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Time and Time Again: an Essay on Temporal Realities in Mozart's Operas JANE PERR Y-CAMP 1 ime, in myth, is both Creator and Destroyer, Grim Reaper with scythe and hourglass, and revealer of Truth. "Time has engendered everything that has been and will be," says the Bhagavad Gita; "Time, which in progressing, destroys the world," speak the Upanishads.' Music bears the essence of time. Music creates time: it takes its own time. Music consumes time: it takes our time. Music gives the truth of time: it reveals what man holds time to be at its given instant. Music tells time. Music tells man's time; thus music is timeless only to the degree that man is timeless. For composer, performer, and listener, to contemplate music's time, then, seems a daunting task; to participate in music's time seems an unavoidable experience—even if only to reject a music's time as not one's own or as a waste of one's time. It has been argued on many platforms that the time we associate with music can run parallel to but separate from the time of everyday life— better said, from the times of everyday life—for through music we gain an illusion of movement, of gestures, which on the one hand are metered in a fashion not unlike the measures dictated by a clock and which on the other hand are bounded only by self-imposed limits not unlike the rhythms suggested by puffs of wind, by floating clouds, or by shifts of mood and heart.2 The energy of musical movement results in part from an inevitable interaction between the kinds of temporal gesture, ranging 125 126 / PERRY-CAMP Example 1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, movement 1, measures 1-4.3 Example 2. William Matthews, "at cold mountain pond," for piano (1981), exerpt from unbarred section.4 from a four-square musical motive (e.g., Mozart's Sonata in C, K. 545 [see Example I]) to the notated phantasm of an improvised flourish (e.g., William Matthews, "at cold mountain pond" [see Example 2]). As in life, the interaction between measured time and experienced events can seem orderly or disorderly. We, of course, like to consider time as a dimension that moves steadily in but one direction: forward. At the same time, we like to enhance that notion of time by its infusion with remembered events which we pluck from recent or distant past experiences. In the process of retrieving memorized events, we seem able to suspend our reliably forward-moving time. To borrow from James Branch Cabell, we seem able to confront "the moment that did not count."5 Indeed, in a sense, we seem to give time back as we return to the past and lose track that we are steadily consuming "new" time while we relive "old" time. Simultaneously, we are able to reassess a past event when hearing it anew, thus reviewing and renewing its value. Time in Mozart's Operas / 127 The reliable unidirectional progression of everyday time, then, is neither simple nor superficial. It is subject to manipulation. Without text, without verbal narrative, music is similarly characterized and thence structured. With text, as is commonly agreed, music plies its powers in conjunction with the libretto and paces the plot's literary action and music's illusory action—and our reactions to them — according to the artistic judgment of composer and author. Through its manipulation, musical time, like the "virtual" time of a novel, when convincingly dispensed, removes us from "ordinary," ontological time.6 It pulls us into total absorption in its ebbs and flows and, as it molds our awareness of the drama that engrosses us, it controls our perceptions of time's forwardness, backwardness, orderliness, unruliness , suspension — and peculiarly within genres with text (which is to point most particularly to opera) it controls also our perception of incorporating into musical time that very ontological, real-world time from which musical time, we are convinced, has removed us. The larger forum seems congruent with none of the circumstances defined by Jonathan D. Kramer in his analyses of the musical time that stretches beyond...

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