Untimely Reflections on Operatic Echoes: How Sound Travels in Monteverdi's LiOrfeo and Beethoven's Fidelio, with a Short Instrumental Interlude

An essay on operatic echoes should be permitted to find itself reflected at odd angles across the history of music. Echoes are messy; they don't synchronize or return to their place of origin; they travel unexpected distances to connect unrelated times. They are a wonderful excuse for what follows: a sprawling and speculative reflection on what the operatic echo might mean with various dialectical reversals echoing back. And, as the title suggests, these reverberations, deflected off the thoughts of Carolyn Abbate and Theodor Adorno, end up in misaligned and slightly misguided places—Beethoven, Monteverdi, and instrumental music (surely, a misdirected item in The Opera Quarterly). The resonances in these three areas raise different issues concerning the mechanism of the echo itself: how does the echo travel through time and space? At what speed? And over what distance? For the musical means by which the echo travels indicate its destination—its meaning.

Preliminary Echoes

The operatic echo made its debut early in the history of opera, doubling Orpheus's lament in the closing act of Striggio and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. It functions as a sonic mirror, reflecting the voice for Orpheus to "gaze" upon. So what does he "see" in this reflection? If Monteverdi's music is anything to go by, it appears that there is not much of significance to view. Compared to the unruly dissonances and warped intervals of Orpheus's lament, the echo seems somewhat pedestrian; the vocal fragments that return are cadential clichés (see Ex. 1). But perhaps that is precisely Monteverdi's point: after the vocal pyrotechnics with which Orpheus, the rhetorical subject, manipulates his way into the inner ear of hell, the final echo replays his voice with an objectivity that borders on blandness. The subject hears itself as object. As such, the echo is literally the self-reflective moment of the opera. Indeed, this moment of knowledge undermines the very premise of opera itself, for the bardic magic of monody, espoused by the Florentine Camerata,¹ which justified the use of "forbidden intervals . . . to move the affects of the soul,"² returns to the bearer unmoved. Instead of penetrating nature, the monodic voice hears its invisible influence reflected by a landscape that it cannot en-chant ; instead of marking out its territorial boundaries with rhetorical flourishes, the voice is dispossessed of its ground; it hears the solipsism of its own monodic pretenses. No wonder Orpheus complains that the echo fails to "return . . . all his laments." Indeed, at one point the echo replies "enough[ ! ]," as if its cadence were an attempt to put an end to the expressive excess of Orpheus's authorial power (Ex. 1). What returns to Orpheus, then, is an object that he cannot master. So despite the claims of Musica at the very opening of the opera, Orpheus's voice works its magic only to lose the objects it desires. All this talk in the prologue of music soothing hearts, inflaming minds, taming beasts, and subduing hell rebounds at the end of the opera as Orpheus's song returns unrequited.³

The echo's critical edge is sharpened by its very deliberate speed of execution; not only does the echo objectify the voice with a plainness at variance with the rhetorical content of what is sung, it delivers the message in slow motion. Unlike a real mirror, sonic reflections travel at the speed of sound and not of light. Music takes time. The echo, by measuring the distance between subject and object, simply stretches the point. Monteverdi's play on the difference between sonic duration and optic instant in L'Orfeo seems to question the assertions in Musica's opening speech: she...