Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner

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СКАЧАТЬ on how they are intended to be performed: theatrical performances involving sets, costumes, and singers enacting characters in the case of operas, and concerts involving singers performing in modern dress, standing in place, without backdrops or props in the case of oratorios, cantatas, and serenatas. Determining the intended mode of performance is not always a simple matter. Some composers endorsed both theatrical and concert performances.¹³ Even if the composer has a definite opinion on the staging of his or her work, performers may decide to pursue an alternative approach. In what follows, I will be speaking about performances that comply with the author’s intentions with regard to performance means. But any work that supports storytelling by means of singers enacting characters could theoretically be staged as an opera, and my account of operatic storytelling would be equally applicable to such performances.

      Perhaps surprisingly for those who regard opera as a primarily musical art form, what makes a musical performance with singing an operatic performance, as opposed to a concert, turns on the function of its extramusical components. In operatic performances, what singers look like, what they are wearing, and the movements they perform typically make things true about the characters they play: what they look like and how they move. With dramatic songs, cantatas, oratorios, and serenatas, by contrast, the singers’ appearance and movements do not typically generate facts about the appearance and behavior of the characters they play. It would be highly idiosyncratic for a singer performing La Lucrezia to appear in Roman garb and to pretend to commit suicide at the end. More commonly, the singer will appear in modern formal attire. The inappropriateness of her dress, in the context of the world of the story, does not disturb listeners, since her apparel is not intended to represent that of the character she plays.

      To better understand this distinction, Gregory Currie’s category of visual fictions will be useful. “Visual fictions are distinguished from non-visual ones by how content is determined. With a visual fiction, content is determined, in part, by what we see. We see, on stage or screen, a man who moves in a certain way. That man plays a character, and his visible movements determine as part of the content of the play or movie that the character moves in that way.”¹⁴ Although Currie is describing cinema, his description also holds true for operatic performances. However, since sound is necessary to opera, while it is not in the case of cinema and other forms of theater, I propose a new category for operas called audiovisual fictions.¹⁵ If operas are audiovisual fictions, then songs, oratorios, cantatas, and serenatas (in addition to instrumental works such as Strauss’s Don Quixote [1898]) are aural fictions: their content is determined primarily by what one hears.

      The connoisseur of song recitals may protest that I am too hasty in dismissing the importance of seeing to appreciating such performances, asserting that watching their favorite singers contort their faces and gesticulate is an important part of their appreciation of vocal recitals. Indeed, most singers school their facial expressions and body language to be appropriate to the content of the songs they sing. These actions may be similar, even identical to those they might perform in an opera.

      Empirical research in the psychology of music perception has shown that even musically trained listeners’ evaluations of the expressivity of instrumental music depend not only on aural information but also on visual information, such as the performers’ gestures and facial expressions.¹⁶ In performances of narrative vocal music, gestures and facial expressions may make certain story facts more salient. Take, for example, “Ich grolle nicht” from Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (1840). The speaker has been jilted in love but declares, repeatedly, that he bears no grudge. If a singer were to perform this song with an angry facial expression and a clenched fist, one would be less likely to take his words at face value. Admittedly, the turgid pounding of the piano ought to prompt the astute listener to come to this conclusion even without these visual cues. But I can imagine another scenario in which a singer, through facial expressions and body language alone, marks an utterance as ironic that would not otherwise be interpreted as such. An example, albeit from an opera performance, is Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of “Ah, chi mi dice mai” from Don Giovanni (Aix-en-Provence, 2010).

      Mozart and Da Ponte intended Elvira’s aria to be a sincere, if exaggerated, expression of the anger and hurt she feels after being betrayed by Don Giovanni. The asides performed by the Don and Leporello contribute levity to this moment for the audience. However, they remain unseen and unheard by Elvira until the end of her aria. In Tcherniakov’s production, all of the characters are part of an extended mafia-like family. Elvira is Don Giovanni’s wife, not a forgotten fling, and she sings this aria as an ironic performance for her wayward husband. The target of her ridicule is the kind of woman Don Giovanni perceives her to be, the kind of woman portrayed in most performances of this aria: one whose entire self-worth is tied up with her ability to attract and retain a man. Since the music and text of the aria have been unchanged, it is primarily through the visual elements of the performance—the singer’s posture, gestures, and facial expressions as well as other staging choices in this aria and the preceding dramatic action—that the character’s ironic intent is conveyed.

      Watching singers’ gestures and facial expressions is important to the full appreciation of song performances, even more so than piano recitals, I suspect, because of the rich representational content of vocal music. This observation does not, however, suggest that songs and oratorios ought to fall into the category of audiovisual fictions. One must be precise about the nature of the information gleaned from spectators’ visual experiences in nonoperatic performances of song. In my hypothetical example of the angry-looking singer performing “Ich grolle nicht,” the story fact generated by the singer’s facial expression is better glossed as “the character is angry” as opposed to “the character is grimacing.” Similarly, if the singer has a beard, that does not make it appropriate to imagine that the character does. Notice the disparity with opera performance, in which a bearded, grimacing singer playing the role of Otello makes it true in the story that Otello has a beard and is currently grimacing. In an opera performance, what singers look like and the actions they perform typically generate story content about the characters they play. Likewise, the visual appearance of the stage typically generates facts about their environment.

      At this point, one might raise the objection that my account describes only naturalistic approaches to stage direction. Even “traditional” productions can pose difficulties due to color-blind casting. In the Metropolitan Opera’s 1989 video recording of Otto Schenk’s production of Die Walküre, the African American soprano Jessye Norman and the white Heldentenor Gary Lakes appear as the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde.¹⁷ Clearly, when Sieglinde comments that she sees in Siegmund’s face a likeness of her own (Act I, Scene 3), we are not to imagine that she is lying or deceived.

      The casting of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015) also complicates the present account, though for different reasons. It too features nonwhite singers playing white characters, but while the Met’s decision to cast Norman was made irrespective of her race, singers’ racial identities were taken into consideration by the casting directors of Hamilton. As a result, Hamilton’s casting policy is more accurately described as color conscious.¹⁸ Singers were chosen specifically because their race differed from that of their characters. These disjunctures were integral to the work’s point. In the words of the director Thomas Kail, Hamilton is “a story about America then, told by America now.”¹⁹ By casting predominantly African American and Latinx actors as America’s founding fathers, Miranda and Kail draw attention to the diversity of contemporary America and, by contrast, the lack of diversity of most of what one sees on Broadway. Daveed Diggs, who created the roles of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, describes “walk[ing] out of the show with a sense of ownership over American history. Part of it is seeing brown bodies play these people.”²⁰ Casting Diggs as Jefferson, or Norman as Sieglinde, did not make their characters black. Yet if one were to ignore Diggs’s race, as one is encouraged to do in Norman’s case, one would miss one of the show’s key artistic and political points.

      To be clear, I have СКАЧАТЬ