that accord with the interests and concerns of their audience. I discuss productions that remove character-narrators and insert new ones as well as those that reframe a portion of the dramatic action as a character’s dream or hallucination, such as Joachim Herz’s 1964 film adaptation of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer. Another way of contending with the offensive political content of many of Wagner’s works is to alter his recommended lines of sympathy. Inspired by an essay by the philosopher Ernst Bloch, Katharina Wagner’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Bayreuth, 2007) upheld Beckmesser as the true artist of the future while linking Sachs’s and Walther’s increasing artistic conservatism with the rise of fascism. Finally, I consider the issue of how to attract new audiences to opera and musical theater by examining Deaf West Theatre’s success at bringing musical theater to a community commonly assumed to be excluded from the appreciation of this art form.
Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories in comparison to novels, plays, and films. I expose problematic assumptions underlying prevailing accounts of narrative and point of view in music scholarship and develop alternatives. I also make fine-grained distinctions between types of narrators and the roles of the orchestra and introduce terminology with which to talk about them.
By considering two art forms that have, historically, been ignored in theories of narrative, this book also contributes to philosophy and literary theory. Bringing opera and musical theater to debates about the necessity of narrators reveals additional exceptions to the claim that all narratives have fictional narrators. This book also offers the first detailed examination of musical means of aligning spectators with characters’ points of view.
Debates about the nature of musical works and musical performance have also proceeded without a serious consideration of opera and musical theater. Drawing attention both to historical practices, such as aria substitution, and to more recent directorial interventions, I show how opera and musical theater constitute exceptions to the prevailing philosophical account of performance in the Western art music tradition.
I also consider problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner’s Jewish caricatures or the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, I reflect on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, I offer suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of audiences in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. 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.
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