Operatic Afterlives (review)

Michal Grover-Friedlander's research interests in opera and musical theatre are chiefly related to the meanings and implications of voice and singing. The author's point of view is deeply influenced by her double activity as scholar and opera director. In her latest book, Operatic Afterlives, she expresses the basic assumption that in opera, singing is the most important way through which a character is determined and builds its own identity. This viewpoint at first seems to adhere to a similar assumption expressed in the most noteworthy opera studies, mainly those of Italian opera. The musicologist and music critic Fedele d'Amico, for example, asserts that in opera, the character exactly corresponds to the voice, or rather, that the character is its own voice ("The physical presence of the character on the stage, conditio sine qua non of Theatre in general, in opera is defined only by his voice"; see d'Amico's essay "Barilli o la caducità del miracolo," in Un ragazzino all'Augusteo. Scritti musicali, ed. Franco Serpa [Turin: Einaudi, 1991], 101). Grover-Friedlander's fundamental postulation is thus more or less the same; in addition, Operatic Afterlives highlights the implications of opera's founding myth and associates it with the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, that is, Orpheus's attempt to revive his dead wife Eurydice with the power of singing. This is connected with the idea that the operatic voice represents the aesthetic foundation of opera, as the author has already examined in her previous book on opera and cinema, Vocal Apparition: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), in which she speaks about a notion of song that engenders a state in which one is always listening in anticipation of a moment when one knows beautiful singing will take place. Since the state of anticipation brings with it a simultaneous consciousness of mortality, and the power of singing over the listener depends on this loss, Grover-Friedlander asserts that "death is immanent in the operatic voice" (Vocal Apparition, p. 4). Following from these preliminary remarks, operatic deaths repeat what the author calls "Orphic death": a mechanism, present in the Orpheus myth, that puts into relation the power of the vocal and that of the visual, since song has demonstrated the capacity to conquer death; that capacity, however, is ultimately overturned by a gesture that is not acoustic but visual. This specific instance of vocal-visual relationship is broadened into a more general idea: "that song is abbreviated or terminated by a visual intervention" (Vocal Apparition, p. 7). At the same time, the repetition of song, and the gesture of dying in opera, "signifies the failure of death to hold sway" (Vocal Apparition, p. 8).

If opera usually kills its protagonists, Grover-Friedlander argues that opera can also represent the ways in which the voice, singing, or song obtain their own forms of aliveness. Operatic Afterlives shows the ultimate power that opera grants to singing: the reversal of death. This is one of the most attractive and at the same time problematic aspects of the book. Grover-Friedlander's analysis diverges quite far from the usual points of view generally adopted in dramaturgical studies about opera, which are more often than not interested in understanding the formal mechanisms governing the opus, considered as sets of conventions shared between the author and his viewers/listeners; see for example Carl Dahlhaus's essay "What is a Musical Drama?" (Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 [ July 1989]: 95-111) or Harold S. Powers's essay " 'La solita forma' and the 'Uses of Convention' " (Acta Musicologica 59, no. 1 [January-April 1987]: 65-90). Grover-Friedlander examines cases in which opera tries to describe an existence, a sort of life beyond death, a revival of the dead, or a concurrent presence of life and death. These portrayals—in operas by Puccini, Michael Ching, and Lodovico Rocca, in an oratorio by Mordecai Seter, and in vocal performances by Maria Callas, primarily in the context...