Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film by Richard Leppert (review)

Richard Leppert's book is a tour de force that marries the cultural history of opera and film with the technological history of modern media and sound technology in order to tackle fundamental questions about art in the age of modernity and our relationship to it. The overarching themes that Leppert discusses include the dichotomies of nature/culture and subject/object, the role of art in negotiating these dichotomies, the phenomenological shifts involved when looking at or listening to music, and the dialectic between the natural world and modernity as defined by technology.

Leppert structures the book as a series of semi-independent yet related case studies. He begins with a reference to Virginia Woolf's assertion that '[o]n or about December 1910, human character changed' (p. 1), firmly situating his study in the context of Western modernism and modernity as delineated by art (predominantly opera, but also film) and technology (predominantly sound recording). He sets out to answer how technology changed art at the turn of the last century and how art, in turn, has been reflecting on these changes ever since.

In the introduction, Leppert also presents one of the book's leitmotifs: the dialectic between nature and culture as a product of modern civilization. He traces this dichotomy back to Rousseau and returns to it throughout the book, showing how David Belasco's 1906 play The Girl of the Golden West and Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (ch. 1), Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo (ch. 2), and Terrence Malick's 1978 film Days of Heaven (ch. 5) all reflect on nature as an ideal and pre-civilized other that is, however, always already lost. But there is hope, because music, according to Wagner, Schopenhauer, Adorno, and Leppert, carries within itself a reminder of nature, which, though lost, can become something to believe in. In the wake of culture and modernity, music still has the utopian potential to reconcile us with nature (p. 7).

The middle part of the book, comprising the first 'excursus' and chapters 3 and 4, is centred around the impact that sound recording has had on opera and our experience of it, particularly concerning subjectivity (the book's next leitmotif after modernity and nature). In chapter 3 Leppert traces, in a historically detailed and engaging story, how the invention of the phonograph shifted people's perception from seeing opera in the public domain of the opera house to listening to opera in the private sphere of the home. This technological and phenomenological change also entailed a social shift, in that opera recordings 'served as the linchpin of phonographic promotions articulating democratic principles of an imagined universal accessibility to the best of musical sound' (p. 95). Of course, with prices ranging from $120 to $5,500 for high-end phonograph cabinets made to order (equivalent to almost $75,000 in 2014 (p. 119)), Robert Haven Schauffler's assertion (made in 1921) that the phonograph 'has made music democratic' (p. 135) must be taken with more than pinch of salt. The class dynamics and the discourse of power and wealth are replicated in the advertising campaigns run by companies such as Edison's National Phonograph Company and the Victor Talking Machine Company, and the illustrations included usefully support Leppert's arguments.

Chapter 4 zooms in from the broadly social to the personal. Leppert takes a very close look at Puccini's La Bohème and Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. He discusses the grace notes in La Bohème in the context of Freud's theories of subjectivity and unfulfilled desires, and he reads the high C in Bluebeard's Castle as the turning point upon which the teleology of Western tonality fails in the face of modernity's uncertainties. 'It's fair to say', Leppert writes, 'that by 1911 [the year Bluebeard's...