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TELLING, OPERATICALLY

IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, OPERATIC PROGRAMMING HAS become ever more varied, including not only a wider range of repertoire from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also an increasing number of works not generally considered to be operas, such as Handel oratorios and Broadway musicals. The Komische Oper Berlin has even staged a production of Mozart’s Requiem. In response to the increasing diversity of items attracting operatic billing, Monika Hennemann has remarked that “there seem to be no limits to what falls under that category.”¹

In light of this trend, an attempt to define what differentiates operatic storytelling from that in related forms such as dramatic songs, oratorios, and cantatas may seem like a futile endeavor. In opera studies, there is a long history of skepticism that there is anything particular about the way operas tell stories, from Edward T. Cone’s suggestion that “every song is to a certain extent a little opera, every opera is no less an expanded song” to Hennemann’s more recent questioning of the distinction between opera and oratorio.² While recognizing the many connections among operas, songs, cantatas, and oratorios as well as the potential to stage many works in the latter categories as operas, this chapter also points to some key differences between these art forms. One distinction my account of operatic storytelling will not make is that between operas and musicals (for reasons given in the overture). In what follows, references to opera and operatic storytelling should be understood to encompass musicals.

My philosophical readers may harbor skepticism of a different sort, arising from the still controversial concept of medium specificity. Following David Davies and Berys Gaut, I understand medium in art as referring not merely to the materials (physical or otherwise) with which artists work but also to the practices governing how they use these materials.³ Skeptics of medium specificity, such as Noël Carroll, target an extreme version of the thesis, by which each medium is believed to possess properties that are unique to it and artists are instructed to exploit only those unique properties.⁴ My aim is merely to identify some features that differentiate opera from related media, such as song and oratorio, not to suggest that composers and librettists ought to focus their attention on only these features.

I also reject some of the evaluative claims endorsed by other moderate supporters of medium specificity. Gaut, for instance, suggests that the effective exploitation of the medium-specific features of cinema makes visual extravaganzas such as Cloud Atlas (2012)—chock-full of montage sequences and special effects—cinematically better than static, dialogue-driven films such as My Dinner with André (1981).⁵ Although commonsensical, such a position would seem to limit the possibilities that are legitimate to pursue in any given medium, a situation I am keen to avoid. In my view, successfully exploiting the properties particular to opera may or may not generate operatic works that are superior in any respect to those that are less characteristically operatic. Nevertheless, knowing what medium the artists were working in, and its particular strengths and weaknesses, plays an important role in explaining and evaluating works of art. For example, understanding the challenges of conveying on the stage the kind of deep psychological investigations at which novels excel renders Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s success at doing so in their 1973 operatic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) all the more virtuosic.

As I did in my exploration of narrative in the previous chapter, I will begin by stating the obvious and then venture to more adventurous propositions. Operas require music, specifically song. Jerrold Levinson has defined “paradigm song” as “a melodically and rhythmically distinctive arch of fully-fledged tones of definite pitch, produced in the form of vocables coalescing into words and sentences, and typically with support, primarily harmonic, from some cohort of instruments.”⁶ Given that this definition would seem to exclude many commonplace components of opera—recitative, vocalise, Sprechstimme, and unaccompanied singing—I am inclined to be more generous. However, that is not to suggest that anything goes. Take, for instance, the Montréal-based composer Luna Pearl Woolf’s “voiceless opera” Mélange à trois (2014) for violin, cello, and percussion. In this work, the performers do not merely play music; they also use their bodies to act out characters in a fictional narrative.⁷ But at no point do they generate sounds with their vocal cords. Their “singing” is made up solely of the sounds they create with their instruments. As such, I regard this work as less an opera than a work of instrumental theater that is inspired by opera, particularly its penchant for melodramatic plots.

Another work that calls into question the nature of singing is Christine Sun Kim’s Face Opera II (2013) for nine prelingually deaf performers. Although it concludes with the performers generating vocal utterances, it is primarily their facial expressions (from the American Sign Language lexicon) that Sun Kim is inviting her audiences to regard as singing.⁸

While acknowledging recent explorations of the limits of song and, accordingly, of opera in contemporary music and performance art, this study concerns opera of a more traditional sort. As such, I will be using the verb to sing in its more conventional or literal sense to refer to utterances produced by the performers’ own vocal apparatus that possess a discernable pitch or pitches with at least enough sustainment to allow for pitch discernment. Given that I will be discussing modernist operas and works of musical theater, the bar on tunefulness will need to be sufficiently low to include not only Sprechstimme but also Rex Harrison–esque “talking on pitch,” immortalized in the film musical My Fair Lady (1964).

Many genres of music tell stories through song. In this chapter, I isolate the medium-specific features of operatic storytelling by comparing it first to narrative songs; then to cantatas, oratorios, and serenatas; and finally to plays and films that contain songs but are not generally considered to be musical dramas.⁹

Operas versus Narrative Songs

One of the remarkable features of opera, in contrast to most other musical genres, is its practitioners’ commitment to storytelling. Since its origins around 1600, opera has been understood as a medium for presenting stories. By far the most common generic label applied to the first operas was favola in musica, story presented through music. And so it has remained, even throughout the aesthetic upheavals of the previous century. While practitioners in virtually all other art forms in the West were abandoning narrative, even representation, librettists and composers kept on representing stories through their works. There are nonnarrative operas, such as Einstein on the Beach (1976), but these are few and far between, and they remain on the periphery of the opera canon, in part because of their denial of our expectation for storytelling. Significantly, we are not similarly disturbed by nonnarrative songs or cantatas. With oratorios and serenatas, the expectation of a story is higher. Notably both were used as opera substitutes during Lent and papal bans. But nonnarrative examples exist, including the most famous oratorio of all, Handel’s Messiah (1742).

It would appear that operatic storytelling can be distinguished from that in songs through Plato’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis or, in the terminology I will employ, enacting character and telling about character.¹⁰ Operatic storytelling involves singers enacting characters: singers’ utterances represent characters’ utterances, and singers’ actions represent characters’ actions. In most songs, by contrast, the singer takes on the role of a narrator who summarizes or paraphrases characters’ speeches and merely describes their activities.

As Cone has noted, there is not always a clear distinction between enacting a character and telling about a character. Schubert’s Lied “Der Erlkönig” begins and ends with a narrator telling about the characters, but in the internal stanzas, the singer impersonates the utterances of the father, son, and elf king, thereby vocally enacting these characters.¹¹ Furthermore, many operas contain scenes of narration (a situation that I will discuss in more depth in the following chapter). From this evidence, Cone suggests that the difference between song and opera is primarily a matter of duration.

Cone is too hasty in his conclusions. One key difference between operas and songs is that one-to-one mapping between singers and characters is standard in the former but not in the latter. In an opera, typically all of the utterances made by a given singer are to be understood as representing the fictional utterances of the character the singer is playing. The less this is true, the more challenging it will be to perform the work as an opera.

Suppose one were tasked with producing an operatic staging of Stravinsky’s Renard (1922). Richard Taruskin summarizes its intended mode of performance as follows: “a troupe of ‘buffoons, ballet dancers, or acrobats’ . . . act the story out in pantomime on a trestle-stage, which they never leave, while the singers remain seated with the instrumentalists in the rear, their voices disembodied after the fashion of Diaghilev’s Coq d’or.”¹² The first step would be to discard the dancers and acrobats and to mobilize the singers to enact the characters: Cock, Fox, Cat, and Ram. This effort would be rather challenging, as Stravinsky often uses multiple singers’ voices to represent the voice of a single character. For this reason, the vocal parts are not designated by the characters’ names, as they are in an opera, but as tenor 1, tenor 2, bass 1, and bass 2. Not all vocal music can support singers enacting characters. It requires approximately one-to-one mapping of singers to characters.

One commonplace exception is works that involve characters at different stages of life. In adapting Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home (2006) into a musical (2013, music by Jeanine Tesori), the librettist Lisa Kron decided to split the central character into Small Alison (age nine), Middle Alison (age nineteen), and (Adult) Alison (age forty-three). Even if the work does not prescribe a character to be divided into multiple roles, a director may decide to divide it between multiple performers. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s opera film Parsifal (1982) distributed the singing and acting to different performers, most radically in the case of Parsifal, who was sung by the Heldentenor Reiner Goldberg but acted by a boy (Michael Kutter) and, after Kundry’s kiss, a woman (Karen Krick). Deaf West Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening (2014) involved character doubling of a different sort. Deaf actors were paired with hearing doubles who performed most of their vocal utterances. Wendla’s and Melchior’s singer doubles also appeared onstage for much of the show, often interacting with their signing counterparts (chap. 8 contains a more detailed discussion).

Narration scenes also pose no obstacle to distinguishing between operas and narrative songs. In the course of enacting a character in an opera, a performer may also tell about character, as when a soprano enacts Lakmé in Delibes’s 1883 opera and in so doing tells the legend of the pariah’s daughter. Scenes of narration do not collapse the distinction between enacting character and telling about character because the singer’s act of telling about the pariah’s daughter is embedded within her act of enacting the character Lakmé.

Operas versus Oratorios and Cantatas

Opera is not, of course, the only genre of vocal music capable of presenting stories by means of singers enacting characters. Some examples, incidentally all by Handel, include the oratorios Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707) and Esther (1732), the serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708), and the cantatas La Lucrezia (1709) and Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (1707). The difference between these genres and opera hinges on how they are intended to be performed: theatrical performances involving sets, costumes, and singers enacting characters in the case of operas, and concerts involving singers performing in modern dress, standing in place, without backdrops or props in the case of oratorios, cantatas, and serenatas. Determining the intended mode of performance is not always a simple matter. Some composers endorsed both theatrical and concert performances.¹³ Even if the composer has a definite opinion on the staging of his or her work, performers may decide to pursue an alternative approach. In what follows, I will be speaking about performances that comply with the author’s intentions with regard to performance means. But any work that supports storytelling by means of singers enacting characters could theoretically be staged as an opera, and my account of operatic storytelling would be equally applicable to such performances.

Perhaps surprisingly for those who regard opera as a primarily musical art form, what makes a musical performance with singing an operatic performance, as opposed to a concert, turns on the function of its extramusical components. In operatic performances, what singers look like, what they are wearing, and the movements they perform typically make things true about the characters they play: what they look like and how they move. With dramatic songs, cantatas, oratorios, and serenatas, by contrast, the singers’ appearance and movements do not typically generate facts about the appearance and behavior of the characters they play. It would be highly idiosyncratic for a singer performing La Lucrezia to appear in Roman garb and to pretend to commit suicide at the end. More commonly, the singer will appear in modern formal attire. The inappropriateness of her dress, in the context of the world of the story, does not disturb listeners, since her apparel is not intended to represent that of the character she plays.

To better understand this distinction, Gregory Currie’s category of visual fictions will be useful. “Visual fictions are distinguished from non-visual ones by how content is determined. With a visual fiction, content is determined, in part, by what we see. We see, on stage or screen, a man who moves in a certain way. That man plays a character, and his visible movements determine as part of the content of the play or movie that the character moves in that way.”¹⁴ Although Currie is describing cinema, his description also holds true for operatic performances. However, since sound is necessary to opera, while it is not in the case of cinema and other forms of theater, I propose a new category for operas called audiovisual fictions.¹⁵ If operas are audiovisual fictions, then songs, oratorios, cantatas, and serenatas (in addition to instrumental works such as Strauss’s Don Quixote [1898]) are aural fictions: their content is determined primarily by what one hears.

The connoisseur of song recitals may protest that I am too hasty in dismissing the importance of seeing to appreciating such performances, asserting that watching their favorite singers contort their faces and gesticulate is an important part of their appreciation of vocal recitals. Indeed, most singers school their facial expressions and body language to be appropriate to the content of the songs they sing. These actions may be similar, even identical to those they might perform in an opera.

Empirical research in the psychology of music perception has shown that even musically trained listeners’ evaluations of the expressivity of instrumental music depend not only on aural information but also on visual information, such as the performers’ gestures and facial expressions.¹⁶ In performances of narrative vocal music, gestures and facial expressions may make certain story facts more salient. Take, for example, “Ich grolle nicht” from Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (1840). The speaker has been jilted in love but declares, repeatedly, that he bears no grudge. If a singer were to perform this song with an angry facial expression and a clenched fist, one would be less likely to take his words at face value. Admittedly, the turgid pounding of the piano ought to prompt the astute listener to come to this conclusion even without these visual cues. But I can imagine another scenario in which a singer, through facial expressions and body language alone, marks an utterance as ironic that would not otherwise be interpreted as such. An example, albeit from an opera performance, is Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of “Ah, chi mi dice mai” from Don Giovanni (Aix-en-Provence, 2010).

Mozart and Da Ponte intended Elvira’s aria to be a sincere, if exaggerated, expression of the anger and hurt she feels after being betrayed by Don Giovanni. The asides performed by the Don and Leporello contribute levity to this moment for the audience. However, they remain unseen and unheard by Elvira until the end of her aria. In Tcherniakov’s production, all of the characters are part of an extended mafia-like family. Elvira is Don Giovanni’s wife, not a forgotten fling, and she sings this aria as an ironic performance for her wayward husband. The target of her ridicule is the kind of woman Don Giovanni perceives her to be, the kind of woman portrayed in most performances of this aria: one whose entire self-worth is tied up with her ability to attract and retain a man. Since the music and text of the aria have been unchanged, it is primarily through the visual elements of the performance—the singer’s posture, gestures, and facial expressions as well as other staging choices in this aria and the preceding dramatic action—that the character’s ironic intent is conveyed.

Watching singers’ gestures and facial expressions is important to the full appreciation of song performances, even more so than piano recitals, I suspect, because of the rich representational content of vocal music. This observation does not, however, suggest that songs and oratorios ought to fall into the category of audiovisual fictions. One must be precise about the nature of the information gleaned from spectators’ visual experiences in nonoperatic performances of song. In my hypothetical example of the angry-looking singer performing “Ich grolle nicht,” the story fact generated by the singer’s facial expression is better glossed as “the character is angry” as opposed to “the character is grimacing.” Similarly, if the singer has a beard, that does not make it appropriate to imagine that the character does. Notice the disparity with opera performance, in which a bearded, grimacing singer playing the role of Otello makes it true in the story that Otello has a beard and is currently grimacing. In an opera performance, what singers look like and the actions they perform typically generate story content about the characters they play. Likewise, the visual appearance of the stage typically generates facts about their environment.

At this point, one might raise the objection that my account describes only naturalistic approaches to stage direction. Even “traditional” productions can pose difficulties due to color-blind casting. In the Metropolitan Opera’s 1989 video recording of Otto Schenk’s production of Die Walküre, the African American soprano Jessye Norman and the white Heldentenor Gary Lakes appear as the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde.¹⁷ Clearly, when Sieglinde comments that she sees in Siegmund’s face a likeness of her own (Act I, Scene 3), we are not to imagine that she is lying or deceived.

The casting of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton (2015) also complicates the present account, though for different reasons. It too features nonwhite singers playing white characters, but while the Met’s decision to cast Norman was made irrespective of her race, singers’ racial identities were taken into consideration by the casting directors of Hamilton. As a result, Hamilton’s casting policy is more accurately described as color conscious.¹⁸ Singers were chosen specifically because their race differed from that of their characters. These disjunctures were integral to the work’s point. In the words of the director Thomas Kail, Hamilton is “a story about America then, told by America now.”¹⁹ By casting predominantly African American and Latinx actors as America’s founding fathers, Miranda and Kail draw attention to the diversity of contemporary America and, by contrast, the lack of diversity of most of what one sees on Broadway. Daveed Diggs, who created the roles of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, describes “walk[ing] out of the show with a sense of ownership over American history. Part of it is seeing brown bodies play these people.”²⁰ Casting Diggs as Jefferson, or Norman as Sieglinde, did not make their characters black. Yet if one were to ignore Diggs’s race, as one is encouraged to do in Norman’s case, one would miss one of the show’s key artistic and political points.

To be clear, I have no intent to discourage color-blind or color-conscious casting or to endorse discrimination against singers whose bodies do not correspond to the conventional body image of their characters.²¹ Rather, my point is that spectators don’t automatically assume that everything they see on stage represents contents or occurrences in the fictional world. A concern for equal opportunity for all singers, regardless of race or body type, should trump any mild discomforts that might arise from casting singers of color in “white” roles. After all, we tolerate design and direction choices that create even more blatant conflicts with the libretto and score readily enough, even when they lack the kind of ethical motivations behind color-blind and color-conscious casting.

A case in point is Martin Kušej’s Don Giovanni for the Salzburg Festival (2002). By presenting audiences with an entirely white set, frequently populated by a dozen or so women underwear models, Kušej is not inviting us to imagine that Don Giovanni’s world is literally devoid of color or that the women in this world stand about like living mannequins in nothing but their underclothes. Even though these features of the set and costuming do not represent what Don Giovanni’s world looks like, they still play a role in our understanding of the opera’s story. One way of interpreting these features is as representations of Don Giovanni’s experience of the world. The bare, colorless set could be understood as conveying his boredom and loneliness.²² The underwear models may indicate that Don Giovanni perceives women as sex objects or that this is an attitude generally held in his society.

There are also cases where the visual elements of the performance generate no story facts but merely express the director’s attitude about the work or other topics. Another way of interpreting the underwear models in Kušej’s production is to regard them as representing the director’s belief that Don Giovanni represents women as sex objects. Even under such an interpretation, the visual features of the performance still help determine its content. And the expectation that what one sees will indicate something about the visual appearance of the characters and their fictional world remains appropriate, even when the expectation is denied.

Operas versus Plays and Films

So far, everything I have said about opera also holds true of plays and films containing singing, such as Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) and the film Casablanca (1942). Despite Desdemona’s “Willow Song” and Sam’s rendition of “As Time Goes By,” neither Shakespeare’s Othello nor Casablanca is an opera. The difference between Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi and Boito’s Otello (1887) is not merely a quantitative difference in the amount of music. It also amounts to a difference in kind, specifically one concerning the role music plays in presenting the story. Saying that an opera’s story is told through its songs and other musical numbers is a truism. In this final section, I will attempt to be more specific about what this truism might mean.

It may be tempting to claim that what differentiates songs in operas and musicals from those in nonmusical plays and films is that the former advance the plot whereas the latter are incidental to it. However, a song may be integral the plot of a play or a film (as “As Time Goes By” is to Casablanca), and many songs in operas merely provide additional insights into what a character is feeling at a given moment, without a noticeable advancement toward or away from that character’s goals.²³

Perhaps songs in operas generate new story facts, whether or not these facts advance the plot. The litmus test would be whether omitting the song would result in a noticeable gap in the story. However, many songs don’t even deepen our understanding of the characters. Many merely involve characters expounding on the current situation or feelings we already know them to have, and to opera enthusiasts, such songs are no worse off for their putative superfluity.²⁴ Furthermore, the requirement that songs generate new story facts is hardly exclusive to opera. When Ophelia sings her mad songs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, her performances make several things true in the story, including the crucial fact that she is mad.

I suggest that one difference between operas and nonmusical plays is that song is one of the main ways characters communicate in operatic fictional worlds.²⁵ As such, operatic worlds are strikingly nonnaturalistic, at least in this respect. When watching a play, one expects there to be a reason for a character to break into song—the character is a professional singer, for instance, or she is insane. In an opera, such explanations are not required. Songs happen anywhere at any time, even in the most unlikely scenarios, such as when one is dying of consumption!

Readers unaware of current discourses on the nature of operatic communication may find this proposal uncontroversial, even banal. However, within opera studies, the proposal that the characters are singing and, generally, hearing the music they and others make is highly contentious, or has been since the publication of Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices (1991). Abbate floats two different positions on this issue. First, she states that opera characters “often suffer from deafness; they do not hear the music that is the ambient fluid of their music-drowned world.” Further along in the same paragraph, however, Abbate puts forth the more radical idea that the “music is not produced by or within the stage-world.” Developing this second proposition, she invites readers to entertain the following thought experiment: “Suppose that while attending a performance of Tosca you are suddenly transformed, given the musical ears of an operatic character. You are struck deaf to most of the singing; everyone merely speaks—except at certain moments, during the offstage cantata in Act II, when you are able to hear the phenomenal performance.”²⁶ According to Abbate’s initial proposal, the characters are singing, but they do not hear the music. According to the subsequent more radical one, the characters sing only during the realistic instances of music-making; otherwise, they communicate as we do: by speaking. The latter position is also taken for granted by the philosophers Kendall Walton and Gregory Currie.²⁷

One advantage of regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing the music is that it renders opera plots more coherent. Opera characters often fall in love at first sight and undergo other drastic changes to their beliefs and desires within a highly compressed time frame. A case in point is the duet between Violetta and Germont père in the second act of Verdi and Piave’s La traviata (1853). Violetta is a courtesan who has fallen in love with a bourgeois man named Alfredo. By Act II, the couple has fled Paris for an idyllic life in the country—idyllic, that is, until the bills begin to pile up. In secret, Violetta has been selling off the accoutrements of her prior life to support herself and Alfredo. After discovering this fact, Alfredo returns to the city to cash in his inheritance and take control over the situation. While Alfredo is away, his father pays Violetta a visit to convince her to put an end to their affair before the scandal ruins not only the possibility of Alfredo’s return to respectable society but also his sister’s hope of marrying the man she loves.

There is little incentive for Violetta to capitulate to Germont’s demands. His appeal to bourgeois morality holds little sway for someone who lives outside of that social sphere. Aside from Alfredo, Violetta has no family or friends who bear any genuine concern for her well-being. Furthermore, she knows that she is ill and, reasonably, wants to spend her remaining time with the man she loves. Yet by the end of the scene, she willingly sacrifices her only remaining opportunity for happiness.

Although Violetta’s choice is the focus of this scene, Germont’s trajectory is just as surprising. Initially affording Violetta little respect, he weeps for her in the end. Ostensibly, his “Piangi, piangi” represents him giving her the license to weep, but it is his vocal line, not hers, that mimics crying.²⁸ Finally, when the courtesan who has nearly ruined his family asks him to embrace her as he would his daughter, he consents without hesitation.

These radical changes to the characters’ beliefs and desires may be unrealistic in our world, but they are not unrealistic for opera, I suggest, because such exchanges are conducted through song. The different capabilities of speech and song have been most thoroughly explored in forms of opera and musical theater that involve characters shifting between these modes of discourse. Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris observe that, while singing, characters in musicals are “more honest than normal, more intensely present, more capable of interpersonal connection, more empowered, more empowering, and generally better to effect transformative change.”²⁹ Successfully singing a duet involves a high degree of mutual attention, responsiveness, and support for each other’s actions. Imagining that Violetta and Germont’s conversation is conducted through music helps explain how they are able to form an emotional connection and harmonize their points of view in such a short amount of time.

Supposing that the characters are either not singing or that they fail to hear much of the music creates problems when one attempts to explain how the characters know the things that they do. Real-life opera spectators learn about opera characters not merely from the words they say but also from the music they make. The same is true of opera characters, I have argued elsewhere.³⁰

The dominant view of operatic communication also limits the possible ways of explaining instances when characters have a musical-stylistic influence over one another.³¹ The ostensible plot of the musical My Fair Lady (1956) revolves around Eliza learning to speak “proper English” from Professor Higgins. By the end, however, it is clear that Higgins has learned just as much from Eliza about being a character in a musical. Higgins is initially incapable of conforming his songs to conventional song forms. Furthermore, the role was created by the nonsinging actor Rex Harrison, who performed most of his songs in a kind of Sprechstimme. His final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” displays much more formal coherence than his earlier songs “Why Can’t the English?” and “A Hymn to Him” and, in the 1964 film adaptation, shows Higgins at his most lyrical.

If the characters do not hear the music, we cannot explain Higgins’s transformation as resulting from him hearing Eliza’s music and being influenced by its greater lyricism and formal coherence (an internal explanation). Rather, we are forced to regard his increasing musicality as part of the composer Frederick Loewe’s attempts to demonstrate his growing attraction to and suitability for Eliza (an external explanation).³² Regarding the characters as singing and as hearing each other’s music allows for both types of explanation. It opens up the possibility that Eliza chooses to sing in a particular way and that Higgins models his subsequent songs on hers. Internal explanations, which elucidate the features of a narrative in terms of the actions and intentions of its characters, rather than merely those of its real-life author(s), endow characters with more agency. In light of the importance of agency to compelling characters, and thus compelling narratives, regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing the music may increase one’s appreciation of the stories operas tell.³³

There are cases where it is not reasonable to regard the characters as intending or perceiving all of the meanings their performances may have for us. This is especially true of the orchestral music in Wagner, a situation that I will return to in chapter 4. However, hearing need not entail understanding, and utterances, in opera as in everyday life, may possess meanings that are not intended by their authors. External explanations—for instance, viewing the music as authorial commentary—are still available to interpreters who regard opera characters as hearing the music and as singing intentionally.

By suggesting that the default position in opera is that characters hear the music, even when they fail to explicitly acknowledge its presence, I may appear to be undercutting a distinction that has become central to opera studies: the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal music, in Abbate’s terminology, and diegetic and nondiegetic music, in terminology borrowed from film studies. In opera and musical-theater studies, phenomenal or diegetic music refers to music that takes place in realistic performance contexts or that is explicitly acknowledged as music by the fictional characters, such as the cantata in Tosca (1900) or Cherubino’s aria “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro (1786). Cherubino reveals that he is the composer of this song, and the Countess convinces him to perform it for her with guitar accompaniment provided by Susanna. Since the character does not profess to have authored his other aria, “Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio,” nor is it acknowledged as a performance of song, it is typically regarded as noumenal or nondiegetic music.

Distinguishing between these two types of music can be important to understanding composers’ musical-stylistic choices. Opera composers frequently take care to differentiate these two types of performance. Diegetic or phenomenal music is more likely to conform to conventional song forms. It may also be more simplistic or less skillful than the noumenal or nondiegetic music, particularly if its actual composer wishes us to regard its fictional composer as possessing only modest talents. Furthermore, if the opera is set in the past or in a foreign land, the diegetic music is likely to take on characteristics of the music of its fictional setting, whereas the nondiegetic music is likely to remain unmarked.

My concern is with the terms that have been chosen to describe this difference. Abbate’s phenomenal-noumenal distinction suggests that the noumenal music is not part of the opera’s fictional world. Additionally, current use of the diegetic-nondiegetic distinction in opera and musical-theater studies is at odds with the use of these terms in film studies. Film scholars use the adjective diegetic to refer to features of the audiovisual display that represent contents or occurrences in the fictional world of the film. This definition leads to logical problems when combined with opera scholars’ equation of diegetic music with realistic music.³⁴ Regarding all of the unrealistic instances of music-making in an opera as nondiegetic is untenable, since many such songs are integral to the work’s plot. In keeping with my aim to avoid jargon, I will refer to so-called phenomenal or diegetic performances as embedded or nested musical performances.

There are many reasons to attend the opera: for the opportunity to hear one’s favorite singer, for the extravagant sets and costumes, for the jokes, or for its purely musical delights. Before Wagner dimmed the lights in the auditorium, it was also possible to go for the people watching, gambling, and other diversions. Another reason to attend the opera is for the stories operas tell. If that is one’s interest, regarding opera characters as singing and as hearing each other’s songs is a distinct advantage. It alleviates concerns about the implausibility of many opera plots. Violetta’s choice to sacrifice her future with Alfredo may seem undermotivated if it were to happen in our world or even the world of a spoken play or film. Regarding her exchange with Alfredo’s father as a duet renders it more plausible, as the act of singing together is capable of forging emotional bonds more effectively than spoken discourse. Understanding the characters as singing and as hearing the music also allows for explanations of characters’ behavior that are grounded in the characters’ intentions and actions, as opposed to merely those of the work’s authors.

The foregoing investigation into the nature of operatic storytelling has revealed the following medium-specific features. In contrast to songs, operas present stories by means of singers enacting characters. Unlike nonoperatic performances of other genres of vocal music in which character enactment is possible, operas are audiovisual fictions. Content is determined not only by what we hear but also by what we see. Finally, opera may be differentiated from nonmusical theater and film by the fact that singing is one of main ways opera characters communicate.

The following chapter continues exploring the medium-specific features of storytelling in the musical theater by defining several common types of character-narrators and discussing the ways in which they differ from the kinds of narrators audiences encounter in literary and cinematic works.

Notes

1. Monika Hennemann, “Operatorio?” in Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77. Hennemann is responding to the Komische Oper’s production of Mozart’s Requiem, directed by Sebastian Baumgarten (2008).

2. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 21.

3. David Davies, “Medium,” in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (London: Routledge, 2011), 48–49; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288–89.

4. Noël Carroll, “Forget the Medium!” in Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–9.

5. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 294–95.

6. Jerrold Levinson, “Song and Music Drama,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 44.

7. Since these characters are defined by the player, not by the instrument, Mélange à trois is a good illustration of Philip Rupprecht’s concept of the player-agent. Philip Rupprecht, “Agency Effects in the Instrumental Drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle,” in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 190.

8. Jessica A. Holmes, “Singing beyond Hearing,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 2 (2016): 546. A video recording of Face Opera II may be streamed from vimeo.com/68027393.

9. A serenata is a large-scale dramatic cantata—dramatic in the sense of singers’ utterances representing characters’ utterances, not in the sense of singers wearing costumes and participating in a fully staged theatrical performance.

10. Plato, The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), bk. 3, 392d–394c. In this translation, mimesis is rendered as imitation and diegesis as narrative.

11. Cone, Composer’s Voice, 15–16.

12. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1237. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le coq d’or (1909) was intended to be staged with singers enacting characters, including the dancing the characters perform. When Diaghilev staged the work with the Ballet Russes in 1914, he separated the singing and dancing components as Taruskin describes.

13. For example, Handel’s first English oratorio, Esther, was first given a staged performance at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in 1732. Handel investigated the possibility of mounting another staged performance at the King’s Theatre but was unsuccessful due to the ban on theatrical performances of biblical stories in public (the previous performance was considered private). Accordingly, he turned his attentions to concert performances. Howard E. Smither, “Oratorio,” Grove Music Online, last modified 2001, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/20397. For other examples of oratorios that have been staged as operas, refer to Hennemann, “Operatorio?”

14. Gregory Currie, “Visual Fictions,” Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163 (1991): 140.

15. That is not to say that the aural properties of films and theatrical performances are unimportant but merely that there are silent films and theater performances. There are no silent operas.

16. For a summary of work in this area, refer to Vincent Bergeron and Dominic McIver Lopes, “Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, no. 1 (2009): 1–16.

17. I thank Udayan Sen for mentioning this example.

18. Chinua Thelwell, “Who Tells Your Story? Hamilton, Future Aesthetics, and Haiti,” in Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World, ed. Chinua Thelwell (London: Routledge, 2017), 112. For an argument that color-conscious casting is preferable to color-blind casting, refer to Aria Umezawa, “Met’s Otello Casting Begs the Question: Is Whitewash Better than Blackface?” Globe and Mail, August 7, 2015, last modified March 25, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/mets-otello-casting-begs-the-question-is-whitewash-better-than-blackface/article25879634/arc404=true.

19. Thomas Kail, quoted in Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 33.

20. Daveed Diggs, quoted in Branden Janese, “Hamilton Roles Are This Rapper’s Delight,” Wall Street Journal, last modified July 7, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-roles-are-this-rappers-delight-1436303922; Leslie Odom Jr. expressed similar sentiments in Kathryn Lurie’s “Playing the Man Who Shot Hamilton,” Wall Street Journal, last modified August 6, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/playing-the-man-who-shot-hamilton-1438896589.

21. I am grateful to an audience member at the 2014 Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group conference for noting that my argument could be used to support the “fat shaming” of Tara Erraught as Octavian in Glyndebourne’s 2014 Rosenkavalier. For a summary of the discourse surrounding Erraught’s casting in this production, refer to Norman Lebrecht, “Singers in Uproar over Critical Body Insults at Glyndebourne,” Slipped Disc, last modified May 19, 2014, https://slippedisc.com/2014/05/singers-in-uproar-at-critical-body-insults-at-glyndebourne/.

22. The interviews with Martin Kušej and Thomas Hampson (who performed the role of Don Giovanni) confirm that both intended to portray Don Giovanni as psychologically troubled, his sex addiction a vain attempt to alleviate his loneliness. Included in Martin Kušej, dir., Don Giovanni (Decca, 2006), DVD.

23. For an argument that “As Time Goes By” is “an essential part of the plot” to Casablanca, refer to Peter Kivy, “Realistic Song in the Movies,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71, no. 1 (2013): 77.

24. John Mueller, “Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (1984): 28–30.

25. Singing is the primary means of communication in most operas, but in opéra comique, Singspiel, and most musicals, speaking is another. In many musicals and some operas (e.g., Auber’s La muette de Portici [1828]), dance also plays an important role.

26. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119, 123. Following Abbate, Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 126, contends that characters in musicals do not hear the orchestra unless a fictional source is identified (e.g., the onstage band in Cabaret [1966]). His stance on whether characters hear the so-called nondiegetic vocal music is unclear.

27. Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 182; Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 59.

28. Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 7; Roger Parker, “Verdi and La traviata: Two Routes to Realism,” in La traviata, ed. Gary Kahn (London: Overture Publishing, 2013), 32.

29. Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, “The Filmed Musical,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 143.

30. Nina Penner, “Opera Singing and Fictional Truth,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71, no. 1 (2013): 85–86.

31. For a fuller exposition of this argument, see Nina Penner, “Rethinking the Diegetic/Nondiegetic Distinction in the Film Musical,” Music and the Moving Image 10, no. 3 (2017): 9–12.

32. On the contrast between internal and external perspectives, refer to Currie, Narratives and Narrators, 49. For an example of an external explanation of the changes to Higgins’s music, see McMillin, Musical as Drama, 67–68.

33. Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 94–95.

34. Penner, “Diegetic/Nondiegetic Distinction,” 7.