Opera In The Flesh

Sexuality In Operatic Performance

Sam Abel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367281953
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000308150
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Verdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, 'These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.' In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.

Part One

Opera and the Body

1
Embodying Opera

A singer’s voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener’s body. … The listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior: Her voice enters me, makes me a “me,” an interior, by virtue of the fact that I have been entered.

—Wayne Koestenbaum
The Queen’s Throat¹

Opera and Bodies

This book is about the way the human body responds to opera. It is about the way an audience that listens to and looks at opera in the theater responds physically and erotically to the bodies singing and performing opera on the stage. It is about opera as a kind of theater and about why opera is unlike any other kind of theater. It is my attempt to find words to express the deep, irrational, and intensely physical passion I feel for that deeply irrational, physical, and passionate art form, opera. This book is my way of trying to verbalize an aesthetic experience that seems to me beyond words, an experience far more physical than discursive.

My feelings for opera do not adapt well to the strictures of discourse. I am not even sure that words exist to express my experience of opera. Other art forms submit much more readily to analysis. I can say in a few sentences exactly why I love Shakespeare and Beckett, Van Eyck and Picasso, Brahms and Stravinsky. But when it comes to explaining my adoration of opera, simple formulas escape me. I become tongue-tied, the way I become in the early stages of love—or, more accurately, sex. These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties; but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me in a way matched only by sexual desire. I want to know why opera feels to me so much more physical, so much more embodied, than any other art form. I want to know why opera feels so much like sex.

I am certainly not the first person to notice the connection between opera and physical desire. The literature surrounding opera (and, more broadly, music) resounds with sexual imagery. Critics call musical themes and cadences masculine or feminine; sonata movements and arias come to a elimax; music seduces its audience. But, as Susan McClary argues forcefully in her landmark book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender; and Sexuality, this language of desire remains largely hidden, a set of secret codes, and few mainstream musicologists acknowledge its presence overtly.² According to the official line, as delivered by the loftiest exponents of high art, opera has no traffic with anything so crude as desire. Opera, they say, is not about carnal knowledge; like all great art, it deals with pure passions (whatever those are). Or rather, since opera is supposed to be nothing other than music, it is not really about anything at all; the narrative is incidental to the platonic effluence of sound. Physical feelings aroused by opera are aberrations, failures of the art to live up to its ideals. No art is perfect. In other words, let’s just pretend these nasty feelings don’t exist and stick to our vision of opera as an elevated, exclusively intellectual experience.

Till the last few years, most opera books have left intact the wall of silence around opera’s physical nature. They offer either dry musicology, or gossipy history about great productions and houses, or tales of the peccadilloes of great (and not so great) singers. None of these approaches tells me much about opera’s erotic impact. Biographies of opera stars and accounts of past productions amuse me, but they do not reflect my immediate experience of opera. And though I find the voyeuristic tone that pervades so much opera history titillating, these chronicles reveal the sex lives of opera people offstage, not the sexuality of opera itself. Most musicology, on the other hand, strikes me as fatally formal, entirely abstracted from the physicality of opera. Analyses of Wagner’s chromaticism tell me what happens musically in Tristan und Isolde but not why my back arches during the “Liebestod.”

What I miss most in opera criticism, in other words, is theater. Until recently, only a few works offered a serious analysis of opera’s theatricality, most notably Joseph Kerman’s groundbreaking Opera as Drama.³ Kerman’s book has, in many ways, fathered this one. Opera as Drama was published in 1956, one year before I was born. It was one of the first books about opera that I read in college; it struck me then, and does still, as both revolutionary, in its defiance of standard critical approaches, and conservative (in the best sense), in its reclaiming of opera’s original theatrical impulses. Through Kerman, I learned to unite my love of opera with my vojcation of theater; I am deeply in his debt. But we all must break away from our parents; Kerman’s way is not my way. I can admire Kerman’s analysis, but I cannot take his critical approach. Most of all, I cannot embrace his condescending attitude toward Puccini and Strauss. I love Puccini and Strauss precisely for the attributes that Kerman uses to dismiss them: their shameless theatricality and passionate emotionalism. Kerman loves opera for its form, not for its feeling. He sees opera as drama, but he never really gets to opera as theater, a performed physical exchange between singer and audience. Opera for me is not formal and analytical; it is messy, overblown, melodramatic, theatrical.

In the last few years, several writers have challenged the stultifying orthodoxy that pervades opera criticism. Susan McClary joyfully jars loose several hundred years of patriarchal assumptions about music and its relation to society in Feminine Endings, defying the turgid status quo of mainstream musicology. Catherine Clement unearths the deeply misogynistic nature of operatic narrative in the disturbing polemic Opera, or the Undoing of Women.⁴ Michel Poizat, in The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to ask why opera arouses such passionate desire in its audience, concluding that opera is a quest for jouis-sane, the rare, orgasm-like instant of eroticized pleasure induced by the climactic moment of an aria.⁵ Anne Rice’s novel about the intrigues of the eighteenth-century castrati, Cry to Heaven, stares unblinkingly at the castrato’s wounded scrotum, unmasking the terrifying sexuality of opera’s great hidden secret.⁶ Much in these books is subjective, passionate, erotic, impressionistic, difficult. They all have evoked emotional, at times unpleasant, responses from critics, who sense the danger inherent in their discourse. I do not agree with everything they say. But in their iconoclastic embrace of opera’s dangerous physicality they begin to articulate what I feel in the opera house. Mostly, what I take from these books is the revelation that opera is about the human body, that opera is embodied.

For me, though, the most energizing recent book about opera is Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. It appeared just as I finished my first draft of this volume, and it forced me to rethink much of my analysis. On the surface, Koestenbaum offers to explain the appeal of opera to gay men, but he does a great deal more. The book is a hymn to opera’s eroticism. As I read it, I was almost overwhelmed by Koestenbaum’s passion for opera. I rejoiced at the precision of his poetic expression, at the depth of his feeling. I felt pain, both in empathy for his anguish and out of jealousy: I wish I had Koestenbaum’s command of metaphor, and I have had to suppress my desire to quote in these pages every line of his book. I also identify closely with the book and its author. Koestenbaum and I come to opera with the same demographic profile: We are both white, middle-class, East Coast, Jewish, gay, intellectual, Ivy League-educated, Ivy League professors writing about opera from fields other than music.

But if we come to opera from the same place, we differ sharply in our outlook. Koestenbaum approaches opera with a pessimism in which I cannot join. He argues that opera is dead, a relic of the past. Koestenbaum posits opera’s death as the central condition of its cultural production, the cause of its erotic appeal to gay men, whose lives (he argues) are defined by rejection and spiritual death. Opera for me is not dead, not a relic of the past, not a subject of despair. Nor do I see my sexuality as a source of pain or rejection. My passion for opera grows out of joy, not anguish. To me, opera’s sexuality—and my own—is a matter of life, not death.

This book, then, is also my reply to The Queen’s Throat Koestenbaum’s book, I would argue, is not really about opera per se; it is about a particular vision of gay sexuality, about how opera functions as a cultural icon for a certain generation of closeted, self-deprecating, urban gay men. Koestenbaum uses the erotic nature of opera as a means to explore his idea of gay sexuality, a dark and troubling vision of disjuncture, loneliness, and failure. My purpose here is exactly the reverse. Rather than using opera to explore gay sexuality, I propose in this book to use sexuality, gay and otherwise, as a means to explore my experience of opera, an experience that (although it may encompass some darker elements) is fundamentally life-affirming, joyous, and celebratory. Koestenbaum eroticizes opera as a function of shame and secrecy, but I want to make opera’s eroticism public. I find too much life in opera to bury it in the closet.

Like Koestenbaum, I am not a musicologist; my background is in theater. The sum of my training in music is a handful of guitar and recorder lessons in grade school, one college course in elementary music theory, and a lot of nontechnical reading. I can hear basic musical structures and harmonic configurations; I can pick out a melody on a keyboard if it is in C major (and in other keys, under duress and given sufficient time). I experience music sensually and intuitively, whereas I view dramatic narrative, under the influence of my schooling, analytically and structurally. Opera’s potency as theater lies for me in music’s power to dislodge my logical faculties, to return me to the dizzying emotionality that first made me love both opera and theater. When I go to the spoken theater I respond as a critic. When I go to the opera, I respond from the gut.

My aim, then, is to articulate this visceral response to operatic performance. I cannot, however, presume to speak for the emotions and feelings of other audience members. I can observe how other people behave in the opera house, and I can listen to them describe their reactions. But when it comes to physical responses, I can only speak with certainty about myself (and that task is difficult enough). And so I choose here to write mainly in the first person, about my individual response to opera. I write in the first person not because I think I am a typical opera audience member or because I think there is something unique about my reactions, but because my own feelings are what I know. And I write about my own experience in the hope that my feelings will resonate with those whose experience of opera is like mine—and perhaps with those who respond to opera in fundamentally different ways or with those who do not respond to it at all. And so, in this spirit of self-understanding, and with apologies to Wayne Koestenbaum, I, too, must begin my tale with autobiography.

Opera and My Body

I first learned about opera from my mother, though I can’t remember how or when. My mother adored romantic opera, Verdi and especially Puccini; La Bohème was her favorite, with La Traviata close behind. But during my childhood she rarely went to the opera and did not own recordings—not even a record player. Opera belonged to her youth; it was not something for a mother of three children, not something for an older woman with responsibilities, not something she shared with my father. For her it was a treasured memory of past pleasures, her open secret. For my mother, opera was something rare, a passion reserved for special occasions. Most children have illicit, guilty fantasies about their parents having sex. I had dreams about my mother at the opera.

My first live experience of opera came when my mother took me to see Beverly Sills sing Violetta in La Traviata at the Opera Company of Boston; I was ten, I think, or thereabouts. Most details of that performance escape me now; I remember a huge, two-level set, the enormous auditorium, but few specifics. What lingers in my memory is the size of the performance. Everything seemed big to my small body, and the biggest thing of all (even bigger than Sarah Caldwell in the orchestra pit) was the overwhelming presence of Sills as Violetta, her physicality, her body on stage making amazing sounds, distant yet sharing the same space with me. The power of that singing body joined with my thrill at seeing my mother’s overt ecstasy, her joy in sharing her joy. In that moment opera assumed a physical existence, something more than a public performance of a story told through music; opera became for me the embodiment of passion, family, and love.

Opera came more regularly into my life about the time I hit puberty. My bachelor uncle, my mother’s youngest brother, worked in a shoe warehouse, but he also sang as a cantor for a Jewish congregation on Saturdays. He also sometimes sang tenor in the chorus for Caldwell’s company in Boston and performed a few leading roles with community troupes. He sang in the chorus of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, which I was told was too difficult for my young ears: an illicit opera. I went instead to see him perform Radames in a community production of Aida when I was about twelve. Again, my memories of that high school auditorium performance are dim. Mostly I remember the last scene of the opera, the death scene, as my uncle was smothered in the crudely staged tomb. The performances and production values could not remotely compare to Sills and Caldwell, but it did not matter. I was enthralled all the same.

When I was thirteen, I bought a cheap stereo with my bar mitzvah money. My older sisters owned opera LP sets from the fifties, some of which, abandoned in a fit of closet-cleaning, formed the beginning of my collection: Aida with Leontyne Price, La Bohème with Anna Moffo (the soprano idolized by Koestenbaum), Madama Butterfly with Victoria de los Angeles. I saved my money and bought an opera recording: the complete Ring with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting. I didn’t know quite what I was letting myself in for. I think I bought it, at the time, more for its massiveness than for any appreciation of Wagner. Carrying it home on the train, I felt as if I owned something important. My ownership of that set inflamed my desire to own more opera sets, a desire that I fulfilled as quickly as my finances allowed.⁷ Ultimately, I gave away all my LPs when I switched to CDs, but I still like my recordings in bulk, an assertive physical presence in my life; my opera sets threaten to take over an entire wall of my living room.

Through my teens, I went to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood and to their open rehearsals at Symphony Hall, learning the sensual pleasures of live performance. I loved my records, but not even their weighty bulk could compare with the real thing, being in the same physical space with the performers. When I got my driver’s license, a high school buddy and I got permission to borrow my mother’s car, and we spent a long weekend at Tanglewood on our own, sharing accommodations in a cheap rooming house, lying on the lawn, staring at the stars in the cool evening air, communing with the music and each other. We repeated this exercise a few times, and we always chose weekends featuring huge vocal events: Mahler symphonies, Beethoven’s Ninth. Looking back at this youthful rite of passage, it’s hard to tell what gave me a greater thrill, the music or the repressed, and entirely unfulfilled, desire generated by a weekend alone with my friend. Or maybe we (or at least I) used the music to substitute for desires buried too deep to acknowledge.

About the same time as my engagement with opera, I began participating in theater regularly. Theater started as a high school hobby, or so I told myself and my concerned and protective parents, and ended as a career—if one considers the demimonde of drama in academia as a theater career. I don’t remember ever wanting to be an opera star, but then I’m no singer. Theater became a way to enact my growing passion for opera without embarrassing myself in public. When I started making theater on my own, directing college productions and writing plays for children’s groups, my ereations looked rather operatic. The more I studied theater in college the more my taste grew toward broadly drawn farce and melodrama rather than the subtler (and more respectable) manners of high comedy and tragedy. Even without the music, I yearned for theater to create the physical impact of opera.

With an undergraduate degree in theater and no taste for business, medicine, or law, I chose the one remaining option for a dutiful Ivy League graduate and started work on a Ph.D. I went to Indiana University, the Mecca for opera students, to study the history of spoken theater. I did not study opera there and had no contact with the Music School, other than religiously attending performances. Ostensibly, I went to Indiana not because of opera but because they gave me money. But I suspect that my gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part One Opera and the Body
• Part Two Opera and Desire
• Part Three Opera and Sex
• Part Four Means and Ends
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index