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In Search of Opera
By Carolyn Abbate PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11731-7
CHAPTER 1
ORPHEUS. ONE LAST PERFORMANCE
Remember the death of Orpheus: attacked by crazy women, dismembered, he is finally decapitated, the worst indignity a singer could suffer. Crazy women throw his body parts in all directions. But his head, accompanied (in a new sense) by his lyre, floats down a river, its mouth still open in song. The journey by water ends at Lesbos, and as soon as the head washes up, a serpent approaches, wanting to bite the mouth and the eyes. Here Apollo steps in, freezes the snake into stone, and (in one source, Hygenius's Astronomica) makes a celestial happy end, placing the lyre but not the head among the constellations. Orpheus's death and dismemberment tell of poetry's survival and dispersal through nature: in the "Sonnets to Orpheus," Rilke contemplates the lamenting head as a miracle. Yet that dismemberment also entails a split between singing voice and human body in terms that suggest the work oi those accustomed to butchery. A terrible physical reality is precondition for the miracle—coexisting with the miracle, side by side. To be complacent about the head, to say it is just a metaphor, thus may reflect willed blindness to the awful aspects of Orpheus's fate, and to a symbolic force that is allied with horror, and not with poetry alone.
Orpheus's life in opera began with classical Latin narratives, interpreted by Poliziano in his pastoral play (ca. 1480) and by Stiiggio for Monteverdi's opera, in 1607. These "two Orfeos" are heavy structural elements in accounts of opera's birth, said to prefigure operatic librettos on the one hand, and launch opera into history on the other. Virgil and Ovid gave librettists three chances to catch Orpheus singing, and two were regularly adapted for operatic purposes. The first is Orpheus's appeal to the King of Hell during the rescue of Eurydice, a song tailormade for that occasion. After he looks back and loses Eurydice, Orpheus retreats in mourning to the hills of Thrace, where he sings and plays. Trees of all kinds and then animals and birds come to hear his singing, and this concert became a common motif in European painting. He unfortunately also attracts the attention of the Bacchantes, who are thirsty for his death. His singing magically deflects their stones and spears, and the women can kill him in the end because they have sheer volume on their side, drowning out his voice with flutes and drums.
The third song is the one sung by the head, and everybody left it alone.
Opera freely embraced the other acoustic image associated with Orpheus's death, the Dionysian symphony of the crazy women. Striggio included it in his 1607 libretto, in which act 5 closes with a long song for the Bacchantes. Orpheus does not perish on the spot, yet the Bacchantes allude to his future: "flown from this avenging arm is our impious adversary, the Thracian Orpheus, despiser of our high worth. He will not escape." Monteverdi, of course, ended up writing music for another ending, in which the Bacchantes are nowhere to be found. Apollo appears and escorts his son into heaven, and surviving shepherds do a dance. In Haydn's Orfeo ed Euridice (also called L'anima del filosofo, composed in 1791), singing Bacchantes force Orpheus to drink poison; his life "ebbs away" rather languidly, and his corpse remains intact. The Bacchantes are punished when a storm disperses them: a fitting end for such women, we are given to understand. The women's singing and dancing provides librettists and composers with an ending that is satisfying as musical theater, even if dubious in conventional ethical terms.
Orpheus's death and his floating head did not become a common motif in European art until the end of the nineteenth century, when fin de siècle bards of exhaustion find his demise an apt metaphor for their condition. By 1948, Stravinsky was ready to put his dismemberment on stage and give musical presence to its violence. Symbolist painters recalled his decapitation in many ways, in works that share one feature: the head is silent. Gustave Moreau's famous Orphée (1865) shows an unworried nymph gazing at Orpheus's extraordinarily peaceful head, which she has collected on his lyre (see fig. 1.1). Along with a convenient drapery, her hand hides any whipsawing tendons or severed arteries, and the closed mouth looks as if it never sang at all. But mouth and eyes are eloquent nonetheless, since, devoid of trauma, they lull the observer into a delusion. A dark shape floating off the bottom of the lyre is a rock that could be the torso and legs that are not there, a wish for wholeness in which the artist denies the torn body with a shadow, and the singing head with a silent one. Doubts arise only after one's eye goes further, encountering the Dionysians on the hill, and the flutes at their lips.
Moreau's reshuffling of Orpheus's fate acknowledges what librettists had realized for centuries: that postmortem song by the floating head is a frightful idea. As Herod says to Salome in Strauss's opera, "The head of a man that is cut from his body is a sickening sight." Sickening, but mesmerizing nonetheless. In Virgil, the head is rather eloquent, lamenting and calling out "Eurydice" with "its voice and icy tongue," and then repeating the name, which is echoed by the riverbank. Ovid's head is less energetic, less clearly musical: "a marvel! While they floated in midstream, the lyre gave forth some mournful notes, mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured, mournfully the banks replied." One wonders how the head continues to sing. That is magic, but what sort? Anatomical magic, discharged organic electricity dying away as mindless babbling? Or is the head inspired from outside, breathed into, before it finally falls silent, like an aeolian harp? Those possibilities are separate, distantly related images of voice and authority in operatic singing.
The image is, then, not merely sickening, just as it is not merely allegorical. Orpheus's last song accesses a sense that is rare and peculiar yet familiar, the taste of something strange but instantly recognizable, the complex emotion experienced during a dream of the dead. The person is there, in the dream, smiling, perhaps speaking, and there is something joyful about the encounter. Yet even as we believe we are miraculously in the presence of the resurrected—of continued singing—we always know that he or she is dead still, that whatever the dead person is saying is being said by the dreamer, that a moment of dissolution will arrive.
What the head sings is also no less musical than what Orpheus otherwise sang; indeed, Ovid exclaims that the head and the lyre are a "marvel," and maybe he is suggesting that Orpheus's premortem performances belonged to a different category. If librettists and composers appear to turn a deaf ear to the singing head, however, the reasons are obvious. Brooding on this last gasp of one's prize doppelgänger—the founding father of the opera business—cannot be comfortable. Bodiless warbling heads are unsettling for professional reasons. Even in Poliziano's play, which ends with the head brought on in triumph after an offstage dismemberment, the body part is silent. In the same way, Orpheus's last number, wished away by Moreau, was suppressed in the operatic versions of his myth. Nevertheless, the sound is a wholly operatic motif, one could even say the operatic motif in his myth.
Put bluntly: the singing head represents the uncanny aspects of musical performance, operatic performance in particular, precisely because one cannot say how it sings, who is in charge, who is the source of the utterance, and what is the nature of the medium through which musical ideas become physically present as sound. In this, Orpheus's head serves as a master symbol for the questions that are central to this book, and that arise not only with respect to opera, but in thinking about music in general. It summarizes the complications of the performance network: its instability, the deadness implicit in any object that has been animated by music, the living noise in the channels that run between compositional thought and the structures inscribed in a score, the creation of music by performers, and the sound that strikes the listener.
But if the head is a master symbol for performance, it also stands for several related phenomena whose significance is less global. The head represents singing that travels far from the body in which it originated, as a physical object that is cousin to a classic poetic image, the echo. Postmortem resonance suggests as well an immense original sonic force, so huge that it continues in a body part. Thus one could see the head as an expression of an opera singer's dream: sing at such volume, with such power, that the voice travels great distances and is heard everywhere. Listening ears are unable to escape. This dream unites mechanics (volume, resonance, and sound transmission) with the metaphysical (songs mythic capacity to "move" human thoughts and passions). The juxtaposition of metaphysics with the material unleashes huge energies in certain librettists and opera composers.
As a minor symbol, Orpheus's postmortem singing summarizes the authority conventionally ascribed to disembodiment. What is sung is, quite literally, music that "doesn't come from" the human body. Disembodied voice—seen less literally and brutally—is a voice originating from an unseen locus of energy and thought, and it has distinct powers, especially as represented in opera and film. If philosophical writings on voice have established a metaphysics of presence in Western thought, there is a powerful metaphysics of absence that runs alongside it, a tendency, at least before modernist disenchantment redefined the terms, to associate the voice with no visible point of origin with omniscience. Such voices are considered divine, or at least supernatural, free of ordinary encumbrances.
One might even see such music as cerebral, as merely hypothetical, or impossible, excluded from representation by virtue of its outrageous magic. Orpheus's singing head could stand for a musical work as a transcendent object, as opposed to that object's embodiment in any given performance. Most importantly, opera itself could be regarded as a response to an outlandish question—how does the dead object continue to sing? Perhaps because Apollo plays it like some ghastly instrument. If so, it is a medium that, though dead, always has the capacity to be brought back to life: an instrument, or a performer. Or, the head sings because the sheer physical resonance of Orpheus's premortem songs endures. As a master symbol, one with several implications in its orbit, Orpheus's last performance reflects on the nature of musical execution in general, as well as the forms of musical power and how such power is construed.
I
Orpheus's head is a musical instrument, an object given life as long as a master plays it. This notion of the "instrument" can be broadened to include the performer, who might similarly be construed as a medium, channeling musical thoughts from elsewhere, "played" by an inscription, or by a musical work. Dead instrument and live performer might seem to be quite different, but collapsing them, in particular when the performer is female—hence assumed more amenable to manipulation, paralysis, or control—is a familiar Romantic cliché. E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Councillor Krespel," where a violin is linked to the body and fate of a human soprano, is one of many literary versions of the tale.
While such narratives might seem historically limited to European Romanticism or the Gothic, the gesture that dismisses the (female) performer as mere instrument is in fact extraordinarily resilient. Joseph Mankiewicz's 1950 film All About Eve has a scene where actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis) gets into a fight with Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), the playwright who has written several works for her to star in. He dismisses her loudly as "nothing more than a voice and a body," thus cutting her up nicely into component parts. This salvo, getting rid of the actress as any kind of whole, is designed to expose just how fully his master voice animates her fragments and has always done so. Just to make sure she has gotten the point, his parting shot goes even further: "It is time for the piano to realize that it did not write the concerto!" His insult—she is not even the pianist, just the instrument—pushes her further back, making her the dead material medium of wood and strings. The irony, of course, is that the film never shows us one of Lloyd's plays, except as fragments, and that Margo Channing as embodied by Davis is so vivid, omnipresent, resonant, and whole that she might be said to be the film, in any scene in which she appears. Lloyd's parting shot is weak, yet it summarizes the persistence of a claim that while musical instruments are truly inanimate, and performers live human beings, the two can meet each other in any symbol that combines deadness and life.
Perhaps All About Eve does a playful take on Orpheus by alluding to the split between "a voice and a body," in Lloyd's intimation that performers are dead objects. But even if there is no direct reference, the terms by which the woman is made into the piano are a reminder that Orpheus's fate appears to involve a symbolic feminization. Indeed, taken as instrument-medium, Orpheus's head recalls another category of performer associated with Apollo, the priestesses of the oracle at Delphi, through whom Apollo announced his prophecies. As Giulia Sissa points out, these women were seen as '"bodies in tune and capable, like a musical instrument, of a full and faithful rendition'; but once removed from their proximity to Apollo, the instrument-women remained "hermetically sealed, untouchable, and silent." No one was playing them.
Such women have no voice of their own and are furthermore not capable of reading symbols and announcing their import. Rather, "a woman's body becomes a locus, a wall of glass, a blank page; speech does not find a symbolic order; it shines like a beacon." Imagining that a transcendent voice speaks through female bodies and vocal cords means that certain protections, certain mental firewalls, must be in place, assuring listeners that the women are neither misinterpreting the message nor doing the unthinkable, inventing the message on their own. Sissa describes these firewalls in some detail, visual and literary fantasies that tended to erase the priestess. Such fantasies struggle to eliminate the threat of inauthenticity. By making the priestess's body invisible, they engineer a "double absence: of a subject who was not herself when words were uttered through her mouth, and of a female body that was not present when the god who inhabited it borrowed its voice."
Still, no firewall can eliminate the fact that such media are not really dead and as the only source for Apollo's voice cannot be wholly erased. Thus Sissa, who prefers to recover the women's collaborative role, proposes a lunar metaphor and the concept of "living instruments." The priestess as moon alters and changes the light of the sun, so we can look at it without going blind. This lunar metaphor reenvisages the woman's voice as entwined with the transcendent voice in ways that entail neither mere repetition nor scandalous reinterpretation. She is not written upon passively, nor is she a distorting mirror: the sign that is created is the double work of god and priestess.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Search of Opera by Carolyn Abbate. Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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