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  • Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse
  • Joseph Cermatori (bio)

Writing is not an independent order of signification: it is weakened speech, something not completely dead: a living-dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of breath.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination

If anyone ever boos you offstage, that is simply applause from ghosts.

Sharon Needles

1. “What remains of opera?”—Some questions just refuse to die. Unsurprisingly enough, this is often true of questions about dying, the dead, and what remains after death. Our repeated attempts at entertaining them ultimately take on the character of an exorcism ritual, as if we could release ourselves from their monstrous power merely by rehearsing them over and over again. Maybe this time, the uttered incantation, the magic bullet, the stake through the heart will put the matter to rest once and for all. Is opera dying? Is opera in New York still alive? One is tempted to declare, “Opera is dead,” but could there be by now a more familiar gesture, and could one make such a declaration without immediately having to follow it with “Long live opera”? The repeated claims of opera’s exhausted status are in themselves exhausting. The same is true of theatre, which has been dead or dying for as long as anyone cares to remember: Artaud, Strindberg, the Romantics, probably even longer. Somehow with opera, just as with theatre, it turns out that the monster’s head still hasn’t been cut off. Or else, like any monster worthy of the name, it keeps finding ways to rise from the grave.

For the purposes of these notes, let’s not be put off by the awkwardness of death metaphors (surely just as awkward, in their way, as birth metaphors). We might just as easily think about opera’s ruins, and indeed, the current critical fascination with remains is in many ways a subset and a continuation of an ongoing critical preoccupation with ruins and ruination. But instead, let’s first acknowledge the ubiquity of the death metaphor, and not just in discussions about opera. The anxious uncertainty over whether opera is still “alive” would seem to have something obvious to do with [End Page 4]


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Atys: Atys (Ed Lyon) mourns over the corpse of Sangaride (Emanuelle de Negri) while the jealous goddess Cybèle (Anna Reinhold) seals his doom. Photo: Stephanie Berger. Courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

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the “declinist panic” that Frank Rich sees as the hallmark of how many Americans today perceive the United States’ current political situation. “Is America dead?” asks his headline (New York Magazine, July 22, 2012). Elsewhere, he might have asked, “Is Europe dying?” or “Is the West’s decline irreversible?” These various examples are linked, in their way, to the paranoia over opera’s vitality. Under bio-political conditions, it is no wonder that these paranoid uncertainties all take the form of a terrible hypochondria. But to put a spin on psychotherapy’s classic joke about paranoia: Just because you’re a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you’re not actually dying.

2. Dead or Undead—I have a friend, a scholar of the English renaissance, who finds my interest in opera utterly bewildering. As he sees it, “certain artistic forms were doomed to die when the socio-economic class that sustained them disappeared.” Honestly, I am never really sure what he means by this quip. I suppose he has in mind something like the ancièn régime. (Let us leave aside the obvious fact that our twenty-first-century world continues to be governed by powerful plutocrats who, in some cases, are also opera patrons.) But one might also argue, as Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek recently have, that “from its very beginning, opera was dead, a stillborn child of musical art. [… F]rom its very beginnings, it was perceived as something outdated, as a retroactive solution to an inherent crisis in music.”1 Rather than dying while still unborn, however, as the stillbirth metaphor suggests, we could counterpose another conceit: that opera actually begins its life already dead, or as it were, already undead. Opera begins its life as...

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