Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera

Yayoi Uno Everett

Description

Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Toward a Multimodal Discourse on Opera
2. Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar: A Myth of "Wounded" Freedom
3. Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater: A Narrative of Trauma and Ambivalence
4. John Adams' Doctor Atomic: A Faustian Parable for the Modern Age?
5. The Anti-hero in Tan Dun's The First Emperor
Epilogue: Opera as Myth in the Global Age
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Criticism
• History of classical music traditions
• Theory
• Musicology
• History
• Opera

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253018052
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
YAYOI UNO EVERETT
Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera
Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Yayoi Uno Everett
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Everett, Yayoi Uno, author.
Reconfiguring myth and narrative in contemporary
opera : Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John
Adams, and Tan Dun / Yayoi Uno Everett.
pages cm - (Musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01799-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01805-2 (ebook) 1. Operas-21st century-Analysis, appreciation. 2. Golijov, Osvaldo, 1960- Ainadamar. 3. Saariaho, Kaija. Adriana Mater. 4. Adams, John, 1947- Doctor Atomic. 5. Tan, Dun, 1957- First emperor. I. Title. II. Series: Musical meaning and interpretation.
MT 95. E 84 2016
782.109 05-dc23
2015019678
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To Hideo and Shoko Uno
La barbarie, ce n est pas l Autre ; elle est en nous, en chacun de nous, tapie comme un fauve, pr te bondir, et c est nous de la d busquer et de la dompter. Il me semble que la musique, la litt rature, et l art en g n ral, ont un r le essentiel jouer dans ce combat qui ne s arr tera jamais.
Barbarism is not the Other; it resides in us, in each of us, lurking like a wild beast ready to jump, and it s up to us to uncover and tame it. It seems to me that music, literature, and the arts in general have a vital role to play in this never-ending battle.
Amin Maalouf, Adriana Mater
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Toward a Multimodal Discourse on Opera
2. Osvaldo Golijov s Ainadamar: A Myth of Wounded Freedom
3. Kaija Saariaho s Adriana Mater: A Narrative of Trauma and Ambivalence
4. John Adams s Doctor Atomic: A Faustian Parable for the Modern Age?
5. The Anti-hero in Tan Dun s The First Emperor
Epilogue: Opera as Myth in the Global Age
Glossary of Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
The inspiration for writing this book came from lively debates I have had with friends and colleagues following performances of new operas at various venues over the course of ten years. Often, the underlying questions centered on whether the opera was successful in its treatment of music, portrayal of characters, narrative proportion, and staging. Back in 2003, I recall debating the profound stasis and circularity in Kaija Saariaho s L Amour de loin at its premiere in Amsterdam s IJstheater; while my Dutch colleague dismissed the opera on the basis that the music goes nowhere, I defended the absence of teleology as an essential feature of the musical drama. At the Lincoln Center s 2005 premiere of Brian Ferneyhough s Shadowtime , my friends and I similarly debated whether this concert-opera, chronicling Walter Benjamin s war trauma in a fragmented sequence of dialogues, monologues, and instrumental pieces, constituted a legitimate opera; the booing and hissing from the audience at the end of the performance indicated that an opera awash in angular, atonal language without flowing lines, and lacking narrative continuity could not be called an opera. Following the Lyrical Opera of Chicago s 2007 premiere of John Adams s Doctor Atomic in Chicago, a composer colleague and I disagreed on the theatrical excesses and the lengthy proportion of the second act in Peter Sellars s mise-en-sc ne. Why does it have to go on for so long? she asked, to which I replied that it had to do with creating a portal into the mythic experience of an operatic apocalypse.
These diverging responses to live performances attest to the fact that opera involves a complex negotiation with the libretto, music, action, lighting, and other aspects of the production. Considering these issues, this book addresses new developments in operatic production that have become commonplace since the 1980s; while music and libretto constitute the initial source material, they operate in counterpoint with variable production components of the director s mise-en-sc ne, including choreography, lighting, props, and filmic projections. The signifying capacity of music and text may be greatly altered by the performative components of an opera s mise-en-sc ne. But why have these new operas stirred up hours of heated debate? What lies at the root of our disagreements in our interpretive experience of opera?
In the last two decades, scholarship on opera has expanded its range of critical discourse by taking into account gender, cultural, literary, psychoanalytic, and media theories. In Unsung Voices (1991), Carolyn Abbate examines the performative dimensions of opera by exploring what she calls the narrating voice. In Feminine Endings (1991), Susan McClary offers a gender-based discourse centered on desire, pleasure, and the body in her analysis of the feminine in works ranging from Monteverdi s Orfeo to Madonna s music videos. Slavoj i ek and Mladen Dolar s Opera s Second Death (2002) explores operatic representations of death and its mythical framework through the psychoanalytical lens of Freud and Lacan. Similarly, Lawrence Kramer examines operatic moments in which the sensory richness of music assumes the function of the Lacanian Real - the unsymbolizable kernel of forbidden/ecstatic pleasure (2006: 270). Combining media and semiotic perspectives, Marcia Citron analyzes filmic operas (Ponnelle s Madame Butterfly ) and operatic films (the Godfather trilogy and Moonstruck ) in When Opera Meets Film (2010); she adopts Wolf Werner s concept of intermediality to explore the relationship between film and opera as well as hybrid systems of signification that arise from the interplay of media.
Prompted by such studies, this book contributes to current discourse on opera as media by examining mythic narratives of operas composed and produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although the historical contexts and compositional approaches vary, the four operas selected for close reading share a common theme by foregrounding human conflicts that arise from war. In Golijov s Ainadamar (2003), actress Margarita Xirgu wrestles with the ill-fated execution of Garc a Lorca during the Spanish Civil War ( chapter 2 ). In Kaija Saariaho s Adriana Mater (2006), Adriana raises a child born of rape during a nameless war, and the opera makes an oblique reference to the Serbo-Croatian War ( chapter 3 ). John Adams s Doctor Atomic (2006) explores scientist Robert Oppenheimer s moral struggle in bringing about the nuclear age ( chapter 4 ). Finally, in Tan Dun s The First Emperor (2006-07), Qin Shi Huang faces a moral dilemma of choosing between duty and love after unifying China as its first Emperor ( chapter 5 ). These operas draw on collective memories of war as a means for reflection and dialogue. Within the imagined plots and fictionalized settings, they transform historical figures into contemporary subjects, inviting the audience to identify with their aspirations and struggles from a transhistorical perspective by moving outside the frame of reference of a particular social or historical context. In these narratives, the main character often stands as a symbol of a more archetypal figure; for example, Garc a Lorca and Xirgu are both represented as Christ-like figures, Adriana as Mater Dolorosa, Oppenheimer as Faust, and Qin Shi Huang as Mao Zedong. Furthermore, by presenting historical subjects in quasi-mythological settings, these opera invite audiences to contemplate the moral and ethical questions raised by war and human conflict.
In qualifying these works as contemporary opera, there are fundamental questions that need to be addressed with respect to how postwar operas have transformed narrative conventions from the past. First, postwar aesthetic trends have brought a fundamental shift in the narrative conventions of opera. As visual media gained in popularity and technical perfection during the twentieth century, the older live performance media modernized by abandoning realism, returning to prototypical myths and moralities, favoring inner expression over clear narrative, experimenting with nonlinearity, and using stage action as a metaphor rather than as a simulation of reality (Salzman and Desi 2008: 63). Earlier twentieth-century operas, such as Prokofiev s Love for Three Oranges (1919), Puccini s Turandot (1925), and Carlisle Floyd s Susanna (1955), are based on a conventional narrative formula in which tension generated from conflict and expectations of resolution builds and sustains dramatic continuity. In comparison, diverse postwar operas have adopted non-linear or refractory forms of narrative, reconfiguring historical figures and myths into postmodern subjects through the deployment of filmic and electronic devices, tableaux vivants , fragmentation, collage, parody, and minimalist musical idioms. In the genre of anti-operas composed by Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Gy rgy Ligeti and others in the late 1960s, operatic conventions are dismantled through parody, distortion, satire, and irony