Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters.(Brief Article)

by Paul Robinson University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $18 (paperback)

Paul Robinson gets his priorities right. He's an intellectual historian (Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University) as well as an accomplished essayist, accustomed to comprehending and expressing ideas through words. Nonetheless, he never forgets that opera is music, that in an opera the "essential argument is posed in musical language," and he issues a slap on the wrist to literary critics who write "not about opera at all but about opera librettos." For Robinson, one expressive musical phrase is worth a thousand words of opera text.

Robinson's special gift is his ability to connect music with meaning. (His first book about opera was called Opera and Ideas.) Writing about Fidelio's Prisoners' Chorus, he says that Beethoven's "italicized" treatment of the words "in freier Luft" (in free air) makes the phrase emerge "almost as a concept," linking the opera to the liberationist intellectual currents of its era. Calling Fidelio a "musical lecture on the idea of freedom," he notes that it begins as one kind of opera and ends as another, shifting from a household drama to a nearly abstract paean to liberty. The "world of bourgeois routine" presented in Fidelio's opening scene gets swept away in the transcendent philosophical rhetoric of the massed finale.

The chapter linking Fidelio to the French Revolution is Robinson's most extended essay on opera here, and it's a tour de force of musical and ...