Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
Before Wagner dimmed the lights in the auditorium, it was also possible to go for the people watching, gambling, and other diversions. Another reason to attend the opera is for the stories operas tell. If that is one’s interest, regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing each other’s songs is a distinct advantage. It alleviates concerns about the implausibility of many opera plots. Violetta’s choice to sacrifice her future with Alfredo may seem undermotivated if it were to happen in our world or even the world of a spoken play or film. Regarding her exchange with Alfredo’s father as a duet renders it more plausible, as the act of singing together is capable of forging emotional bonds more effectively than spoken discourse. Understanding the characters as singing and as hearing the music also allows for explanations of characters’ behavior that are grounded in the characters’ intentions and actions, as opposed to merely those of the work’s authors.
The foregoing investigation into the nature of operatic storytelling has revealed the following medium-specific features. In contrast to songs, operas present stories by means of singers enacting characters. Unlike nonoperatic performances of other genres of vocal music in which character enactment is possible, operas are audiovisual fictions. Content is determined not only by what we hear but also by what we see. Finally, opera may be differentiated from nonmusical theater and film by the fact that singing is one of main ways opera characters communicate.
The following chapter continues exploring the medium-specific features of storytelling in the musical theater by defining several common types of character-narrators and discussing the ways in which they differ from the kinds of narrators audiences encounter in literary and cinematic works.
Notes
1. Monika Hennemann, “Operatorio?” in Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77. Hennemann is responding to the Komische Oper’s production of Mozart’s Requiem, directed by Sebastian Baumgarten (2008).
2. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 21.
3. David Davies, “Medium,” in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (London: Routledge, 2011), 48–49; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288–89.
4. Noël Carroll, “Forget the Medium!” in Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–9.
5. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 294–95.
6. Jerrold Levinson, “Song and Music Drama,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44.
7. Since these characters are defined by the player, not by the instrument, Mélange à trois is a good illustration of Philip Rupprecht’s concept of the player-agent. Philip Rupprecht, “Agency Effects in the Instrumental Drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle,” in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 190.
8. Jessica A. Holmes, “Singing beyond Hearing,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 2 (2016): 546. A video recording of Face Opera II may be streamed from vimeo.com/68027393.
9. A serenata is a large-scale dramatic cantata—dramatic in the sense of singers’ utterances representing characters’ utterances, not in the sense of singers wearing costumes and participating in a fully staged theatrical performance.
10. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), bk. 3, 392d–394c. In this translation, mimesis is rendered as imitation and diegesis as narrative.
11. Cone, Composer’s Voice, 15–16.
12. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1237. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le coq d’or (1909) was intended to be staged with singers enacting characters, including the dancing the characters perform. When Diaghilev staged the work with the Ballet Russes in 1914, he separated the singing and dancing components as Taruskin describes.
13. For example, Handel’s first English oratorio, Esther, was first given a staged performance at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in 1732. Handel investigated the possibility of mounting another staged performance at the King’s Theatre but was unsuccessful due to the ban on theatrical performances of biblical stories in public (the previous performance was considered private). Accordingly, he turned his attentions to concert performances. Howard E. Smither, “Oratorio,” Grove Music Online, last modified 2001, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/20397. For other examples of oratorios that have been staged as operas, refer to Hennemann, “Operatorio?”
14. Gregory Currie, “Visual Fictions,” Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163 (1991): 140.
15. That is not to say that the aural properties of films and theatrical performances are unimportant but merely that there are silent films and theater performances. There are no silent operas.
16. For a summary of work in this area, refer to Vincent Bergeron and Dominic McIver Lopes, “Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, no. 1 (2009): 1–16.
17. I thank Udayan Sen for mentioning this example.
18. Chinua Thelwell, “Who Tells Your Story? Hamilton, Future Aesthetics, and Haiti,” in Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World, ed. Chinua Thelwell (London: Routledge, 2017), 112. For an argument that color-conscious casting is preferable to color-blind casting, refer to Aria Umezawa, “Met’s Otello Casting Begs the Question: Is Whitewash Better than Blackface?” Globe and Mail, August 7, 2015, last modified March 25, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/mets-otello-casting-begs-the-question-is-whitewash-better-than-blackface/article25879634/arc404=true.
19. Thomas Kail, quoted in Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 33.
20. Daveed Diggs, quoted in Branden Janese, “Hamilton Roles Are This Rapper’s Delight,” Wall Street Journal, last modified July 7, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-roles-are-this-rappers-delight-1436303922; Leslie Odom Jr. expressed similar sentiments in Kathryn Lurie’s “Playing the Man Who Shot Hamilton,” Wall Street Journal, last modified August 6, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/playing-the-man-who-shot-hamilton-1438896589.
21. I am grateful to an audience member at the 2014 Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group conference for noting that my argument could be used to support the “fat shaming” of Tara Erraught as Octavian in Glyndebourne’s 2014 Rosenkavalier. For a summary of the discourse surrounding Erraught’s casting in this production, refer to Norman Lebrecht, “Singers in Uproar over Critical Body Insults at Glyndebourne,” Slipped Disc, last modified May 19, 2014, https://slippedisc.com/2014/05/singers-in-uproar-at-critical-body-insults-at-glyndebourne/.
22. The interviews with Martin Kušej and Thomas Hampson (who performed the role of Don Giovanni) confirm that both intended to portray Don Giovanni as psychologically troubled, his sex addiction a vain attempt to alleviate his loneliness. Included in Martin Kušej, dir., Don Giovanni (Decca, 2006), DVD.
23. For an argument that “As Time