Opera: The Extravagant Art by Herbert Lindenberger (review)

REVIEWS Herbert Lindenberger. Opera: The Extravagant Art. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pp. 297. $25.00. Professor Lindenberger records at one point in this darting, provoca­ tive, and theoretically extravagant book an exquisitely ironic anecdote about being asked by “an eminent specialist on the theater of the absurd” why he would “write on anything so absurd as opera.” The question— asked, I hope and trust, with tongue in cheek—is perhaps a reasonable one. For in the last few centuries it has occurred to very few scholars of Lindenberger’s critical stature to devote serious and sustained attention to the subject of opera. So it is pleasant simply to applaud before raising the curtain upon this study, which I suspect may elicit some (shall I say) operatically passionate reactions. Like opera itself, this book is not easily characterized. This is mainly because, as Lindenberger warns, it “does not belong exclusively to the realm of either theory or practical criticism” (p. 18). He warns, with good reason, that readers unfamiliar with recent developments in literary criticism may feel “baffled, perhaps even irritated” by his methods. What we have here is a lively, discursive prolegomenon to the ways of applying modes of literary theory to the operatic aesthetic and repertory. The set-pieces of discourse here have a Purcellian compactness which is a far cry from the more tumidly Wagnerian theoretical excursions of, say, Theodor Adorno. Inevitably, therefore, Lindenberger seldom builds to a really stunning climax; sometimes he fails to convince, rarely makes his points exhaustively. Very broadly stated, the book’s subject is “the ways in which a genre in the high style has survived and adapted itself to changing aesthetic, institutional, and human pressures” (p. 22). The impetus is the author’s desire to rationalize opera in terms of its broadest social and cultural environment. One comes away from the book convinced that opera—like nature’s platypus or aardvark—can be accounted “absurd” only if we fail to understand the evolutionary influences that have served to give it its unique generic form and functions. Indeed, much of Lindenberger’s discussion rests upon genre theory, as his chapter headings make clear (for instance, Opera or Drama; Opera as a Mixed Genre; Opera in Novels; Opera in History, History in Opera). He works to particularly illuminating effect the notion of “layered narrative” in which a high-style mode and a low-style mode are deployed in tandem (pp. 151ff). The discussion of various kinds of conflict and modes of intrusion between higher and lower narrative (pp. 166-96) is a comparatist tour de force. Passages like this and others (see pp. 12744 , 270-84) cause one readily to assent to Lindenberger’s view that 87 “there is more to be said about opera than one can learn from musical analysis and music history alone” (p. 18). “Safe” books on opera are almost as common (and dull) as “safe” performances in the opera house, but this book is certainly not one of them. The author takes risks. Sometimes his generalizations find him secure and compelling in attack (“The commercially viable operatic repertory today has not grown within living memory”); sometimes there is a wobble in the view that leaves one puzzling (“[Opera is] at once a popular and a high-minded form”; “Complex characters are most likely to appear in comic opera if they appear at all”). And, as in so many de­ bates over a given singer’s art, author and reader may often simply have to agree to disagree— as when, for instance, Lindenberger says, “Verdi in his late style managed to cloak the more overt gestures we customarily label ‘operatic’ ” (p. 74). Or when he says that “The Rake’s Progress [is] the greatest opera composed in English since Purcell” (p. 216). Much of the material upon which this discourse is based—both literary and musicological—is well-known to specialists in their respective fields, but it is hard to imagine an open-minded reader failing to benefit from the often impressive ways Lindenberger documents the incursions that literature and music make along their common border, which is opera. In this respect I particularly enjoyed his discussion...