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In Search of Opera
by Carolyn Abbate: Opera News Review

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

“Callas’s Forza,” “Wilson’s Lohengrin:” such shorthand is second nature to most opera lovers, yet it typically provokes conspicuous rolling of eyes among music scholars. These designations, after all, highlight the elements of opera that have traditionally been dismissed as contingent and ephemeral—performances and stagings that happen in specific places, at specific times—and not the “immutable essence” of a work, thought to spring from the master’s mind unsullied by flesh or time, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Opera itself, of course, has always been considered suspect by those who champion music as a “transcendentally-signficant-yet-meaningless terrain” (to borrow Susan McClary’s phrase

Carolyn Abbate’s demanding, suby argued In Search of Opera delves deep into the fissures (and bonds) between two extreme concepts of music: as “embodied, very far from being in any way metaphysical,” and as a form of discourse that often “trumps philosophy” itself. The author, a professor of music at Princeton, examines familiar works—including Orfeo (Monteverdi and Gluck), Die Zauberflöte, Parsifal, and Pelléas—in light of both contemporary critical theory and the culture of their times, highlighting “operatic moments that attempt something impossible: to represent music that, by the very terms of the fictions proposing it, remains beyond expression.”

Abbate sees Wagner, for example, as a “master of blurring the lines between natural sound and music”: Kundry’s shrieks and the “panharmonic instrumental clangor” of the bells in Parsifal, the “primal vibration” with which Das Rheingold begins, the apparently artless song of the shepherd in Tannhaüser. She addresses head-on the ethical implications of the composer’s attempt to “recruit the listener to regression, and hence to an alliance against all that is demonized within his works, whether it is social alienation, modernity, exogamy, or Jews as signs of these phenomena.” At the same time, though, her prose eloquently suggests the awesome power of Wagner’s music: Parsifal’s final measures, for example, whose harmonic spiral goes fleetingly awry at the moment of Kundry’s death:

Thus the end comes, and the listener is floating along euphoric, lulled by subdominants, drowning, sinking… The A-minor measure is so strange, and so indelible, so unlike the narcotic daisy chain: an alarm, the briefest act of mourning, a shudder that wakes a sleeper from dreams of falling, right before he or she falls asleep for good.

No less compelling is Abbate’s unflinching consideration of the underside of the Romantic idea of “interpretive genius”: the idea that performers may be “animated, taken over and made into a mechanism by something exterior.” The author’s erudition and command of her sources (ranging from Plato to Hollywood films, from Continental philosophy to the history of musical technology) are astonishing. Like Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama and Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Abbate’s brilliant study is likely to challenge readers and reshape thinking about opera for years to come.

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