Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
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Название: Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater
Автор: Nina Penner
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты
Серия: Musical Meaning and Interpretation
isbn: 9780253052421
isbn:
32. See, for example, Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, ch. 4; Cone, Composer’s Voice, ch. 5; Marion A. Guck, “Rehabilitating the Incorrigible,” in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57–73; Robert S. Hatten, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 32–34, ch. 7, 287–88; Gregory Karl, “Structuralism and the Musical Plot,” Music Theory Spectrum 19, no. 1 (1997): 13–34; Fred E. Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 1–41; Fred E. Maus, “Music as Drama,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 105–30; McClary, “Talking Politics”; Monahan, “Action and Agency Revisited”; Anthony Newcomb, “Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 131–53; Philip Rupprecht, “Agency Effects in the Instrumental Drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle,” in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 189–215.
33. Jerrold Levinson, “Music as Narrative and Music as Drama,” in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 134n6, also makes this distinction.
34. Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about My Octuor,” in Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 2nd ed., by Eric Walter White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 574, 575. Stravinsky’s essay was originally published in The Arts in January 1924.
35. Walter Nouvel, Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 83 (ellipsis in the original).
36. Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996), 147–56, 543–44; James Hepokoski, Review of Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss by Walter Werbeck, Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 3 (1998): 608–9.
37. Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler’s Todtenfeier and the Problem of Program Music,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 1 (1988): 43. In a letter to Max Marschalk after the premiere of his Second Symphony, Mahler stated that he “was never concerned with the detailed description of an event, but to the highest degree with that of a feeling.” Quoted in ibid., 41.
38. Particularity is also stressed by Currie, Narratives and Narrators, 11; Woodruff, Necessity of Theatre, 98–101.
39. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 30, 31, 36. I thank Linda Hutcheon for recommending this example.
40. Kivy, “Action and Agency.”
41. Michelle Fillion, Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 83, notes that Margaret’s and Helen’s responses dramatize the two modes of listening Forster juxtaposes in his 1939 essay “Not Listening to Music”: “music itself” and “music that reminds me of something.” Although Forster cautions that the latter approach may lead to “inattention,” he also states that “only a purist would condemn all visual parallels, all emotional labellings, all programmes.” E. M. Forster, “Not Listening to Music,” in Two Cheers for Democracy, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 122, 123.
42. A musical work with accompanying pictures is Biber’s “Mystery” Sonatas (1676).
43. If Honegger had represented an athlete running a race, it is possible that this hypothetical work would be a narrative. The train, however, does not have desires or aims.
IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, OPERATIC PROGRAMMING HAS become ever more varied, including not only a wider range of repertoire from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also an increasing number of works not generally considered to be operas, such as Handel oratorios and Broadway musicals. The Komische Oper Berlin has even staged a production of Mozart’s Requiem. In response to the increasing diversity of items attracting operatic billing, Monika Hennemann has remarked that “there seem to be no limits to what falls under that category.”1
In light of this trend, an attempt to define what differentiates operatic storytelling from that in related forms such as dramatic songs, oratorios, and cantatas may seem like a futile endeavor. In opera studies, there is a long history of skepticism that there is anything particular about the way operas tell stories, from Edward T. Cone’s suggestion that “every song is to a certain extent a little opera, every opera is no less an expanded song” to Hennemann’s more recent questioning of the distinction between opera and oratorio.2 While recognizing the many connections among operas, songs, cantatas, and oratorios as well as the potential to stage many works in the latter categories as operas, this chapter also points to some key differences between these art forms. One distinction my account of operatic storytelling will not make is that between operas and musicals (for reasons given in the overture). In what follows, references to opera and operatic storytelling should be understood to encompass musicals.
My philosophical readers may harbor skepticism of a different sort, arising from the still controversial concept of medium specificity. Following David Davies and Berys Gaut, I understand medium in art as referring not merely to the materials (physical or otherwise) with which artists work but also to the practices governing how they use these materials.3 Skeptics of medium specificity, such as Noël Carroll, target an extreme version of the thesis, by which each medium is believed to possess properties that are unique to it and artists are instructed to exploit only those unique properties.4 My aim is merely to identify some features that differentiate opera from related media, such as song and oratorio, not to suggest that composers and librettists ought to focus their attention on only these features.
I also reject some of the evaluative claims endorsed by other moderate supporters of medium specificity. Gaut, for instance, suggests that the effective exploitation of the medium-specific features of cinema makes visual extravaganzas such as Cloud Atlas (2012)—chock-full of montage sequences and special effects—cinematically better than static, dialogue-driven films such as My Dinner with André (1981).5 Although commonsensical, such a position would seem to limit the possibilities that are legitimate to pursue in any given medium, a situation I am keen to avoid. In my view, successfully exploiting the properties particular to opera may or may not generate operatic works that are superior in any respect to those that are less characteristically operatic. Nevertheless, knowing what medium the artists were working in, and its particular strengths and weaknesses, plays an important role in explaining and evaluating works of art. For example, understanding the challenges of conveying on the stage the kind of deep psychological investigations at which novels excel renders Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s success at doing so in their 1973 operatic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) all the more virtuosic.
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