In the UK, academics are incentivised to communicate their research ‘outwards’ through media appearances, collaboration with other organisations, creative projects and performance outputs – and to document the ‘public impact’ of these routes of dissemination.Footnote 1 In this context, it’s worth remembering that monographs remain an ideal format for sustained, complex arguments based on primary sources and on reflexive, critical engagement with existing scholarship.Footnote 2 The three important books reviewed here, each exploring unfamiliar moments in the history of eighteenth-century opera, demonstrate that specialist, single-authored studies, years in the writing, issued in small print runs, employing technical vocabulary, with little commercial or (immediate) public significance drive scholarship forward. In the genre of the monograph, an author tests the limits of their understanding, laying bare not just what they know but how they know it. In so doing, they stand before the reader as something much more interesting than an authority – they stand as a thinker making sense of the world.
Of course, the academic monograph is not a free zone in which an author simply ‘dares to know’.Footnote 3 Everyone is aware that jobs, contracts and institutional affiliations depend upon completion of these tests of stamina and nerve. In addition to those pressures, the genre also possesses narrative conventions that shape as well as convey knowledge, conventions that lay traps for unwary authors and readers. The (varied and flexible) conventions of academic monographs embody epistemologies and ways of knowing that run deep; in comparison with those little engines of progress – academic articles – monographs are slower to respond to disciplinary and intellectual change. Multidisciplinarity is more difficult to sustain in longer formats; the attempt at wide-ranging, more comprehensive and over-arching argument seeming to trigger reversion to older habits. Monographs are often – though not always or necessarily – associated with older (mono)disciplinary conventions, in which the subject of study is concretised and textualised, and evaluated in terms of a survey. In the books under review, the subject is (in a general sense) opera, which tended in the eighteenth century more to the ontologies of embodied performance and multimedia event than to a regulative work, written text, or even stable ‘piece’. But it wasn’t only a performance event, existing also as an object of consumption within emerging cultural industrialisation and urbanisation. Though widely recognised, these ontological subtleties often give way to academically convenient but misleading concretisation.Footnote 4
Multidisciplinary frameworks bring formidable challenges to thinking and writing because they make too visible the complacent habits that grow up within disciplines. In periods of relative insularity and autonomy, musicologists, like literary scholars, could proceed in discussions of complex phenomena such as opera without challenge from academic outsiders. In such contexts, prose exposition needed only aspire to be clear and correct. Plain language, tabular summary of information, extensive documentary footnotes and chronological organisation charting continuity and change were usually adequate. But Castelvecchi, Charlton and Le Guin write about opera as older certainties fall away. More than before, a study (however carefully executed and internally cogent) can be found wanting by readers who do not share the author’s habits and bias. The gradual shift in musical scholarship of the period towards an ‘eighteenth-century studies’ approach is not just a matter of broadened perspective, of increased intention to ‘context’, of deeming opera representational, or of describing the cultural work of operatic institutions and performances.Footnote 5 It concerns how opera exists in the world and how one might write about it.Footnote 6
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A case in point is Castelvecchi’s much-anticipated study of the third-genre of later eighteenth-century Italian opera – tearful, morally didactic works according emotional dignity to characters in contemporary dress and setting. Sentimental Opera is a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, completed in 1996.Footnote 7 The same year saw the author’s now classic article on Giovanni Paisiello’s two settings of Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (on a French libretto by Marsollier and Dalayrac, translated and adapted for the premiere in June 1789 by Giovan Battista Lorenzi and Giuseppe Carpani).Footnote 8 In that ground-breaking study, Castelvecchi located Nina at the intersection of the culture of sensibility (pioneered in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels of sentiment), the rise of bourgeois drama in France (a theoretically and politically provocative genre beyond the neo-classical categories of comedy and tragedy), and emerging theories of mental illness as arising from emotional rather than purely organic causes (and so potentially responsive to therapy targeting the intellect and the feelings). This article, along with the author’s related study of the tension between comic and sentimental impulses in Mozart’s Figaro (originally published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2000), appear as the culmination of the book in chapters 5–7. These important, subtle, and deeply researched arguments contain the core findings of the research; they also stay close to the original articles, and will probably suffice for readers in a hurry or on a budget. I say this not because the new material in chapters 1–4 and chapter 8 is concerned primarily with the literary context of sentimental opera – the series Cambridge Opera Studies, in which this monograph appears, is typically concerned more with the contexts of opera than the operas ‘themselves’ – but because there is a fundamental problem with the book that was not as pressing in the earlier articles.
The problem is that Sentimental Opera does not give the reader sight of enough ‘sentimental operas’ to establish that the genre existed – at least on the generic terms Castelvecchi proposes. As a result, the newly published material, though carefully researched and elegantly presented, is concerned with the literary background to a genre that never appears beyond a couple of putatively representative examples. The frequent references to Nina as exemplary come to beg that question, while the new materials offer only one additional sentimental opera in Italian – a setting by Francesco Bianchi of Bartolomeo Benincasa’s libretto Il disertore (1784). Though other operas are mentioned, they usually fall foul of the author’s stringent criteria that to be sentimental an opera must exclude buffa elements. Here the author’s dissatisfaction with scholars’ casual reference to the mixture of comic and tragic backs him into a theoretical corner. With the repertory of sentimental opera out of view (Castelvecchi proceeds as if there were other works but does not mention them), the book appears misleadingly titled. This is a genre in search of a repertory.
With a thesis derived from literary history and genre theory, Castelvecchi also inherits political-social meanings for the third genre that don’t seem to fit his operatic material: literary and operatic histories need to be differentiated. Conventionally enough, the third genre stands for dawning bourgeois consciousness, even revolution, in the arts. Castlevecchi, following an earlier study by Mary Hunter, focuses his first chapter on Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740).Footnote 9 A penetrating reader of the voluminous secondary literature on this (and several other) topics, with a keen eye for issues of both literary form and reception, Castelvecchi deftly identifies many key elements of Pamela that prove relevant to later sentimental drama: a nearly eventless plot that throws attention onto sentiment; a concern with family relationships, with the domestic and (most private of all) with characters’ interiority; colloquial language, lending an aura of reality to the fictional; advocacy for ‘middle-class’ values to the extent that ‘values’ and ‘middle class’ are elided; an aristocratic rake reformed through the virtuous resistance of a female servant (a theme of reform of male manners that goes unmarked in Sentimental Opera); inscriptions of appropriate responses to the novel through reference to tears (of distress and sympathy) and to a painful delight at Pamela’s plight – the latter testifying to the covert eroticism and sadism endemic to the sentimental mode (matters over which Castelvecchi draws a semi-transparent veil). The remainder of the chapter – recalling Mary Hunter’s earlier study – traces Carlo Goldoni’s adaptation of the novel, first as a spoken drama, La Pamela (1750), and then a libretto, La buona figliuola (1756). The stage is set for Niccolò Piccinni to enter the narrative, and indeed the chapter culminates with his setting of La buona figliuola in 1760 for the Teatro delle Dame in Rome. But, for all the build up, the opera is ultimately excluded from the middle genre on the basis of its stylistic and social mixture, particularly the inclusion of a farcical solider, Tagliaferro. The fact that Goldoni gave the eponymous heroine blue blood also complicates the theory of emerging bourgeois identity in opera (a theory that works well for the novel). At the end of the first chapter, the appearance of the genre of sentimental opera is subject to the first of several deferrals.
Chapters 2–4 offer a second run-up to the appearance of the genre. Exploring French spoken theatre, these chapters proceed through expert synthesis and appraisal of secondary literature. Thus they provide a valuable resource for students of the period and are likely to inspire further commentary. Castelvecchi explores what was at stake for contemporary critics when characters of ambiguously ‘middle’ social standing and in (something like) modern dress appeared on stage. Though framed by contemporaries and by Castelvecchi alike in terms of ‘genre’, there was something politically revolutionary in these incursions of the ordinary into theatre. When recognisable characters emerged as subjects of moving portrayal and identification, rather than as the butt of humour, genre itself was revealed as an ideological construct. That said, middle-class ascendance mingled with apologies for inequality, in pieces (Nina not least among them) that deploy a ‘feeling’ mode of representation not so much to ennoble the lowly as to make hierarchy feel nicer that it is.
Though historical, Castelvecchi’s analysis of the third genre still involves a shift of emphasis away from contemporary concerns. Whereas Diderot and Mercier, Goldoni and Beaumarchais, among others, worried about the legitimacy of a serious, middle-class genre of theatre, and advocated for its importance, in part for political reasons, albeit under the academically exalted and officially sanctioned rubric of genre, Castelvecchi worries more over criteria for inclusion in that new class of piece. It might be argued that the book demonstrates – against its own thesis – that the culture of sensibility was a powerful mode in opera, but not, primarily, a genre issue (or at least not an issue of the emergence of a dedicated, pure, and discrete genre of opera). Similarly, his material suggests that opera resisted appropriation by a single estate, but continued to cater to the interests of the diverse social levels who attended, performed, produced and sponsored it.
Such longing for purity of genre is rather paradoxical given the author’s highly theorised ‘prologue on genre’. Sequestered in a preamble, theoretical awareness does not fully inform the author’s critical practice. An underlying problem is that the questions ‘what is genre?’ (i.e., the issue of the prologue) and ‘does it belong in the middle genre?’ (the question explored in the rest of the book) leave little room for other, complexifying questions: is genre a way of speaking of other things under a convenient and seemingly respectable rubric? Why does genre matter? If genre is concerned with legitimacy, meaning and authority, is it something that can matter to everyone in the same way? There are other reasons, too, why the approach through genre seems to limit the author’s access to his operatic subject matter. Specifically, the putative genre of sentimental opera is policed on the basis of formal properties that are essentially literary and textual(ising). As part of this, the author is not led to consider singing, acting, playing instruments, gesture, costume and other non-linguistic, performative aspects of opera. Not that I’m prescribing a dose of phenomenology, nor complaining that this approach to opera seems a little dated. Rather, I’m concerned that when non-linguistic elements are touched upon, they remain decorative, lacking explanatory significance and epistemological gravity. In this study at least, to be ‘about’ genre, opera can’t also be ‘about’ singing – though in some nice moments in chapter 5, first presented in the Nina article, opera can be about acting and about spectatorship.
There are some brief but elegant commentaries on music in the book that demonstrate how much the literary context of opera can illuminate musical meaning. The author’s reticence about matters musical seems unwarranted. But reticent he is, and this does lead him to miss a beat or two. ‘Music’ (in the form of stage songs and other diegetic musical performances) are prominent in Nina, and in Il disertore; a feature that hints at the privileged place of music – and singing in particular – in the culture of sentiment (and even as a symptom of bourgeois patronage). Music’s refusal to be explained by the prevailing theories of imitation-of-nature – the sense of immediacy accompanying its expressive effects – is one of the things that the sentimental in opera is ‘about’. But Castelvecchi treats music as an incidental element, a supplement, and he tends to sidestep discussions of musical issues in preference for further information on literary precedents. Thus if all students must turn to Castelvecchi for answers to such questions as ‘What is a genre?’, ‘What is sensibility?’ and ‘What is meant by “bourgeois”?’, they must arrive at their own conclusions about the status of music in the culture of sensibility and in the shifting generic landscape of later eighteenth-century opera.
In the remainder of this review, I return to what I take to be the most fundamental challenges all these authors face: first, how to constitute opera for the purposes of study; second, what and how music means in stage works; and third, the place – even effects – of opera within its contemporary political order. My focus is on two authors, David Charlton and Elisabeth Le Guin, who explicitly wrestle with these fundamental challenges. In different ways, these writers convey their struggles to capture how opera exists in the world and what it means. Reflection on these challenges – for which I do not pretend to have solutions – seems more productive than a face value summary of authors’ arguments and the repertory they explore.
Constituting opera
First, then, how to constitute opera within a format that requires authors clearly to define what it is they want to explain – and to show that ‘thing’ to the reader? How to ‘concretise’ a subject matter comprising (to a large extent) ephemeral and permanently vanished performances? Few readers or reviewers today would accept the older ontological sleight of hand that, for pragmatic reasons and also for reasons of aesthetic prestige, granted operas the status of a musical works and constituted them as an elusive mixture of score, libretto and intention. Charlton and Le Guin are aware of these difficulties, but they respond with different degrees of ingenuity and success. Charlton’s approach to constituting opera in Opera in the Age of Rousseau is untheorised but effective in terms of his aim to identify changing dramatic principles in the period of French opera from 1739 to 1774. In keeping with the repertory he brings to light, which notably included ‘old’ works (principally those of Lully), alongside new musical tragedies, ballets and comedies by a host of composers (including, for instance, Rameau, Boismortier, Rebel, Leclair, Mondonville, La Garde and Ferrand for the decade 1742–52), he speaks of pieces (not works), some enjoying repeat performances and revivals. This repertory, it appears, was regulated not by a work concept but by the king’s absolute and divine rule, mediated through notions of Frenchness and tradition – a formidable framework indeed. It would be interesting to know what to call ‘pieces’ that were neither one-off events nor works (as metaphysical and regulative abstractions) – but for now pieces will have to do. Charlton appraises dramatic, linguistic and musical elements through close readings of scores and libretti. He shows readers the relatively scant records of costume, staging and acting that survive, leaving them to fit things together. This way of constituting opera is rooted in the venerable technique of the genre survey – the default option in encyclopaedia articles. Nonetheless, it proves effective because Charlton’s ‘piece-based’ approach highlights formal elements that could plausibly have registered on audiences ‘back then’, that are readily perceived and that correspond to the types of things that contemporary critics wrote about.
This endorsement notwithstanding, only Le Guin avoids the onotological error of over-concretisation throughout. In The Tonadilla in Performance she employs ingenious metatheatrical devices in her text to sustain the reader’s awareness of the context, as well as the physical vitality and evanescence of her material. For example, the first chapter proper is a fictionalised reconstruction of a night at the theatre in Madrid, through the eyes of ‘Louis’, who writes at length to his sister Céline back in France. The technique could backfire, but Le Guin provides scrupulous annotations to the primary sources that she weaves together, and avoids over-writing and literary affectation. Le Guin is far too sophisticated a thinker to believe that her imitation of her subject matter dissolves all boundaries; not naivety, but generosity to the reader is evident in her efforts to link the ontology of her subject matter to the mode of her own presentation. Indeed, she questions her own attempts to recreate (and so in a sense memorialise) the tonadilla in live performances, in one case sponsored by the illustrious Noah Greenberg Award of the American Musicological Society: ‘I have come to believe that in the broadest sense, my re-creative experiment failed’ (248). At the end of her study, she takes the ultimate and, for a musicologist, daring step of consigning the tonadilla back to its original context, ‘for in losing the details of the tonadillas’ original context, one has lost almost everything’ (249). In a multidisciplinary context of course this makes perfect sense – historians of literature and visual culture do not assume that their subjects should be actively revived and cultivated by modern readers. But music history was for so long celebratory of its subject matter, and so long in search of works whose value was enduring and transcendent of context, that Le Guin’s avoidance of aesthetic idealisation is intellectually powerful.
Music and embodiment
Now to the second issue: the role of music in opera. Singing, instrumental playing, and vocal intonation in opera performances pose profound challenges to scholarship. Some of these are presentational – how to show opera to the reader within the medium of the printed - or digital - word. Others are interpretative: how does music create meaning in the context of embodied and multimedia performance? In the old days, music could be separated from other domains, examined via scores, and celebrated if not in purely abstract terms at least through disembodied concepts of characterisation and dramatic shaping. Both Charlton and Le Guin offer major contributions to understanding music on the stage; they also explore what was at stake culturally in the rise of idioms inspired by the Italian intermezzo or, as Le Guin prefers, the galant style. In so doing, they offer models for what a musical specialist can bring to eighteenth-century studies: not a trite insistence on the presence or importance of music, but an analysis of how it participates in a semiotic process.
For Charlton, French opera of the middle decades developed novel techniques of realism that ‘foreground character’ and, implicitly, fostered the immersion of the audience in the fiction. These techniques, which anticipated Gluck’s reform operas, involved an intensifying simplification of plot and tighter integration of media. Pantomimes, linked to the main drama, sought absolute coordination of music and gesture; dances were related to the action, or banished to the end of early acts; subplots were reduced, five acts shifted to three, and heroes, formerly lovelorn throughout, were depicted in a wider range of activity. Training in acting was formalised, fostering gestures that could convey the internal ‘movements’ of the affections. Non-singing characters were encouraged to act, not stand around like statues, and the ‘action chorus’ emerged as at least a theoretical ideal. At the musical level, realism included a focus on characters’ interiority, through ‘orchestral commentary’, in which the orchestra provides a sort of ‘narrative consciousness’ for the character singing. Stage songs, glossing the action, lent characters reflexivity and fostered simpler, more lyrical melody. ‘Expressive’ singing involved the gestures of rubato, while physical gesture was matched to the passionate accents of the voice. In these ways, ‘music’ and ‘acting’ drew closer, ontologically, converging in the sonorous spectacle of the signifying body. Performers, and especially women, applauded for realistic – often meaning ‘moving’ – portrayal of character could achieve some degree of celebrity. Perhaps reflecting ‘Enlightenment’ ideas of music as a natural language of the passions, operas became more ‘music’ weighted, as if music were (in this time and place) more authentic than literary expression.
Charlton’s insight that ‘realism’ in music involved a convergence of singing, instrumental music and acting as varieties of emotive gesture comes to the fore in his important reappraisal of Rousseau’s Le Devin du village (1752). He elaborates Burney’s description of this piece as ‘composed in a familiar pleasing ballad style, neither entirely French nor Italian’ (138–9), showing that it was not perceived by contemporaries as simply a transfer of the intermezzo to French-language opera. Charlton reads the relative simplicity of melody in terms of an emerging democratic ideal of music as a medium that could cut across social hierarchy and make sense to all estates at a level of shared feelings. (The language of an imaginary ‘folk’ furnished aristocracy and bourgeoisie with common ground.) His understanding of the Italian influence connects back to the issue of realism: pieces like Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, he argues, offered a technique for unifying word, music and stage activity within fast-paced structures that fulfilled the requirements of musical coherence and verbal spontaneity. Indeed, Blainville described Le Devin as employing a ‘ton pantomime’, with apparent reference to this coordination of gesture, as much as the inclusion of a pantomime in scene 8 (146).
Likewise, Le Guin discovers in the music of the Italian intermezzo a principle of realism involving gesture. She is even more explicit than Charlton about the techniques involved, positing a pan-Mediterranean ‘galant’ (admittedly arising primarily in Neapolitan comic opera) that was ‘unmarked’ and ‘neutral’ in terms of national character, but which offered a framework for realistic embodied performance. The ‘galant’ offered a technical framework for performative expression characterised by ‘circulating, mutual influence’ of musical events, gestures, physical movement, facial expression and tone of voice. The stereotyped patterns of the musical galant, like those of comic characters and plots, allowed for realistic pace, improvisation and interaction with an audience informed about those conventions. Reflecting on the ‘curious twilight realm of textuality’ (78) of tonadilla manuscripts, she reanimates the seemingly ‘forced and awkward’ repetitions of poetry, and sledgehammer musical gestures, in a 1784 tonadilla by Blas de Laserna, La fuga de la Pulpillo with a ‘hypothetical gestural “score”’ (78–9). Pantomimic gestures suggesting gratitude, timidity, reassurance, fellowship, doubt, rising courage and so on are ‘mickey-moused’ to poetry and music, albeit within a prose table, in accordance with Le Guin’s sense that ‘every rupture of musical continuity had a gestural element on stage’ (78). This exemplary effort to reconstruct the performativity of the tonadilla also shows us what music specialists can bring to eighteenth-century studies: not the usual advocacy for the ‘neglected’ domain of music, but analysis of how music, and other embodied practices, construct meaning.
Politics and performance
And so to the third issue: opera’s relationship with its political context. This interpretative challenge is implicitly in play in Charlton’s discussions of musical meaning (as described above), discussions that speak of the modern in terms of the feeling and signifying body of non-aristocratic persons. To put things bluntly, to equate the new with realistic representations of embodied character and action is to trace the epochal shift from opera as a sign of sovereignty (dealing with the personal qualities, dilemmas and power of absolute rulers who always represent their nation, or state or region, in allegorical form) to emerging ‘bourgeois’ culture focused more on issues of moral ‘character’ and regulative categories of ‘identity’ (including rationality, ethnicity, gender, age, family position, religious observance, trade and occupation, the urbane and the rustic).
Charlton brings nuance to the politics of French opera in the period between Rameau and Gluck, even though, admittedly, this is a ground-up survey of repertoire more than a thematic study. (I even wonder if the book would be more effectively presented as information in a searchable database, accompanied by shorter, focused, thematic essays: as a monograph it is fragmented enough to frustrate all but the most informed, leisured and patient reader.) In 1749, economic crisis encouraged Louis XV to change the managerial systems at the Paris Opéra, transferring power from a court director to the ‘city of Paris’. A ‘consecrated pattern’ of programming was set aside, with fewer performances of Lully, and more of Rameau, whose music-weighted tragedies eroded the sovereignty of French literature and declamation. In turn, these provocations to traditions authorised by and representing the king stimulated discussion of opera in print culture, in a further shift away from court control. In Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) Rousseau asserted that ‘in Paris, the Opéra … is regarded as the most superb monument to the glories of Louis XIV’, suggesting that not just absolutism but a particular historical incarnation of it was at stake. ‘Future operatic developments’, Charlton observes, by which he presumably means the sort of realism he discusses elsewhere, hinged on the commodification of opera. Though not engaging in a sustained analysis himself, he marshals no less a witness than Jürgen Habermas to testify that the emerging public sphere turned ‘art objects’ into ‘commodities which could be desired for their own sake’, less instruments of feudal power than manifestations of ‘cultural industrialisation’ (191). Ultimately, though, it is primary sources rather than political theorisations that interest Charlton, and he seeks less to develop a theory of political change than to set the over-familiar Querelle in the context of earlier debates, and to bust the myth of a Paris ‘before’ the arrival of Italian music.
In the analysis of the politics of opera, Le Guin again distinguishes herself in a subtle, explicit and original discussion. The grand narrative of the rise of bourgeois opera is set aside as barely applicable to a genre whose ‘comic frivolity’, far from a catalyst of social transformation, is ‘of’ its time and place, a mirror (or window) on ‘pre-Revolutionary Europe, where both optimism and comfortable traditions still abounded’ (17). Tonadillas, like Goya’s cartoons, offered lively and energetic imitations of ‘the inhabitants of and visitors to the streets of the metropolis in all their wonderful peculiarity’ – a sort of ‘living portrait gallery’ (17). Satire and caricature may have regulated conduct beyond the stage, by subjecting human foibles to ridicule, but Le Guin posits no instrumental mission for the tonadilla. Instead, she understands its frivolity as largely conservative, a tempering of worldly sadness and seriousness through the antics of stock character ‘types’ lacking interiority. Laughter was ‘good business’ in a time of prosperity and – as the Napoleonic troops break into the last chapter – in times of war and famine. Tonadillas involved ‘the deliberate embrace of inconsequentiality’, they existed in a ‘bubble’ that burst rather than adapted. Notably, Le Guin demures from totalising theories even of comedy, pinning little on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque or Northrop Frye’s ‘idea of comedy as the “myth of spring”’, or ever-renewing optimism (16).
There are good reasons why Le Guin nudges the tonadilla away from political history. From the 1830s through the twentieth century the already defunct genre was ‘a front line in the “battle” for the soul of musical Spanishness’ (10). A nationalist appropriation culminated with the (formerly) definitive, ‘fervid’ study by Subirá, La tonadilla escénica, in three volumes published between 1928 and 1930 (11), a rise-and-fall history tracing the ruination of an authentically Spanish music through Italian operatic influences at the end of the eighteenth century. Just as Charlton emphasises the presence of Italian music in Paris throughout the century – and not just with the arrival of Eustachio Bambini’s small troup of bouffons in 1752 – Le Guin argues that the tonadilla was always and already ‘Italian’ in musical vocabulary. She does not deny that some passages in tonadilla performance could ‘sound’ musically Spanish – through Andalusian vocal embellishments for example. But if I read her correctly, she makes an epistemological distinction between music that can sound ‘Spanish’ – that employed ways of singing and playing that were distinctive to Madrid – and music whose essence or meaning is ‘Spain’ and whose purpose is to represent Spanishness and the Spanish nation abroad. Similarly, the facts of state sponsorship and control of theatres – all of the actor-singers, authors and composers in the tonadilla were appointed and regulated by a junta – did not render the theatre a medium for ideals of sovereignty and absolutism – the comic, in particular, resisted appropriation by any single estate. The barbs of satire were undiscriminating.
Epilogue: performance as the message
Readers will have noticed how excited I am by Le Guin’s approach to writing about opera, and I want to end with a few observations on why I find her approach to opera-as-performance exemplary. My turn to the first person signals a caveat: Le Guin does not engage in methodological polemics, nor theorise her approach to performance, so it’s possible I am misrepresenting her thinking. That caution notwithstanding, my sense is that for Le Guin performance is (no small part of) the content of the tonadilla, not (simply) the medium for communicating something else.
This premise, a version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium is the message, shapes Le Guin’s entire approach.Footnote 10 She attends to the concreteness of embodied performance even as she allows for the peculiar power of performance effects. She does this by exploring performance from the ground up, offering a living portrait of artisan performers, their social backgrounds, training, contracts, social status, rehearsal schedules and pay. This worldly knowledge grounds the account of on-stage performances. Crucially, performance and its effects are not mystified as sublime, as they appear to be in Carolyn Abbate’s contentious inscriptions of the ineffable to the entire domain of musical performance.Footnote 11 Nor is performance textualised, as something to subject to empirical or formalist analysis. Understanding performance as human action, Le Guin is able to steer a course between mystification, in which performance is beyond signification and conceptualisation, and the ‘wrong’ kind of concreteness that treats performances as things to measure. Le Guin is exquisitely sensitive to the character of the material she discusses, and her approach chimes with the metatheatricality of the tonadilla repertory, which often featured scenes of its own production and ‘rehearsal’.Footnote 12 Scholarship such as this makes it difficult to share Georgina Born’s enthusiasm for a movement away from what she styles the ‘performance turn’ in musicology. New insights seem to arise as often from musical scholars following their hearts and intuitions (i.e., from their embodied knowledge), from their sceptical reading of ‘theory’, from proceeding in tension with disciplinary norms, as from reaching out to adopt, say, the potentially flattening, partial terms of anthropological analysis.Footnote 13
Explored in a ‘deep’, loving way, performance shapes issues of meaning (the ‘message’), and here again Le Guin sets us on a different course. I noted above that Castelvecchi and Charlton are fascinated by how dramatic principles, and the order of genres, were influenced by the shift from absolutism to public taste. In a passing remark, that resonates beyond its own making, Le Guin observes that sovereignty in the tonadilla was a fleeting effect of the power of star performers over their audiences. These performers were primarily women, who probably played the male roles too, and were the only members of the cast to sing. Often illiterate, they likely learned their spoken and sung parts by ear, memories jogged by on-stage prompters who, remarkably, audibly read the script throughout. This affront to naturalism might (in light of Castelvecchi’s concerns with audience ‘absorption’) seem to rule out strong affective responses from the audience, to establish distance, but this wasn’t necessarily the case. Audiences in Madrid did not require a pristine ‘imaginary world’ to be moved: as the aged Mariano Querol expressed it in a pamphlet of 1811, ‘the spectator suffers [upon seeing] misfortunes, suffers upon seeing vice punished, hates, and becomes inflamed and interested, in all the matters particular to the cause of country and religion’ (65). The names of several star performers of the tonadilla survive to this day, at least in Spain, a Polonia Rachel (‘La Polonia’) and Maria Antonia Fernández (‘La Caramba’) symbolising the power of performance to achieve mastery, fleeting and enduring, of the attention, imagination and passion of an audience.
