Echoed Above

I. Silent Singing

In the film I Married an Angel (1942), Count Palaffi (Nelson Eddy) dreams he marries a perfect wife: an angel named Brigitta (Jeanette MacDonald). One of her angelic powers is her ability to sing operatically. Typical of cinema's evocation of the operatic voice, the angel sings the cadenza from Lucia di Lammermoor 's Mad Scene. The famous flute sequence, echoing the vocal acrobatics, is played by a harp, providing angelic overtones. Brigitta sings the virtuoso, textless stretch of operatic singing without interference from plot, drama, character, or scenery. When the conductor praises her operatic virtuosity, "You sing like an angel," Brigitta, to our amusement, replies: "but I am an angel!" In the cinematic imagination, when an angel descends to earth, celestial singing is transformed into an image of operatic excess.

In a rather different theoretical context, the image of perfect operatic singing becomes associated with the ascent of the human voice toward the angelic. The fulfillment of this journey is an impossibility: the operatic voice's striving toward the angelic is that which ultimately drives it to its disintegration.¹ In his discussion of a medieval treatise, The Celestial Hierarchy,² Michel Poizat writes:

In this treatise . . . [Pseudo-Dionysius] spells out both the role of the angel as messenger and the silence that accompanies it. At the summit of the celestial hierarchy, he explains, the seraphim dance around God while endlessly singing hymns in his praise. But these hymns are so marvelous, so utterly beyond human language, that they are imperceptible even in the ranks of the celestial hierarchy directly below. . . . It is the seraphim's task to transmit these divine and silent hymns down through the celestial ranks, one sphere at a time, until the musicians of the terrestrial church, discerning the faint echo of the heavenly songs, convey them, in the form of a now audible music, to human ears. It is in this sense . . . that one can speak of "the angel's silent song."³

Poizat, echoing the author of The Celestial Hierarchy, formulates the angelic as a silent core within human song to which that song strives. The angelic stands for what is beyond song in song, what is sought for in song when reaching its utmost limit. Its inhuman, transsexual, unheard-of quality is epitomized in the invention of the voice of the castrato and later is taken up by the soprano and tenor. The futile repeated attempt to reach the angelic can only lead to a breakdown of the voice. The evocation of that moment in opera will be supported by a plot leading to death, thus mirroring the vicissitudes of the voice in the narrative trajectory. Death in opera stands for the apotheosis of voice. In Poizat's words: "In opera, the voice does not express the text—that is what theater is for; the text expresses the voice."⁴ Opera becomes a quest for a voice detached from language or signification, a voice that ultimately turns into a vocal object: soaring higher and higher, it verges on the cry. The cry, in turn, is the outcome of the voice's impossible quest to turn itself into a vocal object, detached from signification and body. Angelic singing for Poizat rests on the notion that "an angel is a living being that is rational, immaterial, hymnological, immortal." Its role, "unceasing singing of hymns/chanting and praising of God,"⁵ occupies in Poizat's matrix a place of silence: the limit of human singing. Could we, perhaps, elaborate an alternative figure for angelic singing? Might it be that angelic singing echoes human song? And might the death of singing be essential to angelic singing itself? In other words, what if angelic singing demanded its own termination, regardless of the human striving to simulate it? Would such termination of song not be conceived as the result of an impossible striving toward the transcendent that is its dissolution, since angels themselves are the transcendent? Far from signaling finitude, might not such termination—singing...