Phantasmagoria

Sociology of Opera

David T Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138353596
• eBook ISBN: 9780429757686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

First published in 1999, this original and entertaining sociological study takes a comprehensive and critical view of opera as unique cultural artefact as loss making 'industry', as institution with a 'museum' culture, and as consumed commodity of rare distinction and elaborate ritual.

Specific chapters deal with opera within the contexts of musicological analysis, auratic art and fetishized taste: opera as business and as 'museum': singers' opera: producers' opera and audiences' opera. There is also a chapter on 'opera': popular, commercialised fragments of opera outside the opera house, consumed by and through all manner of reproduced means: CD, video, Three Tenors concerts: film and TV soundtracks: advertising jingles etc.

Despite the supposed popularisation and successful commercial exploitation of 'opera' during the past decade or so, this study concludes that opera remains an art-form, institution and ritual of relative inaccessibility and exclusiveness. The commercial interest in and profitability of 'opera' do not translate into new 'popular' audiences in the opera house.

The increased dependency of opera companies on corporate funding in the face of retreating government subsidies may have brought a new 'elite' audience into the expensive seats, pandered to by the introduction of surtitles etc., but the traditional 'elite' has succeeded in closing down entry to opera in other select venues where opera continues to confirm and maintain their select identity and prestige of their life-style.

1 Opera as music, text, drama and theatre

No better time to reassert the old truism that opera is drama than just after watching the relay from Pasadena of the Three Tenors doing their thing once more. Apart from the hype ... claims have again been made that this kind of event leads people to opera. It may lead them into opera houses, but it couldn't conceivably foster correct expectations of what they can, or should, find when they get there. The raison d'être of opera has always been that it is drama rendered through music. That was the principle upon which opera's first genius, Monteverdi, created his masterpieces; and it has been indignantly stressed in the great series of manifestos which have punctuated the history of an art-form which is always in danger of collapsing into decadence. Though great voices are never unwelcome, they are not a sufficient condition for great opera, its creation or its performance. The operas which survive thanks to one or two hit numbers which require singing by stars are a luxury which almost none of the world's opera houses can afford. Works such as Adriana Lecouvreur or Fedora, may deserve a recording or two in which prima donnas and their admirers can be indulged, but every time they are mounted they exclude the production of a masterwork, one of those contributions to the genre which provide food for the mind and spirit (Tanner 1994:1).

Introduction

Opera discourses are full of implicit assumptions and explicit instructions on 'right' as opposed to 'wrong' kinds of knowledge, 'correct' expectations of what audiences should rather than can find in opera houses, the naming of 'masterworks' and 'genius' composers and warnings of 'decadence': diva worship, meretricious works, self-indulgence, 'entertainment'—all of which debase the 'true' and 'pure' meaning of opera as 'high culture', as 'auratic art'—ingestion of 'food for the mind and spirit', all this knowledge is suffused with normative and immanent power (Foucault 1981). However despite the overall consistency and authority of such pronouncements, deference from the instructed is not assured: incomprehension, 'ignorance', tensions, resistance, even conflicts can occur, largely for reasons which though not hard to identify (being derived from the peculiar hybridity of form and function which have made opera from its beginnings a cultural form 'in crisis') (Pleasants 1982),¹ are, by being so derived, accordingly difficult to fully describe and explain.

In terms of form the problems are those of stratified multilingual means of communication and their comprehension. That opera is the dramatised combination of text and music is basically agreed, but all three elements, separately and together, are 'expertly' analysed via armouries of technical terms which govern access to opera knowledge at even the lowest levels. As opera is Italian in origin and multicultural in development, these terminologies derive from many different tongues. In terms of voice types (for example, coloratura, heldentenor, Falcon²), opera types (for example, dramma giocoso, zarzuela, opéra comiquei³), opera titles (for example, Cosí fan tutte, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Les Contes d'Hoffmann⁴), aspects of musical structure (for example, 'Da Capo' aria, cabaletta, Leitmotiv⁵), the languages of performance (most large international houses present all works in their original languages rather than those of the audience) and even the names of present and past singers (for example, Angela Gheorghiu, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Viorica Ursuleac), access to opera knowledge depends on the acquisition of a rich mixture of linguistic elements, the ability and confidence to use them 'correctly' for further 'study' and to pronounce them convincingly in interactions with others. Most discouraging of all is probably musical language, which in many mandarin discourses is credited with prior significance over text and drama, thus weighing heavily on opera's largely musically illiterate public, although in this age of 'produceritis' (Pleasants 1989) many amongst the latter may find live' discourses in the form of 'radical' stagings baffling.

Opera knowledge is thus stratified knowledge imbued with differential power which accrues to those who possess or claim it. At the upper extreme are study-bound academic analyses, overlaid with the 'protective sheen of technical jargon and couched in inexpressive prose' (Abbate and Parker 1989: 2), of select 'masterworks'⁷ treated as 'autonomous apolitical art' (Bokina 1993: 187), by 'genius' composers,⁸ governed by 'abstract' musical principles (Schenker 1954; 1974), removed from the theatre wherein lurk the dangers of 'decadence'. At the lower extreme lie the 'in theatre' responses and box office demands of relatively 'untutored' audiences (Shepherd 1987: 60). Between these extremes exist many layers of knowledge and forms of instruction from meticulous analyses of 'the always tense marriage' (Corse 1987 after Conrad 1977⁹) between music and text, 'deconstructionist' and 'expressive' production techniques, the provenance of opera's 'great literary sources' (Schmidgall 1977) and close dissection of libretti (Smith 1971; Groos and Parker 1990).¹⁰

Middle-range materials consist of relatively specialised collections of plot summaries accompanied by basic musical quotations, such as classically found in Newman's Wagner Nights (1949) and Dent's Mozart Operas (1913) and yet more accessible compendium guides to the most popular repertoire works, such as, again classically, Kobbeé (originally 1922 but frequently revised and currently edited by Lord Harewood)¹¹ Texts such as these, together with opera dictionaries, encyclopaedias and histories and the extensive essays which, these days, fill out most opera house programmes, typically provide 'serious' operagoers with their preparatory and post performance 'homework'. Specialised journals such as Opera and Opera Now in Britain and Opera News in the USA provide tutelage of varying degrees of difficulty,¹² whilst the lowest instruction is provided by critics' reviews in the arts pages of broadsheets. The higher the level of discourse, the greater the use of technical, especially musical, terminologies; the lower the level of discourse, the greater the emphasis on potentially 'decadent' element—staging and design details, the indiscriminate treatments of operas regardless of their 'expertly' ascribed quality, reportage on audience behaviours especially at first nights and galas and preoccupation with the lives and loves of the 'stars', especially singers. Broadsheet reviews of opera in performance interconnect with other media representations on non-arts pages of 'opera' outside the opera-house, as technologically reproduced popular and commercial entertainment, most commonly in bite-sized aria fragmentary and 'star' gossip forms—'Nessun dorma' as TV World Cup theme, opera as cinema soundtrack, the Three Tenors doing their thing once again, aria extracts as advertising jingles, Big Lucy P's (Pavarotti's) diet, girth, marriage and customised cologne, Carreras' fight against leukaemia, Kiri's homes, gowns and Rolex, the latest Lesley Garrett recording and interview, National Lottery funds for Covent Garden and so on.

Opera may be 'high' art but it is also a public art—an 'industry' dependent on selling itself to audiences in situ, audiences also socialised into opera as function, as ritual and lifestyle, commodities conspicuously consumed in and outside opera houses as signs of differential wealth, taste and status. It is out of all these discourses, and the power relations which they reflect, that opera is socially and materially constructed. Mandarin discourses may depict opera as an artefact outside and above the sociocultural environment in which it exists—for example 'In opera various "systems" work together, each according to its own nature and laws, and the result of the combination is much greater than the sum of the individual forces' (Petrobelli 1981:129)—but such depictions and the genre they describe are rooted in wider 'systems' of class, patronage, market and politics which ascribe to opera as an institution its particular social meanings and significance.

Art as institution includes the art producing and art distributing apparatus as well as the dominant ideas about art in a certain epoch, which essentially determine the reception of works (Burger 1981: 29).

Accordingly opera is:

... nothing inherently: it is waiting to be used, as a series of signs, a series of rhetorical strategies that is ready to be taken up and used at any point, not only in the production of types of knowledge, but also in the formation of power relations ... What follows from the assumption that Mozart presents life-enhancing values? What but the creation of an elite who are in contact with those values, who alone can appreciate them? And what in terms of power flows from the creation of that elite, whose guarantee of rightness is the self-justifying one that they have access to this art and can appreciate it? (Tambling 1987: 20).

The following chapter will address opera as object of consumption and expression of taste; subsequent chapters will examine the significance of opera as audited 'industry', as 'museum' culture, within which singers, producers and audiences stake their claims. However, first it is necessary to address in more detail the social construction of opera as 'high' cultural artefact by 'expert' discourses on its key components—music, text and drama, their relative importance and their interdependence—commencing with those which ultimately contextualise opera within the paradigm of 'abstract' music and which lead 'Many of our most eminent leaders of music, both living and dead, to have taken the view that opera is a form of music which ought not to be encouraged' (Dent 1965:14).¹³

'Abstract' music

Claims that music has autonomy from social practice, that it is 'hermetically sealed' (Burger 1986), that it must refuse to heed demands for practical utility and which account for its origins in non-social, natural or metaphysical terms, may be traced back at least as far as Pythagoras' 'discovery' of a 'correspondence between harmonious tones and numerical proportions' (James 1993: 20-40; McClary 1987: 15; Norton 1984: 80-104). This Pythagorean model reaches its zenith within the strict rationalised canon of aesthetic modernism, the so-called 'Beethoven legacy' (Scott 1990: 386), wherein 'abstract' music becomes 'transcendent and autonomous' (Wolff 1987:1), governed by universal formal principles so that the'... essential hermeneutic problem about music is ... that it is all syntax and no semantics [it] lacks denotive or referential power' (Kramer 1990: 2). Stravinsky's Poetics in Music (1942) is amongst the most extreme modern statements of this formalist hegemony which seeks 'to expunge all traces of musical involvement with a world outside its own self-enclosed ontologically privileged domain' (Norris 1989: 7). Consequently, 'abstract' music ideology confirms as privileged those able to grasp and enact principles outside contingent historical interests, simultaneously offering a mystifying yet comforting sense to non-initiates

... who know well how music can influence their deepest feelings and convictions, but who don't want to think that such efforts can be obtained through any kind of conscious or social manipulative grasp. [This aesthetic] ... polices the boundary between experience and knowledge, art for the consumer and art as a realm of specialised understanding inaccessible to all but the expert ... (Norris 1989: 9, 10).

This also reifies the idea of musical history as a kind of inevitable, unfolding destiny in sound—a process which involves the increasingly rational categorisation, use and exploitation of tonal resources believed implicit in the nature of all musical experiences, so that music only reaches its peak of achievement in the European 'high' cultural tradition which defines it, 'and then only in the works that manifest the kind of intensive thematic and tonal development that lends itself to precisely this approach' (Norris 1989: 11). From a sociological perspective wherein '... any particular kind of music can only be understood in terms of the group or society which makes and appreciates that music, which utilise an "objectively" conceived aesthetic' (Shepherd 1977: 1), the initial general problem is why the nineteenth century reification of this formalist aesthetic is regarded as the highest of 'high' culture. To, and for whom, did and does this ideology of music as an expression of 'the unspeakable' (Langer 1960: 235), speak?

In the present context, more specific questions arise: what is the relationship between this modernist musical aesthetic and the 'impure', because hybrid opera, which also reached its pinnacle in the nineteenth century, both as a genre with the highest of 'high' artistic pretensions and as entertainment with 'mass' appeal? As 'drama rendered through music' are 'abstract' critiques of opera valid? In opera, music has complex, often disputed, yet integral relationships with texts which, no matter how operatic' in the reputationally 'silly' sense, necessarily carry concrete narrative power within themselves and in some form into the music with which they are intended to be combined in staged lyric dramas, yet 'expert' discourses continue to defer to 'abstract' principles. Why should this be so?

Generally, Western music has been explicitly 'referential', more often than not using the human voice, 'discoursing explicitly about something' (Barzun 1980: 6); indeed, until the late eighteenth century, music with a verbal text was considered a higher form than that without. Only in the past two centuries has solely instrumental music assumed pre-eminence,'... critical enthusiasm for the pure and absolute is the product of a very recent aestheticism. With ... the Beethovian watershed ... conceptless, instrumental music—precisely because of its lack of concepts—became elevated to a language above verbal language' (Dahlhaus and Zimmermann 1984: 179).¹⁴ In the complex interaction of musical, literary and philosophical developments a 'topos of Unsayability' (Dahlhaus 1978: 14) emerged; all that cannot be articulated in verbal discourse may be addressed in the privileged sphere of '... musical rationalisation [which] means that the modern composer can achieve his or her aesthetic purposes only by adapting to the laws of musical technique' (Zabel 1989:199).

This transcendence of 'abstract' music over the textual and vocal with the onset of modernity was contested. Hegel, for example, objected to abstract music precisely because of its lack of specific conceptual content, being thereby 'indeterminate and vague' (Hegel 1964: 181). Kant, too, defended the superiority of poetry which he credited with the higher values of culture, reflection and subjective autonomy, compared with music's indisputably lower order values—enjoyment, sensation, subjective contingency and so on, which reduced its communicability to 'the language of the emotions ... it does not leave any space for reflection [and is thus] ... more pleasure than culture' (1977: 267-8). It did not bear repeated listening, it was ephemeral'... rather like the smell produced by someone who takes out a perfumed handkerchief in company' (quoted in Bowie 1991: 73). Against such judgements it was beholden upon 'serious' musicians to demonstrate their transcendence of such easy virtues of 'emotion', 'enjoyment' and the 'theatre' by demonstrating the scientific principles of harmonic composition freed from textual constraints and diversions of spectacle, as epitomised in the Counter-Reformation's rationalisation of religious polyphony into harmony. The density of polyphonic sound in church services was deemed too

... richly layered. Horns, trumpets, pipes vie and sound along constantly with the voices. Amorous and lascivious melodies are heard such as elsewhere accompany courtesans and clowns. The people run into the churches as if they were theatres, for the sake of the sensuous charm of the ear (Erasmus quoted in Kivy 1988: 4).

Polyphony concealed the spirituality of text and ritual: hence the demand for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Opera as music, text, drama and theatre
• 2. Opera as fetish and taste
• 3. The opera industry
• 4. The opera museum
• 5. Singers' opera
• 6. Producers' opera
• 7. 'Operatic' commodities
• 8. Audiences' opera
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Bibliography