Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. Nina Penner
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and individualism underpinning McClary’s interpretation of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5.14 For those interested in understanding works in light of the actual historical circumstances of their creation, one is better off regarding them as processes—or at least as contextualized products—rather than as mere texts.15 If a work is a process, determining whether it is a narrative involves not only analyzing its structural features but also investigating how and why it was created, including whether its author intended it to tell or present a story.
The relevance of the composer’s intentions to interpretation remains a contentious topic in musicology and music theory. One of the larger aims of this study is to rehabilitate the figure of the author in music scholarship; depending on the object of appreciation, that may be the composer, librettist, director, or performer. As I have argued in more depth elsewhere, commitments to the “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author” fostered the kind of interpretive freedom musicologists of the 1980s and 1990s were seeking but failed to align with the discipline’s renewed interest in history in the past two decades.16
One of the reasons for this incongruity between theory and practice is a lack of awareness of more sophisticated forms of intentionalism that have been proposed in response to the criticisms of Barthes and the authors of “The Intentional Fallacy,” William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. The most robust of these accounts have come from philosophers working in the analytic philosophical tradition. Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention (2005) provides a clear and comprehensive discussion of what intentions are and the roles they play in the creation and interpretation of art. He defines an intention as an attitude one takes toward a plan of action. In contrast to desiring or wanting, intending involves being “settled upon executing that plan, or upon trying to execute it.”17 Even so, it is possible to be unaware of or mistaken about some of the intentions motivating one’s actions. As action plans rather than actions themselves, intentions are subject to revision. Even when we decide to act, we may be unsuccessful in realizing our intentions.
The possibility of author failure is a serious problem for forms of intentionalism that equate the content and meaning of a work with authorial intentions (absolute or extreme intentionalism).18 One response to this problem is to eschew reference to the real author in favor of an implied author, an entity that is constructed by the reader or listener through his or her engagement with the work. The concept of the implied author originates from The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. In philosophy, this interpretive approach is commonly referred to as hypothetical intentionalism, a term coined by Jerrold Levinson.19 Hypothetical intentionalism may serve the purposes of some philosophers and theorists but is unable to explain the attention music historians pay to authors’ sketches, notebooks, letters, and interviews. Such sources inform us about the actual author’s intentions and actions, not those of the implied author. Throughout this study, the intentions to which I will be referring are those of the actual persons responsible for creating the works under consideration.20
Other philosophers, such as Livingston, have responded to the author fallibility problem by defining more moderate forms of real-author intentionalism. According to moderate actual intentionalism, authorial intentions determine meaning only in cases where they are successfully realized in the artistic product. Success is determined by assessing whether the intention and the features of the product “mesh.” Not only does meshing entail a degree of consistency, “but [it] also carries the implication of a stronger condition involving relevance and integration: if there is a sense in which an extraneous hypothesis is consistent with data, but bears no meaningful, integrative relation with them, we would say that the two do not mesh.”21
Another common objection to intentionalism is the putative impossibility of knowing another’s intentions, particularly if one’s subject died hundreds of years ago. In some cases, all we may have is a score. We may not even know who its author was. That there are limits to what may be known does not justify abandoning the search for what can be known. Inquiring into the artist’s intentions does not require mind-reading abilities but merely the sorts of activities musicologists routinely engage in: studying the finished product, evidence about how it was produced, and the various influences on its production, with an aim to understanding how and why it possesses the features it does.
One may also be concerned that a commitment to real-author intentionalism unduly restricts the creativity of the interpreter. If one’s primary aim in engaging with a work is to display one’s creativity or to maximize one’s enjoyment, one may wish to heed Barthes’s call to regard that work as a product rather than as a process. But if one wishes to understand the historical influences on its creation, inquiring into the actual author’s intentions ought to be a component of the interpretive process. Even so, not all questions about art require intentionalist explanations. One question that does, I argue, is the question of whether a work is a narrative, as this is a question of the work’s “category of art.”22
A Moderate Intentionalist Definition of Narrative
What separates Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) from Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) from Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic (2005) from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976), Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (1898) from Igor Stravinsky’s Octet (1923), a recounting of my failed attempts to make a Sachertorte from a recipe for this delicious but formidable dessert? Without much thought or deliberation, someone sufficiently knowledgeable about the above items will tend to categorize the former but not the latter in the class of narratives. One of the factors motivating such determinations is that the former items were intentionally made to communicate stories (and succeed in doing so), whereas the latter were not.23 Obviously, I have not gotten very far in determining what a narrative is. I have merely replaced the question “what is a narrative?” with “what is a story?”
Before addressing this question, it is worth interrogating the validity of the intuitive view that the former of each pair of items is a narrative. Not all narratologists agree. Genette, for instance, defines a narrative as an “oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or series of events,” a definition that would include Pride and Prejudice and, potentially, my story about my attempt to make a Sachertorte but exclude the cases in between.24 Theorists who have brought narratology to bear on cinema and theater have expanded the means of conveying story content to include showing by means of images and sounds. However, like Abbate, many have assumed that since fictional narrators are seemingly ubiquitous to literary narratives, they must be a component of narration in other media as well.25 A more complete response to such claims will need to wait until chapter 3, where I explore the role of narrators in opera and musical theater. For now, I will simply state my agreement with Abbate that narratives require storytellers, not mere sequences of events. The point on which we disagree is her insistence that these tellers be fictional. There is no fictional agent responsible for presenting the entirety of Vertigo, Doctor Atomic, Don Quixote, or my story about my culinary disaster. Nevertheless, these utterances have authors who, in authoring their utterance, also narrate it.26
Although there are many differences between telling a story and presenting one (e.g., through a theatrical performance), everyday use of the term narrative cuts across this divide.27 With regard to the question of whether a work is a narrative, I do not care how the story is conveyed, merely that the work was created to convey a story and that it succeeds in doing so. Thus, I will use narrate to describe any act of communicating narrative content and narrator to refer to any agent, fictional or real, engaged in such an act, regardless of whether it is conducted through language, music, sounds, gestures, pictures, or moving images.
Having clarified my position on the range of acceptable storytelling media, I now turn to the question of what a story is. Since most discussions in music scholarship focus on instrumental music, I will take as my central case studies the aforementioned pair of instrumental