Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (review)

David J. Levin's wonderfully engaging Unsettling Opera endeavors to bring opera and performance studies together and bestow serious academic credentials on the practice (if not quite the discipline) of operatic dramaturgy. Levin's aim is to "map the intersection" between "contemporary stage production" and "contemporary developments in cultural and textual analysis" (25), a project that involves a reprioritization of concerns within opera studies so that actual performances of operas—and not just the "works" themselves—become objects of critical reflection. In this Zukunftsdramaturgie, the dramaturge and/or stage director (the two functions are only occasionally differentiated) emerges as an auteur whose recourse to critical and cultural theory ensures interpretive rigor and sophistication in the staged production of opera.

Although Levin devotes the preface and introduction to a theoretical exploration of the terms in which so-called "deconstructive stagings" might be understood (7), what rises to the fore in the preliminary material is an unresolved, and indeed only partially articulated tension between a fairly visceral distrust of traditional (literal and realist) stagings and the perceived need to nevertheless "ground" praxis in solid operatic criticism. While Levin is inclined to embrace non-traditional productions, he admits, with some ambivalence, that experimental stagings are often self-indulgent and in some cases even "erratic" (xiii). For Levin, the work concept functions as a regulative ideal in the interpretive process. However "polylogical" (12), the work has a formal structure that exists prior to interpretation and that can thus be held up to an interpretation (or performance) as a rule or measure: as he puts it near the beginning (xvii) and again at the very end (207), not "anything goes." In this sense, though in this sense only, Unsettling Opera is oddly, and ironically, anti-interpretive. Hence Levin's inclination to regard departures from written stage directions in terms of "license" and his preoccupation with evaluation: "we need to be able to judge productions," but "more important than the need for judgment is the need for solid ground upon which to form that judgment" (xvii).

While the imperative to judge productions seems less than self-evident to me, I also recognize that Levin steers well clear of a naïve textualism in which meanings are fixed and determinate. Crucial to the book's argument is the conviction that, in opera, a constitutive "excess of expressive means" (xi) gives rise to "antithetical expressive forces" (206), and it is along this trajectory that Levin approaches the romantic dictum that a work of art exceeds all of its possible interpretations. Instead of completing it, however, a genuinely critical interpretation, for Levin, brings out these antithetical tendencies, thus "unsettling" opera. A successful staging "does not simply alert us to but indeed clarifies an opera's specific incongruities" (xii), "illuminating previously invisible points in the text and thus asserting some distance from prevailing and predictable accounts" (45). Yet his claim that, in evaluating a production, we moreover "have to decide [ . . . ] whether it displays intelligence, coherence, and imagination" begs all sorts of questions, suggesting that an understanding of these qualities precedes our interpretive activities, when one of the functions of interpretation is precisely to decide what "intelligence," "coherence," and "imagination" might mean.

Levin attempts to locate solid ground for evaluating stagings in both operatic texts (words and music) and in a method for determining what those texts mean: for Levin, close reading attempts "to elucidate the logic and condition of textuality in the work," thus enabling "its particular terms to emerge all the more clearly" (115). As such, it operates at a deeper level than performance, "prior to mise-en-scène" (138), and gives rise, in Unsettling Opera, to a lot of 'libretto talk,' a lot of discussion, on a fairly basic level, of how the drama goes and what it all means. Although the close readings in Unsettling Opera pull up short of serious considerations of the music, its discussions of operatic narrative altogether transcend the genre. In the...