"A combination of the sublime and the ridiculous"

The use of opera as part of the narrative in fiction developed markedly during the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century, with several contemporary writers still regarding opera as useful for their particular purposes. In literature, the performative, intellectual, and cultural role of opera is depicted by using a particular aspect of performance: usually part of an operatic scene but also in the way the spaces in which the performances take place are used, most particularly the opera box, an important site of the dominant male gaze. It is important to remember that music making in the nineteenth century was both visual and aural, the last period in which this was the case. Susan McClary notes that opera "was one of the principal media through which the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie developed and disseminated its new moral codes, values, and normative behaviors" (xviii).

Fiction increasingly used operatic scenes as a form of both visual and acoustic ekphrasis, often to suggest a sense of interiority. As the ambition and complexity of operatic music evolved out of operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, where the orchestra played a subordinate role to the virtuosity of the singers, into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, where much of the drama is embodied in the orchestra, a form of omniscient musical narration was developed. Analogous with fiction, this allowed opera to explore interiority of character, independent of the vocal line, through orchestral means. It is no accident that the greatest evolution of the novel, and opera, occurred almost simultaneously. [End Page E-7]

One of the difficulties when surveying a plurimedial field is that allusions, parallels, and comparisons between works from different genres can sometimes seem contrived and unconvincing and often require some neat footwork to make the comparisons "stick." Author Andrea Mariani has set himself an interesting yet challenging task in his book, which engages with the role that opera has played in the works of a wide range of American writers. He notes:

The migration of European opera across the Atlantic . . . provided American authors with an extra medium of expression, enhancing the possibility of conveying feelings and emotions that the naked words . . . could not communicate. It promoted the application of more and more sophisticated intersemiotic techniques, making it finally possible to overcome the traditional predominance of Wordsworth's despotic organ of sight—Emerson's imperialistic, totalizing "transparent eyeball."

(234)

He further describes the importance of the use of opera scenes in fiction:

Opera stages the interplay of characters who are at the same time human beings, dramatically suffering, and archetypes of psychological structures, exactly as the traditional figures of the commedia dell'arte. Opera is not based on improvisation but produces in the audience a similar sense of immediacy and almost automatic response to the sudden turns of events (something that regularly happens in Italian opera and, in particular, in Verdi).

(230)

Mariani starts his survey with Emerson and Poe, moving on to Thoreau and Melville in the second chapter, dealing mainly with poetry rather than opera, but there are interesting discussions of both these authors' interactions with opera. Much of the first section of the book is a not completely convincing attempt to draw out and elaborate on the references and inferences to opera in the writers the author discusses. However, with a central chapter on Whitman, the operatic relevance of his discussion emerges in full voice.

Whitman, perhaps more than any other poet writing in English, drew on his extensive knowledge of and love for opera, and particularly Italian opera. Mariani focuses on a handful of poems that reveal Whitman's use of music in innovative ways. Central to Whitman's employment of musical analogies in his verse is the voice, and the discussion of a range of singers and opera performances is illuminating. This chapter ends with a fascinating connection made between Whitman and architecture, particularly the Chicago Opera House designed by Louis H. Sullivan:

Both wanted to create an "egalitarian...