Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner

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СКАЧАТЬ by stating the obvious and then venture to more adventurous propositions. Operas require music, specifically song. Jerrold Levinson has defined “paradigm song” as “a melodically and rhythmically distinctive arch of fully-fledged tones of definite pitch, produced in the form of vocables coalescing into words and sentences, and typically with support, primarily harmonic, from some cohort of instruments.”⁶ Given that this definition would seem to exclude many commonplace components of opera—recitative, vocalise, Sprechstimme, and unaccompanied singing—I am inclined to be more generous. However, that is not to suggest that anything goes. Take, for instance, the Montréal-based composer Luna Pearl Woolf’s “voiceless opera” Mélange à trois (2014) for violin, cello, and percussion. In this work, the performers do not merely play music; they also use their bodies to act out characters in a fictional narrative.⁷ But at no point do they generate sounds with their vocal cords. Their “singing” is made up solely of the sounds they create with their instruments. As such, I regard this work as less an opera than a work of instrumental theater that is inspired by opera, particularly its penchant for melodramatic plots.

      Another work that calls into question the nature of singing is Christine Sun Kim’s Face Opera II (2013) for nine prelingually deaf performers. Although it concludes with the performers generating vocal utterances, it is primarily their facial expressions (from the American Sign Language lexicon) that Sun Kim is inviting her audiences to regard as singing.⁸

      While acknowledging recent explorations of the limits of song and, accordingly, of opera in contemporary music and performance art, this study concerns opera of a more traditional sort. As such, I will be using the verb to sing in its more conventional or literal sense to refer to utterances produced by the performers’ own vocal apparatus that possess a discernable pitch or pitches with at least enough sustainment to allow for pitch discernment. Given that I will be discussing modernist operas and works of musical theater, the bar on tunefulness will need to be sufficiently low to include not only Sprechstimme but also Rex Harrison–esque “talking on pitch,” immortalized in the film musical My Fair Lady (1964).

      Many genres of music tell stories through song. In this chapter, I isolate the medium-specific features of operatic storytelling by comparing it first to narrative songs; then to cantatas, oratorios, and serenatas; and finally to plays and films that contain songs but are not generally considered to be musical dramas.⁹

       Operas versus Narrative Songs

      One of the remarkable features of opera, in contrast to most other musical genres, is its practitioners’ commitment to storytelling. Since its origins around 1600, opera has been understood as a medium for presenting stories. By far the most common generic label applied to the first operas was favola in musica, story presented through music. And so it has remained, even throughout the aesthetic upheavals of the previous century. While practitioners in virtually all other art forms in the West were abandoning narrative, even representation, librettists and composers kept on representing stories through their works. There are nonnarrative operas, such as Einstein on the Beach (1976), but these are few and far between, and they remain on the periphery of the opera canon, in part because of their denial of our expectation for storytelling. Significantly, we are not similarly disturbed by nonnarrative songs or cantatas. With oratorios and serenatas, the expectation of a story is higher. Notably both were used as opera substitutes during Lent and papal bans. But nonnarrative examples exist, including the most famous oratorio of all, Handel’s Messiah (1742).

      It would appear that operatic storytelling can be distinguished from that in songs through Plato’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis or, in the terminology I will employ, enacting character and telling about character.¹⁰ Operatic storytelling involves singers enacting characters: singers’ utterances represent characters’ utterances, and singers’ actions represent characters’ actions. In most songs, by contrast, the singer takes on the role of a narrator who summarizes or paraphrases characters’ speeches and merely describes their activities.

      As Cone has noted, there is not always a clear distinction between enacting a character and telling about a character. Schubert’s Lied “Der Erlkönig” begins and ends with a narrator telling about the characters, but in the internal stanzas, the singer impersonates the utterances of the father, son, and elf king, thereby vocally enacting these characters.¹¹ Furthermore, many operas contain scenes of narration (a situation that I will discuss in more depth in the following chapter). From this evidence, Cone suggests that the difference between song and opera is primarily a matter of duration.

      Cone is too hasty in his conclusions. One key difference between operas and songs is that one-to-one mapping between singers and characters is standard in the former but not in the latter. In an opera, typically all of the utterances made by a given singer are to be understood as representing the fictional utterances of the character the singer is playing. The less this is true, the more challenging it will be to perform the work as an opera.

      Suppose one were tasked with producing an operatic staging of Stravinsky’s Renard (1922). Richard Taruskin summarizes its intended mode of performance as follows: “a troupe of ‘buffoons, ballet dancers, or acrobats’ . . . act the story out in pantomime on a trestle-stage, which they never leave, while the singers remain seated with the instrumentalists in the rear, their voices disembodied after the fashion of Diaghilev’s Coq d’or.”¹² The first step would be to discard the dancers and acrobats and to mobilize the singers to enact the characters: Cock, Fox, Cat, and Ram. This effort would be rather challenging, as Stravinsky often uses multiple singers’ voices to represent the voice of a single character. For this reason, the vocal parts are not designated by the characters’ names, as they are in an opera, but as tenor 1, tenor 2, bass 1, and bass 2. Not all vocal music can support singers enacting characters. It requires approximately one-to-one mapping of singers to characters.

      One commonplace exception is works that involve characters at different stages of life. In adapting Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home (2006) into a musical (2013, music by Jeanine Tesori), the librettist Lisa Kron decided to split the central character into Small Alison (age nine), Middle Alison (age nineteen), and (Adult) Alison (age forty-three). Even if the work does not prescribe a character to be divided into multiple roles, a director may decide to divide it between multiple performers. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s opera film Parsifal (1982) distributed the singing and acting to different performers, most radically in the case of Parsifal, who was sung by the Heldentenor Reiner Goldberg but acted by a boy (Michael Kutter) and, after Kundry’s kiss, a woman (Karen Krick). Deaf West Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening (2014) involved character doubling of a different sort. Deaf actors were paired with hearing doubles who performed most of their vocal utterances. Wendla’s and Melchior’s singer doubles also appeared onstage for much of the show, often interacting with their signing counterparts (chap. 8 contains a more detailed discussion).

      Narration scenes also pose no obstacle to distinguishing between operas and narrative songs. In the course of enacting a character in an opera, a performer may also tell about character, as when a soprano enacts Lakmé in Delibes’s 1883 opera and in so doing tells the legend of the pariah’s daughter. Scenes of narration do not collapse the distinction between enacting character and telling about character because the singer’s act of telling about the pariah’s daughter is embedded within her act of enacting the character Lakmé.

       Operas versus Oratorios and Cantatas

      Opera is not, of course, the only genre of vocal music capable of presenting stories by means of singers enacting characters. Some examples, incidentally all by Handel, include the oratorios Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707) and Esther (1732), the serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708), and the cantatas La Lucrezia (1709) СКАЧАТЬ