Ezra Pound and Charles Bernstein: Opera, Poetics, and the Fate of Humanism

Opera is a peculiar genre.¹ While artistic practices are always enmeshed in the cultural, philosophical, and political tensions of their moment, opera is unique as a veritable petri dish of Renaissance musical humanism. There is perhaps no other instance in which theory so clearly precedes artistic practice, with opera emerging out of the debates over musical composition and text-setting that preoccupied the early humanists.² Notions of unity are central to opera from its very earliest stages—unity of words and music, unity of the past and the present, unity of different modes of knowledge, unity of the expressive subject—ideals that reach their apex in the nineteenth century with Richard Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Early opera is also shaped by the epochal shift under way during its founding: a shift from feudal order to a nascent bourgeoisie, the birth of modern science, and the establishment of modern subjectivity.³ In many ways, opera bridges this gap, recalling the institutions and modes of the past and projecting the possibilities of the future in a combination of aesthetic spectacle and Orphic mystery. As opera participates in the humanistic project of reclaiming the best of the past in order to establish a better future, the practical ideal of unifying words and music becomes an allegory for unity writ large. And, just as political idealism belies the inequities and outright prejudices of practice, so too does the proposed unity of words and music prove elusive.

Opera is often understood as the product of a great compromise between musical and textual demands, a way of thinking about the genre that lays bare the value judgments of aesthetic purists.⁴ As Slavoj Žižek wryly summarizes, from this perspective, opera is “a stillborn child of musical art,” one that “always has to rely in a parasitic way on other arts (on pure music, on theater)” (viii). While Žižek typically embraces this always-already compromised nature of the genre, others have been much less generous. Even Brian Ferneyhough, the composer of one of the very works that interest us here, Shadowtime, has previously pronounced opera “a mostly closed book” (Collected Writings 248). Coming to opera from the literary angle instead of music hardly elevates the genre; such a perspective only accentuates the other, no less happy side of this art-as-compromise, the treatment of the text in operatic text-setting. As I will discuss in more detail below, it is utterly conventional in operatic practice to transform the source text of the libretto so much as to render its semantic content unavailable in performance. While it may be true, as the music purists have it, that opera lets itself be shaped by the demands of narrative (plot and character development, for instance), the resulting artwork is hardly a model of elocutionary clarity. And, if we need to follow the details of a story’s plot, the place to look is in the program, not the stage. Nor is this loss of narrative clarity the limit of text-setting’s effects on the libretto; the very poetics, from the concept of the work as a whole to the microcosmic level of sound-play, is governed by concerns that are much more properly understood as either musical or dramatic. That is to say, writ large or writ small, the poeisis of opera does not simply set a libretto, but, much more significantly, makes something new out of it.

In this essay, I am interested in this troubled status of the text in two iconoclastic contributions to opera, Ezra Pound’s Le testament and Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime, both of which take head-on the foundational issue of text-setting that makes the genre seem such a risky choice for a poet and such a besmirched one for a composer. In ABC of Reading, Pound described his motivation for setting the work of the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, admitting, “technically speaking, translation of Villon is extremely difficult because he rhymes on the exact word,” such that “I personally have been reduced to setting...