Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (review)

The last twenty years or so have brought an embarrassment of riches to the study of opera. Attracted perhaps by opera's (in)famous extremes, its gravitation towards metaphysics and sensuality in equal measure, or its rich multimedia configurations, scholars have teased out an extraordinary array of perspectives. For those musicologists keen to explore music's place in the broader social and cultural fabric, its role in moulding subjectivity, and its relationship to other media, opera has proved a particularly rewarding subject. And the relationship has been reciprocal: opera has gripped and challenged these scholars, while their insights have made opera seem all the more meaningful, strange. . . or both.

Is it possible, though, that something is being taken for granted here? This is the question posed by Lawrence Kramer in Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss, a collection combining several of the author's previously published essays on opera with two newly written chapters and a framing prologue and epilogue. Kramer worries that the work carried out in recent years, 'sophisticated' as it is, doesn't quite come to grips with the historical dimension of opera's engagement with culture (p. 8). Yes, the study of operatic tropes about voice and its relationship to embodiment and transcendence has persuasively addressed critical questions of subjectivity, of gender and desire, among others (p. 1). 'But perhaps', Kramer adds, 'without sufficiently pondering them as tropes: that is, as the rhetoric of a genre whose historical mandate is precisely to uphold the links between voice, sexuality, and transcendence while at the same time forgetting the cultural and historical work performed by doing so' (pp. 8–9). The emphasis, in other words, has been on the configurations and themes that opera tends to highlight, while underlying historical and cultural contingencies are relatively overlooked. This dehistoricizing trend is not, Kramer stresses, for want of trying: much of this scholarship has set out to address a perceived neglect of history in narrowly formal accounts of opera. And Kramer is keen not to present himself as 'more historical than thou'. But there is a tendency, he suggests, for theoretical frameworks to become too preoccupied with their own discourse, too impressed with their own logic, so that the texture and details of opera's historical embeddedness give way to something more idealized (p. 26).

If this opens Kramer to the charge of substituting idealized discourses of his own, one of the strengths of this book is that it manages to construct compelling and rigorous arguments without wearing its theory on its sleeve. Part of this comes down to the breadth and flexibility of the intellectual framework that Kramer is able to summon. Lacan, &#x017Dižek, Foucault, and Derrida make appearances, just as they do throughout his body of work, but, as always, Kramer is not content to mobilize their ideas in a wholesale fashion, let alone use them to construct high-theory dogma. Rather, adaptation and nuanced (re)reading are the order of the day. For example, the idea of 'symbolic investiture' (introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and Eric Santner as reaching a crisis point in modernity) plays an important role in the book, but Kramer wonders whether Bourdieu's emphasis on the 'coercive' nature of our initiation into a socially prescribed mandate is appropriate to opera: 'Symbolic investiture, I would suggest, can come in moments of rapture as well as terror, enfranchisement as well as confinement, even if each of these terms always harbors traces (if not more) of its opposite' (p. 5). This is no trivial reorientation of Bourdieu's concept: while acknowledging the potential slippage between coercion and agency, Kramer critically expands the reach of 'symbolic investiture' to confront the potentially powerful social consequences of opera's reign of pleasure. In places the term will surface explicitly, but it will also quietly inform Kramer's case studies. A chapter on...