The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera (review)

Millennium fever isn't quite over yet, it seems. Hard on the heels of the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music and a myriad other such publications, here comes the 'definitive' attempt to sum up the last century's operatic output. This is not an unproblematic undertaking inasmuch as the ontological status of the ostensible object is far from certain: can we really speak of twentieth-century opera and write its history in the same way as we can in the case of eighteenth-century furniture or the nineteenth-century novel? This is not to ask whether 'opera is dead' (although the fact alone that opera houses continue to commission and perform new operas is not enough to persuade one otherwise, given that this often amounts to little more than desperate attempts to dress up the corpse), but to acknowledge that throughout most of the twentieth century the genre was in crisis. The creation of most significant twentieth-century operas involved a hard questioning of the very nature of opera; it seems almost as if their artistic worth can be measured by the degree of reconceptualization to which their creators subjected the genre: none of opera's forms and conventions could be taken for granted. In what looks like intellectual complacency, it is this sort of interrogation that the Cambridge Companion seems unwilling to engage in. Although many of the individual authors seem to be aware of the problem, the conception of the volume appears to be based on the pretence that twentieth-century opera is a known object which can be described in factual terms and whose relevance and legitimacy have never been questioned.

In this context, it is indicative that the fundamental critiques of opera formulated by, for instance, Brecht and-to a lesser extent- Adorno go unmentioned. Not that we have to agree with them, but they put their finger on a fundamental issue that it well behoves us to consider: opera's problematic relation to modernism and the crisis of representation. In the post-Freudian world of Joyce, Beckett, and cubism, a soprano or tenor singing their hearts out while pledging undying love to the accompaniment of a full orchestra were simply as anachronistic as BBC radio drama is today. As Gary Tomlinson has demonstrated in his Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), the nature of operatic voice is contingent on constructions of subjectivity, and emotional expression in lyrical song is grounded in an idea of unified and integral subjectivity that is fundamentally at odds with the alienation of modernity. Moreover, Carolyn Abbate in her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991) has drawn attention to the latent metaphysics of operatic voice and-more overtly-the division between stage and orchestra pit, which likewise seems untenable in a post-metaphysical age. The concepts of realism, illusionism, and representation implicit in the division between stage and orchestra pit, which is foundational for opera, are ill equipped to deal with the dual challenge of the kind of modernism prevalent in the visual arts and literature on the one hand and the apotheosis of realism in the new genre of cinema on the other. It is for these reasons that the idea that, with some timid and partial adjustments of musical language, we can just continue with opera as we have always done (a decent play set to music) seems so naive. These aesthetic problems have been compounded by social ones, such as the declining influence of the old elites, who have traditionally patronized opera, in the wake of democratization and the competition from popular culture. To be sure, composers and librettists have found ways of addressing these problems, which is precisely what could make a book such as this one exciting-but the issue would have to be acknowledged in the first place, and the book as a whole seems almost wilfully to ignore it.

It is...