Monteverdi's Voices: The Construction of Subjectivity

Est "ego" qui dit "ego"

—Emile Benveniste¹

We often say that music speaks. Our conception of voice seems to be inseparable from the assumption that someone is addressing something to someone.

"Hearing voices," on the other hand, in itself is disquieting. After all, to whom are they speaking—or is there anyone speaking? There is one place, however, where we can feel free to indulge in the idea that everything that is spoken is spoken to us: the opera house, where we may surrender ourselves to the music as it enters the scene and addresses the audience.

Once upon a time—the time of favole in musica (fables in music)—this was all new and marvelous, as, for example, when Alessandro Striggio's and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was first performed for members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti on February 24, 1607, in Mantua's Palazzo Ducale. Commenting on the novelty of the event, Carlo Magno at the Mantuan court, later ambassador for the Gonzagas in Rome, France, and Spain, wrote: "Tomorrow evening the Most Serene Lord the Prince is to sponsor a [play]. . . . It should be most unusual, as all the interlocutors are to sing their parts."² Thus L'Orfeo presented the beginning of a new style and a new genre, stile recitativo in genere rappresentativo—with Orpheus himself as its spokesman.

The question then is: spokesman for what? Or for whom? In other words, and in the work's own words: Chi parla? "The composer," answers Edward T. Cone. When we listen to music, we listen to the composer's voice, according to Cone's renowned study.³

Even if we do not accept Cone's uncomplicated assumption of a direct communication between virtual composer and a more or less real audience, his argument still reminds us of opera's distinctive character: someone is singing to us. Thus Cone approaches opera from the point of view of the audience, before any theoretical construction gets in the way. We might say that he takes as his point of departure the fact that we are entangled in an intentional relationship between the composer and his work (in a phenomenological sense), from the very moment we direct our attention to what is going on, on stage.⁴

As stile recitativo [recitative style], early opera is rhetorical, a musical style that speaks through the conjunction of music and words in order to heighten the rhetorical profile of the text. But as stile recitativo by means of stile rappresentativo, early opera is mimetic as well; it portrays situations and tells a story through its plot.

As rhetoric, however, opera is also performative. The fact that someone stands on a stage singing to us cannot be too quickly reduced to mere vehicle for the delivery of the plot. Thus, the mimetic aspects hardly account for the performative element that keeps the singing-speaking voice in focus, and which again is the basic condition of rhetoric: the speaker who addresses himself to his audience—the basic premise of intentionality, if anything can be said to be such.

Making the representation of a hero like Orpheus plausible presupposes the creation of a heroic subjectivity through the singer's performance, there and then, for our ears and eyes. This condition is crucial to the understanding of the enormous fascination that the new operas evoked. They were the news of the day. What would be left of an opera if it were cut off from its various singers, whether in the seventeenth century or now? It is all too easy to forget this perspective (what Carolyn Abbate names "drastic"⁵) in today's effort to legitimize opera studies by representing opera as mere structure.

An opera's protagonists are of course characters, telling their own stories in their own time. But they are also individuals singing for us here and now, in our time. These are temporalities of different orders. "To have a present," as the French linguist Emile Benveniste reminds us, "someone must speak."⁶ That is, a person, here and now. Otherwise there would be no musical drama...