Interculturalite, intertextualite: les livrets d'opera (fin XIXe-debut XXe siecle) (review)

From conference to published proceedings in less than a year, timeliness uncharacteristic of our field, Walter Zidaric has edited a collection of papers first presented at an international conference on the opera libretto in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries that he convened at the Université de Nantes in May 2002. Although the goal of making the research of the participants available quickly deserves credit, I suspect that the overall quality of the project suffered because of it.

Take the articulation of the scope and aims of the book. Zidaric provides a short two-page essay at the beginning, briefly introducing each paper (as such prefaces often do) and remarking that libretto studies are merely in their infancy, especially research that takes into account the "perspective of comparative literature" (p. 7). Moreover, he notes that "the question of intertextuality and interculturality (interculturalité) are especially relevant to the art of the libretto (la librettistique) in this period because of a host of new subject matter (thématiques nouvelles) spawned by rapid political, social, and technological change" (p. 7, all trans. mine). The meaning of "interculturality" seems clear enough: the essays span an admirably broad repertorial range engaging Spanish, Czech, Russian, German, French, and Italian opera. Several of the contributions do indeed draw parallels among works stemming from these different traditions. But intertextuality is a concept with a broad range of use in the humanities. In a banal, and not quite accurate, sense the term has been applied to the study of literary sources for the work, a way of explaining its relatively closed system of meaning. This seems how most of the contributors to the volume understood their job as explorers into the intertext. In the sense famously developed by contemporary literary theorists, however, intertextuality challenges traditional hermeneutics by proposing an open text which has limitless resonance with myriad other "texts"—cultural, social, political, economic —in effect, limitless chains of meaning. Definition of the perspective of the reader (listener) towards the textually unbounded work, recognition that its signs do not exist on a single undifferentiated plane but are actually profiled in some way (in the act of reading and/or creation), provides a further set of theoretical variables. According to such frameworks, it is unclear why the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries would be more propitious for studies of intertextuality than other periods. Unfortunately, Zidaric is silent on the theoretical premises of the project—and its subtitle.

But more important: what are "libretto studies"? The libretto is, after all, so organically connected to other aspects of the operatic work in this period that it would seem difficult to pry it away as an object for discrete study, a separate text. Again, the preface does not address an essential raison d'être of the volume. My own view is that the case for libretto studies as a subdiscipline in this era may be made most persuasively using a relatively narrow focus. This would prominently include considerations of the literary (or nonliterary) qualities: syntax and diction, recurrent imagery, and rhetorical devices. It certainly might include identification of literary allusion, analysis of recurrent conventions for structuring plot, or typology of character. But even with the last two named interpretive strategies, it is difficult to resist reference to the music. The broader the focus, the more difficult it is to avoid the impression that anything called "libretto studies" is little more than opera criticism toutcourt that gives the music and other aspects of production relatively short shrift, a not uncommon phenomenon in studies that bill themselves explicitly as opera research. Of the twenty-five essays—mainly by French scholars but also with representation from Ukraine, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and the United States—most tend towards the broader scope. The result is a miscellany about opera in...