Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
and musicals. Although most scholars view the orchestral narrator as a fictional entity, I argue that at least some acts of orchestral narration are more coherently understood as authorial commentary.
The orchestra can also be used to express characters’ points of view. Chapter 5 exposes several commonplace but faulty assumptions about point of view: the tendency to conflate the focal character with the narrator; the assumption that character-focused narration invariably leads to identification, sympathy, or empathy; and the suspicion that harboring such feelings for characters who commit morally reprehensible acts has a deleterious effect on one’s moral character.
In chapter 6, my focus shifts from the work of librettists and composers to that of directors, conductors, and singers. Readers with more practical concerns may wish to begin the book at this point. Since my interest is in productions that depart significantly from the score and libretto, operatic examples outweigh those from musical theater. Such departures are more common in the opera house, which relies more heavily on historical repertory. The impulse to rework an opera’s libretto or score arises not only from concerns of monotony but, in many of the examples I discuss, from a need to rectify aspects of the work—sexism, racism, colonialist attitudes—that may be offensive to audiences today. Many musicals are plagued by similar problems, but until recently, few directors working in commercial musical theater have attempted more than minor revisions to address them.16 However, given that Broadway and the West End are increasingly relying on revivals of musicals from the so-called Golden Age (from roughly Show Boat [1927] to the end of 1950s), and audiences are expecting these shows to reflect current attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality, it is reasonable to expect more revisionist approaches in the future.
Chapter 6 identifies some problems with the prevailing way of understanding the work-performance relationship in opera studies, the two-text model. This account is unable to explain how seeing a performance of an opera is to see the opera itself. It also has difficulty explaining the motivations behind productions that deviate from the score or libretto. Such productions also constitute exceptions to the standard philosophical account of performance in the Western art music tradition, the classical paradigm. I argue that the philosopher James Hamilton’s ingredients model, developed for spoken theater, does a better job of describing productions containing substantial revisions to the score or libretto or that use these texts to tell different stories or convey different artistic or political points.17
Yet Hamilton’s suggestion that theater performances are never performances of preexisting works is untrue of opera and musical theater. Amid recent experiments at revising the score and adding new ingredients, many directors are still guided by the ideology of Werktreue (fidelity to the work). I propose that there are two paradigms of opera and musical theater performance today. Some productions can be understood according to the classical paradigm: The production is primarily intended to offer perceptual experiences of a preexisting work. Accordingly, the performers pursue a high degree of fidelity to its score and libretto. Other productions are better understood along the lines Hamilton proposes: The performers regard libretti and scores as merely optional ingredients. Rather than focusing on conveying the artistic statements of the composer and librettist, the performers are primarily concerned with making a statement of their own.
Throughout this book, I use the classical paradigm and ingredients model as the primary means of categorizing opera and musical-theater productions. Although these categories may seem analogous to the more familiar opposition between traditional or Werktreue productions and radical or Regieoper ones, they are not precisely equivalent. There are several reasons why I have appropriated these terms from philosophy rather than employing the ones common to opera criticism. First, the term Regieoper (director’s opera) implies that this directorial approach is primarily found in German-speaking countries, which is no longer the case. It is also predominantly used by critics in a pejorative or honorific sense (depending on the critic’s predilections), rather than as a means of identifying productions that are guided by a coherent set of artistic practices. To the extent that there is anything in common among productions that are commonly classified as Regieoper, it is their “look” (nonnaturalistic, set in the “wrong” period), as opposed to their “sound,” which is usually indistinguishable from more “traditional” productions. By contrast, the classical paradigm and the ingredients model describe the performance’s visual and sonic components.
The final two chapters explore what happens to an opera or musical’s narrative when the performers decide not to follow the performing directions. The examples in chapter 7 involve deviations from the stage directions that are designed to bring spectators to a deeper understanding of the work being performed. Through his use of lighting and placement of musicians, Peter Sellars enhanced Wagner’s musical strategies of character-focused narration in his production of Tristan und Isolde (Opéra national de Paris, 2006). Tim Albery’s Billy Budd (English National Opera, 1988) and Tom Diamond’s Turn of the Screw drew attention to the narrative framing of these works and the way their frames raise questions of narrative reliability. All of these productions involved research into the historical influences on the creation of the work being performed and helped bring these influences to the attention of their audiences.
Chapter 8 considers directors whose work is motivated less by concerns of fidelity than by a desire to present performances that accord with the interests and concerns of their audience. I discuss productions that remove character-narrators and insert new ones as well as those that reframe a portion of the dramatic action as a character’s dream or hallucination, such as Joachim Herz’s 1964 film adaptation of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer. Another way of contending with the offensive political content of many of Wagner’s works is to alter his recommended lines of sympathy. Inspired by an essay by the philosopher Ernst Bloch, Katharina Wagner’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Bayreuth, 2007) upheld Beckmesser as the true artist of the future while linking Sachs’s and Walther’s increasing artistic conservatism with the rise of fascism. Finally, I consider the issue of how to attract new audiences to opera and musical theater by examining Deaf West Theatre’s success at bringing musical theater to a community commonly assumed to be excluded from the appreciation of this art form.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories in comparison to novels, plays, and films. I expose problematic assumptions underlying prevailing accounts of narrative and point of view in music scholarship and develop alternatives. I also make fine-grained distinctions between types of narrators and the roles of the orchestra and introduce terminology with which to talk about them.
By considering two art forms that have, historically, been ignored in theories of narrative, this book also contributes to philosophy and literary theory. Bringing opera and musical theater to debates about the necessity of narrators reveals additional exceptions to the claim that all narratives have fictional narrators. This book also offers the first detailed examination of musical means of aligning spectators with characters’ points of view.
Debates about the nature of musical works and musical performance have also proceeded without a serious consideration of opera and musical theater. Drawing attention both to historical practices, such as aria substitution, and to more recent directorial interventions, I show how opera and musical theater constitute exceptions to the prevailing philosophical account of performance in the Western art music tradition.
I also consider problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner’s Jewish caricatures or the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, I reflect on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, I offer suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives