Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
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sympathies.
An example of an opera with especially self-conscious narrative framing is Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s The Turn of the Screw (1954). It begins with a man addressing the audience directly. “It is a curious story,” he tells us. “I have it written in faded ink—a woman’s hand, governess to two children—long ago.”1 After providing some backstory, he exits the stage and we see the Governess on her way to her new post at Bly. The prologue implies that the rest of the opera is a representation of the Governess’s written account. If so, she would be its narrator. Yet her role in the opera is not entirely analogous to that of her counterpart in Henry James’s novella. Readers’ access to the happenings at Bly are entirely mediated by the Governess in James’s story. There are no interjections from an external observer to provide evidence for or against the Governess’s assertions that the estate is haunted. In the opera, by contrast, Britten’s music draws connections that exceed the protagonist’s level of self-awareness. Most troubling are the musical similarities between the Governess’s interactions with the children and those of the (real or imagined) ghost Quint. The question of who is telling the story is not trivial in this case. The prologue suggests that it is the Governess, but it is not reasonable to imagine that she is drawing comparisons between herself and her ghostly opponent. Rather, this musical commentary seems to stem from an external source, whether a fictional commentator or the real or implied Benjamin Britten.
The issue of narrative agency becomes even more tangled when one considers performances that depart from the stage directions. In Tom Diamond’s production for Opera McGill (2011), the tenor did not exit the stage at the end of the prologue but turned to greet the Governess. After taking a seat on a divan, she proceeded to relive her experiences at Bly with him, her therapist, as part of her “talking cure.” Clearly our potential list of tellers ought to also include directors and performers.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater explores how sung forms of drama convey stories. The reader may reasonably wonder at the impulse to revisit this topic in the second decade of the twenty-first century, long after the heyday of music and narrative studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Musicology’s narrative turn roughly corresponded to the emergence of New Musicology, which sought to reorient the discipline away from philology and formalism and toward history and hermeneutics. However, deriving meaning from works of purely instrumental music is not as straightforward as it is with novels or plays. Pioneers in narrative-based approaches to instrumental music, such as Fred Maus and Anthony Newcomb, drew on methods from structuralist narratology (e.g., those of Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gérard Genette) regarding musical themes, instruments, and pitches as the agents of their narratives.2
In opera studies, one of the most influential contributions has been Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices (1991). Although predominantly concerned with Wagner, Abbate also criticized initial forays into narrative-based analyses of instrumental music. She argued that narratives consist of more than agents and events; they require tellers and listeners. Yet she rejected Edward T. Cone’s suggestion, in The Composer’s Voice (1974), that the teller may be regarded as the composer. The “voices” of which she speaks are also not those of real-life performers but, rather, consist of elements of the music itself, personified into fictional narrating agents.3
Philip Rupprecht’s Britten’s Musical Language (2001) brought narrative and speech-act theory to bear on the work of a twentieth-century composer. His investigation of the ways in which Britten used his orchestra both to comment on the characters and to express their points of view was an inspiration for this study.
Over the past three decades, there have been many applications of narrative theory to the interpretation of individual works. What we lack is a theory of storytelling in the musical theater comparable to Byron Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), concerning instrumental music, or the dozens of theories of narration in the novel or the cinema. What a theoretically focused study offers that the collection of close readings does not is a more critical and rigorous investigation of concepts such as narrative and point of view. By exploring their application to a wider range of repertoire, I develop terms and approaches that can illuminate works not examined in this study.
I revisit some topics that have been addressed by the first wave of music and narrative studies, offering, for example, a different answer to the question of what a narrative is. I also ask some new questions concerning performance. More recently, musicology has shifted attention from composers and their works to performers and performances.4 Most prior studies of narrative in opera and musical theater confine their inquiry to the contents of the score and libretto, overlooking the realities of what happens to these texts in the rehearsal room.5 Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers the first sustained meditation on how the performers’ choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told.
Another reason to revisit the topic of opera and narrative is to respond to the rich body of scholarship on narrative and fiction that has emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the last fifteen years.6 This work remains virtually unknown in musicology in spite of the discipline’s increasing engagement with philosophy during this same period. That music is largely absent from existing philosophical discussions of narrative is surely one reason. Another lies in wider disciplinary allegiances within the academy.
Two discernable traditions emerged within Western philosophy during the twentieth century. Anglophone musicology has developed robust connections with the continental tradition while remaining rather separate from work in anglophone philosophy, most of which is in the analytic tradition.7 The typical approach to differentiating these traditions is through methodological contrasts. For instance, Stephen Davies has characterized continental philosophy as “subjectively focused,” involving “the creation of all-encompassing, elaborate metaphysical systems, or . . . elucidating and comparing the theories of the ‘great men’ of the tradition.” By contrast, he describes analytic philosophy as committed to “objective, clear argument and to an interpersonal, empirically oriented approach,” one that “eschews grand theories in favor of treating specific philosophical issues and problems in a piecemeal or cumulative fashion.”8
Today, many philosophers on both sides of this divide are working toward a reconciliation. As David Davies has observed, focusing on methodological differences hinders a productive exchange of ideas between these traditions.9 He recommends parsing the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy in terms of the body of work with which scholars are predominantly engaging. For continental philosophy, that body of work includes writings by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. Accordingly, continental philosophy has focused on phenomenological questions about the experience of music, music and identity, and music’s relationship to politics.
The analytic tradition descends from work in the philosophy of language by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Saul Kripke. With the exception of Wittgenstein, none of these thinkers had much interest in art. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that aesthetics became a significant concern for analytic philosophers. Peter Kivy (1934–2017) was one of the first philosophers in this tradition to write predominantly about music. Other analytic philosophers who have made substantial contributions to the philosophy of music include Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, Jenefer Robinson, Stephen Davies, David Davies, and Theodore Gracyk. Central concerns of these philosophers have included the nature of musical works and their relationship to performances, musical expression and meaning, and music’s relationship to the emotions.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater illustrates what musicology stands to gain from taking a greater interest in analytic philosophy. I show how recent work on narrative, the nature of musical works, and musical and theatrical performance can help us understand how operas and musicals tell stories. More unusually, this book also shows how philosophy could benefit from musicology. Historically, work in the area of music and philosophy by music scholars has proceeded in two directions. There are many studies about the historical influence of philosophers on composers and vice versa.