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Cone's and Kivy's ‘World of Opera’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

David Rosen
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Extract

‘If music is a language, who is speaking?’ asked Edward T. Cone on the first page of The Composer's Voice (1974), later turning to such questions as ‘does a vocal persona [whether protagonist of a song or character in an opera] know he is singing?’ And does that persona hear the accompaniment? Cone's answer then was that ‘Consciously, he neither knows that he is singing nor hears the accompaniment; but his subconscious both knows and hears’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 61 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Cone, Edward T., The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, 1974), 29–30.Google Scholar The book was the topic of a session of the 1988 national meeting of the American Musicological Society. The papers read at that session, along with Cone's responses and an introduction by Fred Everett Maus, were published in College Music Symposium, 29 (1989), 1–80.Google Scholar

2 Cone, , Composer's Voice, 36.Google Scholar

3 In Cone, Edward T., Music: A View from Delft: Selected Essays, ed. Morgan, Robert P. (Chicago, 1989), 125–38.Google Scholar (‘The World of Opera’ is the only essay in the volume that had not been previously published.) In another recent article Cone offers a similar analysis for the art song: ‘Poet's Love or Composer's Love?’, in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Scher, Steven Paul (Cambridge, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The differences between Cone's theory in The Composer's Voice and in the later two essays are touched upon in the issue of College Music Symposium cited in n. 1; see 5, 37 and especially 77–80.

4 This journal, 3 (1991), 63–77.Google Scholar

5 Kivy, , 63.Google Scholar

6 Kivy, , 70.Google Scholar

7 The four-point summary of Cone's argument appears in Kivy, , 66–7.Google Scholar

8 This is not literally true, of course; even Carmen, Cone's epitome of the ‘natural musician’ ( Cone, , 131–2Google Scholar), has extensive spoken dialogue.

9 Cone, , 126–8.Google Scholar

10 It might be added in support of Cone that in the autograph score Verdi first wrote ‘Entro le scene’ (off stage), referring not to the position of the character Alfredo, but to that of the tenor portraying him. But Verdi smeared this out, substituting ‘Sotto it balcone’, unambiguously referring to the location of the character.

11 This does seem too literal-minded; as Kivy notes, ‘An appeal to operatic “convention” might well suffice as an answer [to this last point]. After all, considering the many other startling departures from reality that one readily accepts in opera, it is hardly asking much more to accept that “speaking” voices carry a little further there than elsewhere’ ( Kivy, , 65Google Scholar). In any case, there is a stronger argument for Cone's position: the accompaniment of the harp, played off stage, is an emblem of the realistic serenade (Manrico's romanza is a fine example).

12 I am not sure what the force of ‘in some sense’ is, but I trust that Cone merely means to call our attention to the inconsistency, rather than claim that we should actually regard this first appearance as ‘realistic singing’ and presumably stage it as such (i.e., in the same ‘realistic’ manner in which Alfredo sang the Brindisi), guaranteeing an outburst of laughter from the audience.

13 Cone, , 130.Google Scholar

14 Cone, (129)Google Scholar finds fault with Jonathan Miller's staging, in which the song emanated from a jukebox on its first presentation, but at least that production, unlike Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's, makes it clear that the song is sung ‘realistically’.

15 Carolyn Abbate also rejects Cone's view, turning against it one of his own examples (the Seguidilla from Carmen), in Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), 119–22.Google Scholar

16 This seems the most problematic category in Kivy's list: in both Paisiello's and Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia it seems clear that Rosina has not composed the aria she sings in her music lesson (nor, by the way, has Bartolo composed the ancient air he remembers from his youth).

17 Cone, , 129.Google Scholar

18 Cone, , 128–9.Google Scholar

19 Kivy, , 67.Google Scholar

20 See Pirrotta's, Nino discussion of ‘the pastoral aura’ in Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Eales, Karen (Cambridge, 1982), 257–70.Google Scholar

21 On the physicality of the voice, see also Barthes, Roland, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Heath, Stephen (New York, c.1977), 179–89Google Scholar; and Poizat, Michel, ‘“The Blue Note” and “The Objectified Voice and the Vocal Object”’, this journal, 3 (1991), 195–211.Google Scholar

22 Cone, , Composer's Voice, 155.Google Scholar

23 Kivy, , 67.Google Scholar

24 ‘I hold no brief for Collingwood's metaphysics of an, language and expression; but nor do I intend to make a critique of it. That has been done often enough.’ Kivy, , 69.Google Scholar

25 Kivy, , 70–1.Google Scholar This moves well beyond Collingwood, but the move is above board; Kivy explains clearly that this extension ‘is Kivy, not Collingwood’.

26 Moliére, The Would-be Gentleman (Le bourgeois gentilhomme) II iv, in Moliére, , Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. Graveley, George and Maclean, Ian, ed. Ian Maclean (Oxford, 1989), 281.Google Scholar

27 But Kivy returns again and again to a subplot in his piece: we are all brother and sister artists, whether we are improvisatory prose artists or Mozart, and Kivy finds this ‘ something of a comfort’ ( Kivy, , 72).Google Scholar

28 Kivy, conducts this part of the argument on pp. 70–2.Google Scholar

29 Kivy, , 73.Google Scholar

30 Kivy, , 73.Google Scholar

31 To be sure, this passive hearing of music – having musical ideas ‘occur’ to one – is pan of what being a composer is about, but only part.

32 Cone, ‘Poet's Love’. Quotations from this article are drawn from the version of the paper delivered at a conference at Darmouth College in 1988 (see n. 3).

33 As Mary Ann Smart pointed out to me, both of Cone's models reflect the critical theories reigning at the time. The Composer's Voice privileges the composer, or rather his or her persona (a New Critical qualification). The ‘underprivileging’ of the composer in the later framework recalls announcements about ‘la mon de l'auteur’ (or at least about his or her poor health).

34 Cone, , 137.Google Scholar See also his comments on the same passage in The Composer's Voice, 30.Google Scholar

35 Kivy, , 75.Google Scholar

36 Cone's comment that ‘not all the characters hear all the instrumental music all the time, and there may indeed be music (notably in Wagner) unheard by any of them’ (137) seems to suggest in a round-about way that this music can be accessible to more than one character at a time. (See also his remarks about Wagnerian music drama on 138.)

37 Kivy, , 75.Google Scholar In The Composer's Voice, Cone raised, then immediately dismissed, the notion that ‘the accompaniment is a sort of stage direction’ (11).

38 I refer to the notion that the events on stage are the acts of music made visible (‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’ [1872]).

75 Kivy, , 75.Google Scholar

40 Kivy, , 76–7.Google Scholar Kivy claims to be puzzled by stage directions in Edward J. Dent's edition of the vocal score which do not appear in the collected works editions. But clearly Dent's stage directions, including some misguided by-play in which Susanna is seen informing the Countess of the Count's plans (hence the gesture of disgust), are merely his suggestions for a staging of the work. Dent may well have found the gesture of resignation in the music, but he surely did not find Susanna in it.

41 Hepokoski, James A. and Ferrero, Mercedes Viale, ‘Otello’ di Giuseppe Verdi, Musica e Spettacolo: Collana di Disposizioni sceniche diretta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrero (Milan, 1990), 87–91 (of the facsimile)Google Scholar; Busch, Hans, editor and translator, Verdi's ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’ (revised version) in Letters and Documents (Oxford, 1988), 598–604.Google Scholar To be fair to Kivy, I should note that, while duets are usually carefully directed, in solos the singers are often left to devise their stage action for themselves, or sometimes even counselled to limit themselves to a few carefully studied gestures.

42 As Cone puts it, ‘“I understand a fury in your words, / But not the words”, says Desdemona: it is this fury that would come to full expression in song (and has notably done so in Verdi's music: not Otello's conscious anger, but the rage beneath the surface, which takes control of him and drives him to his doom).’ This formulation, with its emphasis on the subconscious, is, not surprisingly, from The Composer's Voice (34), rather than Cone's later writings.

43 Abandoning this notion would allow one to consider restoring the rather attractive ‘mixed narrative-dramatic’ model that Cone rejected as incompatible with it. The Composer's Voice, 37.Google Scholar