arguments, it suffices to say that for him the two violas da gamba are playing two distinct parts (judging by the different fingering of the hands), the violetta da gamba and the cornetto are playing from the same text; the violone da gamba plays its own part. The trombone at the back is not playing, so it is likely that the musicians are performing a four-part composition.23 Beschi, thus, explains how four of them could be portraits of Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Claudio Merulo, Annibale Padovano.24 Although these identifications do not have the full support of concrete evidence, it is still conceivable that the figures are portraits of four unknown virtuoso musicians, visually marking the moment when instrumental music was becoming more independent of vocal music.25 That paintings of performers may evoke music performances – thus creating synchresis in their own way – has already been noted by scholars. Francesca Trinchieri Camiz and Andrew Dell’Antonio, for example, state that Caravaggio’s two versions of the “lute singer” – depicting a performer identified as Pietro Montoya – for Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal del Monte may draw not only on the professional singer’s practice of self-­ accompanying and solo adaptation of part-song but also on the repertories that Giustiniani and Del Monte would have associated

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  185 with formative times of their youths. In other words, the image may have facilitated the ‘sonic recollection’ (and parsing/categorization/­ comparison) of different musical events – the part-singing of the patrons’ youth and the solo song of their professional employee.26 Music was an important part of monastic life in general and of the Monastery of San Giorgio in Venice in particular. For instance, a contract dated 1565 (three years after the contract for Veronese’s painting) between Girolamo Scotto and Don Benedetto Venetiano stipulates the printing of the book of Passiones and Lamentationes by the musician Paolo Ferrarese for the Benedictine monastery.27 On Christmas and St. Stephen days, the ducal procession, andata in trionfo, would go to the church of San Giorgio where the Vespers would be celebrated and for which Giovanni Gabrieli had composed a series of compositions.28 According to Gino Damerini, “The Pellegrini academicians, who brought dramatic and musical-­theatrical presentations, staged with great pomp so that they imitated the spectacles of the Este and Gonzaga families, gave a few representations in San Giorgio while Palladio was working there.” However, Damerini admits that there are no documents that confirm this and, whilst referring only vaguely to “è da taluno ritenuto,” (“someone thinks so”), he does not provide more information about this.29 Certainly, we can argue that the monks were familiar with a variety of music-making occasions both within and outside the monastery, which may have been evoked by the musicians represented in the painting. Is it possible to discern something more than just an evocation of music, or maybe the function of this evocation in this context?

The mechanism of the “machine” The placement of the musicians in the painting raises interesting questions about seeing and hearing in the context of principles of harmony and proportion in the Renaissance. Although Christ is the only figure gazing directly at the viewers, his gaze is aligned with the musicians and their “sound,” establishing a dialectic between the senses involved and the original location of the painting. The painting becomes a statement about the relationship between seeing and hearing that can only be understood if we take into consideration the experience, almost a ritual, of the monks walking into the refectory.30 Adapting Bruno’s description of the encounter with Robert Irwin’s Excursus: Homage to the Square, we could say that [the monks] walk into the large space of [the refectory], they adjust [their] eyes to the ambience and access the mise-en-scène of [Veronese’s painting]. There is a rigorous and simple geometry to the architecture of the installation, [with the painting occupying the entire wall opposite the entrance] and yet this seemingly still environment moves, activated over time by way of light. The scene

186  A. Cascelli they experience depends on the time of day, the season, and the state of weather.31 Indeed, entering the refectory at lunch time, with natural light coming through the windows, is completely different from going to the refectory at dinner time, with dimmer natural light and probably candle light.

The space: the refectory The barrier between secular and sacred is very porous in monastic life. Monks, whose title derives from the Greek monos, in the sense of unified, organise their lives between three principal venues: the church, the library and the refectory. They all embody somehow the porosity of boundaries between sacred and secular; yet, each emphasizes a different element. The church emphasizes the spiritual and the presence of the Eucharist; the library stresses the intellectual element, as the space dedicated to study; and the refectory, where the monks eat their meals whilst listening to readings from the writings of the Fathers of the Church, is the space “in-between” them. The food, fruit of physical labour, resonates with the Eucharist celebrated in the church just before meals. The readings from the Fathers of the Church resonate with the liturgy of the word from the church, but also with the intellectual labour undertaken in the library. The refectory is the place where the opposition between sacred and secular collapses, “experienced not in the form of either/or but as not only/but also.”32 It is also enhanced by the painting, which places a sacred event alongside one that is highly spectacular and secular. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of theatre and performance studies, we can say that the collapse of these dichotomies draws attention to the threshold between them. The experience of instability and the dissolution of boundaries becomes part of the event. This opens the liminal space between poles such as presence and representation, and a feeling of in-betweenness dominates. Such threshold events can transform those who experience them.33 According to Laurenz Lütteken, the distinction between “inside” and “outside” performances in the sixteenth century was not so clear cut: performances started outside and continued inside. Splendid and extravagant representations continued into the large interior spaces, even as smaller and more intimate outdoor spaces such as gardens hosted performances of madrigals.… Different from their use in the seventeenth century, “inside” and “outside” remained quite relative terms that led to complex exchanges and overlap rather than strict demarcation. In this way it is possible to open up the concept of space, and one of the most fascinating characteristics of the Renaissance is the way in which the era conceived of music as spatially porous, a more expansive conception than ever before.34

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  187

Figure 13.3  View of the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Singolarità di Venezia e del suo Serenissimo dominio divise in più parti, Venezia 1709, II (c. 119). Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Fototeca dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Arte.

The monks are, thus, caught in this spatial and temporal threshold, between the interior space of the refectory and the exterior space depicted in the painting (Figure 13.3).

The painting With its central perspective, the painting presents a discourse on vision. In his discussion of Renaissance theories of perspective, Charles H. Carman observes that “one can see the inception of Renaissance perspective in terms of the divine embodied in empirical reality, and that it is not yet the beginning of the anthropocentric view.”35 Perspective is, therefore, imbued with an “earthly/divine dynamic,” and “what really matters in the relationship of viewer to single-point perspective image as Alberti unfolds it, is the apparent paradox of conflating incommensurables, and the simple insistence that such a relationship is appropriate.”36 The temporality of the monks’ experience when they enter the refectory plays with the central perspective. At first, as they enter, the painting is directly in front of them, but only until

188  A. Cascelli they move to their seats at the sides of the refectory. The correspondence between the gaze of Christ, aligned with the vanishing point and the gaze of the viewer – a moment of visual enunciation and débrayage – only lasts a brief instant.37 Once they are seated, the monks have only a lateral view of the painting; there is no coincidence of gaze between the viewer-monks and Christ. In a way, the monks become part of the scene and can no longer see it from the vantage point of the central perspective, as their tables are aligned with those at the sides of the painting. The question that I have been rephrasing since the beginning of this chapter, about the role of the musicians in Veronese’s painting, can then be rearticulated one more time: do the musicians and the sound they imply have any role in this earthly/divine dynamic and in the temporal play between the monks and the canvas?

Representation of sound Damerini’s words are once more apt to the discourse here: “the refectory shows, even today, as it is, almost completely bare, a surprising harmony of proportions: an almost unreal space creates an atmosphere of both quiet intimacy and of immediate correspondence between the immensity of the ambience and the souls of those who enter.”38 The refectory in the context of monastic life is a quiet space. Quiet does not necessarily mean silent, as according to Benedictine rules, texts from the Gospels and from the writings of the Fathers of the Church were read aloud during mealtime whilst everyone else remained silent and ate. It seems there is dissonance between the scene represented in the painting and the quiet space of the refectory: if anything, the painting could be described at least as a representation of a loud event, depicting the hustle and bustle of the different actors in the performance of the banquet. The prominence of the musicians especially contributes to this sense of noise, sharply contrasting to the actual quietness of the refectory space. For Kate Hanson, “Perhaps the painting was meant to fill the silence of that austere, quiet room and give the monks fodder for contemplation during their meals. Or it could be seen as a spiritual exercise, as the monks were meant to focus on the quiet and austere figures of Christ and Mary, learning how to block out the ‘noise’ of the material world.”39 Yet, I suggest that the sound implied by the painting, primarily that of the musicians, did not need to be filtered out by the monks but could have been integrated into their daily lives as part of the earthly/divine dynamic. Like the patrons of Caravaggio’s Lute Player, Veronese’s painted musicians inevitably invited the monks to recall music they had known and were familiar with from the numerous occasions of music-making they had encountered. Perhaps they had seen a performance by an ensemble of six musicians. Seeing representations of music, therefore, would have brought past musical experiences to mind, and this at first coincided with the view of the figure of Christ; we should not forget that the musicians are just below

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  189 him, so they are in the immediate visual trajectory between Christ and the gaze of the monks. On every occasion on which they entered the refectory, the monks were once again constituted as subjects of Christ by meeting Christ’s gaze, the visual equivalent of turning to Althusser’s “hey, you there!”40 This was reinforced by the presence of the abbot, sitting just underneath the painting, and was ultimately paired with the painted musicians, who play more than a decorative and accompanying role. The sound represented is, therefore, associated with Christ’s gaze, and had it been actual sound it would have anticipated the gaze because sound from the refectory would already have been heard from the corridor outside. Moreover, the sound exists in each monk’s memory; maybe it would have been the sound that they had been listening to during the liturgical service which normally preceded mealtimes. But because the monk is not actually turning back to meet Christ’s gaze – indeed when he enters the refectory, he is already looking ahead of himself, and knows that Christ’s gaze is there waiting for him – it is expected. In a slight deviation from Althusser’s theory, one could argue that the process of interpellation works not only in the direction from Christ to the monk but also from the monk to Christ, in the sense that the monk constitutes somehow the figure of Christ. The monk enters the refectory and looks at the painting, and in doing so, monk and Christ constitute each other. The moment the monks disengage themselves from Christ’s gaze, they are left with the recollection of music, but this is not the noise that needs to be overcome. It is music they have encountered on many liturgical occasions; it is part of their ritual. It is musica humana and instrumentalis that is represented here; as such musica instrumentalis seems to be fully part of the theological and theoretical exploration of the painting. It is now incorporated in the relationship between finite and infinity. The transient coincidence of the viewers’ gaze with that of Christ, paired with the sense of hearing (the depiction of musicians playing and the monk’s own sonic recollection) and its own transitoriness (hence the hourglass), suggests that that very same ephemerality, typically human, is the path to infinity. Musica instrumentalis is included in the very same perspective that tries to coalesce the incommensurable.

Conclusions Campana’s discussion of synchresis summarizes the experiential trajectory of Veronese’s painting. “Synchresis brings out how the space of the image always already encompasses aurality, whatever that may be. But also, … synchresis takes heed of the in-between temporality of turning back of the gap that allows for an always different spatialization of sound, reactivating recognition, implication. Synchresis also suggests, more broadly, that what we can do for theory is mobilize its ‘figuring’ by way of the contingency of ‘sounding.’”41 Returning to Bruno’s concept of “surface,” Veronese’s canvas

190  A. Cascelli is “a site of mediation and projection,” where the contact between the viewer and the painting takes place, “a ‘superficial’ contact [through which] we apprehend the art object and the space of art, turning a contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy.”42 As a communicative interface then, the painting exists on the threshold, allowing different spatializations of sound, which inhabit both the real and painted space, the outside and the inside, in that ephemeral moment of recognition and implication between the gaze of the monks and the gaze of Christ, accompanied by the represented sound. The canvas is a material surface, with its own performative agency, that mobilises an experience in which architecture, painting and music (recalled from memory) interact with each other.

Notes 1. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5. 2. Chion, Audio-Vision, 63. 3. “Il domasco addosso a quel papa, che suona e lustra...” in Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, eds. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 628. 4. Katherine A. McIver, “Maniera, Music, and Vasari,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring, 1997), 45–55: 55. 5. See “Il miracolo di Cana: Il progetto Nozze di Cana a San Giorgio,” Fonda­ zione Giorgio Cini, accessed June 20, 2019, https://www.cini.it/uploads/box/ d70bd1f97d913a4bab9816e324e9c5cc.pdf. 6. Alberto Ausoni, La Musica (Milan: Electa, 2005), 132–135. 7. Peter Greenaway, “Classical Paintings Revisited,” Change Performing Arts, accessed August 9, 2019, http://www.changeperformingarts.com/ shows/10paintings/10paintings.html. 8. Factum-Arte, The Wedding at Cana: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, September 24, 2009, video, 3:50, https://vimeo.com/6738961. 9. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 146. 10. Bruno, Surface, 2. Bruno is also referring to a passage from Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of the Universe: A New Verse Translation by Sir Ronald Melville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 102–103. 11. Bruno, Surface, 2. 12. Charles de Brosses, Le Président de Brosses en Italie: Lettres Familières Ècrites d’Italie en 1739 and 1740, vol. 1 (Paris: Didier, 1885), 189–190. Translation by the author of this chapter. See also Marc Bayard, “In Front of the Work of Art: The Question of Pictorial Theatricality in Italian Art, 1400–1700,” in Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture, eds. Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 63–77: 69. 13. Amelia Jones, “Live Art in Art History: a Paradox?” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151–166: 159. 14. See Michele Di Monte, “Veronese a Cana: De ludo revelandi cum figuris,” Vene­zia Cinquecento 17, no. 33 (2007), 141–188. 15. Bruno, Surface, 3. 16. See “Il miracolo di Cana,” 5–6. 17. Ibid.

Armonia: seeing and hearing in Veronese’s Le nozze di Cana  191 18. Italian text cited in Gino Damerini, L’isola e il cenobio di San Giorgio Maggiore (Olschki: Florence, 1969), 64. English translation in Venice. A Documentary History 1450 – 1630, eds. David Chambers and Brian Pullan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 414. 19. Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels, “The Visual Arts and the Theatre in Early Modern Europe,” in Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture, eds. Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 8–23: 9-10. 20. Bayard, “In Front of the Work of Art,” in van Eck and Bussels, Theatricality, 63–77: 64 and 69. 21. Ausoni, La Musica, 132–35. 22. Luigi Beschi, “L’immagine della musica in Paolo Veronese. Una proposta per la lettura del concerto delle ‘Nozze di Cana’,” Imago Musicae (1999/2000), 171–91. 23. It was not until 1577 that the first publication in full score format was produced in Venice. See Jane A. Bernstein, Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-­ Century Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139. 24. For a more recent set of identifications, see Manuela Lafarga, “The True Story of Paolo Caliari Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana,” Music and Language Frontiers Lab, accessed October 2, 2019, http://www.theweddingatcana.org/ about.html. 25. In 1568 the instrumental ensemble of St Mark’s was formed with Girolamo, Giovanni and Nicolo’ della Casa. See Denis Arnold and Andrea Marcialis, “Dalla Casa, Girolamo,” Grove Music Online, 2001; Accessed 25 October 2019, https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.jproxy.nuim.ie/grovemusic/view/ 10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007076. 26. Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 54. See also Franca Trinchieri Camiz and Agostino Ziino, “Caravaggio: aspetti musicali e committenza,” Studi Musicali 12 (1983), 67–79; Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “Music and Painting in Cardinal del Monte’s Household,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991), 213–226. 27. Bernstein, Print Culture 78–79. 28. Iain Fenlon, “Music, Ritual, and Festival: The Ceremonial Life of Venice,” in A Companion to Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice, ed Katelijne Schiltz (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 126–129. 29. Damerini, L’isola e il cenobio, 116. 30. See Bayard, “In Front of the Work of Art,” 64. 31. Bruno writes about Robert Irwin’s Excursus: Homage to the Square (1998), Surface, 73. 32. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, eds. Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse (London: Routledge, 2014), 42. 33. Fischer-Lichte, Routledge Introduction, 42. 34. Laurenz Lütteken, Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice, trans. James Steichen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), Chapter 1, loc. 724 of 4969, Kindle. 35. Charles H. Carman, “Meanings of Perspective in the Renaissance: Tension and Resolution,” in Renaissance Theories of Vision, eds. John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 31–44: 33. The author comments on Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting (1435) and Nicholas of Cusa’s On Conjecture (1440). 36. Ibid., 37. 37. “Débrayage” is a term first used by Greimas to express the projection of space-temporal on the one hand and personal categories on the other in any enunciation. Meyer Schapiro was the first to use the term in the context of

192  A. Cascelli visual studies. See Piero Polidoro, Che cos’è la semiotica visiva (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2008), 60–75. See also Algirdas Julien Greimas, Du sens (Paris: Seuil, 1970) and Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures. On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1983) 38. “Il refettorio ci appare, anche oggi, così com’è, quasi completamente nudo, di una sorprendente armonia di proporzioni: una spazialità quasi irreale crea ugualmente un’atmosfera di pacata intimità e di immediate corrispondenza tra la immensità dell’ambiente e l’animo di coloro che vi entrano.” Damerini, L’isola e il cenobio, 65. 39. Kate H. Hanson, “The Language of the Banquet: Reconsidering Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana,” in “Aesthetes and Eaters: Food and the Arts,” special issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 14 (2010), https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_14/hanson/. 40. See Alessandra Campana’s chapter in this book, 18. 41. See Campana’s chapter, 22–23. 42. Bruno, Surface, 3.

14 Listening to space in time Susanna Pasticci

A telling case study for delving into the relationship between music and visual arts is to be found in the Italian orchestral music of the early twentieth century, where the link with visual dimension is also often highlighted by the titles of the works. Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poems are an emblematic example of this trend, which is also shared by many other composers of his generation, such as Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero. Focusing on this repertoire, this chapter makes some general remarks on the interaction between music and visual arts by discussing if – and in what way – an explicit reference to a visual dimension can shape the form and structure of a musical work.

On the road to crossing domains The opportunity to talk about music in terms of visual perception (or vice versa, to talk about a visual artwork in terms of sound perception) is grounded in a well-established repertoire of similarities. In music, we normally talk about “colours,” “nuances,” “chiaroscuro,” “tonal palette,” while the language of visual arts criticism employs musical terms such as “polyphony,” “counterpoint,” “rhythm” and so on. The sharing of a common vocabulary is the result of a growing tendency of the arts to engage in dialectical interaction, which from the ­m id-nineteenth century has been spurred on by the reception of Wagner’s work. His pioneering concept of Gesamtkunstwerk has prompted musicians, painters and writers to question not only the boundaries between the arts but also the exclusivity of their respective domains. It is a common belief, in fact, that each art has its own realm and scope: while music unfolds in time, visual arts unfold in space. In his Essai sur l’origine des langues (1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that these boundaries stem from the involvement of different senses (eye or ear) in the perceptual experience: “each sense has its proper domain. The domain of music is time, that of painting is space.”1 A century later, the desire to cross the boundaries between space and time was to materialize in Wagner’s libretto for Parsifal, when Gurnemanz sings:

194  S. Pasticci “Du siehst, mein Sohn,/zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” [You see, my son,/ Here, time turns into space]. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, these words probably suggest the most profound definition of myth ever given.2 When a hidden order is discovered behind seemingly meaningless events, in fact, time and space answer one another, speaking languages that have at last been reconciled and suddenly become one.3 As Charles Baudelaire suggests, it was precisely this convergence between space and time that made Wagner able to cross the boundaries between music and painting: “No musician excels as Wagner does in depicting space and depth, material and spiritual.”4 Wagner’s legacy has left a profound mark on European culture, even on those artists who have deliberately rejected it. As well as building a strong interdisciplinary vocation, in fact, most of the art movements born of the late nineteenth century such as Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism and Futurism have explored a growing complementarity and fusion between the different arts. Artists wondered about the formal and/or structural analogies between music and painting, the correspondences between sound and colour, the perspectives of synaesthesia and syncretism, the potentialities of a new scenic space free of words and inhabited only by images and sounds, such as the “synthetic theatre” of the Futurists. Despite their heterogeneity, these researches lead towards a common outcome, since they progressively bring about a “temporalization” of painting and a “spatialization” of music. While the wish to emulate the temporality of music would lead avant-garde painters to move away from figurative painting and venture into the realm of abstract art, a growing awareness of sound space potentiality would encourage composers to explore new musical horizons. To investigate the matter, it must be assumed that the boundaries between the arts are not as marked as Rousseau would have us believe. To some extent, even time is immanent in painting just as space is immanent in music: in defining the ontological status of the arts, in fact, perceptual dynamics play a decisive role. The vision of a painting is never instantaneous but rather unfolds over time following subjective and recursive pathways. In the words of the painter Paul Klee, “The eye like a grazing animal feels its way over the surface, not only from top to bottom but also from left to right and in any direction for which the occasion presents itself.”5 Ultimately, “visual experience is dynamic” because what a person perceives is “an interplay of directed tensions.” These tensions “can be described as psychological forces” and could not be conceived outside the temporal element.6 As far as music is concerned, not only does it set itself in a real space, but it also holds the power to “evoke” an imaginary space, shaping our manner of experiencing temporality. Even if time is an immaterial entity that seems to resist any reification, the temporality of music allows time to acquire a form which seems to survive autonomously. In an essay on the relationship between music and painting, Theodor W. Adorno voiced a very negative verdict concerning a possible crossing of respective domains. In trying to “capture” temporal events, in fact, many abstract

Listening to space in time 195 paintings only succeed in reproducing an “illusion of time.” Likewise, music that “paints” moves away from the ideal of spatiality inherent in musically organized forms and “nearly always suffers a loss of temporal organization.”7 Adorno recognizes this process of “pseudomorphosis” towards painting not only in Debussy’s music but also in Stravinsky’s attitude towards shaping form as a succession of juxtaposed “blocks”: a formal structure attained through “the spatialization of time in a merely fictitious way, treating time without consideration, as if it were space.”8 This formal conception inevitably implies the rejection (or at least the weakening) of what Adorno considered to be the core of musical temporality, that is to say, “the art of development and thematic transition.”9 The idea that “development is the engine of musical construction” was also shared by Arnold Schoenberg: a position strongly rooted in the Austro-German tradition but not, of course, a universal rule.10 Beyond his aesthetic positions and value judgements, Adorno’s considerations highlight a crucial point in our investigation, which is that the relationship between music and the visual dimension is not just a matter of “musical representation” of shapes and colours, but primarily an issue of form and temporality. This hypothesis finds wide confirmation in Italian instrumental music of the early twentieth century. A repertoire in which a strong predilection for sound painting is to be found, sometimes also supported by the composers’ drive to engage in a relationship with concomitant research by Italian painters. The phenomenon takes on quite different features from those of other European countries, owing to certain peculiarities of Italian musical culture which deserve to be briefly examined.

A new music for a new century During the nineteenth century, Italian musical culture had been completely ruled by the glorious tradition of melodrama. Most Italian composers worked exclusively for musical theatre and the audience was used to listening only to operatic music or instrumental transcriptions and paraphrases of operatic music. Towards the 1880s, however, it became clear that this glorious operatic tradition was coming to an end. Italy’s newly achieved equal status among other European countries prompted composers, performers, organizers and publishers to promote other repertoires in order to revive an Italian tradition in the genres of chamber and symphonic music. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this project was carried out with great determination by a group of composers born around 1880 who spent a period of apprenticeship abroad, where they could experience the latest trends in European music. While Malipiero attended the Vienna Conservatory and later moved to Berlin to take lessons from Max Bruch, Casella enrolled at the Paris Conservatory at just 13 years of age. Respighi, after graduating in violin and composition at the Liceo musicale in Bologna,

196  S. Pasticci spent a long time in Berlin and Russia, where he was able to take advantage of the magisterium of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.11 What these musicians brought with them, on their return to Italy, was above all the wish to engage in a profound renewal of Italian music, to restore music into a broader cultural and social role. Casella and Malipiero, together with Ildebrando Pizzetti, were the first Italian composers to conceive creative work as inseparable from theoretical thought, critical activity and a commitment to popularization; even Respighi, more reticent about playing an active role in public debate, always nourished his creativity with the fine erudition of the bibliophile and a deep interest in the arts and collecting. In 1917, Casella founded Ars Nova, the information journal of the Società Italiana di Musica Moderna (Italian Society of Modern Music), calling into close collaboration not only musicians but also writers and artists who shared the need to lay the foundations for a “new art” in an interdisciplinary perspective. The gap between Italian music and liberal arts was, thus, overcome, bringing about a new scenario marked by a deep contradiction between European tendencies and nationalistic traits, which would have strong and lasting repercussions in the years to come. As long as Giuseppe Verdi governed most of the international opera market, there was no misunderstanding between Italian and non-Italian music; however, when Italian opera began its slow decline, the problem of “Italianity” arose. After the unification of Italy, musicians also voiced their intention to participate in the “invention” of the Italian nation. Any process of identity shaping relies on the values of the past, history and memory; and memory is always selective because not everything belonging to the past is preserved, and not everything that is kept retains the same value.12 To find a balance between the need for renewal and the recovery of tradition, it was, thus, necessary to decide which elements to enhance and which to abandon. The first thing to overcome was the cult of melodrama, which in the previous century had been so pervasive as to hinder the development of other musical forms. Not all composers, however, shared this need, nor did the audience: opera was still very popular and seemed to enjoy excellent health, strengthened by the successes of Giacomo Puccini and other composers of the Giovane scuola. To challenge the value of such a glorious tradition one needed to rely on one which was equally prestigious, such as that provided by Italian Renaissance and Baroque music. Only by rediscovering its remote past, in fact, would Italian music acquire an aura of cultural nobility that the melodrama of national-popular vocation could not claim.

“All is scenic” in Italy In the early twentieth century, Italian composers could easily decide to give up writing operatic music, but they could not in any way avoid coming to grips with the Italian cultural context, musicians’ attitudes, and the

Listening to space in time 197 audience’s expectations. A telling account of the state of affairs is provided by Casella in an article dated 1925: “Italy” and “theatre” are synonymous. Indeed, in no other country in the world does there exist such a theatrical atmosphere as in Italy, where all is scenic: landscapes, people, gestures, customs, plastic arts.13 In a cultural context where music is mainly experienced in a theatrical dimension, it is difficult for “absolute” music to achieve full citizenship. On the contrary, moving towards programmatic music and associating music with extra-musical elements, might become the best way to involve the audience in the listening experience of instrumental music. Accordingly, by the mid-nineteenth century, program music had entered the agenda of Italian composers along with opera, albeit following different paths from those of other European countries. Going beyond classical symphony and developing the revolutionary potential of Beethoven’s legacy was not the main concern of Italian composers, who worked in a context where Austro-Germanic music was not familiar, or at least not an important point of reference. As for source material, literature does not seem to enjoy a place of honour in Italian program music. While in European program music, from Hector Berlioz to Franz Liszt to Richard Strauss, the fictional protagonists were often exceptional figures (the Romantic artist or great heroes such as Faust, Don Giovanni, Don Quixote),14 Italian composers rarely aimed to celebrate the great ideals of humanity. Only a few symphonic poems referring to literary subjects, such as Antonio Bazzini’s Francesca da Rimini (1890), Antonio Smareglia’s Leonora (1877) and Alfredo Catalani’s Ero e Leandro (1884), are shaped as a musical narrative grounded in a constellation of themes which undergo variations and motivic development. In most cases, however, the poetic idea does not suit a narrative, but rather seems to foster a description of moods in terms of musical tone-painting. Rather than composing symphonic poems, many authors preferred to focus on the “bozzetto sinfonico” (symphonic sketch), a less complex musical form aimed at suggesting portraits of landscapes and atmospheres. In the early twentieth century, this tendency towards tonal painting is also to be found in those composers who were to become the promoters of the renaissance of Italian instrumental music. A review of titles of symphonic works composed and performed in Italy in the first two decades of the twentieth century highlights a widespread tendency on the part of musicians to offer their audiences an “auditory vision” of landscapes, paintings, portraits of life, natural scenes and historical monuments. In 1909, Casella enjoyed popular acclaim with Italia (Rhapsody in two parts for orchestra op. 11), a colourful evocation of scenes of daily life from Sicily and Naples. The title underscores the aspiration toward a “national” music, further strengthened by the use of national folklore melodies.

198  S. Pasticci Another “auditory vision” of Italian landscapes with hints of popular music is offered by Franco Alfano in his Suite Romantica. Poema italiano in four movements (1. Adriatic Night; 2. Apennine Echoes; 3. In the Abandoned Cloister; 4. Christmas in Campania), also composed in 1909. Regional landscapes and scenes from local life are portrayed musically in Attilio Parelli’ s Rapsodia Umbria (Umbrian Rhapsody, 1903), Leone Sinigaglia’s Danze piemontesi (Piedmontese Dances, 1905), Gino Marinuzzi’s Suite siciliana (Sicilian Suite, 1909), Vincenzo Davico’s Impressioni romane (Roman Impressions, 1913), and in the four “Symphonic Impressions” Primavera in Val di Sole (Spring in Val di Sole, 1915) by Riccardo Zandonai (1. Sad Sunrise; 2. In the Woods; 3. The Echo; 3. Butterfly Swarm). The city of Rome offers inspiration and setting for three of Respighi’s symphonic poems, Fontane di Roma (Fountains of Rome, 1916), Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome, 1924) and Feste Romane (Roman Festivals, 1928), to which we will return later. As well as meeting the audience’s expectations of “seeing” something in instrumental music, the choice of “non-universal” referents – like a local landscape or a popular melody – allowed the music to be lent a strong national, if not nationalistic, accent. In terms of extra-musical references, nature has also played a leading role. Scenes from rural life, landscapes and the natural environment are to be found in Gennaro Napoli’s In Montagna (In the Mountains, 1906), Amilcare Zanella’s Festa campestre (Rural Celebration, 1907), Vito Frazzi’s L’usignolo e la rosa (The Nightingale and the Rose, 1911), Vincenzo Tomassini’s Chiari di luna (Moonlight, 1915) and Riccardo Zandonai’s Autunno tra i monti (Autumn in the Mountains, 1918). A deep attraction for natural landscapes also emerges from the titles of Malipiero’s early orchestral works. After Sinfonia del mare (Symphony of the Sea, 1906), he composed three series of Impressioni dal vero (Impression from Life), a title suggesting a clear reference to plein-air painting: Impressioni dal vero I (1. The Blackcap; 2. The Woodpecker; 3. The Scops Owl, 1910); Impressioni dal vero II (1. Colloquium of Bells; 2. The Cypresses and the Wind; 3. Rural Revelry, 1915); Pause del silenzio (Interruptions of Silence, 1917); Impressioni dal vero III (1. Feast in Val d’Inferno; 2. The Cockerel; 3. Tarantella in Capri, 1922). This proliferation of descriptive titles highlights a clear tendency of composers to pursue – including in the field of orchestral music – that “scenic” dimension which, according to Casella, should be the polar star of any Italian artistic experience. Those composers most engaged in the aesthetic debate, however, were perfectly aware of the dangers of such an approach. Malipiero, for example, firmly denies any descriptive or extra-musical intention, as emerging from his commentary notes to Impressioni dal vero I: These impressions are a response against program music and artificially thematic music. Nature, “listened to” by a musician, can only suggest a musical idea. […]

Listening to space in time 199 And the title – which a false interpretation could link to extra-­ musical intentions – represents only a tribute made by the musician to whoever was able to evoke his feeling and desire for expression.15 By means of this quasi-literal quotation from Beethoven’s explanatory remark to his Pastoral Symphony – “Rather expressive of feeling than of tonal painting” – Malipiero was trying to distance himself from the mainstream of Italian music, in which a “scenic” and descriptive approach was uncritically accepted. Nevertheless, he does not give up using evocative titles because he regards them as a very effective means for dissociating himself from the canon of absolute music of the Austro-Germanic tradition. A strong aversion to the German canon was also shared by Casella, as emerges from a review of Giacomo Setaccioli’s Sinfonia in A major published in 1918: When an orchestral composition bears the title “Symphony in A major” and the date “1916”, it is impossible for it to be a really interesting work, since no composer who wants to venture into the vast virgin forest of the musical future will adopt a form that has already been exhausted by Beethoven’s genius.16 As a valid alternative to Setaccioli’s Symphony, Casella, in the same issue of his journal Ars Nova, reviews a work by Malipiero, Pause del silenzio (Interruptions of Silence), defining it as “one of the best orchestral works created in Europe in the last ten years.”17 In terms of compositional techniques, the rejection of the Germanic tradition also implied a refusal of thematic development. Like Casella, Malipiero also believed that a rediscovery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian music techniques was the only way to free oneself from the “tyranny” of thematic development: I refused the easy game of thematic developments because I was fed up with them and found them boring. Once a theme has been taken up, turned, fragmented and expanded, it is not difficult to compose a movement of a symphony (or of a sonata) which amuses the amateurs and satisfies the insensitivity of the connoisseurs. The motion of authentic Italian music (such as that of Domenico Scarlatti) never stops, following the natural law of relationships and contrasts; not a geometric construction but a solid architecture, anti-symmetrical and proportionate.18 These programmatic intentions find precise application in Pause del silenzio, a piece conceived as an uninterrupted sequence of seven thematically independent short panels. Malipiero describes the seven panels as

200  S. Pasticci “pastoral,” “between a scherzo and a dance,” “a serenade,” “a tumultuous round-dance,” “a funeral elegy,” “a fanfare” and “a fiery outburst of violent rhythms.” In any event, he specifies that “the listener is free to choose different interpretations from those provided by the author.” The remarkable variety of materials and compositional techniques (constellation of melodies, diatonic modality, parallel harmonies, whole tone scale, pedals, ostinato figures, polyphonic textures) is balanced by a formal framework which appears as simple as it is effective. A simple fanfare is repeated at the beginning and at the end of every panel, starting a semitone higher at each recurrence. In the absence of thematic development, there is neither a linear connection between events nor a clear relationship of cause and effect. The recurrence of fanfare gives rise to a form based on an assemblage of clearly separated blocks that seem to have been nearly “sculpted” in space and time and which finds interesting parallels in the painting of time. Casella will provide a theoretical framework for this approach, finding in the visual arts a decisive test to verify the validity of their musical choices.

Parallels roads and crossing points Casella was a passionate art collector and his interest in the visual arts was also boosted by the wish to draw a connection between his poetics and that of his favourite painters. In an article published in 1926 with the title “Painting and Music in Italy,” he remarked on a “close aesthetic affinity between some Italian paintings of recent years and contemporary musical works” that share the same guidelines of “clarity, moderation and balance.” This convergence of aims does not concern the use of “content” or the search for a relationship between sound and colour, but is mainly played out on a stylistic and formal level: In both arts it is the same renewal, attained by absolute freedom from foreign influences and by attentive study of the national past. And this analogy is especially striking for what concerns, on the one hand, the rapprochement of Italian painters to Giotto and the Quattrocento, and, on the other hand, that of Italian musicians to the national instrumental style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.19 The need to not yield to Impressionism influences is another common trait of Italian composers’ and painters’ research. The issue is further explored by Casella in another article comparing Debussy’s music and Impressionist painting. In spite of its refinement, Impressionist painting is too ethereal, since forms and bodies seem to disintegrate and dissolve in the fluidity of the air. Likewise, Debussy practically abolished all that which in music is equivalent to linear drawing and perspective in painting, namely form, rhythmic

Listening to space in time 201 framing and melodic unity. According to Casella, these models could not be imported into Italy where the natural landscape, lacking in nebulosity and mystery, does not harmonize with an Impressionistic viewing: Italian owns too much plastic sense to enjoy an art whose main feature is precisely the negation of drawing and form. […] The evanescent, tenuous art of Debussy is now contrasted [in Italy] by a music much more interested in rhythmic dynamism, plastic construction, strophic solidity and linear clarity.20 Who were, therefore, the painters with whom Casella felt such a strong identity of intent? A photograph of his studio, taken at the end of the 1920s, is reproduced in Figure 14.1;21 it looks like a museum, where the composer has “staged” his artistic references. On the piano, piles of scores surround a half-length reproduction of Delphi’s charioteer, while on the floor a number of volumes from the Raccolta Nazionale delle musiche italiane (National Collection of Italian Music) are piled up. Around the piano, above some photos with ­dedications – Stravinsky, Debussy, Malipiero, Respighi and many others – are hanging five paintings. On the left wall, we see L’attesa by Carlo Carrà. Then, clockwise, two paintings by Felice Casorati, La conversazione platonica and

Figure 14.1  Photograph of Alfredo Casella’s studio in his Roman house in via Nicotera - Fondo Casella of the Giorgio Cini Foundation (Venice).

202  S. Pasticci a portrait of Casella. Further to the right, Il pino sul mare by Carrà and, hardly visible beneath the beams of light, Mercurio e i metafisici by Giorgio De Chirico. These paintings accompanied Casella in his daily activities, as silent spectators but also in some way participants in his work. The authors of these paintings shared the same need for a renewal of art through the recovery of the ancient, and their works reveal a great predilection for the clarity of drawing, the solidity of formal architecture and the recovery of “plastic values” (Valori plastici is the title of a journal founded in 1919 to give a theoretical background to this artistic trend). In De Chirico’s work, the portrayal of heroic myths – together with dislocated spaces and hybrid characters, from dummy to androgynous – offers a fitting example of a “depiction of a modernity anchored in an aged culture.”22 In addition, Il pino sul mare by Carrà, pervaded by a tone of arcane immobility, is an emblematic example of “active classical.”23 Casorati was perhaps the painter Casella felt closest to, both in his predilection for a static art, devoid of dynamism, and in the enigmatic tone of his compositions, always pervaded by a slight melancholy. In 1924, Casella commissioned Casorati for the portrait hanging in his studio, and two years later, he dedicated to him one of the most important works in his catalogue, the Concerto romano for organ, brass, timpani and string orchestra. In his autobiography published in 1941, Casella explains that this piece marks his definitive detachment from both the influences of Impressionism and the “seductions” of the symphonic poem. Although the title refers to the city of Rome, the work has no descriptive intention. In any case, the relationship with the visual arts plays a fundamental role. What the composer wishes to experiment, in fact, is the possibility of expressing in purely musical terms the characteristics of Baroque monumental art: The relief of volumes, shapes, chiaroscuro (which is directly linked to the greatest Roman art); freedom and the fantasy in reinterpreting classical forms; the predilection for violent plastic contrasts.24 The choice of the instrumental ensemble is the first means the composer employs to achieve that “relief of volumes” typical of Baroque art. Three groups of instruments face one another and alternate plastically: a group of brass, a group of strings (together with the timpani), and the solo organ. The alternating between solo sections and those given to the different orchestral groups is an explicit reference to the praxis of Baroque concert. In the first movement, the clarity of the formal design is enhanced by a martial theme that returns several times, like a refrain. The near-total absence of timbre mixtures becomes more evident in the second movement, in which the treatment of the instrumental families as hermetically closed sets strengthens the feeling of experiencing a form conceived as an assemblage of sound panels. The last movement, more discontinuous and

Listening to space in time 203 fragmentary, brings the “natural law of contrasts” to its most extreme consequences, exploring the potentialities of that rapid alternating of emotional states that Casella seemed to appreciate so much in Malipiero’s music.

Listening space in time While Casella was composing his Roman Concerto to explore new ways of interaction between music and visual arts, the city of Rome became the subject of the successful trilogy of Respighi’s symphonic poems. Respighi’s stylistic path was quite different from Casella and Malipiero’s since his involvement in symphonic poem was the result of a choice made belatedly. His early instrumental works follow in the footsteps of the classic-romantic Germanic tradition that he had been assimilating during his apprenticeship, and it was only in the mid-1910s that Respighi began to give up the traditional forms of symphony, sonata and concert in order to experiment with the form of the suite, a free succession of pieces to be associated with programmatic titles. He composed his first symphonic poem Fountains of Rome at the age of 37, revealing a vocation for sound painting that was to become the fulcrum of his last creative season. The work consists of four movements, bearing a programmatic title referring to a fountain in Rome at a particular time of day: La fontana di Valle Giulia all’alba (Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn); La fontana del Tritone al mattino (The Fountain of the Triton in the Morning); La fontana di Trevi al meriggio (The Fountain of Trevi at Noon); La fontana di Villa Medici al tramonto (The Fountain of Villa Medici at Sunset). It was Respighi himself, in the program notes accompanying the score, who emphasized the essentially “visual” matrix of his inspiration, speaking of “visions,” “contemplation of landscapes” and “observer”: “In this symphonic poem, the composer endeavoured to give expression to the sentiments and visions suggested to him by four of Rome’s fountains, contemplated at the moment when their characters are most in harmony with the surrounding landscape, or at which their beauty is most impressive to the observer.” Each movement looks like an auditory tableau vivant: since there is no thematic development there is no plot and no narration of events, but only a sequence of music panels without thematic relationships evoking great collective scenes. Thanks to sophisticated orchestration and the skilful handling of a rich palette of colours, Respighi emerges as a true painter-symphonist. The same formal design can also be discerned in the other two symphonic poems inspired by the city of Rome. In I Pini di Roma, four visions of pine trees are portrayed at different times of the day in four different locations (Villa Borghese, near a catacomb, the Janiculum, and the Appian way) follow one another uninterruptedly. The four movements of Feste Romane (Circenses, The Jubilee, The October Festival, and The Epiphany) evoke four scenes of collective life in which popular inspiration is tempered by a mystical feeling reminiscent of sacred painting. In the same way, most

204  S. Pasticci of the movements of the “Roman Trilogy” seem to evoke the timbres and settings of the Italian painting of the time. Consider, for example, Musica al Pincio and Viale di Villa Borghese by Armando Spadini, Ottobrata by Giorgio De Chirico, or the atmosphere of Scipione and Francesco Paolo Michetti’s paintings.25 The relationship with painting becomes even more explicit in Trittico botticelliano (Botticelli Triptych) composed in 1927, a symphonic poem for small orchestra in three movements named after three famous paintings by Sandro Botticelli held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence: Primavera (also known as Allegory of Spring), the Adoration of the Magi and The Birth of Venus. A brief focus on the first movement allows us to outline the main features of this auditory-visual experience that Respighi aims at offering to his audience. The piece opens with a clear reference to Antonio Vivaldi’s La Primavera (Spring), evoked not only through a literal quotation but above all in terms of atmosphere, of Stimmung. The thematic material is quite rich and heterogeneous, as it includes a popular theme, an ancient troubadour melody (A l’entrade del tens clar), a psalmodic theme as well as a melody reminiscent of a Renaissance dance. All the themes recur several times, sometimes in a transposed or slightly varied form, more often in their original form. Although the use of tonal syntax with modal inflections provides a strong sense of directionality driven by cadences, we still have the impression of a mosaic of auditory panels, rather than a gradually evolving organic form. Sometimes themes surface unexpectedly as figures that suddenly emerge in the foreground from a mobile and constantly changing orchestral background. Yet they are never identical because they are played by different instruments and, therefore, acquire a new timbre, a new colour nuance; and even when the themes are played by the same instruments they seem different because the orchestral background has changed and our perspective along with it. It is hard to recognize a descriptive intention in the compositional techniques used by Respighi, who does not seem interested in “translating” into music the “content” of Botticelli’s paintings. Likewise, neither Casella nor Malipiero has sought to “translate” the content of a visual inspiration into music. Although the visual arts have played a decisive role in their musical poetics, it is not in terms of “content” that this interaction with painting is expressed, but rather in terms of compositional “materials.” These materials may become active and propulsive factors of their poetics only insofar as they are subjected to the structures of musical form. In other words, the poetic idea – in this case the visual inspiration – is not a substance that precedes the music as an extra-musical premise to be paraphrased in notes, but the final result of the compositional process.26 The results of this survey show that if there is something that these composers wanted to “translate” into music, it was not the “content” of

Listening to space in time 205 a painting, but rather the “experience” of looking at a painting. The latter is a static and immutable object, which remains identical to itself; it is we, through our perception, who transform the painting into a dynamic experience. Like the grazing animal Klee was talking about, when we look at a picture our eyes can freely wander in any direction for which we feel the need. We can look at the ensemble and then turn our attention elsewhere. But we can also decide to focus on details, on little things, on subtle shades of colour. This is what Italian composers invite us to do, by constructing their musical form like a constellation of spaces and surfaces. Adorno would probably have interpreted this approach as a result of a questionable tendency to pursue “the spatialization of time in a merely fictitious way, treating time without consideration.” As emerges from the experience of Italian composers, however, a spatial conception of music does not necessarily come into conflict with the natural flow of musical temporality. This is true especially if the dialectic between music and visual inspiration is not played out at the level of content but is aimed at exploring, in purely musical terms, the potential of some concepts proper to the visual arts such as size, weight and extension. All these qualities, in their reciprocal relationships and tensions, can result in a musical design that allows us to experience a new and different dimension of space in the domain of temporality, understood as a possible experience of being in time. And it is precisely through this apparently impossible challenge – that of listening to space through time – that the visual arts have been able to leave a tangible mark of their presence in the Italian symphonic tradition of the early twentieth century.

Notes 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “False Analogy between Colors and Sounds,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 62. 2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 219. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 60. 4. Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. Patrick Edward Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 325–357: 332 (emphasis in original). 5. Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee, Volume I. ed. Jürg Spiller (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1961), p. 188. 6. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 11. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Some Relationship between Music and Painting,” Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 66–79: 67. 8. Ibid. 67. 9. Ibid., 68.

206  S. Pasticci 10. Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, eds. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1967), 58. 11. Susanna Pasticci, “Ottorino Respighi e Ildebrando Pizzetti,” in Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero. Musica. Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (Roma: Treccani, 2018), pp. 531–540. 12. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14. 13. Alfredo Casella, “The Musical Theatre in Italy,” The Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 1925, 8. 14. Jonathan Kregor, Program Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3–4. 15. Gian Francesco Malipiero, “Catalogo delle opere annotato dall’autore,” in L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero, ed. Gino Scarpa (Treviso: Canova, 1952), 220, my translation. 16. Alfredo Casella, “Le musiche nuove all’Augusteo,” Ars nova 2, no. 3 (February 1918): 1, my translation. 17. Casella, “Le musiche nuove all’Augusteo,” 4, my translation. 18. Gian Francesco Malipiero, “Ricordi e pensieri: Musica e musicisti”, in L’opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero, ed. Gino Scarpa (Treviso: Canova, 1952) p. 340, my translation. 19. Alfredo Casella, “Painting and Music in Italy,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 1926: 8. 20. Alfredo Casella, “Impressionismo e antimedesimo,” Ars Nova 2, no. 4 (March 1918), 5. 21. The photograph is kept at the Fondo Casella of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice; thanks are due to Gianmario Borio, director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s Music Institute, for authorizing the publication of this document. 22. Keala Jewell, “De Chirico’s Heroes: The Victors of Modernity,” in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-garde, eds. Mario Moroni and Luca Somigli (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), 351. 23. Wilhelm Worringer, “Carlo Carrà Pinie am Meer”, Wissen und Leben, November 10, 1925, 1165–1167. 24. Alfredo Casella, I segreti della giara (Firenze: Sansoni, 1941), 231. 25. Sergio Martinotti, “Respighi tra modernità ed arcaismo,” in Musica italiana del primo Novecento: La Generazione dell’80 (Firenze: Olschki, 1981), 111–124. 26. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

15 The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland Denis Condon

“For a single body and a single face on the screen,” writes Michel Chion in Audio-Vision, “thanks to synchresis, there are dozens of allowable voices.”1 Chion has just defined synchresis in audio-visual media as “the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.”2 Chion’s phrase “allowable voices” is suggestive in thinking about who and what was permitted to provide vocal accompaniment to opera films. In such a form, it would seem to be particularly essential to establish and to maintain the weld between the acting body and the singing voice as it is particularly manifest in the face of the opera star singing and his or her lips moving in synchronization with the sound produced. In this case, only one voice is surely allowable; if the audience is looking at the animated image of the face of Enrico Caruso or Geraldine Farrar, star of New York’s Metropolitan Opera between 1906 and 1922, they will want to hear the voices of these famous singers and will likely know if they are not hearing them because they know the stars’ voices from such other media as live opera or recordings. Image and voice were not usually welded in this way, however, between the first public projection of moving pictures in 1895 and the launch of widely adopted and, therefore, commercially successful synchronized-sound systems in 1927. In those three intervening decades, films were mute, silent to the extent that they lacked synchronized soundtracks, albeit that opera was on the minds of the many innovators who developed synchronized sound systems in those intervening thirty years. Despite this unpromising context for the synchretic weld, operas were filmed throughout the silent period. When they were exhibited, these opera films were, like other films of the period, most often accompanied by sound of some kind matched to the images at the point of exhibition: in the cinema, music, voice and/or sound effects were provided from unsynchronized recordings or produced live. As scholars such as Rick Altman have shown, the enormous variety and variability of such sound supplements over these 30 years and cinema’s global spread began to be tempered by the emergence of standard industry practices in the mid-1910s. Altman identifies 1915 as a particularly important year in the standardization of composed scores because high-profile scores

208  D. Condon accompanied such landmark films as the notorious The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and Carmen (1915), a screen adaptation of Bizet’s opera directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Farrar in her first film role.3 Taking the sounds that accompanied the showing of Carmen and other contemporary opera films as its focus, this essay plunges into this enormous variety, tempering the plenitude by focusing on a particular location, Dublin, Ireland in 1916. Evidence from Dublin suggests that the relationship between image and sound retained a large degree of the intermediality that is apparent in all new media. The articulation of intermediality here is particularly indebted to such early cinema theorists as André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, who contend that all new forms of media experience a double birth: the first when the technologies are developed and the second when a new medium emerges based on those technologies.4 In their example, moving picture technologies were developed at the end of the nineteenth century, but the institution of cinema – with largely agreed ways of engaging with these technologies – only really emerged in 1910 or so and was substantially in operation by the middle of the 1910s. In the first decadeand-a-half of its existence, early cinema was intermedial, in that it was used by many different and already established cultural practices to do what they had been doing previously by other means.5 Before turning to how these phenomena play out in 1910s Ireland, it is necessary to examine how synchresis and intermediality operate in relation to early cinema’s interaction with the cultural practice of opera. Opera was famously in Thomas Edison’s thoughts as work progressed on devices to reproduce moving images at his New Jersey laboratories in 1891. Edison foresaw in the coming invention such a happy combination of electricity and photography that a man can sit in his own parlour and see reproduced on a screen the forms of the players in an opera produced on a distant stage, and, as he sees their movements, he will hear the sounds of their voices as they talk or sing or laugh.6 With its domestically located (male) spectator to whom images are conveyed, Edison’s vision seems to resemble television more than theatrical cinema, and opera as one of the Western culture’s highest forms of cultural achievement serves to guarantee the elevated nature not only of the content but also of the new technology that will deliver it. The device his collaborators developed that came nearest to producing image and sound together, however, was the kinetophone, which when commercially released in 1895, combined sounds from Edison’s commercially successful cylinder phonograph of the 1870s with the company’s newly developed moving-picture viewer, the kinetoscope.7 The kinetoscope did not project its moving images onto a screen for a collective audience; instead, it was housed in a wooden cabinet into which one viewer at a time peered to

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 209 see its short film. The cabinet was not located in the viewer’s own domestic parlour, as Edison’s vision suggested, but at his company’s licenced phonograph parlours – now kinetoscope parlours – where audiences had previously paid to listen to recorded sounds for the first time. As this exhibition context suggests, the kinetoscope had strong links with the phonograph, a point emphasized by Edison’s famous pronouncement that the kinetoscope “would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”8 This intermediality was epitomized by the kinetophone, whose innovation on the kinetoscope was to house a phonograph within the kinetoscope’s cabinet so that when the viewer peered into the eyepiece to see the moving images, s/he could simultaneously use ear tubes to listen to the sounds produced by the phonograph. Making explicit the kind of intermediality operating here, Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith argue that early cinema was a part of phonographic culture, observing that “what we now call cinema was also once perceived as an ‘enhanced phonography’ or a ‘phonography with added visuals.’”9 One of the few films specifically sold for the kinetophone was an opera scene, now lost, but like other films shown on the device, image and sound, although experienced together, were most likely not closely synchronized, and instead what Altman’s has called a “semi-synchronization” was achieved by matching moving images of figures dancing or marching to suitable phonograph music.10 This suggests that while the synchretic weld of Edison’s vision would remain in play, the intermediality of the kinetoscope and kinetophone would become dominant for the projected silent cinema that succeeded them. Opera remained important in the early 1910s. It was on the mind of Irish author James Joyce when in advanced publicity, he promised to offer patrons opera films at the Cinematograph Volta, one of Dublin’s first dedicated cinemas that he briefly managed with Italian partners in late 1909 and early 1910. “By this ‘opera film,’” a promotional newspaper article for the Volta declared, “the entire story of an opera is vividly presented on a specially prepared disc, while an orchestra accompanies the unravelling of the plot by the rapid, but artistic, playing of a selection from the composer’s music for the opera.”11 Luke McKernan contends that this projected film series would have appealed to Joyce, who was a talented amateur singer.12 The promised accompaniment to the recorded image’s vivid presentation, however, makes no mention of vocalists but was instead to be provided by an orchestra whose competence was to be matched by speed of execution. Speed was important because films of this period were typically one-reel long, running approximately ten minutes, and a cinema programme consisted of several films and often live acts, such as singers, comedians or other music-hall performers. Consisting of five short films and no live acts, the Volta’s opening programme ran between 35 and 40 minutes.13 The Volta’s small orchestra, consisting of five string musicians led by musical director Reginald Morgan, seems like it would have been well suited for such a task, but in the event, the Volta appears never to have offered opera films in the way described by this chapter.14

210  D. Condon Nevertheless, this description gives a good idea of how cinema managers would typically have addressed the accompaniment of opera at the beginning of the cinema building boom in the run-up to the First World War. A small group of musicians or even a single musician playing piano or violin would likely have played a well-known selection from the opera, but the matching of this music rhythmically or tonally to onscreen action was less important than that its general suitability could be seen by the audience.15 Although this arrangement hints at connections with the accompaniment of staged opera, the article’s use of the technically incorrect phrase “specially prepared disc” suggests that synchresis is not fully forgotten here. Moving images were not recorded on a disc but on a strip of celluloid that was frequently referred to in term of its length in feet or number of reels that constitute the film in question. It is likely that the article writer was making a connection with one of the most popular synchronized systems of the period, French company Gaumont’s chronophone, in which the film images were designed to synchronize with music recorded on a disc. Most chronophone films were films of songs and because of the limited capacity of discs of the period were generally no more than three or four minutes long. Rather than one of the cinema’s main attractions, the chronophone was more akin to a recorded alternative to the live singers who were early cinema’s most popular live acts. Although the Volta’s links to a canonical modernist author mean that it has received the most scholarly attention and is consequently the best documented of Ireland’s early cinemas, much of this scholarship seeks explanations of what happened at the Volta in details of Joyce’s life rather than seeing the cinema in a wider social context. More productive methodologies in new cinema history indicate ways in which the scattered sources on cinema of the 1910s can illuminate the relationship between music and image in opera films. Particularly concerned with the social dynamics of cinema, new cinema history rejects the methodologies of film studies focused on the textual analysis of films. “As a discipline,” argue the editors of a recent introduction to new cinema history, “film studies have not sought to provide sophisticated answers to basic questions about the operation of cinema as a social phenomenon.”16 In addressing these questions, new cinema history seeks to “rethink the history of cinema as the history of the experience of cinema” by paying particular attention to cinema’s historical audiences.17 As such, it is a project of retrieval of the everyday life experiences of ordinary people, with an aim of “rescu[ing] the undistinguished membership of cinema’s audiences from the condescension of a posterity that has so far been more concerned to contemplate ‘its own desires, criteria and representational structures’ than it has been to construct a meaningful account of the past.”18 Much of this research has focused on locations beyond the metropolitan centres, correcting the previous assumption that metropolitan audiences epitomized audiences everywhere.

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 211 Drawing on these ideas, we are focused here on the experience of opera film in Dublin in 1916. The histories of the vast majority of early cinemas must be gleaned, when they can be at all, from a multiplicity of widely scattered sources. Although these sources – which may include surviving posters and programmes, trade journals, local and national newspapers, city directories, maps and census records – very seldom treat the relationship between music and moving images directly, they do sometimes offer the only surviving clues. Given that “audiences are evanescent, unstructured social agglomerations who assemble for each event, dissolving without apparent trace on each occasion,” it is particularly difficult to discuss the experiences of actual historical audiences.19 Although some limited audience reception of Dublin’s opera films does survive, most of the available information that allows us to reconstruct the experience of Irish cinema music of the 1910s comes from sources other than audiences, with newspapers offering the most diverse details. That said, few Irish newspaper reviewers of the period discussed cinema and when they did, they seldom mentioned musical accompaniment in anything but the barest detail. An exception was the Dublin Evening Mail music critic H.R.W., who on occasion treated the subject at some length, as she or he did in a June 1916 column entitled “Picture House Music.”20 This article compared the development of the theatre orchestra with that of the cinema or picture house, “that most casual and convenient class of entertainment,” as s/he termed it. “The picture house band started with a piano and violin,” s/he observed, for piano and anything constituted a band on the bills. Other instruments were gradually added, but it should be noted that as a general rule the tendency was to increase the string tone and not to introduce brass and wood wind. It has been found by experience that unless you have an orchestra of thirty or forty, it is better to keep to strings. As we shall see, although Dublin’s cinema orchestras of the mid-1910s had increased in size from the quintet at the Volta, even the largest never reach a figure as high as thirty. Rather than considering this restriction to strings negatively, H.R.W. compared the picture-house orchestra favourably to the theatre orchestra. The columnist argued that the theatre orchestra had to accommodate brass, woodwinds and percussion “because, at certain times, such as visits of operatic companies, their numbers could be supplemented without disturbing the balance of tone.” Ultimately, while “the theatre orchestra was allowed to degenerate into mere noisy accompaniments to conversations in the auditorium during the interval, [in the picture house,] “conversation is subdued, the music is subdued, and the lights are subdued. The whole effect is soothing to the nerves.” Rather than to theatre, then, H.R.W. suggested that cinema music’s strongest intermedial connection was to the concert hall, indicating one of

212  D. Condon the most remarkable developments in Dublin’s picture house music in the mid-1910s: the engagement of the city’s best-known musicians to play separately advertised solos.21 For H.R.W., the cinema’s subdued lighting allowed the audience to appreciate not only the music that accompanied the films but also the solos, which were played when no images were on the screen. The columnist revealed that he had visited the Bohemian Picture House twice the previous week to hear the impressive rendering of Max Bruch’s arrangement of “Kol Nidrei” played by Clyde Twelvetrees. A renowned concert cellist and professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Twelvetrees had been hired by the Bohemian management in April 1916 to play solos as part of the evening programme. H.R.W. claimed that “the exact atmosphere is created by the fact that the solos are played in half light. The attention paid by the audience shows that this new feature is appreciated to the fullest extent.” The Bohemian was not alone in engaging concert musicians in this way. Indeed, it had engaged Twelvetrees to maintain its reputation for having the best cinema orchestra in the city when in March 1916, the newly opened Carlton Cinema had engaged violinist Erwin Goldwater as musical director and soloist. Several other Dublin cinemas also hired soloists, but the Bohemian won back its pre-eminence when its musical director Percy Carver engaged a second soloist, violin virtuoso Achille Simonetti. H.R.W. commented that Goldwater’s and Simonetti’s “distinguished abilities attract large numbers of people from the most distant parts of the city,” and this was important to the Bohemian because it was a 900-seat cinema located not in the city centre as the Carlton was and where theatres and concert halls had traditionally been found. Instead, the Bohemian lay on Dublin’s northern periphery, in the suburb of Phibsboro. Thriving suburban cinema was an extraordinary development that epitomizes how cinema, here in a relationship with the concert hall, changed the entertainment geography of the city. Suburban areas that had previously never had professionally produced entertainment were now desirable destinations for the most sought after patrons, the middle-class audiences most familiar with concert music and willing to pay for the cinema’s higher priced seats. Not enough of these patrons lived in the vicinity of the Bohemian; they had to be attracted across the city, and music was one of the chief ways the Bohemian management accomplished this. Sheer number of musicians was one strategy of differentiation from the competition; the Bohemian orchestra of 16 musicians was apparently the largest in the city. H.R.W. concluded his/her article by arguing that “the picture houses are affording us an opportunity of hearing the very best music, and in the hands of such fine artists as I have mentioned we can hear anything from a string quartet to a symphony.” A surviving programme from the Carlton in 1916 gives a clearer idea of what Goldwater’s role as soloist and musical director in accompanying an opera film entailed (see Figure 15.1). The programme survives in a collection of ephemera housed at the National Library of Ireland that belonged to Joseph Holloway, a Dublin architect and obsessive theatre-goer who

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 213

Figure 15.1  Programme for the Carlton cinema for the week of November 6–11, 1916. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

also recorded his impressions of many of the entertainments he attended in his diary. Although the existence of the programme in his collection suggests that Holloway attended the film, he did not write about it in his diary entries for the week of the film’s run, November 6–11, 1916. Nonetheless, the programme is very informative because it includes not only the names of the films to be shown but also the music that Goldwater chose to accompany them, as well as his solo, which formed a separate attraction. At 5:40 p.m. and 8:20 p.m. each evening, he would, by request, play a Dvorak’s “Humoreske.” As it is represented on the page, the solo was at the centre of the programme. Nevertheless, the Carlton advertised its attractions as continuous, which should have meant that the programmed items began when the cinema opened its doors at 1 p.m. and continued until it closed at 10:30 p.m. However, the programme also gave times for when the feature would start: 1:20 p.m., 3:40 p.m., 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. With The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) running to eight reels or approximately 130 minutes at the standard projection speed, only about seven minutes remained for the other film items – a Pathé Gazette newsreel and an episode of the non-fiction serial Dr. Dorsey Expedition Picture (1916). In the normal course of events, the programme would have changed completely on Thursday, and although the minor items were changed for further episodes of the same series, the

214  D. Condon feature film this week was an exceptional attraction, and it would also run in the second half of the week. The Dumb Girl of Portici was exceptional in a number of ways. It was an expensive adaptation of Daniel Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828), directed for the US film production company Universal by one of “early Hollywood’s most renowned filmmakers,” Lois Weber.22 It starred internationally renowned Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in her first and only film role, as the “dumb girl” Fenella, the mute sister of Neopolitan fisherman Masaniello, who leads a revolt against Spanish rule in Naples. The opera was based on historical events in the seventeenth century, and given that it had inspired the Belgian revolution of 1830, it is perhaps surprising it was not more controversial in a Dublin whose city centre adjacent to the Carlton remained substantially in ruins in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. Instead, publicity stressed the film’s respectability, which resided not only in its connection to such high-cultural forms as opera and ballet but also, in the fact, as the programme put it, that “the Royal Family recently held a command Performance of this Film and was highly delighted with the production.” Goldwater’s musical choices suggest that he agreed with H.R.W. that cinema had close links to the concert hall. Music here seems to perform two distinct roles: as a solo and as accompaniment. During the solo, the eyes as well as the ears attended to the performer as he played the music and were offered a receptive atmosphere by the half-light and the predominance of soothing strings. Although the solo might be seen as a similar item on the programme to the popular song in a cinema serving or cultivating an audience that did not aspire to such elevation, the intermedial dynamics of the music hall or variety theatre where singing-along was encouraged, the virtuosic solo requires the silent attentive listening associated with the concert hall. While the solo epitomizes the links to the concert hall, the music chosen for accompaniment suggests that those links remained predominant even when an orchestra was playing while moving images were on the screen. A large element of this was Goldwater’s choice of music. His ten numbered selections to be played during this film were: 1. Friedemann’s Slavonic Rhapsody; 2. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite; 3. Luigini’s Ballet Russe; 4. Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite; 5. Brahms’s Three Hungarian Dances; 6. Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance; 7. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, no. 2; 8. Byng’s A Day in Naples; 9. German’s Henry VIII. Dances; and 10. Michiels’s Parisi Czardas. Two things are immediately striking in these choices. First, the essential muteness of silent cinema is emphasized by the lack of vocal accompaniment, a decision justified by the casting of Pavlova, a star ballerina and not a singer. Second, Goldwater did not include any of the music that would surely have been the most suitable: the music from the opera itself. In its place, he chose well-known pieces, with only Byng’s A Day in Naples having any obvious thematic relevance. If the suitability of many of the pieces is that they are dance music accompanying an opera film featuring a

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 215 ballerina, then they resemble the music played by the phonograph to accompany dance films in the kinetophone and as such are semi-synchronized in Altman’s phrase. Rather than underscoring onscreen action, the music is a well-played selection of classical favourites that might be heard at a concert. A quite different relationship between music and moving image is evident in the almost contemporaneous accompaniment of Carmen at the Bohemian from August 28 to September 2, 1916, suggesting a more syncretic vision. However, the type of information that survives about these performances differs from The Dumb Girl of Portici at the Carlton because the kinds of sources that survive differ. Although the Bohemian also issued programmes with musical selections, no programme for this run survives. Nevertheless, Joseph Holloway did attend the film and wrote about it in his diary. This is a valuable source, but while such sources as newspaper ads are less rich, they are informative in different ways. “At the Bohemian Picture House,” Holloway recorded in an entry for Tuesday, August 29, 1916, the second day of Carmen’s run, I saw a fine five act film of “Carmen,” the actress who filled the role of the amorous gipsy girl played with wonderful seductiveness and passion in many of the incidents & proved herself a really great film actress. Mons. Carlo Berckmans sang The Flower Song & Irvine Lynch the Toreador Song. Some of the episodes were almost too passionately realistic – the fight in the inn in which José slays the Captain was quite exciting and thrillingly enacted.23 Given that he did not recognize Farrar, Holloway was clearly not compelled by her fame to travel across the city to the Bohemian, even if he was deeply impressed by her performance once he experienced it. In an undated note he added some time later, he corrected this failure of recognition: “It was Geraldine Farrar who impersonated Carmen with such convincing realism in film drama. Some of the film acting is really wonderful!”24 It is hard to account for the fact that after seeing the film, he did not know that Farrar was playing Carmen. At least in the version that survives, her name features very prominently on the opening title as well as on an intertitle about five minutes into the film when Carmen first appears.25 And Farrar’s name certainly circulated in Irish newspapers, particularly in advertisements for her recordings and celebrity news columns. While this failure of recognition is puzzling, it suggests that Holloway was attracted to the Bohemian by Carmen as the adaptation of the opera. Like any member of the Irish middle-class used to going to theatres and concerts, Holloway was intimately familiar with Carmen’s arias. The full opera was regularly staged in Dublin, including engagements at the Gaiety Theatre in March and November 1916. Irish audiences were not alone in this, and Carmen’s worldwide popularity meant that it was adapted for film four times in 1915 alone, including Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on Carmen

216  D. Condon and a high-profile version produced by the Fox company, for which Raoul Walsh directed Theda Bara, an actress renowned not for her singing but for embodying the exotic allure of the vamp. Scholars put the total number of film adaptations of Carmen at about eighty.26 For audience members familiar with the opera and aware of Farrar – as Holloway apparently was not – the expectation that they would hear music from the opera, and even vocal performance, would likely have been high. Although Holloway does mention vocal accompaniment, he has disappointingly little to say about the orchestral music. And he was not alone in this because newspaper notices also neglect to mention the music that was played beyond the vocal items. Indeed, a large ad in the Dublin Evening Mail (see Figure 15.2.) made the only reference to the orchestra, which had been such a feature of the cinema’s publicity in the past. The same ad prominently featured soloists Simonetti, “the world-renowned violinist,” and Twelvetrees, “Ireland’s greatest cellist.” Therefore, in the case of Carmen, it is not clear what music the orchestra actually played during the film. The score that Hugo Riesenfeld composed from Bizet’s music and conducted at Carmen’s premiere survives, but there is no evidence that it was played in Dublin, and indeed, its lack of vocal parts makes this unlikely.27 Given that musical director Percy Carver prepared three different scores a week to accompany feature films at the Bohemian, it is more probable that he made

Figure 15.2  Dublin Evening Mail, August 26, 1916.

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 217 his own adaptation of Bizet’s thoroughly familiar music. For musicians such as Simonetti, congruence between music and images was something to be striven for. Shortly after his debut alongside Twelvetrees at the Bohemian on Whit Monday, June 12, 1916, Simonetti gave an interview to the Freeman’s Journal, in which he compared playing in the picture house to the concert hall. “[T]he spectacle, so vividly depicted in the moving picture acts on the sense of the interpreter of the music as on the listener and beholder,” he claimed. “By the picture the player is impelled to throw his whole ardour into his musical illustration. Apart from his love of art, he is enthused to play up to the passion or pathos of the situation in the passing scenes.”28 He also observed that because he is playing at the Bohemian, his music is available to an audience wider than those who usually experienced the kind of music he played. In any case, assuming Carver did produce a score from suitable music in a way that Goldwater’s selection for The Dumb Girl of Portici was not, both it and the programme’s novelty – the vocal accompaniment – indicate the desire for and the limitations of the syncretic weld at this time. The Evening Mail ad also offers evidence for this; it placed Farrar’s name centrally, but it was flanked by the names of the live vocal accompanists the Bohemian management had also engaged for the occasion. To her left was tenor Carlo Berckmans, a member of Antwerp’s opera company who had come to Ireland as a war refugee, and to her right was Irvine Lynch, “the fine Irish basso, who within the last few weeks sang before a distinguished London audience, including the Grand Duke Michael of Russia.”29 Berckmans and Lynch were respected concert vocalists, and they did not appear regularly at the Bohemian or any other picture house. Their presence was a musical treat, with these singers taking the musical parts of Carmen’s rival male lovers, Don José and Escamillo, and being “accorded hearty applause at the different performances.”30 However, their presence must surely have emphasized the physical and vocal absence of a singer taking Carmen’s part, who would have faced the added difficulty of having to navigate the audience’s knowledge of Farrar’s voice as her image appeared on screen. As well as this, the film did not provide any obvious visual cues for potential synchresis, especially moments in which Farrar, Wallace Reid and/or Pedro de Cordoba – the latter two actors playing Don José and Escamillo, respectively – sang on screen and offered the opportunity for lip synch. Berckmans’s and Lynch’s voices were allowable, but the voice of a singer taking Carmen’s part was not. As a result, opera films show that cinema in the 1910s remained highly intermedial. It relied on opera, the concert hall and a range of other existing practices to define the relationship between image and music, and that definition was subject to a high degree of local variation. Works such as Carmen offered the opportunity for exhibitors, musicians and audiences to test the possibilities of synchronization, albeit that the syncretic weld remained to be fully achieved for the feature film.

218  D. Condon

Notes 1. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 63. 2. Ibid. 3. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 292-95. Altman’s work is central to the discussion here; see also ­A ltman, “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (Winter, 1996), 648–718; and Altman, ed., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 4. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “A Medium is Always Born Twice …,” Early Popular Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (May 2005), 3–15. 5. See also Gaudreault, “From ‘Primitive Cinema’ to ‘Kine-Attractography,’” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 85–104. 6. New York Sun, May 28, 1891, 1; quoted in Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (Pordenone: La Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1997), 76. 7. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 78–83. 8. Ref. 9. Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith, “Reconfiguring the History of Early Cinema through the Phonograph, 1877-1908,” Film History 21, no. 4 (2009), 311– 325: 311. 10. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 177; Altman, Silent Film Sound, 81-2. 11. “Italian Bioscope Company Invades Dublin,” Bioscope, December 23, 1909, 37. 12. Luke McKernan, “James Joyce’s Cinema,” Film and Film Culture 3 (2004), 7–20: 10. 13. Dublin Evening Mail, December 20, 1909, 2, quoted in McKernan, “James Joyce’s Cinema,” 12. 14. McKernan, “James Joyce’s Cinema,” 10. 15. On music’s changing suitability in the silent period, see Ian Christie, “‘Suitable Music’: Accompaniment Practice in Early London Screen Exhibition from R. W. Paul to the Picture Palaces,” in The Sound of the Silents in Britain, eds. Julie Brown and Annette Davison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95–110. 16. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers, “The Scope of New Cinema History,” in The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, eds. Biltereyst, Maltby and Meers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 1–12: 2. 17. Ibid., 5, here quoting Robert C. Allen, “Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Moviegoing Age,” in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, eds. Maltby, Biltereyst and Meers (Malden, MA.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 41–57: 55. 18. Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, “Introduction,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, eds. Maltby, Stokes and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press), 3. Maltby and Stokes are echoing E.P. Thompson focus in The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollanz, 1963) and quoting Vivian Sobchak, “What is Film History?, or, the Riddle of the Sphinxes,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 303. 19. Maltby, “New Cinema Histories,” in Explorations in New Cinema History, 3–40: 13.

The allowable voices of silent opera films in 1910s Ireland 219 20. H.R.W. “Picture House Music: Its Growth and Development,” Dublin Evening Mail, June 28, 1916, 5. All quotes in this and the follow two paragraphs are taken from this article. 21. I give this topic a fuller treatment in “‘Players Must Be of a Good Class’: Women and Concert Musicians in Irish Picture Houses, 1910-1920,” in Music and Sound in Silent Film: From the Nickelodeon to The Artist, eds. Ruth Barton and Simon Trezise (London: Routledge, 2019), 79–92. 22. Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 3. 23. Joseph Holloway, “Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer,” unpublished diary, National Library of Ireland, microfilm. 24. Holloway, “Impressions.” 25. Carmen, with original Hugo Riesenfeld score played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gillian Anderson (Pleasantville, NY: Video Artists International, 2006), DVD. 26. Ann Davies, “Introduction,” in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, eds Chris Perriam and Ann Davies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 3. See also Phil Powrie et al., eds., Carmen on Film: A Cultural History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), and Ken Wlaschin, Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen: A Guide to More than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos and DVDs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 27. It is also problematic in other ways; see Gillian Anderson, “Geraldine Farrar and Cecil B. DeMille: The Effect of Opera on Film and Film on Opera 1915,” in Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, Perriam and Davies, 23–36. 28. “Classical Music at the Bohemian Picture Theatre,” Freeman’s Journal, June 16, 1916, 7. 29. “Fete at Cabinteely House,” Irish Times, April 9, 1916, 5; and “‘Carmen’ at the Bohemian,” Freeman’s Journal, August 28, 1916, 8. 30. “Bohemian Picture Theatre,” Irish Times, August 29, 1916, 3.

Index

Abbate, Carolyn 55, 56, 68 Actaeon 171–2 adaptation 6, 57, 91, 92, 94, 144, 146–7, 208, 214, 215–16 Adorno, Theodor W. 4, 117, 194–5, 205 affetto 37, 39, 40–1 Alberti, Leon Battista 187 Alma’s theme (Gustav Mahler) 148–9 Althusser, Louis 18–20, 23, 25, 189 Altman, Rick 207, 209, 215 Amore, Lo (film; Federico Fellini & Roberto Rossellini, 1947) 57 Amy (film; Asif Kapadia, 2015) 79–80, 82–87 Anderson, Benedict 66, 73 Apollo, Apollonian 171–5 Argentina, Imperio 91–2, 94–101 Armenini, Giovanni Battista 4 Armide (opera; Jean-Baptiste Lully & Philippe Quinault, 1686) 40, 120, 122–3, 127 artista comprometido (politically & socially committed artist) 140 audience 210–11, 214, 217; audio-spectators 3, 5, 7 Audran, Girard 125 Auslander, Philip 54 Awaji ningyõ (Japanese puppetry) 67 Azimuth coordinator 24–5 Baglione, Giovanni 170 Baird, Bil 66 Baroque 120, 169–70, 174, 175, 196, 202 Bartók, Béla 56, 60 Bassano, Jacopo 184 Baudelaire, Charles 194 Bayard, Marc 183

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 142 Beach Boys 21 Beethoven, Ludwig von 149–50, 197, 199 Bell, John 68 Berckmans, Carlo 215, 217 Bergman, Ingrid 57 Beschi, Luigi 184 Beistegui, Miguel de 3–5 Bhagavad Gita 70 biopic 81, 87, 142, 143 Birth of a Nation, The (film; D.W. Griffith, 1915) 208 Bizet, Georges 93–5, 208, 216, 217 Bluebeard’s Castle (opera; Béla Bartók, 1911) 56, 60 bossa nova 137 Bovy, Berthe de 57 Boyle Heights, Los Angeles 108, 109–10, 112–14, 116 “Brain Damage” (song; Pink Floyd, 1973) 24–5 Breaking Bad (television series; Vince Gilligan, 2008–13) 153–64 Brosses de, Charles 181, 183# Brouwer, Leo 131–8, 140 Bruno, Giuliana 180–1, 182, 185, 189–90 Bruch, Max 212 Burggraaf, Cora 60 Burlesque on Carmen, A (film; Charles Chaplin & Leo White, 1915) 215 Burton, Julianne 132 Bussels, Stijn 127, 183 Caccini, Giulio 1 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 169–71, 184, 188 Carlos, Wendy 22

Index 221 Carman, Charlese H. 187 Carmen (film; Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) 92, 208, 215–17; (opera; Georges Bizet, 1875) 93–5, 208, 216–17 Carmen la de Triana (film; Florián Rey, 1938) 91–5, 98–101 Carrà, Carlo 22 Carracci, Annibale 45 Caruso, Enrico 207 Carver, Percy 212, 216, 217 Casorati, Felice 201, 202 Casella, Alfredo 193–204 Chion, Michel 3, 21, 22, 68, 155, 179, 207 chronophone (Gaumont) 210 cine Cubano 134–5 Cinematograph Volta 209–10 Citadelle du Château d'Oléron 59 Cobain, Kurt 79–88 Cobain: Montage of Heck (film; Brett Morgen, 2015) 79–88 Cocteau, Jean 56–8, 60 Comanini, Gregorio 181 Comédie-Francaise (theatre, Paris) 57 Connor, Steven 68 contradanza 134 Cortazar, Julio 111 Crouch, Julian 75 Cuban Film Institute, see Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos Cuban Revolution 131, 138–9 Dalla Viola, Francesco 1 Damerini, Gino 185, 188 danzón 134, 136, 137 Dark Side of the Rainbow 23, 24 Davidson, Jane 55 Da Vinci, Leonardo 2–3 Death in Venice (film; Luchino Visconti, 1971) 143–4 Debord, Guy 109, 116 débrayage 188 de Certeau, Michel 109 De Chirico, Giorgio 202, 204 Dejong, Constance 70 Delivrance de Renault, La (ballet; 1617) 46–7 Dell’Antonio, Andrew 184 Del Monte, Francesco Maria, Cardinal 184 Delouche, Dominique 58–9 De Rore, Cipriano 184

Diapason (magazine) 59 Dies Irae 22 digital era; digital technologies 6–7, 23, 28, 80–1, 83–6, 88, 111, 180, 182 Dionysian 172, 174 Doke, Joseph 71, 74 Dolar, Mladen 20 Dolce, Lodovico 171 Dombrowski, Damian 174 Donnelly, Kevin J. 23–4 Dublin 208–17 Dumb Girl of Portici, The (film; Lois Weber, 1916) 213–15, 217 Duval, Denise 58–9 Edison, Thomas 208–9 embodiment 34, 53–4, 61, 69, 181 epiphany 53, 55, 61 Eurydice 4, 21 Farley, Carole 60 Farrar, Geraldine 207, 215–16, 217 Fellini, Federico 57 Fernández, Joseíto 135, 137 Ferrarese, Paolo 185 Festival Musiques au Pays de Pierre Loti (festival) 59 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 5 Florence 171, 204 flute 135, 136, 145, 171, 172 Fournier, Sophie 58–9 Francoism 91–2, 94, 95, 98, 100–01 Franko, Mark 46 Fulkerson, Matthew 3 Gabrieli, Giovanni 185 Gandhi, Mohandas 65–6, 69–76 García Padilla, Antonio 98 Gardel, Carlos 96, 97 Gentili, Augusto 173 gentrification Gerusalemme liberata (poem; Torquato Tasso, 1581) 33–5, 41, 42–5, 120 Giustiniani, Vincenzo 184 Glass, Philip 64–5, 69–71, 76 gogo 137–8, 140 Goldwater, Erwin 212–15 Gorbman, Claudia 154 Goyesco 92, 97, 99–100, 101 Greenway, Peter 180 Gross, Kenneth 68 “Guantanamera” (song; Joseíto Fernández, 1929) 135, 137, 139–40

222  Index Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 53, 61 Gunning, Tom 2 hailing (Althusser) 18,20 Handspring Puppet Company 67 Hannigan, Barbara 60 Haydn, Joseph 64 Hispano-Film Produktion (HFP) 91, 92, 93, 94 Holloway, Joseph 212–13, 215–16 Hopscotch (novel;Spanish: Rayuela, Julio Cortázar, 1963) 111 Ibsen, Lillebil 57 identity 28, 34, 54–5, 61, 95, 97, 100, 101, 140, 174, 196 ideology 21, 23, 29, 33, 66, 68, 76, 94, 131, 132, 138, 140 “I Get Around” (song; Beach Boys, 1963) 21 implication 18, 20, 22–3, 29 Improbable Theatre Company 72, 75 Inception (film; Christopher Nolan, 2010) 28, 29 incongruence (audio-visual) 153–6, 160–4 Indian Opinion (newspaper) 70, 73–4 Industry, The (opera company) 110, 111, 114, 115, 116–17 Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Film Institute, ICAIC) 131–2, 134, 138–9 intermediality 1, 6–7, 108, 116, 131, 146, 15 6,158, 208–9 interpellation 19–20, 25, 29, 189 Ireland, Dave 153–4, 156 Irwin, Robert 185 Jerusalem Delivered, see Gerusalemme liberata Joyce, James 209–10 Jurkowski, Henryk 67 Kapadia, Asif 80, 82–3, 85, 86, 87 kinetophone (Edison) 208–9, 215 King, Richard 28 Kittler, Friedrich 24–5 Klee, Paul 194, 205 Kotcheff, Ted 57 Krims, Adam 115, 117 Kubrick, Stanley 21, 22 Law, Jane Marie 67 Leeper, Jill 22 Leterme, Vincent 58

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 194 literacy campaign 137–8 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 4 Louis XIII 46–7 Lucía (film; Humberto Solás, 1968) 131, 134–40 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 120, 122, 128 Lütteken, Lorenz 186 Lynch, Irvine 215, 217 lyre 172, 173 Macahdo, Gerardo 131, 136 Machart, Renaud 59 Magnani, Anna 57 Mahãbhãrata 65 Mahler, Alma 142, 144, 145, 146–9 Mahler, Gustav 142–51 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 193, 195–6, 198–9, 201, 203, 204 Mancini, Henry 26, 27–8 Marin, Louis 36–7 marionettes, marionette theatre 64, 67–8 Marsyas 171–6 Martínez del Castillo, Rafael 94, 98 Martínez del Castillo, Guadalupe 96, 98 Massey, Doreen 27–8 McDermott, Phelim 64, 65–66, 71–6 McIver, Katherine 179 McPharlin, Paul 66 Mendelsohn, Daniel 70 Menotti, Gian Carlo 56 Merenciano, Bosch 98 Mérimée, Prosper 93, 96 Merulo, Claudio 184 Metropolitan Opera (New York) 60, 64, 107, 207 Migenes, Julia 60 Mildenburg, Anna von 147–8 minimalism 70 mirror/ing 34–7, 40, 42, 44–6 modernism 28, 111, 114, 143, 210 Monde, Le (newspaper) 59 monodrama 53–61 Monteverdi, Claudio 1, 169–70 Montoya, Pietro 184 Morgen, Brett 82, 84–5, 87–8 Morris, Christopher 54 Morris, Errol 85–6 Mostazo, Juan 98 Muette de Portici, La (Daniel Auber 1828) 214 Mulvey, Laura 55–6 Muñoz Molleda, José 94, 98

Index 223 Murch, Walter 26, 27, 28 musica humana 189 musica instrumentali 189 music documentary, see rockumentary music video 79–80, 84–5 Muzzik (publishing house) 58 new cinema history 210 new Latin American cinema 132 “Non, je ne regrette rien” (song; Charles Dumont & Michel Vaucaire, 1956) 29 Novak, Jelena 69 Nozze di Cana, Le (painting; Paolo Veronese, 1563) 179–90 Oliva, Joaquín de la 98 Opera Auckland 60 Opéra-Comique (theatre, Paris) 56, 58 Operadagen Rotterdam (festival) 59 Opéra de Lyon (theatre) 59 opera films 207–17 Orpheus 1, 4, 8, 19, 21, 68, 173, Ovid 171 Padovano, Annibale 184 painting 2–4, 6, 7, 33–8, 40–2, 45, 47, 123–8, 169–76, 179–90, 193–5, 197–205 Palisca, Claude 1 Palladio, Andrea 182, 185 paragone 2–3 Penderecki, Krysztof 134 Perelló y Ródenas, Ramón 98 Peri, Iacopo 1 Perojo, Benito 91–2, 93, 97 personage 54–5 phonograph (Edison) 208–09, 215 Piccola Scala, La (theatre, Milan) 58 Poliziano, Angelo 1 postopera 69 Poulenc, Francis 56–9 Poussin, Nicolas 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 123–8 presence 4, 5, 19, 53, 55–7, 61, 126, 182, 186, 189, 217 Prêtre, Georges 58 print capitalism 73 program music 197–8 Rãmãyana 65 Raphael 179, 181 Renaissance 35, 115, 169–70, 172, 175, 185–7, 196, 204

representation 5, 19, 25, 27, 33, 34, 41, 54, 55–6, 57, 64–5, 66, 67, 69, 74, 76, 94, 126–7, 173, 174–5, 179, 183–4, 186, 188, 195, 210 Respighi, Ottorino 193, 195–6, 198, 201, 203–04 Rey, Florián 91–2, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98–9, 101 Ribera, Jusepe de 174–5 Rinaldo and Armida (painting; Nicholas Poussin, ca. 1628, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) 35–7, 36, 41, 123; (painting; Nicholas Poussin, ca. 1628, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London) 37–8, 38, 39–40, 41, 123–6, 124, 127–8; (painting; Annibale Carracci 1600–1601, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples) 45–6, 45; (engraving after Poussin; Girard Audran, c.1684–90, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 125, 126, 127 Rippl, Gabriele 6–7 rockumentary 79, 80, 85 Rome 171, 198, 202–04 Ross, Alex 109 Rossellini, Roberto 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 40–1, 120, 193, 194 Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra 59 Russell, Ken 142–51 Schechner, Richard 5 San Giorgio Maggiore 180–3, 185–9 Sanskrit 65, 71, 73–4 Satyagraha (opera; Philip Glass & Constance DeJong, 1979) 64–76 Sayers, Jo Ann 57 Schaffer, Paul 132 Schechner, Richard 5 Scotto, Girolamo 185 Second Republic (Spain) 92, 94, 96, 97 semanticization 22, 29 Sennheiser 107–08, 109, 111 Shining The (film; Stanley Kubrick, 1980) 21–2 Signoret, Simone 57 Sharon, Yuval 107, 111, 114 silent cinema 3, 209, 214 Simonetti, Achille 212, 216–17 site-specific performance 108, 109–17 Solás, Humberto 131 solo performance 53–7, 61, 99, 136, 139–40, 145, 184–5, 202, 212–14, 216 son guajiro 137, 139

224  Index soundtrack 22, 26, 27, 28–9, 79, 98, 112, 131, 147–9, 154, 157, 159, 162, 207 space/spatialization 4–6, 9, 19–20,22, 24 25, 26–8, 29, 83, 108–9, 112, 114, 115–6, 134, 157, 170, 183, 185–7, 188, 189–90, 193–5, 200, 202, 205, 207, 210, 217 Spanish Civil War 91–2, 95, 99, 100–01 Strinati, Claudio 174 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 134 symphonic poem 191, 197–8, 202–04 synaesthesia 53–4, 61, 194 synchresis 1, 4, 7–8, 18, 21–3, 179, 185, 189, 207 synchronicity 18, 21, 23 synchronization 3, 7, 18, 19, 21, 23–4, 26, 29, 208 Tasso, Torquato 33–5, 38, 47 120–5 Taylor, Diana 113, 114 Telephone, The (opera; Gian Carlo Menotti, 1947) 56 television 6, 57, 80, 84, 138, 153, 156, 158, 208 threshold 1, 5–6, 8, 95, 101, 108, 109, 115, 117, 186–7, 190 Tillis, Steve 67 time 4–5, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27–9, 38–9, 42, 59, 65, 70, 76, 122, 170, 187–8, 193–5, 205 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 169–76, 184 tonal painting 197–9 Touch of Evil (film; Orson Welles, 1958) 25–6, 27–8 translation 19, 33–47, 144–7 Trinchieri Camiz, Francesca 184 Turner, Victor 5 Twelvetrees, Clyde 212, 216–17 Twist, Basil 67

UFilms 94 Urfé, Odilio 136 Van Eck, Caroline 183 Van Gennep, Arnold 5 vanguardismo 133 Vasari, Giorgio 172, 179–80, 181 Venetiano, Benedetto, Don 185 Venice 55, 173, 182, 185 Vermeje, Jan Cornlisz 184 Vernallis, Carol 80, 84–5 Veronese, Paolo 179–85, 188–90 Vincentino, Nicola 1 Voce umana, Una (film; Roberto Rossellini, 1947) 57 voice, speaking; voice, singing 2, 8, 18–19, 21, 24, 53, 55–6, 59, 61, 65, 66, 68–9, 70–1, 74, 76, 81, 83, 84, 85, 88, 91, 95, 97–8, 101, 111–12, 115, 123, 155, 161, 162, 207–08, 217 Voix humaine, La (opera; Francis Poulenc & Jean Cocteau, 1959) 53, 56–61; (play; Jean Cocteau, 1928) 56–7; (film; Dominique Delouche, 1970) 58 Wagner, Richard 64, 109, 143, 193–4 Warlikowski, Krzysztof 60 Warsaw Autumn Music Festival 133 Welles, Orson 25–6 Willaert, Adrian 1, 184 Winehouse, Amy 79–80, 82–88 Zamora, Camille 60 Zanetti, Anton Maria 184 Zimmer, Hans 28 Zauberflöte, Die (opera; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1791) 64, 67