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Flying a Wagner Kite: Subjunctive Performances of a Rheingold Scene Based on a Dramaturgical Sketch by Carolyn Abbate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2010

NILA PARLY
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Abstract

Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 159 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 In Friedrich Nietzsche's pamphlet Nietzsche contra Wagner he scornfully called Wagner: ‘the most enthusiastic mimomaniac, perhaps, who ever existed, even as a musician …’ (der begeistertste Mimomane, den es vielleicht gegeben hat, auch noch als Musiker …). He accused Wagner of being obsessed with staged gestures. The drama might have been the end, and music its means in Wagner's theories, but in his practice the pose was always the end, he said. The Wagnerian music drama was in Nietzsche's eyes a mere ‘occasion for many interesting poses!’ (eine Gelegenheit zu vielen interessanten Attituden!). Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstücke eines Psychologen (1899), in Der Fall Wagner, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 132–3. Mary Ann Smart has written a whole book about opera inspired by Nietzsche's term: Mimomania, Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, 2004).

2 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices, Opera and the Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991).

3 Carolyn Abbate, ‘“Das Rheingold”: A Sketch for Dramaturgy’ written directly for a creative seminar at the Royal Danish Opera, April 2006, 1–3. The sketch is here being published for the first time. I have chosen to spread its chapters over my article to increase the chances of discussing its content in detail, but I have left nothing out; Abbate's ‘Sketch for Dramaturgy’ is printed in its entirety.

4 Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring’: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Robert L. Jakobs (Cambridge, 1983); originally published as Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (1881–96), 38–9.

5 Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Musikdramen (1971; 2nd edn, Zurich, 1985), 108–10.

6 Dahlhaus, 108–10. C major is used in a similarly ambiguous way later in the Ring, namely in connection with Siegfried's two love affairs: it first supports his and Brünnhilde's unspoiled love meeting in the last scene of Siegfried, and later (in Götterdämmerung, Act II scene 5) it supports the wedding procession of the manipulated couple, Siegfried and Gutrune.

7 Jürgen Schläder, ‘Kontinuität fragmentarischer Bildwelten. Postmoderne Verfahren im Stuttgarter Ring von 1999/2000’, in OperMachtTheaterBilder. Neue Wirklichkeiten des Regietheaters, ed. Jürgen Schläder (Berlin, 2006), 195–97. And Klaus Zehelein, ‘Zum Stuttgarter Ring 1999/2000’ in Der Stuttgarter Ring, ed. Staatsoper Stuttgart and Klaus Zehelein (Stuttgart, 2000), 5.

8 One could even let Wotan use a sword to open the champagne and in that way kill two birds with one stone.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone, first published as Versuch über Wagner (1952; London, 2005), 32.

10 Adorno, 27–8.

11 Abbate, ‘Sketch for Dramaturgy’, 3.

12 Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, Vollständige kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich, 1977), 36–7.

13 Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988), 470–1. See, for example, Richard Wagner, Beethoven-Festschrift (1870), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Julius Kapp (Leipzig, 1914), VIII, 188–9.

14 Abbate ‘Sketch for Dramaturgy’, 3–4.

15 ‘Bass-baritone’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1992), I, 345.

16 See, for example, Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington, 1992).

17 For example Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main, 2004).

18 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (New York, 2005), 17–26. Fischer-Lichte mentions that in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) he explained that, in the Greek theatre, the community-creating Dionysian principle and the individuating Apollonian principle collided, producing a transformation in which the boundaries separating individuals dissolved; his proposal for a modern equivalent was, not surprisingly, performances of Wagner's music dramas.

19 Clemens Risi, ‘Swinging Signs, Representation and Presence in Operatic Performances’, in Arcadia. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 36 (Berlin, 2001), 364.

20 Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Die Gegenwart des Theaters’, in Transformationen. Theater der neunziger Jahre, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Christel Weiler (Berlin, 1999), 17.

21 In Schechner's view no social performance takes place for the first time, always for the second to nth time. As theatrical performances on stage are marked, framed, or heightened behaviours separated out from just ‘living life’, they could even be termed ‘restored restored behaviours’. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York, 2002), 28–9.

22 Abbate ‘Sketch for Dramaturgy’, 5–6.

23 Adorno In Search of Wagner (see n. 9), 27.

24 I am grateful to Suzanne Aspden for this observation.

25 Lars von Trier abandoned the Ring project in 2004, already realising that the perfect concretisation of his concept of darkness would have exceeded any theatre budget, and unwilling to accept a mediocre production; nor would he consider turning it into a film, because the cinematic medium does not have the power of presence. However, he posted his conceptual ideas and the sketches he had made for Walküre and Siegfried on the homepage of his film company, Zentropa, for a month as a source of potential inspiration.

26 Abbate ‘Sketch for Dramaturgy’, 4–5.

27 Adorno In Search of Wagner (see n. 9), 50.

28 ‘Mickey Mousing’ is a cinematic technique by means of which the actions on screen are completely synchronised with the music. The term was originally used in connection with cartoons – the early Walt Disney films and ‘Tom and Jerry’ – where the music mimics the movements of the animated characters in detail. Today the term is mostly used derogatorily, describing a meaningless doubling of sound and vision. It is precisely because Wagner's frequently employed technique of matching an acoustic event with a scenic action has been used and developed to extremes by Disney and others that modern stage directors cannot simply reproduce his intentions without risking laughter in the auditorium; and this is probably also why we never see Wotan pick up a sword at the first appearance of the ‘Sword’ motif – in this case, following Wagner's intentions would cause unintended laughter.

29 Nila Parly, Absolut sang. Klang, køn og kvinderoller i Wagners værker (Copenhagen, 2007), 32.

30 Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, ‘Dismembering Mozart’, this journal, 2 (1990), 187.

31 It is tempting to compare our path through different acting methods with the professional development of Konstantin Stanislavskij, the father of Method Acting. At the outset, Stanislavskij demanded extremely naturalistic, ‘credible’ characters from his actors, but towards the end of his career he tended much more to accept the creation of a role out of bodily movements, ‘physical action’, although never giving up the basic psychological understanding of the part.

32 See also Risi ‘Swinging Signs’ (see n. 19), 363–72, where the tactile perception of the music caused by extreme duration and repetition is discussed at length.