Operatic Subjects: The Evolution of Self in Modern Opera.(Review)

By Sandra Gorse. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000. [227 p. ISBN 0-8386-3858-9. $39.50.]

Like her previous books (Opera and the Uses of Language: Mozart, Verdi, and Britten and VVagner and the New Consciousness: Language and Love in the Ring [Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1987 and 1990 respectively]), Sandra Gorse's latest one reveals both a literary scholar's attention to the subtleties of language and dramatic convention and a musicologist's concern for musical strucwre. Few people have the kind of dual professional training that she has, so few others can do justice to opera as a truly mixed genre. The book's central theme is opera's contribution to the delineation of modern subjectivity. While this delineation has been a topic much discussed in recent decades (especially in literary studies), opera too has recently joined the debates with Gary Tomlinson's study of how the operatic voice locates the subject in the world (Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999]) and Carolyn Abbate's recent essays, including "Outside Ravel's Tomb" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 [1999]: 465u530]). Gorse's position is that opera combines the social interaction of characters with a representation (through both words and music) of a complex and contradictory interiority in a way that far surpasses, for example, the novel as a means of exploring inner consciousness. Operatic subjects are the products of physical, embodiedl characters presented on the theatrical stage plus the music that occurs with their words and actions, and thus opera contributes in a special way to our understanding of the con tradictions of modern subjectivity. Careful to define what she means by subjectivity, Corse draws on philosophical, literary, and linguistic discourses (rather than psychological or psychoanalytic) to offer a lucid, if sometimes simplified, overview of the history of philosophical modernity from Rend Descartes onward; she focuses on the sense of the individual from the Enlightenment emphasis on reason to the romantic beginnings of the modern view, through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's critique and re definition of the subject in terms of intersubjective social experience (and subsequent interpretations of Hegel by Theodor Adorno and Slavoj Zizek). Her argument is that opera does not reflect, reinforce, or reproduce the ideologies of bourgeois identity, as is often assumed, but challenges cultural conceptions of persons and interpersonal relationships precisely through its dialectical mix of drama and music.

The contradictions of the modern subject are explored in depth in a discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche's Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian Birth of Tragedy as a "drama of the self" (p. 44); this discussion acts as a preparation for the chapter on Richard Wagner and his redefinition of opera as a theater of the self. The world-historical teleology of Der Ring des Nibelungen is read through Hegel's theory of human consciousness, as is Tristan and Isolde (with the addition of Arthur Schopenhauer)--the first moment of operatic modernism. I did find myself quibbling with isolated interpretations en route here--for example, it is arguable that neither Parsifal with its structure of comedy, nor Tristan with its celebration of the night-death and the Schopenhauerian noumena, can really be called "pessimistic"--but Gorse is always strongest when bringing together the music, the text, and the drama. In the next chapter, the legacy of the Wagnerian split subject in all its complexities is examined in symbolist drama and the n in Claude Debussy's Pelleas et Milisande, with its focus on the interior, not the socia], realm. Here interiority is represented as experiential flux in a highly ordered flow of time, which is objectivized in the supporting orchestral music--and all this is said to force the audience to rethink its assumptions about subjectivity. Richard Strauss's Elekra is also treated in this chapter, for it too builds on Wagner's representation of the interior self, but this time in terms of social isolation. Given her focus on desire as always involving a relation to others, Gorse interprets the physical hotly as incidental to both operas, but Melisande does die after childbirth, so clearly it is not literally the case that "even the desire of the men around her cannot touch her" (p. 88), and Elektra is defined in bodily (and even in ...