Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner

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       WHAT IS A NARRATIVE?

      ALTHOUGH MUSIC SCHOLARS HAVE PUT NARRATIVE THEORY TO many innovative uses, when it comes to defining what a narrative is, we have largely left the task to our colleagues in literary theory. Based on their stipulations about the necessary components of narratives, some, such as Carolyn Abbate, have even come to doubt that the category has much applicability to music. Others, such as Byron Almén, have resisted the hegemony of literature in narratology, proposing new ways of conceptualizing narrative that include not only operas and musicals but also most works of instrumental music. Despite their differences, both camps understand narratives as merely the products of composers’ labors (sound structures, in the case of instrumental works). Thus, narrative status depends primarily on the structural features of those products, such as contrast and discontinuity. In this chapter, I argue that works are better conceived as processes than as products alone, and I explore the consequences of this view for our definition of narrative.

       Narrative in Music Scholarship

      The first wave of work on narrative in music scholarship largely took their definitions from structuralist narratology, particularly Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1983; 1972 in the original French) and Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (1978). Genette and Chatman argue that a narrative is not a mere sequence of events; it requires a narrator and the ability to distinguish the work’s story, the events of which it is comprised, from its discourse, the way in which the events are told by the narrator.

      Applying this definition to music in Unsung Voices (1991), Carolyn Abbate observes the difficulty of making a similar sort of distinction, even in an opera. Most operas convey stories, but in few cases are we invited to imagine that there is a fictional entity responsible for presenting the entire story to us. Abbate concludes that operas are not narratives, but they may contain “moments of narration” where the story-discourse distinction can be perceived through discontinuities within the score or between the score and the libretto.¹ The narrator of musical narratives remains unclear in Abbate’s account, however. As she repeatedly informs her readers, the voices of which she speaks are not those of the historical persons who created the work, nor the implied author, nor even the singers who make the work perceptually accessible.² Through a process of elimination, these voices must refer to features of the work’s structure.

      This suspicion is borne out in the evidence Abbate presents for or against a work being a narrative. Her argument that the epilogue to Paul Dukas’s symphonic poem L’apprenti sorcier (1897) constitutes a moment of narration rests on the appearance of the main theme in rhythmic augmentation. Abbate argues that the epilogue serves an analogous function to the quotation marks encasing the sorcerer’s words at the end of the poem on which Dukas’s work is based, Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797). Both imply the presence of a “third person narrator” who recounts the events to us.³ This storyteller is internal to the work’s structure. Absent from Abbate’s discussion is any consideration of the work’s context of performance: what its storyteller (Dukas) was attempting to accomplish with L’apprenti sorcier, whether he was successful, and how his audiences interpreted his work. Did they imagine an apprentice sorcerer’s futile attempts to put a stop to his spell, or did they regard the work as a purely abstract composition?

      In the wake of Unsung Voices and other high-profile rejections of the possibility that musical works could constitute narratives, music scholars treaded more cautiously with regard to the narrative-definitional question, typically avoiding it altogether.⁴ An exception is Byron Almén, a music theorist who is not merely content to say that musical works are like narratives or that we may gain insights about them by regarding them as such. In A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), he argues that musical works are narratives and presents a new “medium-independent” definition to support this claim. For Almén, a narrative consists of a hierarchy, established within a system of signs, that is subject to change over time—change that a listener interprets as a change in a cultural hierarchy of some sort.⁵

      Almén outlines a method for interpreting virtually any musical work as a narrative. The first step is to identify the salient features of the music (pitches, keys, themes, instruments) that are brought into conflict. One observes the hierarchy in which they are found at the beginning and tracks changes to that hierarchy throughout the composition. Next, one classifies one’s findings according to the narrative archetypes that the literary theorist Northrop Frye proposed in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957): romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony (resulting from the permutations of order/transgression and victory/defeat). Finally, the analyst interprets these musical conflicts as representing conflicts taking place within a single agent, between agents or groups thereof, or between an individual and a group.

      To highlight how his theory builds on existing practices in music theory and musicology, Almén illustrates it with discussions of preexisting analyses representing a variety of interpretive approaches. One such example is Susan McClary’s interpretation of the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 (1721). McClary focuses on the relationship between the harpsichord and the rest of the players (the ripieno, or large ensemble, as well as the other soloists). Bach’s concerto initially appears to be for flute and violin, with the harpsichord performing its customary “service role” as part of the continuo. Before long, the harpsichord begins to assert itself beyond its station, eventually “hijacking” the piece by inserting an inordinately long solo capriccio in which it “unleashes elements of chaos, irrationality, and noise until finally it blurs almost entirely the sense of key, meter, and form upon which eighteenth-century style depends.”⁶ Only then does it deign to allow the ripieno to reenter and restore order with its performance of the final ritornello.

      McClary interprets the conflict between the harpsichord and the rest of the instrumentalists as representing the conflict between the growing individualism of the bourgeoisie in Bach’s time and European society, which was still largely under absolute rule. As Almén observes, a more typical concerto from this period would represent individualism and social stability as co-realizable through either “the appropriate submission of individual aspiration for the good of society” or “the reconciliation of the apparently contradictory aims of the individual and society.”⁷ Bach’s concerto, McClary argues, represents individualism that exceeds social acceptability. That the harpsichord eventually yields to the ripieno may appear to represent the individual СКАЧАТЬ