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  • Sarrasine's Failure, Campaspe's Lament: Solo Song and the Ends of Material Reproduction
  • Michael Markham (bio)

Film, while it is perhaps the most obviously mechanical, is only the latest in a long line of materializing formats that have attempted to bridge the gap between the performerly moment of solo singing and the spaces and time beyond ephemeral, embodied performance. It is also only the latest in an equally long line of potent failures. Regarding the intersection between opera and film, much of what has interested scholars recently is precisely the inevitable, meaningful gaps that form between the living "present" performance and its mechanized representation, or between the grain of the performer and the grainy imprint of his/her presence or voice onto fixed physical media. The study of "opera in film" has rapidly given way to the study of film ghosting, echoing, or being infected with opera.1 Opera in film (rather than simply operas on film) has become a subject less about representation or replication than about a sort of partial or distorted atomic migration of operatic viscera into a new vessel, a process that falters somewhere between facsimile and parody. The result is a recognizable but not always lovable mutation, not unlike the failed DNA migration imagined in the science-fiction film The Fly, with admittedly less grotesque if not always less disastrous results. In fact, even when just glancing at the titles of recent studies, it becomes clear that the allure or attraction of opera toward film has come to be seen as no less compulsive than the replication/death wish at the heart of that film.2 More to the point, what comes out of the process only resembles, never truly replicates, what went in—a result that we seem ready to regard as something more interesting than simple failure.3

However, the meaningful failure in the moment of transference from stage to frame (which is also that from performance to artifact) is not a problem exclusive to film. The sense of inevitable fading in the process of material reproduction weighs heavily in the discourse on popular art forms in the twentieth century, at times taking on an ethical weight, as in Certeau's statement, "Today . . . [the voice] is 'recorded' in every imaginable way, normalized, audible everywhere, but only when it has been 'cut' (as one 'cuts a record'), and thus mediated by radio, television, or the phonograph record, and 'cleaned up' by the techniques of [End Page 4] diffusion."4 While musicology seems poised to move once and for all beyond the idea that this "cutting" or "cleaning up" can only and simply be read as a loss or corruption, the anxiety over this failure of representation still motivates our search for meaning. It is often the momentary recognition of such mediation that initiates and guides our critical thought about music in film.5 Such ambivalence when encountering a mechanical reproduction of soloistic singing, however, is not ours alone. Our search for meaning in failure is rooted in an anxiety over the ideological claims of mimesis that emerged long before film. It was of central importance to the cultural understanding of musical soloism, and particularly solo singing, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The underlying anxiety when approaching the singer in the wild, and the desire to capture something of his/her essence in some descriptive, notational, or mechanized form for later use, analysis, or dissemination can be seen on display wherever performers are cleaned up: captured, cut, transcribed, described, or sculpted.

Moreover the process of capturing, cutting, and disseminating has already moved beyond film. We have rather suddenly found ourselves at a point where the majority of the opera on film being experienced is not in the form of fully filmed productions but short streaming video clips, constructed and shared online among an opera audience ranging from traditional collector/connoisseurs to casual fans. In what may be one of the most important shifts in the mechanization of performance, brief glimpses have become a central part of the critical experience of opera: found, uploaded, rumored, and finally exchanged via web sites like YouTube. It is there that the now venerable operatic culture of bootleg...

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