Chapter 1
1.2.d Opera as a Medium
Levi-Strauss wrote on myth and music in his book The Raw and the Cooked, stating that '[b]oth indeed are instruments for the obliteration of time' (1964: 15). He highlights that myths deal with fundamental truths which do not diffuse over time (just like physics). Vladimir Jankélévitch (2003) and Carolyn Abbate (2004) have also argued for the timelessness of musical experiences. This established connection between music, myth, truth and time is a fundamental part of the argument for embedding scientific thought within the libretti and performances I am producing. As stated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poetics helps us to make use of a 'willing suspension of disbelief' (Tomko, 2015: 19). In further explanation of this Coleridge cites the example of a theatrical representation of a forest, posing the notion that on stage we are not being asked to view and engage with the picture of a forest but with a forest itself (Marshall, 2020: 24). There is a form of deception occurring in which our will to give faith to the sight that deceives us is fully accepted, as we also have the will to withdraw such belief. The audience willingly suspends, or places aside, their reliance on the expected environmental signals which imply the presence of a forest, and allows for an artistic interpretation of the forest to satisfy the phenomenology of what is presented on stage. In fact, often in theatre the audience will go beyond just willingly suspending disbelief, and willingly believe in the impossible or deceitful worlds created on stage. The sheer act of opera itself, as a sung through story, abstracts the audience from any expectation of a realistic representation of life.
Going further, contextualising contemporary opera within the genre of Music Theatre (not to be confused with Music-Theatre) opens the boundaries of the work we can produce. In The New Music Theatre: Seeing the Voice and Hearing the Body by Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi they suggest that:
The use of metaphoric performance roles, as told through a fairy-tale setting – and especially when sweetened or underlined by music – may stimulate an interest in a subject without resorting to mere voyeurism (2008: 86).
Tom Sutcliffe (2005: 339) states that opera has a ‘much greater freedom in its staging precisely because it is not primarily a realistic or straightforwardly narrative form’, and so is an excellent format through which to represent an abstract or complicated idea.
The multimodal nature of opera, which makes use of music, text, visual art, performance, dance, and now film and digital media, allows the producer to use multiple streams of communication with the audience at the same time. Everett (2015) highlights how narrative may be subverted or enhanced through various different production elements. She describes how the various levels of pre-production (composer/librettist) and production (director/designer/choreographer) can work together in a multimodal way to convey the semiotics and underlying narrative elements of the work:
Each operatic production is unique in the sense that the multimedia elements – music, libretto, film, objects, lighting, mime and/or dance – operate as interdependent structural and semantic components that shape the narrative production of the whole. (2015: 2)
This creates an intermedial representation of a subject matter in which the different modal elements (text, music, visual) combine and interact to create a whole (Elleström, 2010). When working with abstract concepts, such as physics, this provides an opportunity to constantly reframe and emphasise elements and to effectively communicate them to the audience in several layers. Through the interference of these many different channels of communication the audience can grasp onto the subject being communicated to them, without having to comprehend the scientific jargon or technical language. As suggested by Salzman and Desi (2008: 83) ‘a good libretto offers the composer the possibility of combining gestures or expressions with musical motives, thus making a connection between what is heard and what is seen’. Unlike the reader of this PhD, who will be concerned with how the words combine towards the meaning of the sentence, and the sentences towards the meaning of each paragraph, the experience of an opera allows the audience to take on those individual parts as a coherent or destructive whole, and for the inputs towards the audience to be repeated, or forgotten as the dramaturgy of the production progresses.
Smith describes a trend in early and mid-twentieth-century libretti saying there has been a ‘development in the libretto (and in other arts) of a new approach to the traditional which is not a continuation but a revival. Conscious archaism has been one of the prime ingredients’ (1971: 385). He particularly cites Auden’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) and Henze’s The Bassiards (1966). From Rinuccini’s first libretto of Dafne (1598 composed by Jacopo Peri), and the Florentine Camerata’s revival of Greek drama and myth, through to Wagner’s Nordic Gesamtkunstwerk, and the contemporary use of myth in works such as The Minotaur (composed in 2008 by Harrison Birtwistle and libretto by poet David Harsent), the relevance of myth and archetype to operatic narrative has never faded. Yayoi Uno Everett’s recent publication on Reconfiguring Myth in Contemporary Opera (2015) also provides a thorough analysis of how the semiotic structure of myth might be applied to more contemporary works such as composer Osvaldo Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang’s Ainadamar (2003) and composer Kaaija Sariajo and librettist Amin Maloof’s Adriana Mater (2015). My work as a librettist falls prey to this ‘conscious archaism’. I actively make use of the typical structural forms such as recitative, aria, chorus, ensemble etc., making sure to highlight these as part of the libretti I pass on to my collaborators. Making use of archetypal characters (and creating them through research of mythology) also echoes the libretti of the past, referencing stories and characters that have been seen in opera many times before. I acknowledge and play with these influences to explore new ways in which to make use of the traditional form.