Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century by Clive McClelland (review)

The topic of the supernatural in seventeenth-century music is a popular one, and it comes as no surprise, considering the importance of "merveilleux" or the "marvelous" to the genre of opera in particular during that time. The supernatural in eighteenth-century opera, however, is a subject that has yet to receive the scholarly attention it merits. Before the appearance of this work by Clive McClelland, there existed only two books that focused on this topic (p. 8): Reinhold Hammer stein's Die Stimme aus der anderen Welt: über die Darstellung des Numinosen in der Oper von Monteverdi bis Mozart (Tutzing: Schneider, 1998), and David Buch's Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). McClelland's Ombra can be added to the growing list of studies seeking to identify the various features of a particular musical style and to examine the interaction between this style and what or how it communicated to contemporary audiences.

In the introduction, McClelland defines ombra as a musical topic having "dark and brooding tonality, angular lines, prominent dotted rhythms and syncopations, unexpected dissonances and chromaticism, and awe-inspiring timbres provided by unusual orchestration, especially in the use of trombones" (p. vii). The majority of the book deals with works that employ the use of the ombra style in operas before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although the book does include discussion of several of his works. The last three chapters are less detailed but give an overview of the ombra style in sacred music, instrumental music, and music after Mozart. McClelland mentions in "Chapter One: Ombra Music in Context," that the earliest version of the term is associated with Mozart's contemporary, the widely respected composer Niccolò Jommelli (p. 1). He does not hypothesize on why this may be, but it makes sense when considering the progressive operas that Jommelli composed music for in the middle of the eighteenth century, particularly at Stuttgart. These French-inspired productions such as Ifigenia in Aulide (1751), Enea nel Lazio (1755), Pelope (1755), and Fetonte (1768), included vast amounts of spectacle, which was notably different from traditional settings of Metastasian librettos common at the time. Furthermore, the librettist he collaborated with, Mattia Verazi, was well-known for depicting horrific events on the stage and for bringing the audience to awe, terror, or tears.

While various scholars have written studies on the subject of musical "topics" from the eighteenth century (Leonard Ratner, Wye J. Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Birgitte Moyer, George J. Buelow, and Elaine Sisman), few have treated the topic of ombra with analysis or examination in detail. McClelland divides supernatural events and characters before Mozart's operas into five categories:

1. 1. Celestial: benevolent deities, heaven, paradise, and the Elysian Fields

2. 2. Ceremonial: processions, rituals, sacrifices, prophecies, oracles, and statues

3. 3. Ominous: incantations, sorcery, ghosts, tombs, dungeons, caves, night, and death

4. 4. Infernal: malevolent deities, hell, demons, and furies

5. 5. Devastating: sudden scenic transformations, monster, storms, and earthquakes (p. vii-viii)

He further observes that scenes of the last category, "devastating," involve characteristics that have "come to be associated with Sturm und Drang, namely, fast tempo, minor keys, disjunct motion, rapid scale passages, dissonances, chromaticism, irregular rhythms, loud dynamics, and full orchestral textures often involving brass and timpani" (p. viii). Indeed, he mentions that the main difference between the topic of ombra and that of Sturm und Drang is the tempo: ombra is always slow and Sturm und Drang must be fast. Both are anachronistic terms that were first used in the twentieth century in an attempt to label the topics (p. viii). Although they were not specifically used in the eighteenth century, the styles did exist and, as he argues, were widely understood by composers and audiences. One salient critique is that there are often so many overlapping areas between topics, particularly ombra and Sturm und Drang, that an attempt to keep them separate is difficult if...