Operatic Afterlives (review)

Operatic Afterlives is an ambitious foray into an innovative area of musicology. In many ways it serves as a sequel to Grover-Friedlander’s first book, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (Princeton, 2005), which was also concerned with operatic death, the voice’s anticipation of death, vocal ephemerality, and the impact of opera’s interaction with media on vocal death. The new study is devoted to the concept of vocal afterlife. Unlike the filmic focus of its predecessor, Operatic Afterlives ranges over a broad swath of repertory—from Puccini opera to Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, from cartoon to biopic film. Yet the diversity is shaped into a unified whole that makes structural sense and provides a stimulating read.

The main thread entails the idea that in certain works that involve operatic death, the voice separates itself from the character or plot to such a degree that it functions as an independent entity; it takes on an afterlife. This is shown in case studies that become more radical (the author’s term) as the book progresses. By the last two chapters the claims push the boundary of representation (and everyday logic) in their suggestion that a continuous song can issue from a non-existent song or a dead figure. We have entered the mystical realm of Kabbalah and the magical kingdom of Disney animation, places where such transformations can occur. These mark the end of the book’s journey from conventional constructions of the afterlife to challenging forms that demand a leap of the imagination. Grover-Friedlander’s interest in the intersection of voice, death, and ephemerality shows the strong influence of Carolyn Abbate, whose work she acknowledges alongside that of Stanley Cavell and Gary Tomlinson. Abbatean traces also colour the book’s writing style, which is at once allusive, lyrical, and personal.

The layout is appealing. After the Introduction, a core of four chapters is framed by a Prologue and Epilogue. The middle two are followed by brief Interludes that elaborate on the preceding material and become mini-epilogues. The first half of the book revolves around Gianni Schicchi in various roles and incarnations: in a biopic, as the opera itself, and in a sequel to Puccini’s work. I was captivated by the ingenious layering of perspectives applied to this piece. The book’s second half, more diffuse, operates in the rarefied realm of mysticism and magic. Although full of important insights, this part of the volume was less consistently successful.

The Introduction provides an excellent overview of Grover-Friendlander’s approach and her theoretical forebears—much more convincing, I might add, than in the earlier book. The Prologue, ‘Traces: Giacomo Puccini, Le villi (1884)’, presents a brief case study that concretizes several ideas and hints at what will follow. It also introduces a Puccini theme that will blossom in the Schicchi material.

Chapter 1 explores the film Callas Forever (2002). Franco Zeffirelli’s hommage to an adored singer is a fictionalized account of the final months of Callas’s life. Larry (Jeremy Irons), a friend and media agent, wants to revive the diva’s career and moribund voice. One project involves a new film of Carmen in which Callas (Fanny Ardant) will lip-synch to a recording from her prime. Ultimately Callas rejects the idea: ‘The voice, she implies, should remain “whole”, “in its time”’ (p. 51). Further resonance comes from the fact that Zeffirelli tried but failed to do a film with Callas, and that the fictional Carmen film resembles a landmark of opera-film, Francesco Rosi’s Bizet’s Carmen. As Grover-Friedlander observes, ‘In creating a Callas troubled by this Carmen, Zeffirelli casts suspicion on the very technique on which his film operas are based’ (p. 51). Moreover, the vocal dynamics of Callas Forever affirm a ‘Voice-Callas’ as a distinct entity and demonstrate the primacy of sound over image. A second attempt at revival, at Callas’s behest, has the singer using her present ‘lost’ voice. This is rendered by Ardant...