In search of Opera. (Books).(Review)(Brief Article)

In Search of Opera by Carolyn Abbate Princeton University Press, 264 pp. $29.95

"Callas's Forza," "Wilson's Lohengrin": such shorthand is second nature to most opera-lovers, yet it typically provokes conspicuous rolling of eyes among music scholars. These designations, after all, highlight the elements of opera that have traditionally been dismissed as contingent and ephemeral -- performances and stagings that happen in specific places, at specific times -- and not the "immutable essence" of a work, thought to spring from the master's mind unsullied by flesh or time, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Opera itself, of course, has always been considered suspect by those who champion music as a "transcendentally-significant-yet-meaningless terrain" (to borrow feminist philosopher Susan McClary's phrase).

Carolyn Abbate's demanding, subtly argued In Search of Opera delves deep into the fissures (and bonds) between two extreme concepts of music: as "embodied, very far from being in any way metaphysical," and as a form of discourse that often "trumps philosophy" itself. The author, a professor of music at Princeton, examines familiar works -- including Orfeo (Monteverdi and Gluck), Die Zauberflote, Parsifal and Pelleas -- in light of both contemporary critical theory and the culture of their times, highlighting "operatic moments that attempt something impossible: to represent music that, by the very terms of the fictions proposing it, remains beyond expression."

Abbate sees Wagner, for instance, as a "master of blurring the lines between natural sound and music": Kundry's ...