Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner

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СКАЧАТЬ of music listening and criticism in Mahler’s sociocultural context. Nevertheless, for my purposes, I will reserve the category of narrative to works that tell or present particular stories.³⁸ Since particularity admits of degrees, the question of the requisite degree of particularity arises. As sketchy as Strauss’s musical representations are in comparison with Cervantes’s novel, I suggest that they are sufficiently particular to qualify as a narrative. But to preserve a distinction between Strauss’s Don Quixote and Stravinsky’s Octet, I am disinclined to lower the bar such that any work that is conducive to narrative imaginings is able to clear it.

      What about works that fall in between these two extremes, such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? In a famous scene from E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910), the Schlegel siblings attend a performance of the symphony. While Margaret and Tibby concern themselves with the “music itself,” Helen imagines “a goblin walking quietly over the universe” who is dispelled in the final movement with “gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!” Her more sober siblings dismiss the legitimacy of her response to the symphony. In Margaret’s words, “she labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music.”³⁹

      In response to the interpretive flights of fancy that characterized much music criticism of the Romantic era, many twentieth-century critics harbored similar doubts about the appropriateness of responses like Helen’s. In philosophy, Peter Kivy has been one of the most outspoken opponents of narrative-based interpretations of instrumental music.⁴⁰ I take a more moderate view. The struggle-to-victory narrative Helen and many nonfictional interpreters have heard in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is insufficiently particular to ground it as a narrative, in my view. Who is struggling? What is the nature of his struggle? With Don Quixote, there are answers to such questions. With Beethoven’s Fifth, there are not.

      Yet, like Forster himself, I am disinclined to agree with Margaret that her sister failed to treat Beethoven’s music “as music.”⁴¹ The impulse to imagine fictional scenarios while listening to music is a natural one, born of our tendency to anthropomorphize objects and make sense of events in our lives with narratives. Narrative listening is not merely a way to make works of instrumental music accessible to children or members of the laity but can also benefit musicians and music scholars. Narrative-based analysis can be a powerful tool for understanding music because it draws attention to conflicts and discontinuities that may be overlooked by other analytical methods.

      Almén is right to be skeptical of many of the stipulations about the necessary ingredients of narratives put forth by literary theorists. However, if they can be faulted for their failure to consider dramatic or musical narratives, an analogous complaint can be laid at Almén’s feet, since his definition is plausible only in the context of instrumental music. Music scholars concerned that our field is a perennial outsider within broader discourses in the humanities ought to consider whether idiosyncratic definitions of shared concepts are apt to bring us closer to or further away from colleagues tackling similar questions in other fields. My motive for proposing a more circumscribed definition of narrative is to facilitate dialogues between music and other disciplines and between music scholars, performers, and members of the general public.

      If works are more akin to processes than products alone, determining whether a work is a narrative involves more than merely studying its structural features. One must also consider the way it was made (was it modeled on a preexisting or composer-authored story?), its intended mode of reception (did its composer intend for listeners to hear this story’s characters and events in the work?), and whether the composer was successful in achieving the desired response (are listeners able to hear the music as presenting this story?). Thus, I propose that a narrative is an utterance intentionally made to convey a story.

      In defining what a story is, I have taken an agent-oriented approach, rather than one focused on the representation of events, because it directs our attention to one of the chief reasons for our interest in narratives: the agents at their center. These agents need not be human, but they do need to perform intentional actions. Comparing Strauss’s Don Quixote to Stravinsky’s Octet, I argued that narratives concern particular agents performing particular actions. As such, themes, pitches, and instrumental parts are not strong candidates to be the agents of narratives, but they may be rendered more particular if listeners use their imaginations. Composers of works of instrumental music express their intention that their work presents a story by inviting listeners to imagine that musical features, such as themes or instruments, represent agents. In most cases, this invitation is made through extramusical means, such as the work’s title and accompanying program or pictures, which serve to guide listeners’ imaginative escapades.⁴²

      Putting it all together, I propose the following definition: A narrative is an utterance intended to communicate a story, which necessarily involves representing particular agents exercising their agency through particular intentional actions. Due to music’s lack of semantic specificity in comparison with literature or theater, successfully conveying a story in a work of instrumental music typically involves a suggestive title and a program that clarifies what the music is intended to represent. Thus, the category of narrative music overlaps with that of program music—music intended to represent or evoke extramusical phenomena—but not precisely. Debussy’s La mer (1905) and Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923) both fall into the latter category but not the former. Although both are representational and, furthermore, represent a change in state—of the sea and of a train gradually picking up speed, respectively—they do not represent any sentient beings and thus are not narratives under the proposed definition.⁴³

      In the next chapter, my focus shifts from instrumental music to opera and musical theater, exploring what is involved in conveying a story in a musical drama.

      Notes

      1. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ch. 1, 48–56.

      2. Ibid., x, xii–xiii, 11–13.

      3. Ibid., 57–60.

      4. Another scholar who is dismissive of music’s narrational abilities is Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrative Music?” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115, no. 2 (1990): 240–57.

      5. Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 40. Almén’s definition is based on James Jakób Liszka, The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

      6. Susan McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during a Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Susan McClary and Richard Leppert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25, 28, 36.

      7. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 25.

      8. McClary, “Talking Politics,” 40.

      9. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 39.

      10. Ibid., 32–35, 41.

      11. Peter Kivy, “Action and Agency,” in Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 119–56.

      12. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–64.

      13. Some music scholars treat the score as the composer’s product (e.g., Michael Talbot, “Introduction,” СКАЧАТЬ