Operatic Subjects: The Evolution of Self in Modern Opera 0838638589, 9780838638583

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Operatic Subjects The Evolution of Self in Modem Opera

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Copley Square Boston MA 02116

Operatic Subjects argues that opera is more than just a conservative and belated reflection of social, intellectual, and artistic trends; opera in its own way actively has contributed to the creation of the conceptual vocabulary of modernism. Particularly, this work maintains that opera has helped form our notions of what it means to be a self in twentieth-century western culture. This is partially because since the nineteenth century music has frequently been seen as inherently expressive of inner emotional or intellectual states. Equally important for the develop¬ ment of opera was the radical experimenta¬ tion and change, especially during the sec¬ ond part of the nineteenth century, that oc¬ curred in spoken drama. In opera, drama and music collided, competed, and cooperated in the search for meaningful subjective expres¬ sion. in this way opera becomes in the mod¬ em period a site in which cultural construc¬ tions of the subject are explored by librettist, composer, and audience in often subtle but revealing ways. Operatic Subjects begins with an explora¬ tion of the meanings and forms of subjectiv¬ ity within the conceptual frames typical of modernism, then discusses the late works of Wagner, which were heavily influenced not only by Hegel’s conceptions of the self but also by subsequent writers, notably Nietzsche. The concept of the self Wagner found in these writers was immensely im¬ portant to his compositions, and in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal he continued the work he had begun in the Ring cycle of alle¬ gorizing the self on stage and in its presenta¬ tion in music. The post-Wagnerian works examined in this book demonstrate a

BOSTON PUBLIC LI8BABY

SANDRA CORSE

Operatic Subjects The Evolution of Self in Modern Opera

Sandra Corse

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press London: Associated University Presses

© 2000 by Associated University Presses, Inc. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-3858-9/00 $10.00 + 80 pp, pc.)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corse, Sandra. Operatic subjects : the evolution of self in modem opera / Sandra Corse, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8386-3858-9 (alk. paper) 1. Opera—19th century. 2. Opera—20th century. 3. Subjectivity in opera. 4. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML1700.C73 2000 782.1—dc21 99-058593

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Contents Introduction: Opera, Modernism, and the Self 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Subject, Subjectivity, and Opera Operatic Form: Drama and Music Wagner and the Self Post-Wagnerian Opera: The Interior Self Allegories of the Subject: Strauss and Hofmannsthal Individual and Society: Berg and Weill The Absent Center: Berg and Schoenberg Minimalism and the Self: Glass and Adams Conclusion: Heterogeneity of Persons and Sounds—Messiaen

Notes Works Cited Index

7 17 33 49 76 99 125 145 171 192 207 221 225

5

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/operaticsubjectsOOsand

Introduction: Opera, Modernism, and the Self In the latter part of the nineteenth century, opera gradually

developed into a genre that consciously addressed issues emerging in all the arts at the beginning of modernism. This change occurred largely through the works of giants of the genre such as Wagner and Verdi, and can be seen as framed by two popular settings of a single text, Shakespeare’s Othello. Verdi’s setting has remained important in opera houses around the world since its first production in 1887. But for a while it competed with a version created by Rossini and his librettist Berio that had held the stage since its completion in 1816. (In recent years, however, the Rossini work has begun to re¬ gain some of its previous popularity; today there seems to be room on the operatic stages of Europe and America for both works.) Both Rossini and Verdi were important Italian composers who found themselves implicated in the Wagnerian revolution in opera: Ros¬ sini because his work was often the paradigm against which Wagner worked both in his musical and his theoretical texts, and Verdi because he was particularly sensitive to the changes wrought in operatic forms by his German contemporary. It is interesting that both Rossini and Verdi chose to set Shake¬ speare’s Othello as an operatic text. They of course did so in part because Othello is in some ways the perfect operatic subject: it in¬ cludes a great love relationship, jealousy, rage, and the murder of a beautiful woman, as well as such standard “operatic” moments as crowd scenes and public ceremony. In addition to its concentrated love story, its murders, and its pomp, Othello’s importance as an operatic subject for Rossini and Verdi perhaps lies in elements first tapped by Shakespeare (who in turn borrowed the story from ear¬ lier sources) that penetrate a bit more deeply into the common psy¬ chology of audiences who have loved the play and the operas. However, the Rossini and Verdi settings, written near the beginning and end of the nineteenth century respectively, approach these

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OPERATIC SUBJECTS

psychological elements very differently. The Verdi-Boito version re¬ tains the main plot lines of the play, even though it rather de-emphasizes the complexity of Shakespeare’s characterizations: Iago’s motivations are somewhat simplified while Desdemona is trans¬ formed from Shakespeare’s self-sufficient and strong-willed woman character into a passive, religious, almost saintly figure. By contrast, the Rossini-Berio version reconstructs Shakespeare’s drama of misplaced jealousy by transforming it into a drama hing¬ ing on the rivalry of two men for one woman (three men, if we count Jago). The Rossini and Verdi versions of the Othello story are different because they tell different tales of the self. Rossini’s story works with expressions of selfhood inherent in his own historical mo¬ ment, particularly those embedded in the genre of Italian opera. In his version, Desdemona is secretly engaged to Otello, but her father demands that she marry Rodrigo, here the son of the Doge and one who hates Otello because of the latter’s public successes. Jago, once a secret admirer of Desdemona, now seeks revenge against her for ignoring him and against Otello for his public privileges. Desdemona’s father intercepts a letter from Desdemona to Otello, but in order to keep her liaison a secret, she changes the name on the letter and pretends it is addressed to Rodrigo, whom her father then demands she marry. However, in true operatic fashion, Otello assumes that she wants to marry Rodrigo, and enraged with jeal¬ ousy and a sense of betrayal, comes into her room on the fateful night through a secret passage in the castle. At the end, after Jago has confessed to his own machinations, Rodrigo and Desdemona’s father change their minds, saying that they will allow her to marry Otello after all. But of course their change of heart is too late, for Otello, returning to his Shakespearian roots, has already killed himself after killing Desdemona. If this was a plot type more familiar to Italian opera audiences in 1816 than Shakespeare’s complex dramatic concerns, it also some¬ what derailed the thrust of Shakespeare’s story, which hinges on the sense of self in Othello himself, on his ability to define himself in a way that allows him to function as a responsible member of a social-political world that was in many ways alien to him. This sense of the importance of the self is missing from the RossiniBerio version, where the characters, obeying the genre rules of early nineteenth-century Italian opera, rarely indulge in introspec-

INTRODUCTION: OPERA, MODERNISM, AND THE SELF

9

tion or agonize over selfhood. Instead, Rossini’s characters display a sense of self closely related to conventional notions of love and jealousy that seem somewhat superficial when compared with Shakespeare’s. This is of course not to argue that Rossini’s version is inferior. Rossini and Berio could perhaps not emphasize the unique quali¬ ties of the Shakespearian story and yet retain the formal elements of Italian opera. However, they no doubt didn’t try because they didn’t need to, because the emotional and subjective world they wished to present was traditionally expressed not in plot but in the musical forms they had to work with. In other words, music, usu¬ ally the primary expression of form in opera, also enables an em¬ phasis on emotion and desire so that these may consequently be less thoroughly or convincingly exposed in the plot (thus, as nu¬ merous commentators have pointed out, many if not most operas have what would be substandard texts if these texts were required to stand without their musical elaborations of emotional and sub¬ jective content). But the seventy or so years between the premiers of Rossini’s and Verdi’s Otello witnessed significant changes in the ways in which the self is presented in opera—changes due in part to internal de¬ velopments within Italian opera and in part to the influence of the German tradition. The differences are a result of the turn to interiority that occurred in opera in general during the nineteenth cen¬ tury. In Verdi’s version of the story, Boito’s text, like the music, assumes that emotions are internal and always exceed in some way their external expression. Human selfhood is no longer assumed to be ruled by rational and social processes that project themselves as emotional states that emphasize rather than alter those processes (except in cases of madness, the exception to the rule much loved in opera). Romanticism, finding its way fully into Italian opera after Rossini, came to view the individual’s emotional life as in opposi¬ tion to his or her external, rational life, and hence as interior and hidden. This conception of the self as fundamentally interior and hidden yielded in Verdi’s and Boito’s Otello an opera whose richness and variety continue to appeal to contemporary audiences and that seems much more modem than Rossini’s. For Boito, as for Shake¬ speare, Othello is a complex individual whose problem is that he is unsure of his position in the social world of a foreign power; his real

10

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

motivations, unlike those of Rossini’s characters, remain hidden. The move toward interiority in this opera is demonstrated in a number of ways: for example, the orchestral passages, unlike Rossi¬ ni’s, which present public emotions (a military march or a public celebration to announce Desdemona’s engagement), record mo¬ ments in which the characters seem to feel more than they say. Verdi’s orchestra takes on a Wagnerian role of commenting on or elucidating the inner lives of the characters, a role the orchestra usually does not play in Rossini. The differences between the two operatic versions of the Othello story lie, of course, deep in operatic and cultural history. But they demonstrate that one aspect of that history has enormous conse¬ quences for opera history: the theme of personal interaction. The personal interactions of which the drama of Verdi’s work, like Shakespeare’s version and in contrast to Rossini’s, is constructed hinge on the concept of the self, a fundamental concept in human history out of which, in this case, grow stunning acts of murder and suicide. This concept of the self may be examined as a cultural phe¬ nomenon explored in nineteenth-century opera most consciously by Wagner and subsequently, in varying degrees, by a number of twentieth-century composers more or less influenced by, or react¬ ing to, Wagner’s example. The study of the development of the sense of self in the late nine¬ teenth- and twentieth-century opera is inseparable from the study of the development of modernism in the arts in general. The his¬ tory of modernist culture is extensive, covering a century (or more) of changes, movements, developments, and revisions in general culture as well as in the arts. Music has its own history that both influenced and was influenced by changes in other art forms, and the history of opera, usually seen as a subcategory of music history, reflects those changes and developments. Although with a few ex¬ ceptions opera has been and remains a conservative form, not given quite so much to radical restructuring as other art forms have been, it certainly experienced at least indirectly many of the up¬ heavals characteristic of modernism at its most self-consciously avant-garde. But in spite of its conservatism, opera is more than just a denial or a belated reflection of those changes; opera in its own way actively has contributed to the creation of modernist forms and concepts. Particularly, opera has contributed in impor-

INTRODUCTION: OPERA, MODERNISM, AND THE SELF

11

tant if sometimes overlooked ways to our notions of what it meant to be a self in twentieth-century Western culture. The history of modernism begins in the nineteenth-century—for opera studies, particularly with Wagner. As the contrasts between Verdi’s and Rossini’s Otellos in some ways demonstrate, opera dur¬ ing the course of the nineteenth century changed from being a so¬ cial experience in which eighteenth-century or Enlightenment attitudes predominate to a genre in which the modernist concept of the self frequently finds expression in a theatrical experience en¬ compassing drama and music. To a large extent the move from court entertainment to philosophical exploration that opera under¬ went in the nineteenth century is the result of Wagner’s influence, not only in his musical innovations but also in his interest in popu¬ lar philosophic movements of German idealism. But one did not have to be a Wagner, attempting to bridge a perceived gap between intellectual trends and the music-consuming public, in order to compose music which was indeed, consciously or not, a part of those intellectual trends. Music came more and more in the nine¬ teenth century, thanks not only to opera composers but also to such figures as Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, to be regarded as inher¬ ently expressive of inner emotional or intellectual states. Equally important for the development of opera, drama underwent radical experimentation and change, especially during the second part of the nineteenth century. In opera, drama and music collided, com¬ peted, and cooperated in the search for meaningful subjective ex¬ pression. In this way opera, often noted for its lack of realism and its propensity for exaggerated display, became in the modem pe¬ riod a site in which cultural constructions of the subject are ex¬ plored by librettist, composer, and audience. Opera in the hands of its most articulate and responsive composers and librettists, begin¬ ning with Wagner, developed into a genre in which the vital prob¬ lems and contradictions of the construction of the self in Western culture are clearly played out. The following chapters, then, begin with an exploration of the meanings and forms of subjectivity, then discuss the late works of Wagner, which were heavily influenced not only by Hegel’s concep¬ tions of the self but also by subsequent writers, notably Feuerbach and Nietzsche, both of whom adopted many of Hegel’s ideas but also revised or revolted against them. The concept of the self Wagner found in these writers was immensely important to his

12

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

compositions, and in Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal he continued the work he had begun in the Ring cycle of allegorizing the self on stage and in its presentation in music. The post-Wagnerian works examined in this book are arranged roughly in chronological order and demonstrate a diversity of ways in which music-dramas ap¬ proached the common cultural attempt to define the self. However, the chronological arrangement does not mean that I am suggesting a real progression or a dialectic. What I am suggesting is that vari¬ ous composers and librettits were more or less sensitive to a partic¬ ular kind of construction of the self that grows out of the genre of opera itself, out of the fact that the characters presented on stage are represented in theatrical ways—as actors, costumed and acting out a story—but also as music. Thus the “self” of operatic charac¬ ters is particularly physical—it comes to be understood by the audi¬ ence members not only by what is said and done on stage but also by what musical presentation or accompaniment occurs with these words and actions. This awareness of the physicality of the self is a minor and some¬ what neglected strain within the themes and notions that consti¬ tute what we usually understand as modernism. A number of philosophers—Adorno and Levinas, for example—who take ethical issues seriously have identified the tendency within Western cul¬ ture to see the self as disembodied and idealistic as a problematic stance. More frequently, however, the problems created by a firm adherence to modernist notions are identified in terms not specifi¬ cally dealing with the self: Lyotard suggests in The Postmodern Con¬ dition1 that a certain sense of closedness is characteristiac of modernism; he identifies two master narratives that he believes dominated art and culture during this period. One of these, most obviously exemplified by the French Revolution, tells a story of hu¬ manity as the heroic agent of its own liberation through the ad¬ vance of knowledge; this is the “story” of human development that the sciences usually adhere to. The second, however, tells a story of humanity as spirit progressively unfolding the truth. This is of course the story told in German idealism and usually associated with Hegel. This “master narrative” shows up in opera in the Ring cycle, written in large part while Wagner was under the influence of Hegel and his follower Feuerbach. Therefore, one could argue that modernism in opera, beginning with Wagner, sees itself as part of a history of the human individual as gradually structuring a

INTRODUCTION: OPERA, MODERNISM, AND THE SELF

13

world of sense and truth. Yet, as I will explore in more detail in chapter 1, in fact a close look at Hegel suggests that the oversimpli¬ fication of his views identified by Lyotard as a “master narrative” is not the only story that can be, and has been, obtained from his writ¬ ings. The sense of self in Hegel and Wagner is more complicated and less coherent than this story suggests. In addition to seeing the history of modernism as the history of events and experiences arranged under these master narratives, modern art has been characterized by its tendency toward the avant garde, by its sense of the past as something to be revolted against or transformed. This need to reformulate appears in the op¬ eras examined in this study: all of them attempt to re-create our sense of the self in operatic terms, that is, as music and text, as an entity that may be able to work itself free of conventional text- and language-based forms of being in the world. The argument of this book is that opera’s particular contribution to modernism lies in its very structure as music. Music reflects the dominant social order in subtle ways, and can come to seem a vast, indifferent art form that exists alongside social and historical developments in other as¬ pects of culture but has little effect on them and rarely responds to them. Opera, frequently a conservative art form, may seem to contribute to the tightly bound structures of selfhood implied by the master narratives of modernism. But in fact the paths of modem opera show it subverting these tight boundaries in various ways, growing in part out of its involvement, through the influence of Wagner, with German idealism, but more fundamentally growing out of its freedom to represent the self as dramatic character and as music.2

Operatic Subjects

1

,

Subject, Subjectivity, and Opera 0 THELLO IS SUCH A POPULAR AND SUCCESSFUL SUBJECT FOR OPERA, AS

the Rossini and Verdi renditions show in their differing ways, not only because it engages typical operatic themes of love, violence, and extravagance, but more fundamentally because it articulates a parable of the self. The mechanism of desire and mutual recogni¬ tion articulated in Shakespeare’s text is an important motif within Western concepts of subjectivity. Though the novel is usually con¬ sidered the genre that articulates Western notions of selfhood most clearly, opera is also a genre in which cultural notions of the self are explored and exploited. The point of this exploration in opera is somewhat different from that embedded in the novel, for in the novel, no matter what social conditions are described and ex¬ plained, the individual consciousness remains necessarily the point of departure. In opera, on the other hand, the social interactions of characters is the main point, as in many other types of theater. But opera has an added element, music, that allows the audience ac¬ cess to the interior consciousness of characters in a way similar to that common in the novel. Nevertheless, an important difference exists even in the portrayal of the individual consciousness; in the novel, this portrayal is in words, while in opera it is in words and music or music alone. This use of the physical medium of music has important implications that opera composers have frequently exploited. Historically, the genre of opera has close connections with West¬ ern cultural concepts of the self. Because opera arose approxi¬ mately at the same point in time as the philosophical concept of subjectivity, we are tempted, as Slavoj Zizek suggests, to examine opera for “traces of the trends and shifts that make up the history of subjectivity.”1 Of course, the concept of the individual—what constitutes him or her, what it means to be a self—-is a concern

17

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OPERATIC SUBJECTS

important in Western art since the Greeks. However, this concern reaches new significance as art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries moves away from its role in support of religious and state ideologies and moves toward the exploration of bourgeois social val¬ ues. In particular subjectivity becomes a central concern of much artistic endeavor since its influential articulation in philosophy by Descartes. During the nineteenth century, partly due to the influ¬ ence of Wagner, the subject becomes the subject matter of opera itself. Wagner was particularly well placed to develop opera as a genre in which subjectivity was an important thematic and structural force. He and other innovative nineteenth-century composers such as Schumann and Liszt conceived of music as primarily an expres¬ sion of text, whether in opera, lieder, or the symphonic poem. This conception of music as expression implies an author or narrator and an engagement with language and social realities even in its vaguest forms, such as the tone poem or character piece. But it is in opera where music as expression becomes the dominant para¬ digm, for here music is seen as expression not only of a text but also of a dramatic situation in which characters create meaning by interacting with one another. Thus subjectivity in opera is to some extent a matter of representation: the music is seen to represent in objective form the interior mental and emotional life of the charac¬ ters, interiority being often thought of as the essence of subjectivity. Music in opera creates an illusion of a palpable inner essence for the characters. Not only the words sung by a character but also the orchestral music used to accompany actions on stage can be con¬ structed to represent the inner emotional state of the character. We can go further, however, and argue that subjectivity is impli¬ cated in opera in a much more elusive way also, embedded in the form/content relationship. If we accept Hegel’s notion that form is embedded content, the musical forms of opera, whether the sonata-allegro form sketched embryonically in the second act of Wozzeck or Wagner’s continuous melody, retain traces of the cul¬ tural embeddedness of notions of the self. Cultural concepts of self¬ hood are also implicit in the relationship an opera creates with its audience insofar as theater is a ritual, communal site for exploring and celebrating cultural attitudes. Thus subjectivity in opera is from a broader point of view a complex intersubjectivity residing in

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

19

the relationships among composer, fictional characters, musical and dramatic forms, and audience. This subjectivity embedded in the work itself is quite distinct from the viewer’s subjective reactions when viewing the artwork. Subjectivity in an artwork is not the same as the subjective feeling we get looking at or listening to art, though it may be related in complex ways. Subjectivity in the sense of an internal emotional reaction or the singular flavor of experience is important only inso¬ far as these seemingly unique reactions are instances of a larger social concept of the subject, internalized and believed in by the individual and embedded in the artwork in specific ways (for exam¬ ple, the manner in which Wagner’s music almost always compels a strong emotional reaction, controlled by music and text, on the part of the individual audience member). One way to keep in mind the difference between the commonsense definition of subjectivity as a seemingly unique emotional interiority and the more complex phil¬ osophical notion explored here is to take note of Adorno’s insis¬ tence that traditional concepts of the subject are inadequate insofar as they ignore the objective component of the subject: he suggests that the subject and its traditional opposite, the object, are both constellations of elements in which each element is histori¬ cally and socially determined, but in different ways by different forces. All the elements interact with the other parts, with other subjects and with objects but in different ways. We should avoid thinking of a simple subject-object dichotomy: subject and object do not stand as separate, opposite entities, and the prevalent defi¬ nitions of subjectivity as a private, unique experience and objectiv¬ ity as a public, always verifiable experience do not hold up logically. Adorno particularly emphasizes the interpenetration of subject and object in artworks, where subjectivity is more compelling than in other types of cognition because the objectivity of the artwork, which he insists is extremely important, still is seen only through a subject: For the art work as well as for aesthetics, subject and object are mo¬ ments. Their relation is dialectical, which means that the several com¬ ponents of art—material, expression, form or whatever—are each simultaneously subjective and objective. Material is shaped by the hands of those who bring it into the work; expression, while objective in itself, is also a subjective input; similarly, form has to be produced

20

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

with the necessities of the object in mind but by a subject, or else it remains a mechanically imposed mould. Not unlike the construction of a datum in epistemology, the material often confronts the artist like an impenetrable wall; but material is also a sedimentation of the subject. Conversely, in expression which is ostensibly the most subjective com¬ ponent there is objectivity in the sense that the work of art is being transformed, as it incorporates and deals with expression; thus expres¬ sion turns into a subjective mode of behaviour bearing the imprint of objectivity. The reciprocal relationship of object and subject in art works is a precarious balance, not an identity of the two.2

Subjectivity is represented in opera in numerous ways by various composers and becomes an especially important motif in modern¬ ist operas. Opera is uniquely valuable in the representation of the concept of the self in that it depends on and exploits the singing voice. Just as the body is the primary sign in theater, the voice in opera is the primary sign, proclaiming the presence and actions of the person. But the voice is a contradictory sign; on the one hand, it reminds us that the self exists inevitably as a material body. (The same is true of drama, of course, where the individual actor’s body and voice represent the fictional character, but in opera the re¬ moval of voice from the ordinary mode of speaking to the extraordi¬ nary mode of singing ensures and emphasizes a kind of Otherness, an insistence on the material, more intensely than in spoken drama.) On the other hand, in opera the voice is oddly dematerialized, projected out of the body; it seems to exist in another dimen¬ sion from the space-time of the stage and the social world it represents. The music (voice and orchestra) constitutes an entity that is so different from the speaking voice as to seem to come from another world. As a complicating factor, music itself is Otherness in another form; that is, the material sounds of music come origi¬ nally from nature or the objective world, though of course highly mediated. In experiencing music, we experience nature or matter as something having its own structure and embodiment, its own purpose. The sounds of music are material (vibrations striking the eardrum) and at some stage in their history derived from nature (natural vocalizations by animals or humans, wind sounds, whack¬ ing sounds, and the like). But music is the embodiment of material sound in purposeful structures that are so far removed from their origins both in nature and (to a lesser extent) in human agency that

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

21

they seem to constitute a separate and independent material uni¬ verse. Music in opera, especially since Wagner, is self-divided, ex¬ isting both as “absolute” music emanating from the orchestra (and thus it sometimes suggests a land of disembodied subject, a narra¬ tor) and as sung music emanating from the characters on stage. As a result, opera is an art in which the human self is often simultane¬ ously defined in a contradictory manner—as sensual, time-ori¬ ented, changing, feeling (in the orchestral musical text) and as social, controlled, and controlling (in the dramatic text). This is not to say that the two spheres are rigidly separated, but the general division of labor is much more important in opera than in other forms of drama or music.3

Definition of Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a complicated term with a range of meanings. It usually means something like, in Dallmayr’s words, the “underly¬ ing foundation or pre-given substance in which human experi¬ ences are rooted,” and is often used as roughly synonymous with ego and self.4 But a broader definition of subjectivity, one which deemphasizes the psychological or essentialist aspects of the term, is perhaps more useful. The subject, in the sense I am using it, is a culturally developed disposition which varies to some extent ac¬ cording to the time and place in which it occurs, rather than a human given which is always the same through every historical pe¬ riod. The subject is in a sense an ideology of the self: that is, the idea we have and the use we make, individually and as a culture, of what it means to be a self. That does not mean that there is not an essential human nature, of course: perhaps there is a human psychology that remains constant in spite of cultural change. In¬ deed, the Freudian theory of drives is based on this assumption. And Hegel, as we have seen, assumed that certain elements of indi¬ vidual behavior were innate, especially desire. But in any case, the “natural” or essential element of subjectivity develops only in its cultural context. So a useful definition of subjectivity is that it is the culturally defined disposition of natural elements that enables individuals to act and interact as selves in modern human society. The philosophical discourse I am drawing on to define the subject, a discourse which includes Freud and Hegel, is only one of many

22

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

in Western culture that help create an overall image of the subject, an image that individuals internalize and more or less live out in their own experiences. My thesis is that opera is one of those dis¬ courses, particularly important because of the ways in which it combines many strands of representation and expression, particu¬ larly drama and music. The question of subjectivity is articulated as such in the philo¬ sophical discourse but of course arises in other cultural arenas as well.5 There is a strong, internalized sense of the subject through¬ out Western culture; for example, cultural differences such as those observable in the differences between nineteenth-century German and Italian opera arise at least partially from variations in the conception and representation of subjectivity. But regardless of historical differences, the subject, in the popular definition, is al¬ most always the speaking subject, the individual who produces spo¬ ken (and written) discourse and who controls language, creating internal meanings and producing words and sentences that trans¬ mit these meanings. But as Francis Jacques, drawing partly on poststructuralist philosophy and partly on the language theories of Bakhtin, asserts, the premises of this commonsense view of the subject must be supplemented. Jacques points out that although the subject is the speaker, he or she is also a listener, because he or she takes part in a dialogue. Thus if we define the subject as the person who speaks his or her mind, we are logically required to ex¬ tend that definition to include the person who listens and responds to the speech of others.6 Because we logically and empirically must include the listener, Jacques argues, we should see subjectivity in terms of the speaking person, but not a person who is in charge of and completely in control of his or her words and meanings. In¬ stead, the speaking person is by definition operating in a situation of verbal communication.7 Thus to think of social dialogue as an interchange between two independent individuals is not quite ac¬ curate. Instead, we must remember that those individuals are al¬ most entirely dependent on language and the social history embedded in it for their own self-definition and action as speakers. Thus the individual results from rather than causes social dialogue, and can place himself or herself as an individual only through shar¬ ing language with others. Yet Jacques admits that this sense of the self as contingent upon interpersonal communication is difficult to envision. As a speaking

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

23

person, each of us creates a sense of an interior consciousness that we feel, very strongly, is separate from and prior to ourselves as speakers. In Jacques’s words, “the unifying I individualizes and creates interiority. My consciousness constitutes a synthetic whole unified in time, but isolated from others and incommunicable.”8 This sense of possessing a thing, consciousness, that exists within the mind and unifies our experiences, is powerful, the source of the common concept that our most characteristic trait is interior¬ ity, the soul or consciousness that inhabits our bodies and controls or guides our outer lives. This interior sense of self, the cogito with which Descartes begins his exploration of the subject, is also fre¬ quently seen as the cognitive or psychological set of physiological reactions or emotion. However, in spite of its importance to our sense of self, this psychic/emotional interior is just a part of the complex constellation that constitutes subjectivity. That constellation appears to us in different perspectives from various segments of our experiences. Jacques draws a distinction between persons, characters, individuals, and the self, arguing that these words represent different discourses into which we project our sometimes contrasting ideas of the subject. In his typology, when we designate the subject as a character we have in mind a public persona or type, such as the magnanimous or meditative person—such individuals have qualities that are “the predictable manifestations of certain dispositions.” Characters in drama some¬ times fall into this category: they have one dominant characteristic and their actions are perceived as consistent with that characteris¬ tic. By contrast, what we usually designate as the self—an entity prone to self-confession—is the collection of qualities we tend to think we own, yet is something larger that this set of qualities. The self is “generally held to be the conscious possession of experi¬ ences” and is created by the continuity of memory. The person, still another category of the subject, is a social and legal being “tradi¬ tionally defined by its ability to assume responsibility and, I would add, to respond to others as a possible interlocutor.” Another term, the individual, indicates those who are “undivided, singular people who count only on themselves (the famous self-reliance so dear to Emerson).” According to Jacques, subjectivity is not any one of these concepts but includes all of them: the concept has undergone “extremely dramatic changes in the course of its history, which could be redefined as a history of different discourses on the self.

24

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

Different discursive games, rather than a gradually revealed system of representation, are what have determined the fundamental characteristics of the ego.”9 Thus the subject is a diversely defined and experienced thing. It develops historically and is distinct from the physical experience of life that humans share with other forms of life. Hegel was careful to point out that to be a subject is to be self-conscious; as Adorno puts it, the subject is a subject only when he or she represents him¬ self or herself as a subject: “the individual becomes a subject inso¬ far as its individual consciousness objectifies it, in the unity of the self as well as in the unity of its experiences; to animals, presum¬ ably, both unities are denied.”10 Thus it follows that the self is not an innate characteristic but something specific to humans and something that is learned, consciously and unconsciously, in the process of enculturation. The self is created out of our language, our experiences, and our natural propensities. Moreover, subjectiv¬ ity in this sense is not a given, but is rather an accomplishment, partly conscious, of the individual: as Drucilla Cornell affirms, “A self is not a given, it is a goal, an aesthetic achievement.”11 But of course to argue that subjectivity is a cultural construct does not suggest that our sense of ourselves as unique experiencing entities is entirely incorrect. Our experience of self, much more complex than common sense allows, has been called the “illusion of subjectivity” or the “subjectivity effect.”12 Jacques identifies the “subjectivity effect” as “an illusion whose purpose, in its most phil¬ osophical form, is to turn the individual into a subject of knowledge or action, to constitute the subject-self into a form of being. It is an illusion that allows persons to appear to themselves with a feeling of autonomy and permanence, with memories, qualities, and their own baggage of guilt.” It is an illusion in the sense that it appears to us as a thing even though we may realize it is a process. Jacques argues that what is in fact directly given us is not a thing but is sim¬ ply our experience of intercommunication. Therefore we must see subjectivity as “sometimes an effect, sometimes an illusion, but never as a basic principle.”13 Jacques’s argument that the self is culturally constructed from dialogue and hence permeable and un¬ stable serves to emphasize the cultural rather than the innate as¬ pects of the self. Although we may accept Jacques’s position concerning the philo¬ sophical principles involved in subjectivity, the fact that most per-

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

25

sons experience the subjectivity effect makes its appearance or representation in opera and other discursive forms still dominant. It creates, as Jacques notes, “the illusion of a private, ineffable interiority. This is of course because subjectivity, which is so loudly re¬ jected on an epistemological level, acquires in our life experience a color, flavor, and tone that are irreducible.”14 This color or flavor of interiority is a basic entity represented in Wagnerian and postWagnerian opera; musical structure that may have been objective for Bach became with romanticism more and more the repository for the impulse to express a sense of inner being, not the inner being of the composer, of course, but of a general cultural sense of what it feels like to be an individual or, in the case of opera, the inner being of characters.

Historical Development of Subjectivity Subjectivity has a history. It developed as a concept at the begin¬ ning of philosophical modernism with the writings of Descartes, who articulated a new notion of subjectivity in which the thinking human defines himself or herself as a person who constructs the world through the action of the mind. This new subjectivity par¬ tially replaced a generally accepted version of the human self in which the responsibility of the individual was simply to understand and fit into a world created by God: in Andrew Bowie’s words, mod¬ ernism begins “when the basis upon which the world is interpreted ceases to be a deity whose pattern has already been imprinted into existence and becomes instead our reflection upon our own think¬ ing about the world.”15 The loss of certainty in the belief in god in the beginning of the modem age required that humans turn else¬ where to discover ways to make sense of the world. Historical forces created a new situation for Western humans that compelled them to restructure the world, not according to the dictates of church and state, but according to the efforts of the seemingly independent individual mind. It seems clear that with the end of the medieval world, in which individuals were assumed to be determined in their characters by God and responsible to church and state, the concept of the indi¬ vidual person changed. Freed from previous obligations, the self at the beginning of modernism shifted; indeed, as Heidegger suggests,

26

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

“the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes sub¬ ject”—that is, man becomes the ground of all that is.16 Because the Cartesian discourse articulated this newly arising assumption of the self as the source of all knowledge and experience, Descartes is generally credited with the “invention” of subjectivity.17 The Carte¬ sian view was opposed to a conception of society that assumed that social institutions were part of a natural hierarchy and that the in¬ dividual lived out a life within this sphere in whatever preordained mode he or she was bom into. Cascardi points out that the person living in such a highly stable society had a definite conception of moral value and of the orderliness of the universe; values were given and could never be modified. But historical changes made that kind of certainty no longer possible—a process articulated in Othello and other works—and there arose the necessity for recons¬ tituting the subject on new grounds. The Cartesian subject, then, is a response to the new unstable, contingent conditions, and itself constitutes an effort at creating a new kind of stability.18 However, traces of the medieval view of the subject remain in cultural dis¬ courses; the medieval self has not been destroyed, simply displaced as the dominant form by competing views. The individual as sub¬ ject to a mythical or sacred power and as taking up a firm position in relation to this power is still an important cultural idea that sur¬ faces in all sorts of discourses, including opera, of course, which has historically had a strongly conservative element. However, with the advent of modernism, the subject confronts a different but also difficult situation: values, having lost their as¬ sumed emanation from an already-existing universe, must be cre¬ ated anew. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many persons came to feel that truth and validity, no longer given by the church, could be recovered in reason, newly defined as a natural mental system available to all humans, a system emanating from and capable of comprehending nature. Thus in the modem world values and rights came to be seen as issuing from a generalized or transcendental subjectivity, that is, the rational self available to everyone. This portrayal of the individual as an instance of the gen¬ eralized rational subject in which moral values originate lies at the basis of much of Enlightenment thinking. Many of the Mozart op¬ eras demonstrate this sense of values, but often, for Mozart, the drama is supplied by the contrast between this moral subject and individuals who at least temporarily refuse to see themselves as

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

27

part of this universal moral/rational universe: Count Almaviva gives in at the end but Don Giovanni does not. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reason came more and more to be questioned as a firm and unfail¬ ing basis for the establishment of value and meaning. The romantic impulse to assert the individual’s freedom to determine the good for himself or herself is essential to the modem definition of self. However, modernity continues to struggle with its inability to give up concepts of authority and order in the social sphere. This cre¬ ates a radical instability that Cascardi feels is definitive of modern¬ ism itself. Thus the new freedom from the constraints of a primarily theological point of view, articulated by Descartes and both continued and critiqued by Hegel, creates both freedom and doubt: according to Cascardi, the modem view of the world, the disappearance of hierarchies and a given order of the good “yields a vision of the world as potentially open to transformation from within, but also raises fears that the world may be governed by no authoritative perspective or controlling point of view.”19 Thus Casc¬ ardi wishes to emphasize that the modem subject is enmeshed in a continuing struggle for autonomy that clashes with its perhaps nostalgic desire (and real political need) for a secure social struc¬ ture.

Hegel and the Formation of the Subject

A correction for the loss of value inherent upon the rise of subjec¬ tivity and the solipsisms, selfishness, or self-indulgent excesses ac¬ companying the consequent rise of individualism has frequently been sought by emphasizing, as Francis Jacques does, the deriva¬ tion of the subject from intersubjective experience. This critique of individualism begins with Hegel, who reproached Cartesian subjec¬ tivity in a particularly modernist way by suggesting that subjectivity arises not entirely from the individual but from social and historical forces, particularly intersubjective ones. Hegel points out that the subject cannot be understood apart from the historical and social world it is set in. This was a profoundly important philosophical move; although Kant’s transcendental subject had been abstracted from real individuals, Hegel’s critique of the formalism and nonhistorical approach of Kant’s view allowed him to reinterpret the

28

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

subject as radically determined by the social. Hegel’s theory of mu¬ tual recognition, which outlines subjectivity as a self-consciousness that develops only as a form of desiring consciousness that re¬ sponds to the desire of another consciousness, remains the most important philosophical statement of this approach to subjectivity. Hegel’s insistence that the self-consciousness of the individual is created through experience with others constitutes his lasting con¬ tribution to modernism, outliving his insistence on system and the final resolution of subject and object in Absolute Spirit. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel analyzes the experiences in which subjectivity, which he calls self-consciousness, is created. Hegel holds that experience and knowledge are not simple or uni¬ tary but emerge as a series of occurrences or a process that always follows a dialectic pattern. Hegel outlines a process whereby the simple biological consciousness, imbued with a spurious certitude derived from the testimony of the senses, goes through various ‘‘moments” that can be separated out and analyzed but that are in fact not only intertwined but specifically entail each other in the creation of the self-conscious human subject. Though he empha¬ sizes that the object has a reality independent of the subject’s per¬ ception of it (like Kant’s thing-in-itself), for Hegel, the subject’s awareness of this independence is a negative moment that is essen¬ tial both to the process of becoming a subject and to entering into a relationship with the world. That is, the object has a reality that escapes human conceptualization, but the moment we think of it this way that reality has indeed changed its character; the thing-initself has become a concept, however shadowy. Thus no matter how hard we try to overcome this conceptualization, the objective world remains in a sense locked in the subject’s mind. But this is not an empty idealism which amounts to solipsism; Hegel does not argue that the object has no actual reality, nor does he argue that such actuality does not matter. Indeed, it matters very much; for Hegel, the inability to conceptualize the real and the simultaneous awareness of that inability are essential to the self’s concept of itself as a perceiving and thinking entity. The independence of the object world, which we can never know except as a shadowy idea, is a void, a lack, an inability on the part of the perceiving mind to com¬ prehend the world. This void is definitive of the subject, according to Hegel:

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

29

With that first moment [consciousness viewing the objective world in immediate sensuous acceptance] self-consciousness is in the form of consciousness, and the whole expanse of the sensuous world is pre¬ served for it, but at the same time only as connected with the second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself; and hence the sen¬ suous world is for it an enduring existence which, however, is only ap¬ pearance, or a difference which, in itself, is no difference. This antithesis of its appearance and its truth has, however, for its essence only the truth, viz. the unity of self-consciousness with itself; this unity must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general. Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz. itself which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object. In this sphere, self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes ex¬ plicit for it.20

That is, in one moment of consciousness (a land of presubjective state), the subject views the world as simply what appears to the senses. But this presubjective state never really exists; instead the modern subject, at the same time it perceives the world, perceives itself as a self (“the unity of self-consciousness with itself”). Thus the objective world is seen not entirely as an independent thing; the thing-in-itself, the moment the subject understands that he or she is the perceiving agent, becomes an idea, semblance, or “ap¬ pearance.” But because of this understanding of the double nature of the world—as reality and as appearance—the subject must see itself too as appearance. The subject is the appearance, the under¬ standing of the thing-in-itself as a concept rather than as a physical reality. Thus the subject is formed through the understanding that it can never really perceive the world except as a void, as a lack in the subject itself. Desire, the need to fill up and overcome that lack, becomes the subject’s determining characteristic. Hegel goes on to say that a parallel process happens on the part of the object; it is not simply an inert something but turns back on itself; here he finds it necessary to define the object as Life. Be¬ cause the subject will find not the inert object but a living process as the thing-in-itself and as appearance, the subject will “learn through experience that the object is independent,”21 because it

30

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

(the objective world) exists as a process that develops autono¬ mously. Thus Hegel insists that the object does not exist simply in the mind of the perceiver. Actually, it is the subject itself which ex¬ ists only in that way. The subject is appearance, negativity, void, gap: “Self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by supersed¬ ing this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an inde¬ pendent life; self-consciousness is Desire ”22 Thus the subject enters into historical and social practices through its recurring but always incomplete relationship with the Other. Negativity and desire are doubled, however, in that Hegel takes his argument a step further—the Other against which the subject defines itself is not only Life but more specifically another self-con¬ sciousness. The thing in which the subject must find itself is some¬ thing that also exists in the negative, that is, another subject: “Selfconsciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-con¬ sciousness.”23 The subject cannot form itself against an inferior en¬

tity, something that is less complex and less developed than itself, because the steps, the “moments,” required for the development of the self simply do not exist. So for Hegel the subject is formed by interacting with another subject, which he calls the mutual recog¬ nition of two equally complex and aware self-consciousnesses, or subjects: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. ’ ’24 Thus desire becomes extremely important in Hegel. In the first place, desire causes the self to perceive itself as a self rather than as a simple self-transparent perceiving mechanism. For Hegel, the self who becomes aware of its own desire therefore becomes aware of itself as a desiring entity. Further, desire is the desire to trans¬ form the desired object— Hegel’s example is hunger, in which the desire is to destroy, by consuming, the object. This is a moment of negativity: the subject’s desire expresses itself as the need to negate the object, to consume or own it. Desire itself is negative, an ex¬ pression of an emptiness or lack. Thus, as Kojeve explains it, “man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothing¬ ness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it an¬ nihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being. . . .”25 However, this type of desire is typical of animals also. In order to differentiate human desire from animal desire, Hegel suggests that the thing desired finally is something that can’t be

1: SUBJECT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND OPERA

31

consumed (because after the consumption the incipient self re¬ turns to its previous state instead of becoming something more; the dialectical process is stymied and it remains animal). The particu¬ larly human step is when the human subject desires that which cannot be consumed: the other person, the desire of the other per¬ son, the recognition given by the other that the subject exists as subject.26 This resistance to being consumed is an expression of the impulse toward freedom characteristic of the modem subject. The Other who is desired saves himself from this consumption by offer¬ ing something more, by reflecting desire and self-definition back to the subject.27 Another approach to this is to say, as Zizek does, that the Hege¬ lian subject is finally simply the moment of negativity left over when the inadequacy of mind to the objective world is manifest. Zizek defines the Hegelian subject as “absolute, self-relating negativity— [the subject] is nothing but the very gap which separates phenom¬ ena from the Thing, the abyss beyond phenomena conceived in its negative mode, that is, the purely negative gesture of limiting phe¬ nomena without providing any positive content which would fill out the space beyond the limit.”28 Thus, for Zizek, the social and histor¬ ical processes set in motion through the negativity of desire must always be marked by their origin in this void.29 Adorno, among other modern readers of Hegel, suggests that Hegel’s theory of mutual recognition was important in that histori¬ cally it began the process of undermining the view of the subject that sees it as really some type of object—that is, the view that tends to see the Other as a thing that cannot see us back. Yet, as Adorno points out, this “philosophy of consciousness,” which Hegel to some extent opposes with his idea of mutual recognition, is both false and true: false in its view of the subject as rationally single and independent, but true in that Adorno sees the individual, trapped in modem social structures, as isolated against his or her will from other humans.30 Thus for him the contradictions of modem aes¬ thetic forms, including opera, reflect this simultaneous truth and falsity of our traditional modes of thinking about the subject. Therefore we can see that while it is not incorrect to see desire, isolation, and the negative aspects of the mechanism of subjectivity in the appalling social histories referred to in such works as Wozzeck, Lulu, and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, it is also not incorrect to read the same mechanism of subjectivity (viewed V

32

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

with the stronger emphasis on intersubjectivity that lies behind the concept of mutual recognition) as reflecting the liberating qualities of subjectivity implied in such works as Parsifal and Messiaen’s Saint Frangois d’Assise. Opera is a particularly fertile aesthetic dis¬ course in which to examine these contradictions, a genre in which composers and librettists adopt, consciously and unconsciously, varying attitudes toward what it means to be a subject in the mod¬ em world.

6

2

.

Operatic Form: Drama and Music Subjectivity, then, is an “invention” of modernism, an ideological

construct created from a variety of conflicting discursive sources. The modem concept of the self arose primarily in the Renaissance, as a part of the new freedom from medieval modes of conceptual¬ ization that swept Europe. But the prinicipal development of the idea of the human as a “subject,” as an entity with a unique and individual approach to perception and interaction with the world, was most clearly articulated in philosophical texts, beginning with Descartes. But the concept of the self or subject that shows up in opera and other forms of culture is not derived from philosophical texts, though it is influenced by them (a reciprocal influence: the texts themselves partially or wholly describe existing cultural tend¬ encies). Rather, the concept of the self that develops in opera, es¬ pecially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is itself an important part of the general cultural understanding of selfhood; opera, in a way that differs from other types of cultural texts, contri¬ butes positively to our understanding of what it means to be a self. Opera is not frequently seen as performing such an impressive cultural function. Instead, it is frequently seen as a form that sim¬ ply reproduces reigning ideologies of bourgeois identity, reproduc¬ ing these for the comfortable self-assurance of its wealthy (and, in this view, not too smart) patrons. However, of course such a view is limited; opera can and does contribute to modernism’s develop¬ ment of subjectivity. While it is certain that one thing opera does is to reinforce existing social structures and the concepts that shore them up, such reinforcement is one function not only of opera but of all types of art. But we usually try to maintain that “art” does something more, that art challenges and criticizes social struc¬ tures, whether consciously or not. The autonomy of art is funda¬ mental to this modernist notion in that it was the historic release

33

34

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

of art from political and church patronage that allowed it to begin to function in more critical ways. We have only to think of the dif¬ ferences between Mozart’s opera seria and his Da Ponte operas to see ways in which the genre itself responded to this freeing of art from patronage. However, opera is today viewed with skepticism by some because it so clearly still retains so much of the flavor of patronage. Because opera is inordinately expensive to produce, it does not tend to be a product of small experimental theater companies or avant-garde artists (there are some notable exceptions, of course).1 Opera today tends to reside in larger cities and to have, if not government pa¬ tronage, at least the sponsorship or partial sponsorship of corpora¬ tions and foundations, as it is usually impossible to support opera with ticket sales. Thus it does tend to reinforce standard or capital¬ ist values. But such a view of opera is superficial. What the most engaging operas have always done, because of their combination of drama and music, is to examine in a unique way the cultural con¬ cept of persons and their interpersonal interaction. (Again, the Mo¬ zart opera seria come to mind: works such as La Clemenza de Tito engage a text clearly designed to flatter the ruling power but also engage Enlightenment values of individuality that Mozart was evi¬ dently committed to.) Operas frequently, though not always so clearly as in the case of Mozart, directly engage contradictory goals; the music may suggest on the one hand an experience that defies language and rationality, and the text on the other hand may par¬ ticipate in language and ideological structures, especially because of the conservative nature of many opera texts (only a few operas, such as the Glass operas or those based on the libretti of Gertrude Stein, engage experimental texts). Certainly opera is frequently ideologically conservative; as part of what one theater critic calls “ritualized discourse,” opera and other types of theater participate in what Foucault terms the “capillary form” of power, in which power structures are diffused throughout culture and seem to get into our very pores. For example, styles of acting popular in theater before the twentieth century may at first seem simply quaint, but they were actually important in that they may have had an “ambition to promulgate self-mastery and to im¬ plant particular behaviors in the body.”2 That is, theater as ritual¬ ized discourse has often had the function of imaging for its audience, sometimes in quite literal ways, acceptable social behav-

2: OPERATIC FORM: DRAMA AND MUSIC

35

iors including, perhaps, discipline and control of the body. The mu¬ sically stylized emotions of opera seria or even the early romantic style of Rossini had a similar function. But the advent of modern¬ ism in the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the ideological function of opera change and opened the way for composers to begin to challenge dominant codes of control and power through exploring the conflicting messages of modernism (this is Nietz¬ sche’s reading of opera in The Birth of Tragedy). Because opera al¬ ready encompassed, by definition, conflicting ideologies embedded in its often conflicting discourses, music and text, such challenges fell naturally in the way of opera composers.3

Music and Text That opera is created equally out of drama and music constitutes its unique strength and allows its particular contribution to mod¬ ernism. Historically, much of opera criticism has been devoted to the question of this equality; commentators have continually asked themselves whether music or drama may claim primacy in opera. One recent entrant in that conversation is Peter Kivy, who argues that opera may be divided into two principal types, which he desig¬ nates opera and music drama, and that these, while not mutually exclusive, do point toward two different tendencies in opera his¬ tory, one toward an assumption that opera is primarily a musical form, so that the musical requirements (of structure) remain fore¬ most, the other toward “an art-form-cum-music, which is in vari¬ ous respects independent of the requirements of musical form.”4 In general early opera instituted a sharp difference between drama and music, dividing operatic structure within itself into recitative and aria. However, to regard this distinction between music and text as the “problem of opera,” as many commentators have, is to reify a historical tendency in a way that the development of the genre itself does not support. In fact, words and music form a dia¬ lectical and necessary tension within opera, and this tension itself is what is most characteristic of opera. The tension arises in part because the music and the text have a different history and a differ¬ ent purpose within the overall dramatic context. (Brecht, one of the most important modernist innovators in theater, emphasized this difference in suggesting that the separation of the elements of

36

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

drama, rather than their fusion, as he imagined Wagner to advo¬ cate, was essential to effective drama.) We should certainly remember, too, that both the text and music of an opera are meaningless outside of their dramatic context, and to discuss them as mutually exclusive is to omit consideration of what is most important—theater. Theater is a cultural discourse that serves a number of functions—communal, celebratory, criti¬ cal—and music, visual effects, text, styles of acting, and the physi¬ cal layout of the theater are all historical variables that allow a particular theatrical experience to serve its purpose in a singular way. Modern opera has its own singularity: the historical differ¬ ences that were created separately through, first, the historical development of drama as a form that explores primarily intersubjective relations, and second, the development of the idea that music is an expression of interiority, provided the primary motivic energy in the development of modem opera. What opera does—using music to support or elucidate a text through its ability to be constructed as an expression of the hidden or psychological states of the characters—though associated now with Wagner and other romantic composers, actually has a long history. Kivy points out that the seventeenth-century composers of the Camerata regarded music that employs pictorial representation (that is, works in which textual references to tears elicit a “sighing” melodic line or references to a fountain a rising, “bubbly” one) as inferior, aimed only at delighting the ear. They preferred music that represents “passions” or emotions as morally significant (such music would enable the audience to imitate the hero, for in¬ stance).5 This was a first move toward seeing music as a represen¬ tation of interiority, but a concept of the individual as subject—the originator of all experience and knowledge—had not yet been fully articulated. However, a change comes into opera and other music with text with the development of a new, post-Renaissance psy¬ chology. This new view of the makeup of the human “soul” was elucidated, rather fittingly, by Descartes in Les Pasions de I’ame (The Passions of the Soul, 1649). In this work, which was influen¬ tial at the time though not well-known now, Descartes presented a mechanistic theory of the emotions, suggesting they are caused by physical properties of the body (something like chemical reactions) but interpreted by the mind as emotions. Most important to com-

2: OPERATIC FORM: DRAMA AND MUSIC

37

posers was that he imagined the emotions as discrete things that begin, run a course, and reach an end.6 Thus opera seria, with its sectionalized structure, was based on the doctrine of Affektenlehre, from Descartes’s book on psychology. Opera seria, then, according to Kivy, is a reflection of this type of psychology: “the characters of opera seria —emotional fanatics, if you will—either remain obsessively faithful to the last or, where they change, change to an equally obsessive fanaticism at (usually) the opposite pole. And this the da capo aria, that most obsessive, fanatic of musical forms, forever returning to its original complaint, perfectly reflects: perfectly transformed into drama-made-music.”7 The doctrine of Affektenlehre had its influence on acting too. In ba¬ roque drama, the assumption was that the depiction of strong emo¬ tion was the purpose of drama and the most important aspect of acting. Emotions and how to enact them were analyzed in guide¬ books written to explain to actors just what gestures and facial ex¬ pressions to use to express such states as admiration, shame, entreaty, and reproach.8 Thus a kind of inevitably split self, seen as a complex of alternating but relatively independent factors, espe¬ cially reason and emotion, became the subject of opera for Handel and other baroque composers; emotion was, on the one hand, seen as the opposite of reason, but rather inconsistently seen on the other to subscribe to a type of reason of its own, having its own dis¬ crete developmental form and a limited set of categories or genres. But for Mozart and subsequent composers, a different psychol¬ ogy, according to Kivy, led to a different concept of the relationship between musical form and dramatic expression. In the new associationist psychology introduced in the eighteenth century, emotive responses were understood to be acquired rather than innate, and, more importantly, they were felt to supply an unlimited array of re¬ actions and interactions that blend into each other often impercep¬ tibly and that are susceptible to quick changes. Such emotional reactions are personal and idiosyncratic because persons learn emotional responses by associating them with things that happen in life. Kivy suggests that the first great musical expression of this theory of emotions are the finales in Mozart s comedies.9 In these concerted numbers the breakdown of the distinction between reci¬ tative and aria was begun; this breakdown paralleled the musical representation of emotions without borders and opened the way for Wagner and other innovators.

38

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

The traditional relation between music and text coincides in opera with the notion developed above that music contributed to drama a particularly appropriate representation of the emotional states of characters in usually static and arbitrary moments, and that music must be subordinated to dialogue and action (in recita¬ tive) at other moments. This formal structure, based on a distinctmn between emotion and action, expression and dialogue was exploded by Wagner’s engagement with the Hegelian subject in the hooH CyrG T wh the SchoPenhauerian understanding of self¬ hood in Tnstan. Wagner rejected the distinction between recitative ana and intensified the depiction of interiority until his characters seem to engage in dialogue almost at an interior level (a ten¬ dency developed more fully in post-Wagnerian opera, particularly Debussy) Wagnenan and post-Wagnerian opera in facf solves the problem of the separation of music and text in a particularly effecve way hrough the objectivization of interior emotional states.

Form and Content

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