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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2016 |
| Series: | Theory Q |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 382 KB |
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Melodrama
An Aesthetics of Impossibility
By Jonathan Goldberg
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7404-6
CHAPTER 1
AGENCY AND IDENTITY
The Melodram in Beethoven's Fidelio
In the score of Fidelio (1814), Beethoven's only opera, the duet between Leonore and Rocco in the second act is preceded by what the heading for musical number 12 calls a "Melodram." This is the appropriate technical term for this brief two-minute stretch of the opera: the two characters speak, their utterances punctuated with musical phrases. Beethoven's opera is formally a singspiel or op‚ra comique; everywhere else in the score, we find either speech or concerted numbers. If the orchestra is playing, the singers will be singing. If not, the singers speak. Music and speech never interact except in this Melodram. This raises some obvious questions: Why does Beethoven introduce melodrama into his opera? Why at this point in his score does he violate the rules of composition about speech and song that he follows everywhere else? In "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Drama," Thomas Elsaesser pointed to melodrama of the kind we find in Fidelio as a "system of punctuation" through which the emotional weight of the moment is underscored. For Elsaesser, this formal feature lies at the heart of all melodrama and is notably present in the twentieth-century work most immediately associated with melodrama, the films of Douglas Sirk. What it might be doing in an opera, where, it is easy to presume, the singing voice heightens emotion, is a question that Elsaesser does not ask.
Although Elsaesser's point is not about opera, it does help to remind us how much the plot of Beethoven's opera and the moment at which it arrives in its dramatic-musical Melodram brings his score into the orbit of a family drama. Leonore is, in this scene, descending into the lowest reaches of a prison in the company of Rocco, the jailer in charge of the prison. In male disguise and bearing the name Fidelio, she has insinuated herself into Rocco's company by winning the affection of his daughter Marzelline away from Marzelline's previous lover, Jaquino. Now engaged to Marzelline, she has persuaded her future father-in-law to allow her to be a fuller partner to him in his job, his assistant in the most arduous tasks. The job before them is to dig the grave of a long and unjustly held political prisoner whom the commandant of the prison, Pizarro, is about to murder. This prisoner may be Florestan, Leonore's husband, as she suspects, and as we, well before she does, will know it is. This is why she has disguised herself — to find him, to save him. At this melodramatic moment of disguise and blocked knowledge, at this moment when Beethoven writes a Melodram, discoveries of identity — his, hers — are incipient. Will all be revealed, or will she be there only to witness his death, to prepare his grave?
Beethoven's Melodram begins with a brief descent partway down a scale, ending with a tremolo punctuation on a diminished seventh chord. After this moment of musical descent and suspension, Leonore speaks in a voice that, the stage direction indicates, is "halb laut," mezza voce: she remarks how cold it is this deep underground. Rocco responds by commenting how natural this is since they are down deep ("Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief"). Rocco's common sense is belied by the unresolved musical descent down the scale and by a tremolo chord that changes from a seventh to a diminished seventh. However much one can name these musical elements, the line of music is anything but predictable: its effect is to open a space of irresolution. The music is not there merely to illustrate the downward movement of the characters, as commentators claim it does. When the music stops on the tremolo, it opens the way for a voice that is only half-voiced, and in a space that, however much it may be located in this world, is nonetheless below the earth, "unterirdisch" (164) underground: hell, a grave, another world. As Andr‚ Lischke comments, the music that accompanies this scene of underground cold and the imminence of death produces an effect that we might expect today in a horror movie. It intimates that alongside the everyday world there is another.
When the music resumes after this initial exchange about depth and cold, it repeats the descending motif, starting anew, but a half step lower, a key change that has nothing to do with the key anticipated by the suspended seventh chord. This descent is a truncated version of the initial musical line. The descent this time is sudden and interrupted, landing precipitously on a chord that is, this time, sustained; but once again, it is, like the earlier tremolo conclusion, augmented, producing yet another change in key and further irresolution. Leonore's words at this point —"I never thought we would find the entrance" ("Ich glaubte schon, wir wüRden den Eingang gar nicht finden," 164) — might describe the music seeking resolution as easily as it does the terrain they are exploring as they look for the cell that holds the prisoner. But does it find resolution? In what key is the Melodram written? There is no answer to that question, it seems, until three chords in quick succession that follow Leonore's observation disrupt that supposition. The tempo changes at this point as well, from the Poco sostenuto of the first two descending phrases to an Allegro. The music, for the first time, arrives somewhere harmonically; the three chords resolve in D major. "There he is" ("Da ist er"), Rocco says, as if the arrival in a key were the equivalent to the discovery of the man. "He seems totally motionless" ("Er scheint ganz ohne Bewegung"), Leonore responds. To Rocco's commonsense observation — "There he is" — Leonore offers a chilling rejoinder. Is he there if he is not moving — if, that is, this means he is not alive? Does the D-major resolution underline his identity, that he is there, or does it mark his end, that he is not there? Leonore's observation all but says that he is dead. The equivocation of appearance — "he seems" — seems overridden in the chordal progression that follows: the Allegro continues, the D-major chord replaced by a D-minor chord underscoring the ominous possibility that they have found him dead already. Rocco gets the point: "Perhaps he's dead" ("Vielleicht ist er todt," 164), he says, but, once again, the statement is not definitive: "Perhaps."
The music continues, two more chords follow, once again moving to a diminished seventh, opening musically the possibility in the "perhaps" of moving forward, beyond the life-death quandary. Leonore questions Rocco, "really dead?," and the music answers when the diminished chord is followed by a passage in F major marked Poco Adagio; an arpeggio ascends in the key of F, descending in the C7 that is its harmonic partner. This is the second time in the Melodram that we experience an expected harmonic progression; this time it is prolonged. For the first time, speaking voice and music overlap and coincide, for, at the same time that the music plays, Rocco speaks. "He is asleep" ("Er schl„ft"), he says. The music continues, again changing speed, again changing key, prompting Rocco to speak again in the interval opened: it's time for them to get to work, he urges. The opening — the discovery of the sleeping man — gives them an opportunity that must be seized. But when the music resumes, it does so only to come to an immediate halt. A staccato C-major sequence is replaced with a sustained C-minor chord that then modulates into a series of more-than-measure-length chords that come to a halt on yet another seventh. As it sounds, Leonore speaks: "It is impossible to distinguish his features" ("Es ist unmöglich seine Züge zu unterscheiden," 164). The chord continues with an additional note, and she speaks over it again: "May God help me if it is he!" ("Gott steh mir bei, wenn er es ist!," 165).
That it is, and that her wish may be answered, seems indicated by the Andante con moto that follows in the key of E-flat that resolves the chord on which Leonore hung. But the musical phrases keep passing in and out of the minor; Rocco again enjoins them to seize the moment and begin to dig. The melody resumes, this time punctuated by tremolos that Rocco translates quite literally into an observation about his companion: "You're trembling," he says. "Are you afraid?" he asks. Leonore denies it, after a brief Allegro passage moves away from the major/minor theme to a series of chords that appear to be heading for G-flat major; the answer to Rocco's question is couched in his naturalizing language. "It's so cold," she says, that's why she is trembling — as if the temperature could explain her affect, as if there simply was an outer cause for her inner turmoil. Not that Fidelio could say to Rocco: "I'm Leonore, not your future son-in-law; that man might be my husband." To the kind of explanation possible to be uttered, Rocco can respond in his usual commonsensical way — work will warm you up, he promises. After she speaks, the key changes, however, to A major for three measures before arriving at A minor, the key in which the duet is set. Speech is replaced by singing; the Melodram is over.
Why is this melodrama here? What has happened in it? Outwardly, nothing. Leonore still does not know if the man she sees is Florestan. Rocco sees beside him a trembling young man, his future son-in-law Fidelio, apparently cold, perhaps afraid of the job to be done. He does not know Fidelio is Leonore. Florestan does not know his wife is there. The melodrama, half-voiced, spoken at cross-purposes, is remarkable (as Daniela Kaleva notes in an essay titled "Beethoven and Melodrama" that has helped guide my musical analysis) for how various its uses of musical punctuation are, sometimes used between utterances, sometimes alongside them. Sometimes speech occurs while music plays, sometimes as a chord or pedal point is sustained, sometimes in the silences between which the music keeps reinventing itself in its extraordinary series of key and tempo changes. "The harmonic language relies on prolongation of dissonance, tonic-dominant progressions, and major-minor relationships for illustrative purposes," Kaleva writes. But illustrative of what? Kaleva notes Leonore's agitation, anxiety, and fear, along with Rocco's impatience. She assumes that the music underlines the dramatic tensions of the scene. This is true, as far as it goes, but more than that kind of underlining is involved.
Kaleva assumes we are to read Fidelio as Leonore, that the truth behind disguised and unknown identity lies beneath the surface, and that music underscores such singular truths. I would suggest, however, that this melodramatic passage is a very unsettled and unsettling interval and that that is what it is about — not some underlying truth waiting to be revealed, but an inhabitation of the irresolutions, the what-ifs and as-ifs: Who is it? Is he alive or dead? Why is s/he trembling? These hesitations, suspensions, and doubts play out in the words spoken and in musical passages that are themselves sometimes at cross-purposes, resolving, unresolving. These relationships undermine the kind of naturalizing understanding of the scene that Rocco is prone to offer and that musicologists tend to echo; they suggest the limits of an analysis of the music as simply underscoring some singular point of reference (descending scale = descending stairs; tremolo = shivering). Whatever this Melodram is about, it's not simply the temperature that's making Fidelio tremble, not a matter of a young man not up to the man's work Rocco has been sent to perform. (Earlier, when Rocco had hesitated when Pizarro wanted him to kill the prisoner, Pizarro had asked him, "Are you a man?" ["Bist du ein Mann?," 91] before staking his own manliness on the murder.) Nor is the scene merely about the question of the identity of the prisoner or his rescuer. For Leonore to know she has found her husband, for Florestan to know that Leonore has found him, for Rocco to know that Fidelio is Leonore and that the young man is a woman: such knowledge certainly could and will dissipate some of the tension in this scene. As this knowledge surfaces, the strict decorum of speaking and singing will be resumed.
The question not asked in assuming that these suppressed revelations of identity are the underlying truth of the Melodram is this: Will identity revealed in itself produce a solution? Such a supposition is certainly in play in Peter Brooks's theory of melodrama in The Melodramatic Imagination, that there is some moral clarity and force in the distinctions represented by characters, that to reveal those distinctions is the aim of melodrama. For husband and wife to know each other would be tantamount to salvation. Marriage would secure the social and political order. But if Florestan is in prison precisely because he is Florestan, how would knowing he is Florestan lead to his freedom? And if he knew that Leonore was there, how would such knowledge of her identity have salvific force? Brooks supposes that some form of self-identical goodness triumphs in melodrama. But are these characters simply to be understood as themselves? Is it who they are that enables the resolution of the dilemma of unjust imprisonment? Is that political situation solved by a domestic revelation? To suppose a seamless connection between the dilemma of unjust imprisonment and revelation of identity is to imagine that the lifting of the veil empowers action, indeed explains why and how action is possible. To assume a correlation between action and identity relegates melodrama to an impasse to be overcome; it assumes that embodiment and visceral experience serve as hindrances to the achievement of identity. This is the idealizing and ideological plot that lies behind the kind of literariness that Brooks accords melodrama.
Melodrama offers more than such an either/or in which disguise, opacity, and impasse must be exchanged for identity, knowledge, and action. Beethoven's Melodram, however much it involves disguise and uncertain knowledge, is not simply some false state that would be relieved by true knowledge, nor is it in the service of the equation of such supposedly true knowledge with power. We can see this formally if instead of understanding the Melodram as a violation of the rule of the opera's separations of speech and song that needs to be repaired, we view it as a moment dense with musical invention, filled with experiments in the relationship between speech and music. These various states of hesitation, musical irresolution, cross-purpose, key change, suspension, and half-voicing are themselves kinds of knowledge. They point in fact to something that exceeds the rule that keeps music and speech separate. In its plotting, too, the Melodram continues the opera's exploration of states of possibility marked by disguise. It is, after all, as Fidelio that Leonore has arrived where she is, as male and marriageable (rather than as female and married); it is as Fidelio that she has been able to act. That doing may be tied to a false identity, but it is nonetheless real action. It may thereby call into question the assumption that action is tied to true identity. It calls into question, moreover, the singularity of identity.
To assume that Leonore is the truth of the character, that the basis of what is happening is tied to the fact that "underneath" Fidelio there is Leonore, makes everything — all possibility — hinge on the revelation that Fidelio is Leonore. It makes that identity her only identity, her one true identity. This Melodram is just about the last moment that Fidelio can be Fidelio: in the next musical number she will know who the prisoner is; he will be Florestan, not merely an unjustly imprisoned man, and once he is Florestan, she will be Leonore. But these true names, and the knowledge of them — the knowledge that might be supposed to be that of true identity — are something more than the truth of personal identity. "Fidelio is based on the French drama, L‚onore, ou L'amour conjugale by J. N. Bouilly," as Kaleva reminds anyone unfamiliar with the basic information. Beethoven first called his opera Leonore before settling on Fidelio. The moment that she is "herself," that is, Leonore will be Florestan's wife. "First kill his wife!" ("Tödt' erst sein Weib!") is the tremendous line she sings when she stands up to Pizarro and reveals who she is. "His wife?" ("Sein Weib?"), asks Pizarro; "My wife?" ("Mein Weib?"), asks Florestan. "Yes, Leonore is here. Look!" ("Ja, sieh' hier Leonore," 194), she says, speaking in propria persona, as his wife, as Leonore.
"Yes, Leonore is here. Look!" she says, and melodrama is over. Beethoven has not used it for the revelation of identity, nor for the resolution of action, but to sustain irresolution. Nonetheless, if we return to the score of the Melodram, we can see that it more than hints where it is going — toward a resolution that will remove Fidelio and reveal Leonore but, in so doing, will reveal her only as Florestan's wife. The Melodram suggests this from its first note, an F in the cellos and double basses that points to the key of the aria Florestan has sung just before at the opening of act two of Fidelio. Florestan's aria closes with the C7–F-major harmonic resolution to be expected for an aria in the key of F. When the F sounds in the strings at the beginning of the Melodram, we are, musically, still in his world. The tremolo, which Kaleva follows Erich Schenk in calling a "shiver motif" — as if Leonore's remark about the cold is only to be taken at face value — recalls the tremolo heard toward the end of the first part of Florestan's aria when he sings about the chains that are his unjust reward for his commitment to the truth (158). If the tremolo functions in his aria in what is usually taken to be the melodramatic mode of underscoring his words, and if, at the same time, it is supposed to imitate the clinking sound of his chains, it carries two meanings at once — naturalistic imitation of the sound of chains and unnatural imprisonment. This double meaning has the effect of making the natural sound unnatural; the music means more than the literal because the literal is not univocal. The tremolo captures this as it oscillates between two notes; rather than simply fitting the situation, it marks a lack of fit and serves as a critical comment, another language. These effects are further complicated when Florestan's music, including the tremolo, are heard again in the Melodram. Quotation does not bear the same meaning in that scene. Identical notes do not carry identical meanings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Melodrama by Jonathan Goldberg. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xvii
Part I. The Impossible Situation
1. Agency and Identity: The Melodrama in Beethoven's Fidelio 3
2. Identity and Identification: Sirk—Fassbinder—Haynes 23
Part II. Melos + Drama
3. The Art of Murder: Hitchcock and Highsmith 83
4. Wildean Aesthetics: From "Paul's Case" to Lucy Gayheart 133
Coda 155
Notes 169
Bibliography 187
Index 197
What People are Saying About This
"Melodrama is a major work that offers a superbly original way of thinking queerness, impossibility, and melodrama together. Exploring the insistence of nonidentity in the melodramatic mode, Jonathan Goldberg reads texts by Beethoven, Sirk, Fassbinder, Haynes, Hitchcock, Highsmith, Cather, and Davies to show how melodrama, by confronting limitation, reveals that nothing is only what it seems: other readings are always available; other potentialities always inhere. Beautifully elaborated, theoretically pointed, and intellectually provocative, Melodrama gives thought in constant motion a chance to take center stage."
"Jonathan Goldberg is always interesting and always incisive. In this wide-ranging and powerfully revisionist study he tracks the melodramatic form across music, film, fiction, and television, from Fidelio to The Wire. His suggestive readings show how melodrama’s rhetoric of moral peril generates queer energy and brings about 'an aesthetics of the impossible situation.'"