Notes oN opera’s - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Notas sobre la ópera
exquisite Corpse

Joseph Cermatori

Writing is not an independent order of signification: es
weakened speech, something not completely dead: a living-dead,
a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of breath.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination

If anyone ever boos you offstage, that is simply applause from ghosts.
Sharon Needles

1. “What remains of opera?” — Some questions just refuse to die. Como era de esperar
suficiente, this is often true of questions about dying, the dead, and what remains after
death. Our repeated attempts at entertaining them ultimately take on the character of
an exorcism ritual, as if we could release ourselves from their monstrous power merely
by rehearsing them over and over again. Maybe this time, the uttered incantation, el
magic bullet, the stake through the heart will put the matter to rest once and for all.
Is opera dying? Is opera in New York still alive? One is tempted to declare, “Opera
is dead,” but could there be by now a more familiar gesture, and could one make
such a declaration without immediately having to follow it with “Long live opera”?
The repeated claims of opera’s exhausted status are in themselves exhausting. El
same is true of theatre, which has been dead or dying for as long as anyone cares
to remember: Artaud, Strindberg, the Romantics, probably even longer. De alguna manera
with opera, just as with theatre, it turns out that the monster’s head still hasn’t been
cut off. Or else, like any monster worthy of the name, it keeps finding ways to rise
from the grave.

For the purposes of these notes, let’s not be put off by the awkwardness of death
metaphors (surely just as awkward, in their way, as birth metaphors). We might just
as easily think about opera’s ruins, and indeed, the current critical fascination with
remains is in many ways a subset and a continuation of an ongoing critical preoc-
cupation with ruins and ruination. Pero en lugar, let’s first acknowledge the ubiquity of
the death metaphor, and not just in discussions about opera. The anxious uncertainty
over whether opera is still “alive” would seem to have something obvious to do with

4  PAJ 103 (2013), páginas. 4–18.

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Atys: Atys (ed Lyon) mourns over the corpse of Sangaride (emanuelle de Negri) while the jealous goddess
Cybèle (Anna Reinhold) seals his doom. Photo: Stephanie Berger. Courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

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CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  5

the “declinist panic” that Frank Rich sees as the hallmark of how many Americans
today perceive the United States’ current political situation. “Is America dead?” asks
his headline (New York Magazine, Julio 22, 2012). elsewhere, he might have asked, “Is
europe dying?” or “Is the West’s decline irreversible?” These various examples are
vinculado, in their way, to the paranoia over opera’s vitality. Under bio-political condi-
ciones, it is no wonder that these paranoid uncertainties all take the form of a terrible
hypochondria. But to put a spin on psychotherapy’s classic joke about paranoia: Just
because you’re a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you’re not actually dying.

2. Dead or Undead — I have a friend, a scholar of the english renaissance, who finds
my interest in opera utterly bewildering. As he sees it, “certain artistic forms were
doomed to die when the socio-economic class that sustained them disappeared.”
Honestly, I am never really sure what he means by this quip. I suppose he has in
mind something like the ancièn régime. (Let us leave aside the obvious fact that our
twenty-first-century world continues to be governed by powerful plutocrats who, en
some cases, are also opera patrons.) But one might also argue, as Mladen Dolar and
Slavoj Žižek recently have, that “from its very beginning, opera was dead, a stillborn
child of musical art. [… F]rom its very beginnings, it was perceived as something
outdated, as a retroactive solution to an inherent crisis in music.”1 Rather than dying
while still unborn, sin embargo, as the stillbirth metaphor suggests, we could counterpose
another conceit: that opera actually begins its life already dead, or as it were, already
undead. Opera begins its life as a zombie. Or perhaps, as Frankenstein’s monster, un
undead heap of fragmentary limbs and organs, each cut from somewhere else (poetry,
música, dance, you name it) and stitched together into a grotesque conglomeration.

3. (Y)dead or Endangered — A biological metaphor ( “Art form x is alive, art form
y is dead”) also expresses an idea about an underlying “ecological” set of condi-
ciones. On the one hand, a resemblance to the living dead inheres within opera’s
very concept; but on the other hand, as J. D. McClatchy and others have suggested,
it also resembles an endangered species, and as such it asks us to take seriously
that art forms are capable of vanishing completely. Después de todo, no one today performs
dithyrambs in the way the Greeks once did, not even Richard Schechner. As an
artistic practice, they have gone the way of the Dodo. In this light, the deathly pallor
of opera reflects the specter of total extinction, and if the idea of a future without
opera is chilling, it may be because it also raises the possibility of a future without
the arts in general. Pero de nuevo, some questions never die: these go back to The Birth
of Tragedy, and long before.

4. Contaminations of the contemporary — Does contemporary opera even exist?
Today’s artists, working under the slogan of “the contemporary,” alongside today’s
critics, working under the ever-accelerating journalistic paradigm of “news,” come
together to maintain custody over what the Italian Futurists once founded as “the
religion of the new.” (No need to dwell upon the fact that these same Futurists
were also enthusiasts of fascism, that most radical form of state-enforced capitalism,
and that a religious worship of the new owes as much to the religious or fetishistic
form of the commodity as it does to the traditions of artistic experimentation and

6  PAJ 103

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avant-gardism.) For now, let us set aside the question of whether the new and the
contemporary are always and everywhere the same thing. In a situation where worship
of “the new” is the rule, opera would seem to be a special blasphemy, a pollution
that reeks of the defunct, a dead weight dragging things down toward the old and
the impure. The very fact of opera’s survival in — or in some cases, in competition
with — these art world conditions suggests that the genre has found ways, like a
parasite, to thrive in even the most adverse of circumstances.

5. The corpse as aesthetic object — One way of narrating the history of a modern
sensibility in the arts would be to take stock of the shifting status of the dead as
objects of artistic representation. Walter Benjamin locates a point of origin for this
narrative in seventeenth-century europe — historically contemporaneous with the
emergence of opera — in whose theatre, so he argued, “the corpse becomes quite
simply the pre-eminent emblematic property,” the bodily sign that ruination extend
its empire over every corner of the world, even to the physical, creaturely body.
From this point one could proceed through Goya, Baudelaire, the Surrealists’ parlor
juegos, etcétera, up to the present. These days, the cadaver’s powers of fascination
seem as strong as ever before in elite and mass culture alike. even drag performance
today is in thrall to the charms of the cadavre exquis, as the widespread popularity
of Sharon Needles attests.

6. The corpse as Verfremdungseffekt — For all these reasons, James Jorden’s remarks
in his March 2012 review of Christopher Alden’s Cosí Fan Tutte at City Opera are
remarkable: “Zombies are impossible to escape these days — on television, película,
video games, even reworkings of Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies),
and now New York City Opera has given us a Cosí Fan Tutte starring the undead”
(New York Post, Marzo 19, 2012). If opera maintains connection with death and
undeadness, what happens when contemporary opera productions are conscious of
this connection? Alden’s Cosí came close to answering to this question. It dispensed
with the glitter that often accompanies Mozart’s operas, and centered on a cast of
pale-faced actors drifting vacantly through a stark, grey space. The production drew
on its singers’ capacity for irony, understatement, and cynicism. Alden frustrated
the audience’s capacity for empathetic engagement, often risking its boredom. El
approach seemed Brechtian, but only vaguely so: Brecht-ish. Was the deadness in
these performers’ eyes because they were zombies, or because they were exercising
an alienated approach to acting, o ambos? Although the answer was not altogether
clear, the ambiguity was itself suggestive. The epic theatre supposedly came about
in a moment when Brecht decided to powder his actors’ faces with ghastly white
chalk in order to indicate the fatigue — the dead tiredness, so to speak — of their
characters in Edward II. Defamiliarization, that means by which art can revive the
zombie-like spectator and reawaken perceptual processes deadened by habit, tiene
always paradoxically contained a faint hint of the morbid.

7. Bodysnatchers — Deadness behind the eyes, and a certain flatness of affect: el
singers in Alden’s Cosí had this much in common with the performers in Rich-
ard Maxwell’s similarly gestic co-production with the Wooster Group of eugene

CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  7

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Top: Così Fan Tutte, directed
by Christopher Alden. Photo:
Carol Rosegg. Courtesy New
York City Opera. Middle:
The Wooster Group’s La
Didone, directed by elizabeth
LeCompte. Photo: © Paula
Court. Courtesy The Wooster
Group. Bottom: Dark Sisters,
directed by Rebecca Taichman.
Photo: Richard Termine.
Courtesy Michelle Tabnick.

8  PAJ 103

O’Neill’s Early Plays, seen earlier that season at St. Ann’s Warehouse. even more,
sin embargo, this Cosí called to mind another recent Wooster Group project: their La
Didone (2009), which brought together Cavalli’s 1641 opera of the same name and
a B-rated Italian horror film from 1965, Planet of the Vampires. In yoking together
sensuous music-theatre and vampiric aliens into a concetto of sorts, the Woosters
found dialectical ways to reconsider age-old anxieties plainly manifest within opera
history about performance’s power to take control of its spectators’ bodies. Estos
anxieties go all the way back to Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, that paradigmatic favola of
musical enchantment (and enchainment) playing at the boundaries of the living and
the dead. En breve, the Wooster Didone tapped into a problem intrinsic to the very
concept of opera itself.

8. Horror / Cheese — A principle of possession seemed also to operate in Alden’s
Cosí, albeit in the background. Only occasionally did Alden bring it forward, as when
Fiordiligi’s aria “Come Scoglio” was staged with the soprano Sara Jakubiak seated
with her head dangling down at the neck, her long blond hair falling over her face
in a manner that recalled the iconic image of the undead child in The Ring (2002).
What is it about opera that seems so ripe for comparison with horror movies, if not
that both play unashamedly on the pleasure produced by a playful manipulation of
sensory stimulus and haptic/emotional response? Opera and cheesy scary movies:
both crave bodies. The same could be said for any medium or genre that trades heav-
ily in sensation, Por ejemplo, the popular novel. It’s no surprise, por ejemplo, eso
Anne Rice’s interest in vampires is supplemented by her interest in castrati and the
exquisiteness of eighteenth-century opera, as her 1982 novel Cry to Heaven attests.

9. Operatic remains as a question of politics — Peter Gelb’s installment at the
Metropolitan Opera in 2006 was greeted with a tremendous amount of critical and
popular excitement. Life and death seemed to hang in the balance. Would Gelb
revivify the Met, and in turn, the larger New York opera scene? Several productions
seemed to suggest the possibility that he might: the William Kentridge Nose (2010)
and the Willy Decker Traviata (2011) come immediately to mind, but even more
than these, Patrice Chéreau’s staging of Janác=ek’s From the House of the Dead (2009),
which I reviewed approvingly in PAJ 96 (2010). In Chéreau’s hands, Janác=ek’s opera
was a paean to the machine-like power of modern social conditions to transform
living bodies into the walking dead. It was a deeply political piece, but in no way
didactic. It posed no facile answers. Instead it left something discomforting under
the audience’s skin, some itchy irritant or remainder left behind by the performance.2

10. The Pulse — All glimmers of hope aside, six years after the start of Peter Gelb’s
regime, vital signs at the Met and in the larger New York scene have seemed, to some
parties at least, as weak as ever. At the end of the spring 2012, Alex Ross complained
in the New Yorker that “[t]his has been the most dispiriting opera season since I
began reviewing music in New York, twenty years ago,” attributing the problem to “a
lack of intellectual vitality” (The New Yorker, Marzo 12, 2012). In the Times, Zachary
Woolfe requested a return to first principles, asking “What do we want from opera
in New York?” as though recent catastrophic events demanded the entire question

CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  9

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be rethought from the ground up, or as though the cultural administrators of New
York opera needed to be reminded of their basic artistic obligations (New York Times,
Enero 4, 2012).

No hay duda, the dimming of hopes surrounding Gelb’s leadership at the Met has fueled
much of this rhetoric. Certainly Gelb should be credited with the positive aspects of
his pioneering Live in HD broadcasts, which bring opera more fully into the age of
digital reproducibility. But could the phantom liveness promised by these mediated
spectacles make up for the company’s great gamble, Robert Lepage’s malfunctioning,
$16 million Ring cycle, proclaimed by Gelb to be “revolutionary” but panned by just about every major New York opera critic? Frankly, I couldn’t say. The Met refused my request to write on the Ring for PAJ (and prohibitive ticket prices, cerca de $400
for Family Circle seats, combined with the cycle’s poor reviews proved truly effective
deterrents). Cuando, not long after, the Times broke the news that Gelb had tried to
ban Opera News’s critics from reviewing the Met’s performances after receiving their
tepid notices in response to the Lepage Ring, it seemed the company had gone into
full-blown “damage control” mode (New York Times, 21 Puede 2012).

11. On Life Support / Dead on Arrival — The situation with New York City Opera
has been even more depressing, ever since its failed bid to bring Gérard Mortier to
its helm in 2008. Since then, it has been beset by a host of budgetary woes, forced
to move from Lincoln Center, and ensnared in intractable labor negotiations. El
programming has suffered for all of this misery, both in the quantity and quality
of performance offerings. The company’s most exciting venture in recent memory
was its presentation of three existential, one-act Monodramas (John Zorn’s homage
to Artaud, La Machine de l’Être; Schoenberg’s Erwartung; and Morton Feldman’s
Neither, based on Beckett’s poem of the same name), staged by Michael Counts in
primavera 2011. Its 2011–12 season was a mostly dreary affair, and for a second consecu-
tive year, its 2012–13 season will feature only sixteen performances, a considerable
falling-off for a company that once produced hundreds of opera evenings each year.

For a new work in 2012, City Opera brought forward Prima Donna, with music and
libretto by the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Billed as a “love letter” to opera,
Wainwright’s score did little more than nostalgically knock off the conventions of
Romantic opera (late Strauss, Delibes), at times blending them with those of modern
pop and indie music. Where Broadway once embraced “rock opera,” Prima Donna
might more accurately be called “rockstar opera” in honor of its celebrity composer,
but the Lloyd-Webberism is much the same. Prima Donna’s libretto also failed to
arouse any serious interest. Focusing on an aging singer, it felt like the most obvi-
ous and narcissistic kind of autobiographical allegory. There were gestures made in
the direction of class politics, cliché, and campiness — citing, in its way, both Sunset
Boulevard and The Queen’s Throat — but these gestures were uncommitted, as if the
piece couldn’t decide whether to take any of its own attitudes seriously or not, provok-
ing the audience’s awkward laughter during some of its more obviously sentimental
sequences. Its only honest moment came at the very end, when Wainwright let the

10  PAJ 103

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ottocentismo fall away and offered a last ballad, a slow and melancholy strain whose
dying fall sounded finally like the composer’s own music.

12. Back to life — Not all backward glances are equally doomed. While this was not
the case with Wainwright’s Prima Donna, sometimes what’s old, and even what’s old
enough to be properly historical or canonical, can seem fresher and more exciting
than what purports to be new. A veces, the liveliness of the (supposedly dead)
past rivals that of the present (supposedly living) moment. From this perspective,
we might recall Giorgio Agamben’s view, as expressed in his essay “What is the
Contemporary?", that being contemporary consists not in “the new” per se, pero
rather in “the untimely.” For Agamben, channeling Nietzsche, to be authentically
contemporary involves standing apart from one’s time, being out-of-sync with one’s
historical situation, finding ways in which the past survives within the present, y
seeing the present’s achievements not as points of pride, but rather, as symptoms.
En esto, Agamben echoes a point already made decades earlier by T. S. eliot, cuyo
essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argued that anyone who wishes to
be an artist “beyond his twenty-fifth year” must possess a historical sense, uno
that “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

13. Funerary Architecture — With respect to the untimeliness of the contemporary,
it is telling that two of this season’s most impressive offerings were “remounts.” One
of these two was the Les Arts Florissants production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys,
originally performed at BAM in 1987. This restaging of Lully’s opera, a tragédie-en-
musique from 1676, made plain that seventeenth-century music continues to have
tremendous contemporary appeal, more than twenty years after Richard Taruskin
published his thoughts on “The Modern Sound of early Music.”3 Philippe Quinault’s
libretto focuses the tragic action on the amorous entanglements of Atys, in love
with the nymph Sangaride, who is herself betrothed to the King Celenus, mientras
Atys is beloved by the vengeful goddess Cybèle. Theatrically speaking, this was not
an historical opera being performed “the way it really was,” nor was it an infantile,
creampuff fantasia on baroque themes (as was the case with some of the productions
LAF brought to Brooklyn for BAM’s Baroque Opera Festival in 2010). Bastante, el
LAF production revealed Atys as baroque in a truly robust sense: somber, obscure, a
great marble mausoleum draped with heavy Phrygian cadences. Director Jean-Marie
Villégier often quoted the historical conventions and gestures of the late seventeenth-
century stage, lending them classical gravity while never slavishly recreating them,
while Carlo Tommasi’s scenic design moved the opera’s pastoral setting indoors, en
a windowless room suggesting one of the apartments at Versailles. En breve, fue
a kind of French tombeau, in the multifarious sense described by musicologist and
opera scholar Carolyn Abbate: both a physical monument, and an artistic homage
in music and/or literature to the past, one that effectively recreates the past anew.4

In Atys’s most spellbinding moment, the title character falls asleep and is sent a
dream from the lovesick goddess. The sirenlike voice of Le Sommeil (Sleep) sounds
the mesmerizing words, “Dormons, dormons tous / Ah que le repos est doux” ( “Let’s

CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  11

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sleep, let’s all sleep. / Ah, how sweet is rest.”), like a clarion call from beyond the
bourn of time, and the slumbering Atys is greeted with a vision of a dancer who
clearly recalls the famous image of the sun king in his splendid ballet costumes. Como
Mark Franko has argued, this staging introduces its own conceit of memorialization
into the opera: the production is set in the time of the opera’s premiere, the 1670s,
while the tradition of the courtly ballet flourished some two decades earlier, en el
1650s. “The dream is the nostalgia of the court for youth in the heyday of its earlier
enthusiasm for court ballet. The present is cold and nocturnal whereas the dream
rediscovers the light of day. This wonderful baroque conceit offers a model for our
relation to the performance itself. […] Our relation to this production is conditioned
in more ways than one by the past: the 1980s compared to today; the 1650s compared
to the 1670s” (Jampole.com, Octubre 12, 2011).

To these remarks, I would only add that the moment becomes a mournful alle-
gory — not just of the past in its relation to the present, as Franko argues — but an
allegory of spectatorship as well. The dream moment is also a spectacle-within-a-
spectacle, with Atys separated from the theatrical image by the mediation of the
dream. In this way, the play-within-the-play and the framing Howard Gilman Opera
House recall Benjamin’s notes on Brecht’s epic Theater, which describe an “abyss
which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living [emphasis
mío], the abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama and whose resonance
heightens the intoxication of opera.” With opera, the clarion call of the dream and
the theatre is also the call of the past and the dead.

14. Replaying the Play of Mo(tu)rning (Sex and Language) — The other “remount”
of the 2011–12 season that bears discussing was That Morning Thing. Robert Ashley’s
1967 opera had never been seen in New York prior to its November 2011 premiere,
sponsored by the Kitchen and Performa 11. After Ashley wrote the piece, it was only
performed three times in the following few years: at Ann Arbor’s ONCe Festival in
1968, y luego, in Tokyo and Oakland. Still, the piece gained a following as rumors
and recorded fragments circulated in the 1970s. Although Ashley’s work still remains
to an embarrassing extent outside the established, institutionalized scene of uptown
opera, it has long been a staple of the downtown performance world and abroad,
and it continues to command a cult following. (This following is reflected in the fact
eso 2011 also saw performances of his 1984 television opera Perfect Lives in both
Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as evenings of his chamber music performed at
Calle. Marks’s Incubator Arts Project. These St. Marks performances included the debut
of Ashley’s new work, World War III Just the Highlights, whose score appeared last
year in PAJ 101.) For the fall Performa festival, Ashley worked with a cast of sev-
enteen musicians and dancers to reconstruct That Morning Thing, mostly from his
own memory. Tal como, the work might better be described as a re-performance, a
reenactment of the performative remains of its original. Typically, we say that operas
and plays are re-mounted or revived, and that works of live art or performance are
reperformed, but with Robert Ashley’s work, which vexes the boundaries between
the two categories, we are in unclear territory.

12  PAJ 103

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Over a series of mostly disconnected “acts” and an epilogue, That Morning Thing
explores sexual power relations from a variety of different positions. The overall effect
is chilling. Its various movements include: women trafficking robotically in gridlike
patrones, seeming to respond to subtle cues from their static male counterparts; a
woman of color being made repeatedly to count to four in irregular rhythms while
a white, male keyboardist counters with increasingly violent, arrhythmic sounds;
a female dancer imitating a randomized series of pin-up girl poses while another
woman’s recorded voice narrates in graphic detail the experience of being sexually
assaulted, the opera’s only narrative event, de modo significativo.

As one might expect from this intertwining of erotic and violent behavior, death and
decay are near the heart of this opera too. Ashley has explained that the piece came
about in response to the coincidentally simultaneous suicides of three of his female
amigos. He insists, sin embargo, that the “decay of language” into an invisible medium
for perpetuating power relations is the piece’s more crucial concept. In interviews he
has linked this decay to the larger political-economic conditions of capitalism, pero
también, more generally, to language’s incapacity for expressing the infinite complexity
of life, particularly in the face of the mysteriousness of death. (In his words, “you
can’t explain in words why you commit suicide.” See: Performa Magazine, Agosto 21,
2011.) In forging links between sexual violence and language’s performative power,
That Morning Thing anticipated, as it were, much of the next few decades’ feminist
and queer politics (p.ej. Michel Foucault, Judith Butler). At the same time however, en
its repeated scenes of misogyny performed by a cast of young, student-age women,
That Morning Thing was disturbing. It walked a razor-thin line between demonstrat-
ing these links and merely representing sadism and the death drive without any
contextualization or commentary.

15. Twilight of the Myths — Catherine Clément, OMS (literally) wrote the book on
how opera finds systematic ways to undo its women, has drawn significant attention
to the close, indeed pathological, relationship this undoing has to opera’s basis in
myth. As a genre, it’s unclear whether opera can ever shed its myths entirely, y
the intractability of the mythic in opera is not only a problem for women, but for
the metaphysics of opera itself. From Monteverdi’s time to Mozart’s, the presence
of onstage gods and other similar supernatural beings was simply standard operat-
ing procedure. Además, many operas that go by the name of nineteenth-century
verismo could be seen as myths disguised in nineteenth-century dress: Traviata as a
rewriting of Orpheus for a disenchanted, realistic age, Por ejemplo. even when the
gods would seem to have disappeared altogether, Wagner brought them back again,
if only to try killing them off in a spectacular conflagration. Can god be killed? Can
opera be killed? These questions, arguably, go hand in hand. But again, here we
come back to Nietzsche.

16. Mournfulness and Stoicism — In Dark Sisters, young New York composer Nico
Muhly and playwright/librettist Stephen Karam take up the question of myth in a
typically American way: by drawing on historical events and figures, and endowing
them with a mythic stature (see also: The Mother of Us All, Einstein on the Beach,

CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  13

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Top: That Morning Thing, directed
by Fast Forward. Act I: Frogs. El
cast’s female performers, trafficking
robotically in gridlike patterns,
seeming to respond to subtle cues
from their static male counterparts.
Photo: © Paula Court. Courtesy
Performa. Right: Atys: The dream
ballet. Photo: Pierre Grosbois.
Courtesy Les Arts Florissants.

14  PAJ 103

Satyagraha, Nixon in China). al mismo tiempo, this new work is an opera about
the many myths of America itself, their illusions and their internal contradictions.
Based on the aftermath of a raid conducted in 2008 by Texas state authorities against
a polygamous community of Mormon fundamentalists, Dark Sisters begins with
the laments of a group of sister-wives belonging to a family undergoing a similar
catastrophe. From this crisis follows a larger crisis of faith for the opera’s sister-wife
protagonist, eliza, who comes to doubt the divine infallibility of her prophet husband,
and ultimately claws her way, Nora Helmer-style, to a Pyrrhic kind of freedom. En
its final scene, set at an open grave, the opera leaves ambiguous the question of life
after one severs one’s ties with a religious past.

A chamber opera for seven singers and thirteen traditional instruments, Dark Sisters
appears governed by a principle of musical restraint and discipline, one appropriate
to an opera on the theme of patriarchal repression in which the female characters
have to remind themselves, mantra-like, to “Keep sweet, no matter what.” The score
is entirely tonal. It employs no digital electronic elements, but it clearly and deftly
draws influence from Muhly’s many compositions that combine live instruments
with laptop, such as when a series of arpeggio trills stops all too abruptly several
times in rapid succession, each time as though in a digital sound file cut. Similarmente,
on a more structural scale, large musical ideas and movements break off too soon
and come to anti-climax, repressing the culminations and fulminations one typically
associates with opera. (During an earlier preview performance of some of the opera’s
songs at Le Poisson Rouge, Muhly explained that the treatment of mad scenes in
most traditional operas is a bit too “Jersey Shore” for his tastes.) The overall tone is
notably stoic — though more the kind of stoicism that erupts when one’s beliefs have
been shaken to their core rather than the kind typically associated with American
Puritan Christianity — but it was leavened with a sense of intimacy. Muhly cites
Copland’s Tender Land, Meredith Monk, American hymnody and folk music for his
sources of inspiration.

17. Allegory of the Cave(s) — If one seeks out the caves where opera’s shadow
lives on after its supposed death, one finds many such shadowy places in New
york, some more flourishing than others. Beyond the large-scale basilicas (Lincoln
Center), the mid-sized temples (Gotham Chamber Opera), and the various smaller
chapels (Dicapo Opera. etc.), one finds a host of even smaller, more independent
organizations in a variety of forms, often operating under the radar of most Lincoln
Center subscribers. One can point, as several critics recently have, to the work of
independent opera impresario Beth Morrison, who is teaming up with HeRe Arts
Center in January 2013 to produce the first annual Prototype Festival. Prototype 2013
looks to program ambitious new work, likely similar in its aesthetic sensibilities to
that once seen at City Opera’s Vox Opera Festival, which is now greatly reduced
in its scope compared to what it once was, like the rest of City Opera. Judging by
Morrison’s most recent projects — for example, her production of young American
composer Missy Mazzoli’s new opera Song from the Uproar this past spring at the
Kitchen — the practitioners of this new work are young, enterprising, talented, y

CeRMATORI / Notes on Opera’s Exquisite Corpse  15

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highly trained. They battle a dismal economy and a climate of austerity with a DIY
approach and the desire to redefine the genre from the ground up. They work in a
variety of stylistic idioms, drawing upon the many great musical developments of
the twentieth century that are still residual in twenty-first century musical culture:
atonality and serialism, the use of folk and popular forms, indeterminacy and chance,
minimalism and post-minimalism, electronics, sound, y ruido.

But more than anything else, the full name of the Prototype: Opera/Theatre/Now
Festival suggests an increasing emphasis on the interwovenness of theatre and opera,
one I find not only in Morrison’s work as a producer, but across the entire field of
New York opera in all its various manifestations, all the way up to Peter Gelb’s Met.
This work makes a hybrid, protean form from the conventions of opera, theatre,
experimental music, actuación, live art, and media. Tal como, it often seems to draw
inspiration from the notion of inter-/multi-medial exchange and synthesis seemingly
intrinsic to the concepts of “the operatic” or “the theatrical” themselves. As examples
of this practice, one might think of the composer Joe Diebes, or of the interdisci-
plinary artist Pablo Helguera, both of whom have recently appeared in this journal.

18. Theatricality — The current trend toward combining elements from opera and
performance art reflects the fact that there has long been an operatic side of sorts
to the world of contemporary performance: Por ejemplo, Robert Wilson, or Marina
Abramovic; and her admiration for Maria Callas, or the two combined in Wilson’s
recent Life and Death of Marina Abramovic;. More provocatively, sin embargo, this ten-
dency counterbalances another current trend among contemporary performance and
visual arts practitioners — detected by numerous critics, from Roberta Smith in the
Times to Paul David Young and others in this journal — toward embracing theatri-
cality, after decades of disavowing the theatrical altogether. In his influential 1967
essay, “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried famously argued that, “The concepts of
quality and value — and the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art
itself — are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. Qué
lies between the arts is theatre.”5 Or opera. Or both, whenever opera tries to out-
theatricalize the theatre.

19. Opera’s Spectrality, Opera’s Futurity — “What is the future of opera?” Really,
we’re asking the same question a different way, since one can look at a ruin or a
remain and see the future predicted within it. The August 2012 issue of Opera News
was devoted to the future of the genre, not just in New York but nationwide. Philip
Kennicott wondered whether the future might mean mostly the increasing sophis-
tication of technologies used to organize and disseminate opera performances: Live
in HD taken to its logical extremes to incorporate holographic bodies set within
immersive virtual spaces made availalable at great distances. In short, a kind of
Handel-on-the-Holodeck scenario. The issue also profiled a number of up-and-
coming singers, conductors, composers, directors, and managers, but it kept its focus
mostly on the uptown scene in New York and elsewhere. Among the young talents
hailed as opera’s next wave, I noted the inclusion of Andreas Mitisek, currently the
head of California’s Long Beach Opera, an administrator who also serves the com-

16  PAJ 103

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pany as a conductor, stage director, and designer, often all at once. And so on the
one hand, we find modern-day Berninis like Mitisek, and on the other, a new idea
of operatic form taking place in downtown New York and elsewhere — one that more
closely aligns itself with the tradition established by Robert Ashley’s operas (entre
otros: Por ejemplo, Meredith Monk’s operas and Robert Wilson’s early work) y
that has at times been billed by its producers as nothing less than the future of the
genre itself. either way, we seem repeatedly, ineluctably, to be finding some kind of
theatricality as the future of opera. So, are we contemporary, or Wagnerian, o ambos?

20. Playing Through — It has long been a commonplace in the German philosophi-
cal tradition to regard history as a kind of drama. One thinks immediately of Marx’s
rewriting of Hegel’s claim that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, pero
Benjamin argues that this tradition of using theatrical vocabulary to describe histori-
cal events extends all the way back to the German seventeenth century. Regardless,
let’s stick with this metaphor for a final moment. If history is a drama in process,
one could then say that practitioners of contemporary opera are in a word, “corps-
ing.” To corpse, as the British theatre slang has it, is for an actor to break character
mid-scene. Corpsing typically occurs when something hilariously funny happens,
but the scene or circumstances require the actor to pretend not to notice, or not to
be amused. One corpses when one plays through these catastrophes, demands a
keeping-up of appearances, even after the illusion has been murdered or ruined.
Perhaps the illusion died long ago, or right at the very beginning. Perhaps it never
existed to begin with.

To recognize these possibilities is to have an understanding of opera that is histori-
cally informed, and to look forward to its futures, endlessly rewriting and replaying
the notes written on its own (ever increasingly) exquisite corpse.

NOTES

1. Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (Londres: Routledge, 2002), viii–ix.
See also, the title of Joseph Kerman’s collection of essays, Opera and the Morbidity of Music
(Nueva York: NYRB Books, 2008).

2. Joe Kelleher has written about the “unpredictability of theatrical events [cual] is also
tied up […] with whatever happens to remain [emphasis in original] of the event, Por ejemplo
in the thoughts and feelings of the audience as it is passing before us.” In reflecting on these
remains as something that gets “under the skin” and acts like an irritant, he cites Alan Read.
See Kelleher’s Theatre & Política (Londres: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 22–23, and Read’s
Theatre, Intimacy & Compromiso: The Last Human Venue (Londres: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

3. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 164–72. (essay originally published as “The Spin Doctors of early Music”
in July 1990.)

4. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 2001), 189–91.

5. Rebecca Schneider draws specific attention to the interrelatedness of intermediality and
Fried’s notion of theatricality in this passage, which she quotes in Performing Remains: Art and

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War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Londres: Routledge, 2011), 159. Here and throughout
this essay, I am indebted to Schneider (and particularly Performing Remains) for the signifi-
cant attention she has paid to question of remainder, remains, reenactment, death, zombies,
haunting, theatricality, and temporality. See also: Rebecca Schneider. “In Response, a Call,"
Cambridge Opera Journal 16, No. 3 (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge: 2004), 307–9.

JOSePH CeRMATORI is assistant editor at PAJ: A Journal of Performance
and Art. His writing has appeared in Theater, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics,
The Brooklyn Rail, capitalnewyork.com, and hotreview.org.

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