Opera: The Art of Dying (review)

In a short survey of cinematic violence, David Thomson remarks that while there are multiple, horrifying deaths in many films—The Godfather, for example, serves up seventeen in 171 minutes—they are seldom regarded as 'macabre', but can be 'beautiful', 'balletic', 'graceful'. In a career as a film critic spanning some thirty years, Thomson estimates he has witnessed around 100,000 cinematic deaths—some beautiful, but many demonstrating a slack pointlessness, and this is because 'the limit to death in most . . . films is that it shows what poor attention they pay to life'. (David Thomson, 'Death and its Details', in Stephen Prince (ed.), Screening Violence (London, 2000), 86–98 at 98).

However, Thomson proposes that death in cinema can, occasionally, function as preparation and consolation for our own experience of death. Before going to see a film such as The Godfather we already know that 'Deathliness is in the mise-en-scène' yet perhaps 'with death so climatic or constitutional, ghastliness becomes a subject . . . our watching from the dark, intensely "with" the images yet powerless to intervene in their progress, is a model for stories in which those left alive may keep some kind of community with lost ones' (op. cit., 92 and 94).

The implication of Thomson's essay is this: films that are 'about' death can have a therapeutic effect on the spectator, even—indeed especially—those that confront our worst fears; and this notion is primarily the subject of Linda and Michael Hutcheon's Opera: The Art of Dying. Although concerned with opera and not cinema, comparison with Thomson's essay is still instructive because in common with cinema, '[o]pera is an art form that has proved to be obsessed with death from its birth' (p. 8). One might add that in opera, too, 'deathliness is in the mise-en-scène', and while for sheer numbers cinema has the upper hand (except in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, whose death count rivals that of The Godfather) the subject of death in opera is at least as compulsively promoted to the foreground.

A whistle-stop survey of opera criticism will confirm this. Peter Conrad's 1987 study of the 'meaning' of opera is entitled A Song of Love and Death; and Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar's Opera's Second Death (2002) and large swathes of Wayne Koestenbaum's melancholy The Queen's Throat (1994) revolve around opera's many deaths. The subject of opera attracts death-related headings, such as John Deathridge's 'Post-mortem on Isolde'; Michal Grover-Friedlander has recently made something of a specialism of opera's 'death-songs' (see e.g. 'Voicing Death in Opera', Common Knowledge, 5/2 (Fall 1996), 136–44); and Catherine Clément's well-known Opera, or The Undoing of Women is premissed on the supposed fetish made of female death on the operatic stage. The subject of death even outstrips sex in contemporary opera criticism. Žižek and Dolar embrace their subject so fully as to contemplate not only death in opera but of opera, suggesting that the birth of psychoanalysis around the turn of the twentieth century coincided with the 'death' of opera '[a]s if, after psychoanalysis, opera, at least in its traditional from, was no longer possible'. Dolar continues that, nevertheless, opera's peculiar quality is that it flourishes the more dead it is: 'zombielike', it survives its own death by fulfilling our requirement for fantasy that psychoanalysis has perhaps supplanted and rendered unnecessary in terms of new operas. What remains is a repertory extending largely from Gluck to Puccini, and indeed most opera criticism is concerned with operas within these limits.

It is welcome, therefore, to find something outside this catalogue of familiar 'zombies'. The Hutcheons' new book reaches beyond the standard repertory, and also provides a fresh and unusually grounded approach to this subject. Covering operas from both the mainstream and the obscure between Monteverdi and...