Orientalism and the Operatic World by Nicholas Tarling (review)

Tarling was raised in England and completed a doctorate in Southeast Asian history at Cambridge. He spent most of his career as a professor of history and administrator at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and is now a fellow at the New Zealand Asia Institute. In addition to publications in his academic field, he has been engaged with opera and theatre, as a performer on stage, in radio broadcasts on opera, and in writing program notes and reviews for Opera Australia and Opera magazine.

Tarling opens his volume with a two-page “Argument”. Here, he notes the intensification of contacts between different cultures in the world, especially over the past five hundred years, and notes that these contacts have “...been diverse, peaceful, and the reverse of peaceful”. He then references two books of Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), and its successor volume, Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said, Tarling tells us, saw in the contacts between West and East a “homogenising and stereotyping and thus dehumanising view of the other”, as evidenced especially in English literature. But, Tarling notes, a study of opera, even those with the Orient as their subject matter, does “...not support the accusation that Europe or ‘the West’ took a stereotyping, homogenising, or dehumanising view of the East...” as part of the West’s desire to dominate. Opera humanises because of its reliance on “...a common...human attribute, the voice...”

The main part of this volume is made up of two large sections, entitled “Recitatives” and “Arias”. “Recitatives” contains three chapters, the first giving an overview of opera’s spread from Europe to the Americas and to Asia. The second (“Genre”) lays out the nature of the genre, focusing on the different roles of composer, librettist, performers, and critics, as well as historical changes in performance venues, and the interaction of opera with film and DVD. Tarling’s writing in this chapter is not always focused, often moving from one topic to another in a way that obscures the point he is trying to make, and introducing barely relevant facts. One example will suffice: “…Pierre Boulez proposed that opera houses should be blown up to make room for new musical-theatre experiences in experimental spaces. Verdi was ‘stupid, stupid, stupid’. György Ligeti, however, saw his Le grand macabre (1978) as ‘anti-anti-opera’, and audiences still wanted opera. The Ring itself regularly sold out across the world. In a post-modernist culture, indeed, audiences seemed to respond to the kind of grand narrative whose existence critics and creators sought to deny. The vast symphonic works of Bruckner and Mahler attained a popularity they had never before enjoyed…In that sense the repertoire expanded forward as well as backwards into the baroque, though few orchestras could risk playing new works”.

The third chapter (“Orientalisms”) traces the varied ways in which different European countries, and North America, came to encounter the cultures of Asia. Here again Tarling’s promised dialogue with Said never really materialises, other than his conclusion that opera never dehumanises the East, but rather emphasises “…the individual, the personality of its characters, and, indeed, of its performers”.

Tarling’s discussion of specific operas (“Arias”) is spread over seven chapters, largely divided by geography. After chapters entitled “Bible-Based Operas”, and “Crusaders, Arabs, and Turks”, chapters are devoted to Egypt, India and Ceylon, China, Japan, and Russia.

The organisation of material in “China” is typical. After a quick survey (three paragraphs) of Chinese history since the sixteenth century, Tarling discusses operas on Chinese topics from Gluck and Caldara’s settings of Metastasio’s libretto Le Cinesi (in 1754 and 1735, respectively) to works by contemporary Chinese composers such as Qu Xiaosong and Tan Dun. Along the way are discussions of Busoni’s and Puccini’s Turandot operas, Franco Leoni’s L’Oracolo (1905), set in San Francisco’s Chinese community, John Adams’ Nixon in China...