Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
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Myfanwy Piper, The Turn of the Screw (libretto), in The Operas of Benjamin Britten: The Complete Librettos, ed. David Herbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 233.
2. Fred E. Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 1–41; Anthony Newcomb, “Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118–36.
3. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28, 13.
4. In opera studies, much of this work has been on historical singers: Suzanne Aspden, The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Patricia Howard, The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Susan Rutherford, Verdi Opera, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kimberly White, Female Singers on the French Stage, 1830–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Most treatments of opera staging focus on continental Europe: Evan Baker, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Gundula Kreuzer, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); John A. Rice, Mozart on the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
5. Exceptions include Mauro Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Yayoi Uno Everett, Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera: Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
6. See, for example, Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 5; Andrew Kania, “Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 1 (2005): 47–54; Derek Matravers, Fiction and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); George M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
7. Music is not alone: A similar tale may be told about theater studies and cinema studies prior to the 1980s. On theater studies, refer to David Z. Saltz, “Why Performance Theory Needs Philosophy,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16, no. 1 (2001): 149–54.
8. Stephen Davies, “Analytic Philosophy and Music,” in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (London: Routledge, 2011), 294–95.
9. David Davies, “Analytic Philosophy of Music,” in Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomas McAuley, Jerrold Levinson, and Nanette Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
10. On Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, see Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche, see Katherine Fry, “Nietzsche, Tristan und Isolde, and the Analysis of Wagnerian Rhythm,” Opera Quarterly 29, no. 3–4 (2014): 253–76.
11. Some roles in musicals do require classical technique; for example, the high tessitura and elaborate coloratura of Cunégonde’s “Glitter and Be Gay” from Candide (1956) and Johanna’s “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” from Sweeney Todd (1979). However, most of the other roles in these works were intended for singers who are not classically trained.
12. Derek B. Scott, “Musical Theater(s),” in Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53–72, discusses stylistic differences between opera and musical theater in more depth.
13. Opera scholars who have expressed concerns about the reliance on recordings include Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505–36; James Treadwell, “Reading and Staging Again,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 2 (1998): 205, 209. Like Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 327–29, I see at least as many benefits as drawbacks.
14. Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 11–13, makes a similar point.
15. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 123. This line of thinking has also influenced writing on the musical; for example, Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 126.
16. Exceptions include Diane Paulus’s deceptively titled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (American Repertory Theater, 2011), which attempted to rectify the work’s racial stereotypes through textual revisions by Suzan-Lori Parks and a new musical arrangement by Diedre L. Murray. Sam Mendes’s Cabaret (Donmar Warehouse, 1993), pulled Cliff out of the closet by revising the script and adding the songs Kander and Ebb composed for Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation. James Leve, Kander and Ebb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 72–76.
17. The first application of the two-text model to opera was Levin, Unsettling Opera, 11. David Davies coined the term classical paradigm in his Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). James Hamilton presented the ingredients model in The Art of Theater (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 31–33.
ALTHOUGH MUSIC SCHOLARS HAVE PUT NARRATIVE THEORY TO many innovative uses, when it comes to defining what a narrative is, we have largely left the task to our colleagues in literary theory. Based on their stipulations about the necessary components of narratives, some, such as Carolyn Abbate, have even come to doubt that the category has much applicability to music. Others, such as Byron Almén, have resisted the hegemony of literature in narratology, proposing new ways of conceptualizing narrative that include not only operas and musicals but also most works of instrumental music. Despite their differences, both camps understand narratives as merely the products of composers’ labors (sound structures, in the case of instrumental works). Thus, narrative status depends primarily on the structural features of those products, such as contrast and discontinuity. In this chapter, I argue that works are better conceived as processes than as products alone, and I explore the consequences of this view for our definition of narrative.
Narrative in Music Scholarship
The first wave of work on narrative in music scholarship largely took their definitions from structuralist narratology, particularly Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1983; 1972 in the original French) and Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (1978). Genette and Chatman argue that a narrative is not a mere sequence of events; it requires a narrator and the ability to distinguish the work’s story, the events of which