Chapter VI - Cinéma-Vérité in America (II): Don't Look Back

Summary

That Monteverdi's first opera, as well as the two that preceded his initiating masterpiece, and Gluck's masterpiece a century later, which brings the aria to the musical level of the recitative…, all work from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is almost too good to be true in establishing the myth of opera, of its origins – the story of the power of music, epitomized as the act of singing. So we might reemphasize the turn in the story, familiar but not universal, in which, after moving hell to release his wife, and despite charming tigers and stones, Orpheus at the last moment cannot redeem Eurydice for their everyday life together again; which makes the story one about the limitations of the power of voice. To draw morals from myths is an ancient practice, and which moral you draw from the Orpheus myth is apt to depend on how you understand “looking back.” A sixteenth-century Italian translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, one of the sources of the myth, interprets it as “man's loss of the soul whenever he abandons reason and turns back: that is to pursue blameworthy and earthly concerns.” This moralism is particularly striking in view of the ease with which the moral can be seen to be about skepticism, about the loss of the world through an impossible effort to certify its existence by means of the senses, especially through looking. (Freud's observation is pertinent here, that doubt is the emotion expressive of our essential uncertainty about what is happening behind us.)

– Stanley Cavell, “Opera and the Lease of Voice” (from A Pitch of Philosophy)