Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
the characters sing only during the realistic instances of music-making; otherwise, they communicate as we do: by speaking. The latter position is also taken for granted by the philosophers Kendall Walton and Gregory Currie.27
One advantage of regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing the music is that it renders opera plots more coherent. Opera characters often fall in love at first sight and undergo other drastic changes to their beliefs and desires within a highly compressed time frame. A case in point is the duet between Violetta and Germont père in the second act of Verdi and Piave’s La traviata (1853). Violetta is a courtesan who has fallen in love with a bourgeois man named Alfredo. By Act II, the couple has fled Paris for an idyllic life in the country—idyllic, that is, until the bills begin to pile up. In secret, Violetta has been selling off the accoutrements of her prior life to support herself and Alfredo. After discovering this fact, Alfredo returns to the city to cash in his inheritance and take control over the situation. While Alfredo is away, his father pays Violetta a visit to convince her to put an end to their affair before the scandal ruins not only the possibility of Alfredo’s return to respectable society but also his sister’s hope of marrying the man she loves.
There is little incentive for Violetta to capitulate to Germont’s demands. His appeal to bourgeois morality holds little sway for someone who lives outside of that social sphere. Aside from Alfredo, Violetta has no family or friends who bear any genuine concern for her well-being. Furthermore, she knows that she is ill and, reasonably, wants to spend her remaining time with the man she loves. Yet by the end of the scene, she willingly sacrifices her only remaining opportunity for happiness.
Although Violetta’s choice is the focus of this scene, Germont’s trajectory is just as surprising. Initially affording Violetta little respect, he weeps for her in the end. Ostensibly, his “Piangi, piangi” represents him giving her the license to weep, but it is his vocal line, not hers, that mimics crying.28 Finally, when the courtesan who has nearly ruined his family asks him to embrace her as he would his daughter, he consents without hesitation.
These radical changes to the characters’ beliefs and desires may be unrealistic in our world, but they are not unrealistic for opera, I suggest, because such exchanges are conducted through song. The different capabilities of speech and song have been most thoroughly explored in forms of opera and musical theater that involve characters shifting between these modes of discourse. Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris observe that, while singing, characters in musicals are “more honest than normal, more intensely present, more capable of interpersonal connection, more empowered, more empowering, and generally better to effect transformative change.”29 Successfully singing a duet involves a high degree of mutual attention, responsiveness, and support for each other’s actions. Imagining that Violetta and Germont’s conversation is conducted through music helps explain how they are able to form an emotional connection and harmonize their points of view in such a short amount of time.
Supposing that the characters are either not singing or that they fail to hear much of the music creates problems when one attempts to explain how the characters know the things that they do. Real-life opera spectators learn about opera characters not merely from the words they say but also from the music they make. The same is true of opera characters, I have argued elsewhere.30
The dominant view of operatic communication also limits the possible ways of explaining instances when characters have a musical-stylistic influence over one another.31 The ostensible plot of the musical My Fair Lady (1956) revolves around Eliza learning to speak “proper English” from Professor Higgins. By the end, however, it is clear that Higgins has learned just as much from Eliza about being a character in a musical. Higgins is initially incapable of conforming his songs to conventional song forms. Furthermore, the role was created by the nonsinging actor Rex Harrison, who performed most of his songs in a kind of Sprechstimme. His final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” displays much more formal coherence than his earlier songs “Why Can’t the English?” and “A Hymn to Him” and, in the 1964 film adaptation, shows Higgins at his most lyrical.
If the characters do not hear the music, we cannot explain Higgins’s transformation as resulting from him hearing Eliza’s music and being influenced by its greater lyricism and formal coherence (an internal explanation). Rather, we are forced to regard his increasing musicality as part of the composer Frederick Loewe’s attempts to demonstrate his growing attraction to and suitability for Eliza (an external explanation).32 Regarding the characters as singing and as hearing each other’s music allows for both types of explanation. It opens up the possibility that Eliza chooses to sing in a particular way and that Higgins models his subsequent songs on hers. Internal explanations, which elucidate the features of a narrative in terms of the actions and intentions of its characters, rather than merely those of its real-life author(s), endow characters with more agency. In light of the importance of agency to compelling characters, and thus compelling narratives, regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing the music may increase one’s appreciation of the stories operas tell.33
There are cases where it is not reasonable to regard the characters as intending or perceiving all of the meanings their performances may have for us. This is especially true of the orchestral music in Wagner, a situation that I will return to in chapter 4. However, hearing need not entail understanding, and utterances, in opera as in everyday life, may possess meanings that are not intended by their authors. External explanations—for instance, viewing the music as authorial commentary—are still available to interpreters who regard opera characters as hearing the music and as singing intentionally.
By suggesting that the default position in opera is that characters hear the music, even when they fail to explicitly acknowledge its presence, I may appear to be undercutting a distinction that has become central to opera studies: the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal music, in Abbate’s terminology, and diegetic and nondiegetic music, in terminology borrowed from film studies. In opera and musical-theater studies, phenomenal or diegetic music refers to music that takes place in realistic performance contexts or that is explicitly acknowledged as music by the fictional characters, such as the cantata in Tosca (1900) or Cherubino’s aria “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro (1786). Cherubino reveals that he is the composer of this song, and the Countess convinces him to perform it for her with guitar accompaniment provided by Susanna. Since the character does not profess to have authored his other aria, “Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio,” nor is it acknowledged as a performance of song, it is typically regarded as noumenal or nondiegetic music.
Distinguishing between these two types of music can be important to understanding composers’ musical-stylistic choices. Opera composers frequently take care to differentiate these two types of performance. Diegetic or phenomenal music is more likely to conform to conventional song forms. It may also be more simplistic or less skillful than the noumenal or nondiegetic music, particularly if its actual composer wishes us to regard its fictional composer as possessing only modest talents. Furthermore, if the opera is set in the past or in a foreign land, the diegetic music is likely to take on characteristics of the music of its fictional setting, whereas the nondiegetic music is likely to remain unmarked.
My concern is with the terms that have been chosen to describe this difference. Abbate’s phenomenal-noumenal distinction suggests that the noumenal music is not part of the opera’s fictional world. Additionally, current use of the diegetic-nondiegetic distinction in opera and musical-theater studies is at odds with the use of these terms in film studies. Film scholars use the adjective diegetic to refer to features of the audiovisual display that represent contents or occurrences in the fictional world of the film. This definition leads to logical problems when combined with opera scholars’ equation of diegetic music with realistic music.34 Regarding all of the unrealistic instances of music-making in an opera as nondiegetic is untenable, since many such songs are integral to the work’s plot. In keeping with my aim to avoid jargon, I will refer to so-called phenomenal or diegetic performances as embedded or nested musical performances.
There are many reasons to attend the opera: