Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century available in Paperback, eBook
Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
- ISBN-10:
- 0691026084
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691026084
- Pub. Date:
- 04/21/1996
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691026084
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691026084
- Pub. Date:
- 04/21/1996
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691026084 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/21/1996 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Opera , #1 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Unsung Voices
Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
By Carolyn Abbate
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09140-2
CHAPTER 1
MUSIC'S VOICES
We begin with a scene that explores the power of narration, by showing us how a certain Hindu priestess comes to tell the "Tale of the Pariah's Daughter":
Nilakantha (avec beaucoup de sentiment):
Si ce maudit s'est introduit chez moi,
S'il a bravé la mort pour arriver à toi,
Pardonne-moi ce blasphème,
C'est qu'il t'aime!
Toi, ma Lakmé, toi, la fille des dieux.
Il va triomphant par la ville,
Nous allons retenir cette foule mobile.
Et s'il te voit, Lakmé, je lirai dans ses yeux!
Affermis bien ta voix! Sois souriante,
Chante, Lakmé! Chante! La vengeance est là!
(Les Hindous se rapprochent peu à peu.)
Par les dieux inspirée,
Cette enfant vous dira
La légende sacrée
De la fille du Paria ...
Tous: Ecoutons la légende, écoutons!
Lakmé: Où va la jeune Indoue, Fille des Parias? (etc.)
[Nilakantha (with great emotion): If this villain has penetrated my domain, if he has defied death to come near you, forgive my blasphemy, but it is because he loves you, my Lakmé, you! You, the child of the gods! He's passing in triumph through the town, so let us gather this wandering crowd, and, if he sees you Lakmé, I shall read it in his eyes! Now steady your voice! Smile as you sing! Sing, Lakmé! Sing! Vengeance is near! (The crowd of Hindus gathers slowly around.) Inspired by the gods, this child will tell you the sacred legend of the pariah's daughter.
The Crowd: Let's listen to the legend! Listen! Lakmé: Where does the young Hindu girl wander? This daughter of pariahs? (etc.)]
This is, of course, the setup for one of opera's most famous virtuoso numbers, the Bell Song from Delibes' Lakmé, which premiered—two months after Wagner died—in 1883. What happens in this scene will serve to underscore a series of distinctions critical to any interpretation of musical narration: plot and narrating, story and teller, utterance and enunciation.
Upon first being urged by Nilakantha to "steady your voice ... sing" (the line is significant), Lakmé responds with a wash of wordless coloratura. This initial improvisatory vocalizing is what first fascinates the crowd, and, from their random wanderings (they are a "foule mobile"), strikes them into immobility as a closed circle of listeners. They hear a woman who transforms herself into a kind of musical instrument, a sonorous line without words and unsupported by any orchestral sound (Example 1.1). Pure voice commands instant attention (both ours and that of the onstage audience), in a passage that is shockingly bare of other sound. In opera, we rarely hear the voice both unaccompanied and stripped of text—and when we do (in the vocal cadenzas typical of Italian arias, for instance), the sonority is disturbing, perhaps because such vocalizing so pointedly focuses our sense of the singing voice as one that can compel without benefit of words. Such moments enact in pure form familiar Western tropes on the suspicious power of music and its capacity to move us without rational speech. Beyond this, however, this moment of initial vocalization, with its strong phatic effect, prefigures the thrust of Lakmé's vocal performance as a whole.
In verse 1 of her song, Lakmé tells the tale of a poor girl who wanders in the woods, and in the course of her wandering encounters a stranger threatened by "fauves [qui] rugissent de joie" ["wild animals (who) roar with joy"]. She jumps in to save the stranger by charming the animals with a magic wand, decorated with a bell. In verse 2, the stranger, revealed as Vishnu, rewards her by transporting her to the heavens; the song ends with the narrator's address to the onstage audience, reminding them that "depuis ce jour au fond des bois, / Le voyageur entend parfois / Le bruit léger de la baguette / Où tinte la clochette / Des charmeurs" ["since that day, those who travel deep into the forest sometimes hear the gentle sound of the wand on which the enchanters' bell rings"].
Known now to most only as a coloratura showpiece (and one associated chiefly with such art-deco divas as Lily Pons), the Bell Song derives its name from the refrain that closes each of the two narrative verses, in which the soprano imitates, by vocalizing on open vowel sounds, the "magic bell" described in the story. (The coloratura passages in the refrain are similar to those initial improvisatory roulades that first pull the crowd.) Few are aware that the Bell Song is actually the "Légende de la fille du Paria," that it is a narrative, and that its fetishization of voice as pure sound is interwoven with the telling of a story. Nonetheless, the scene demonstrates the ways in which vocal performance will indeed overpower plot, for Gerald, the besotted British officer, is attracted not by the tale but by the voice that sings it. Gerald betrays himself involuntarily, and, acting equally against her will, Lakmé delivers an overtly seductive performance, and extracts one erotically fascinated listener from the crowd in which he hides. Implicit in all that has been said, of course, is the realization that the Bell Song is a scene of performance on two levels: a narrative performance, and a musical performance that the onstage audience can hear as music. The scene involves "phenomenal" performance, which might be loosely defined as a musical or vocal performance that declares itself openly, singing that is heard by its singer, the auditors on stage, and understood as "music that they (too) hear" by us, the theater audience.
A scene of seduction, Lakmé's performance nonetheless does not seduce by means of plot. This by no means implies that her "tale of the pariah's daughter" is irrelevant, for in the context of the opera as a whole it might well be read as an allegory of Lakmé's own fate—eventually, she sacrifices herself to save Gerald. Nilakantha's anger at Gerald's "blasphemous pollution" of the priestess is thus assuaged by her death, and when at the end of the opera Nilakantha cries "Elle porte là-haut nos voeux, / Elle est dans la splendeur des deux!" ["She brings our prayers on high, she resides in the splendours of heaven"], he associates her with the transfigured maiden of her own tale. Gerald the foreigner and imperialist is at the same moment obliquely complimented by being, with Lakmé, inserted into the tale and equated with divine Vishnu (that the compliment is put in the mouth of an enraged native is one of the opera's covert means of luxuriating in its own Orientalist romance). In this allegorical role, the Bell Song represents a common operatic type, a song whose reflexive narrative text prefigures the plot of the opera in which it appears. Such songs generate complicated nested reflexive spheres, and their effects are discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. Within its immediate context, however, the tale that Lakmé tells is insignificant, for it is not the story that acts upon its listener. The act of telling it—the act of narrating—is the point.
The crowd can be understood as naive listeners, as eavesdroppers or an excluded audience, for the real force of the performance—the seduction—is not meant for them. They are content with the story of the pariah's daughter—they will, as they say, "listen to the tale" perhaps as a simpler reader might "read for the plot." Gerald, to the contrary, is envisaged by Nilakantha as listening not to plot but to voice and performance. By urging Lakmé to "steady her voice," by repeating his exhortation "chante, chante," he seems to realize that she must become much more than a story telling itself; she must be a sheer source of sound, to attract—fatally—the attention of that single listener. Gerald's experience of the song is deemed by the scene's stage-manager to be an experience of a musical voice-object. As if to confirm her own status as sonority rather than story, Lakmé produces music that might itself be regarded as working against the story she narrates, since the two musical verses, by remaining similar, by repeating, in some sense deny the progressive sequence of changing events that are recounted in Lakmé's words.
Gerald, the intended listener, is in fact never conscious of the tale (Lakmé's story of Vishnu and the pariah), because he is too far away to hear her words when Lakmé delivers her formal singing performance. When the song fails to flush his prey, Nilakantha urges Lakmé to sing again, to sing until the traitor is revealed. Lakmé, exhausted by formal performance, can no longer produce either the coherent narrative, or a whole verse of the song. She merely recapitulates textual fragments and bell sounds (Example 1.2). The broken coloratura inverts the smooth virtuosity of Lakmé's improvisatory prelude (her "steadying" of the voice), and the bell-flourishes, repeated in upward sequence as Lakmé loses control of pitch, mark the end of the performance in the face of its success (Gerald has appeared at Lakmé's side). In this epilogue, both the sequential plot described by the words of the song, and the coherent sequence of musical events in the song, have dissolved into fragments as Lakmé becomes explicitly a body emanating sonority. Finally, Gerald hears. The Bell Song's epilogue reinterprets the song, exposing plot as empty distraction, and affirming that a narrative performance can signify in ways that pass beyond the tale told. Lakmé's singing has the same perlocutionary force as a command to Gerald to reveal himself, a force not connected to the structure or the content of her story.
Lakmé's performance might be conceived (though the idea deflates the scene somewhat) as transcending certain concerns of structuralist narratology and endorsing the brief of narrative pragmatics, by demonstrating how we do well to examine narrative activities rather than the events that they describe, to examine forms of enunciation rather than forms taken by utterance. Put this way, the debate sounds merely institutional. The scene is far richer, of course, but it does enact certain oppositions and above all suggests the fascinations and complexities of voice in the musical work.
I
Voice is a charged word within contemporary critical theory; it is less so, naturally, in music criticism. In a musical work, voices are not easily muffled. But what are the voices that sing musical compositions? Voices can be understood commonsensically as the human voices of opera and song: soprano, mezzo, alto, castrato, countertenor, tenor, baritone, bass. In technical terms, voices are the individual contrapuntal lines of a polyphonic composition. Any critic of opera is aware, continually, of voices in the former sense, and is sensitive as well to their role in operative performance. An attraction to opera means an attraction to singers' voices—this goes without saying. But there is also a radical autonomization of the human voice that occurs, in varying degrees, in all vocal music. The sound of the singing voice becomes, as it were, a "voice-object" and the sole center for the listener's attention. That attention is thus drawn away from words, plot, character, and even from music as it resides in the orchestra, or music as formal gestures, as abstract shape; Lakme's performance plays out precisely this radical autonomization. When opera allows itself to project this voice-object, it also runs into peril—for, according to Michel Poizat, the "presence of the performer" may well suddenly emerge to impede the listener's contemplation. We are aware at these junctures—painfully, if the high C is missed—that we witness a performance. The membrane between the pure voice-object and the voice that we assign consciously to the virtuoso, as performance, is thus thin, and permeable. In the Queen of the Night's second aria, for instance, Poizat argues that the performer is actually forced to the foreground, because the voice-object in this extraordinary piece threatens to bear too great an emotional charge, to become a pure unfolded "cry." For Poizat, the aria shifts constantly, every time the performance (lodged in the melismatic vocalises) parts the curtains to peep out from behind the fearful voice-object that inhabits the nonmelismatic passages. I would read the aria rather as oscillating between drama—the angry tirade by the character—and voice-object that comes to the fore precisely in the melismatic vocalises, for the melismas, by splitting words ("nimmermehr," "Bande") and separating syllable from syllable, destroy language. So the Queen, by killing language, also kills plot, and herself as a character. She suddenly becomes not a character-presence but an irrational nonbeing, terrifying because the locus of voice is now not a character, not human, and somehow not present. This same uncanny effect, I would claim, can govern moments marked by a singing voice in instrumental (that is, non vocal, textless) music. This fear— instilled by voice without a physically present human character—might well be kept in mind, as it is partly responsible for the penumbra of uneasiness that characterizes works such as Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice (discussed in Chapter 2) and Mahler's Todtenfeier (Chapter 4).
In making his distinctions between vocal levels in opera, Poizat attempts to define different modes appropriate to each. The first level is a rational, text-oriented one, in which the singing voice retreats before literary elements (words, poetry, character, plot). Recitative is, of course, the best representative of this mode. The second is the level of the voice-object; the third consists of moments at which either of the first two are breached by consciousness of the real performer, of witnessing a performance. Opera actually replays these three levels within itself, within a convention that will return (in Chapter 3) as one governing sign for my speculation about music and narration: narrative songs, like Lakme's, that are "sung within the opera"; narration that is thus also self-consciously a musical performance.
Voice in music can, however, be understood in larger senses—as the source of sonority, as a presence or resonating intelligence. Voice in this sense was proposed in Edward Cone's book The Composer's Voice, and Cone's metaphor initiated parts of my own investigation of "voices," as well as my resistance to the centering and hegemonic authorial image of "the Composer." For Cone, the "composer's voice" is an "intelligence in the act of thinking through the musical work." This voice can be distinguished from the distinctive "voice" of a vocal persona in song or opera, who is the character we assume to be speaking or singing (a wandering musician, a girl about to be married, a lover in despair). In song—and much of Cone's work draws on the Lied repertory—the "composer's voice" may lodge itself in the piano, and may also seem to be ordering the vocal part in ways that the "vocal persona" cannot discern. Cone's vision of voice is thus one of a virtual author, and he associates voice securely with a creative mind whom we assume to have made the work as a whole. The work created by the "composer's voice" is in Cone's view essentially monologic (in the Bakhtinian sense) and monophonic—not, of course, literally (as a one-line melody), but in that all its utterances are heard as emanating from a single composing subject. Cone's book is effective as an interpretative réanimation of ideas about musical composition, in insisting upon a conception of music as "sung" through time, as originating in an oscillating, sonorous body—both literally in performance, and figuratively, as music issuing from what might be called the composer's throat. Traditional musical analysis, with its orientation toward the notated score, has been relatively unconcerned with music as constituted through (literal or figurai) performance. Cone presented an alternative, and one that will resist disconcerting questions. Some of the most disconcerting of these might indeed, come not from traditional musical analysis, with its straightforward formalist orientation, but rather from criticism of language and literature, from which Cone borrowed his "voice" in the first place. Voice, like the idea of presence, has suffered some battering at the hands of poststructuralists, through arguments that attempt to dislocate or disembody speaking subjects, in order to demonstrate how the subject is constituted through language, as a grammatical fiction. Voice, according to these writers, is unduly privileged in a metaphysical tradition that suppresses because it fears the contrary notion of inscription and text. But music's voices—unlike the voices assumed to reside in written texts, or voice as a metaphysical desideratum—cannot be summarily stilled in these terms. As a consequence of the inherently live and performed existence of music, its own voices are stubborn, insisting upon their privilege. They manifest themselves, in my interpretations, as different kinds or modes of music that inhabit a single work. They are not uncovered by analyses that assume all music in a given work is stylistically or technically identical, originating from a single source in "the Composer."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unsung Voices by Carolyn Abbate. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceCHAPTER ONE Music's Voices
CHAPTER TWO What the Sorcerer Said
CHAPTER THREE Cherubino Uncovered: Reflexivity in Operatic Narration
CHAPTER FOUR Mahler's Deafness: Opera and the Scene of Narration in Todtenfeier
CHAPTER FIVE Wotan's Monologue and the Morality of Musical Narration
CHAPTER SIX Brunnhilde Walks by Night
Notes
Bibliography
Index