Post on 08-Apr-2018
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 1/15
Don’t Look Now: Opera, Liveness,and the Televisual
nm e l i n a e s s e
e a s tm a n s c h o o l o f m u s ic
o
In 2005, on the occasion of the “Opera Goes to the Movies” festival in Washington,
DC, Philip Kennicott, a writer for the Washington Post , assessed the state of opera onfilm in an article entitled “Opera and Film: Can This Union Be Saved?” Arguing
that the “relationship” between opera and film is “long-standing” but not entirely
“fruitful,” Kennicott echoed the dissatisfaction of many critics. “Where are the great
films of opera?” he asked. “Yet to be made. The form has never conquered what
might be called the tongue-and-teeth problem. While it makes perfect sense within
the opera house that everything is sung, when transferred onto film, the opera illu-
sion often breaks down. Suddenly one is wrenched from a world where it’s normal
for people to say hello and good night and I love you in song, into a world where
you notice huge gaping mouths, swelling diaphragms, quivering tongues and glis-tening teeth. . . . Rather than assist in the creation of theatrical intimacy, the camera
usually punctures the basic illusion essential to opera.”1
Kennicott argues that although musicals seemed to have escaped this predica-
ment, the “tongue-and-teeth problem” plagues opera on video as well. Indeed, his
diagnosis echoes earlier critiques of televised opera; in a 1989 essay entitled
“Death by Television,” for example, Henry Pleasants complained about producers
and directors, asking “What makes them think that the enjoyment of opera is
assisted by an examination of a prima donna’s molars or the mole on her cheek
or the agitation of her tongue and soft palate?”2
Though Kennicott’s primary subject is opera films, and Pleasants is discussing televised opera (both live
broadcasts and studio productions), their objections are remarkably similar. Both
authors display a kind of squeamishness about the uncanny proximity made pos-
sible by the camera, embodied in their preoccupation with an image they find
equally grotesque and disturbing: the close-up of a singer’s working mouth.
Instead of portraying filmed or televised opera as somehow lacking, or claim-
ing that it just isn’t the same as “being there,” these critics are disturbed by its
intrusive physicality and presence. Exposing the singer’s technique in all its cor-
poreality, which is akin to a revelation of the means of operatic production, rends
The Opera Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 81 –95; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbq014
Advance Access publication on May 15, 2010
# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 2/15
the veil of illusion that shrouds live performance. Common to these complaints
is the notion that opera and technologies of visual reproduction and dissemina-
tion are simply incompatibleopera is an inherently fantastical medium, where
disbelief must be radically suspended, while contemporary film and televisionmore often convey a realist (even hyperrealist) aesthetic.3 As Philip Auslander has
argued, television has become the realm of the live, while in the movie theater,
Dolby-enhanced sound is typically meant to lend gritty reality to the images
onscreen.4 Kennicott concludes that “the best guide to [making] film opera may
be to avoid realism at all costs.”5 Distance helps foster the suspension of disbelief
as well as the illusion of Romantic transcendence. Getting up close and personal,
in other words, is antithetical to the work of opera as fantasy. These critiques
confer a special status on live opera, cordoning it off from the commercial
pandering to short attention spans represented by cuts and close-ups. In doingso, they also celebrate the glamour and magic of admiring a singer from afar as
she fills a large hall with beautiful noise.
Now would seem the moment for the obligatory nod to Walter Benjamin and
to assert that modern critics are merely enacting a kind of negative proof of his
mechanical reproduction essay, which famously claimed that cinema, in bringing
the art object closer to the viewer, eliminates the mystique of the original and
effaces its aura.6 However, in this essay I would like to do something slightly dif-
ferent: namely, to reconsider the distinctions being made here between the live
and the mediated, between televisual immediacy and lively distance. For these cri-tiques rely on the assumption that opera as experienced live is somehow funda-
mentally different from opera translated into the medium of film or television.
This seemingly innocuous assumption (who could argue with such an apparent
truth?) is worth probing. While critics have been debating the merits of filmed
and televised opera, the boundaries between mediatized forms and the unsullied
“live” have become increasingly blurred. Whether through actual film footage pro-
jected on the backdrop, the presence of video screens, turntables, or radios on
stage, or more subtle techniques such as rotating stages to imitate tracking shots,
opera has been taking account ofeven bringing aboutits own mediatizationfor years. Simulcasts of opera in movie theaters and the recent operas filmed in
European capitals with a steadicam and broadcast in real time are perhaps the
most current manifestations.
Auslander has dubbed this phenomenon “liveness”: the persistent interpenetra-
tion of the live and the mediatized such that there remains no clear distinction
between the two. He presents a slew of evidence to support his claim that the live
event itself is a product of mediatizationfrom jumbo video screens at baseball
games (where fans can watch instant replays and close-up simulcasts) to theatrical
productions of television series and movies. “To put it bluntly,” he writes, “thegeneral response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority
82 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 3/15
of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible.”7 One
moment in the history of operatic liveness will serve here as a kind of test case:
Harry Kupfer’s production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice , first
conceived for the East German stage in 1987, filmed at Covent Garden in 1991, andsubsequently released on video by Kultur. It may seem strange to revisit a produc-
tion whose visual language has, by now, become something of a cliche. But
Kupfer’s production thematizes the very issues of presence, distance, intimacy, and
liveness that have preoccupied scholars of opera, performance, and media in
recent years.8 In particular, I want to explore the particular cultural freight that
Kupfer’s mediatized staging still carries today. What might his production tell us
about the way we have come to experience opera in the age of television?
Icon of performance
The myth of Orpheus is one of music’s origin stories, and as such, it is all about
efficacious performancein particular, the potential of musical performance to
conquer death and transcend loss. Orpheus’s wife Eurydice is struck down in her
youth, bitten by a venomous snake, and the mourning hero travels to the under-
world to win her back, convincing the gods with his songs that his sorrow is
sincere. They relent and agree to return Eurydice to life on one condition:
Orpheus must not turn to look at his beloved while they journey out of the under-
world. He is unable to resist gazing upon her, however, and she dies a secondtime. Orpheus gives himself over to despair and is ultimately murdered and dis-
membered, his head still singing as it floats down the river Hebrus.9
The plot of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice differs from the source myths in a few
crucial ways. Here, Euridice pleads with Orfeo to turn and acknowledge her, and
he is unable to resist her sorrow and scorn. Despite Orfeo’s illicit gaze, Gluck’s
opera ends happily: the hero’s final lament for the twice-lost Euridice convinces
the gods to relent, and they agree to release her from death and allow the two
lovers to unite. This lament, the famous “Che faro senza Euridice,” has some-
times puzzled listeners thanks to its major-mode refrain: Gluck himself admittedthat it would be easy for a performer to turn it into a kind of puppet dance,
stressing the importance of the performer in creating appropriate sentiment.10
Operatic treatments of the Orpheus myth are by nature self-referential, in that
convincing singing becomes the subject of the work. As such, they seem to lend
themselves to speculation about the nature of musical performance: Carolyn
Abbate, for example, has used the image of Orpheus’s severed head as a meta-
phor for performance, one that both acknowledges and questions the notion of
the performer as a mere vessel for sound that originates from elsewhere. She
writes, “The singing head represents the uncanny aspects of musical perform-ance, operatic performance in particular, precisely because one cannot say how it
opera, liveness, and the televisual 83
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 4/15
sings, who is in charge, who is the source of the utterance, and what is the
nature of the medium through which musical ideas become physically present as
sound.”11 Orpheus’s singing head is a kind of “master symbol” that “summarizes
the complications of the performance network: its instability, the deadnessimplicit in any object that has been animated by music, the living noise in the
channels that run between compositional thought and the structures inscribed in
a score, the creation of music by performers, and the sound that strikes the lis-
tener.”12 The severed head “represents singing that travels far from the body in
which it originated” and is a reminder of the “enduring quality of live sound,”
thus evoking echoes, repetition, and the mechanical.13
But Kupfer’s production of Orfeo adds another variable to the equation: how
do operagoers come to hear these echoes of the live? The Orpheus myth serves
as an excellent point of departure for considering the media of mechanical repro-ductionthe ways in which operas are captured and stored for repeated listening
and viewing (e.g., CDs, tapes, and DVDs), as well as the technological dissemina-
tion that allows live opera to enter homes and movie theaters as it comes into
being. This storythe mediation of operais one that needs to be told.
Euridice, lost and found
A cryptic note at the end of Abbate’s In Search of Opera suggests that Kupfer’s
staging of Gluck’s opera may have been the catalyst for her thoughts onOrpheusand no wonder.14 Abbate sees the Orpheus myth as pointing beyond
the notion of performance as always already scripted toward a notion of a “double
work,” co-created by performers and composers.15 Indeed, the multiple versions,
revisions, variants, and editions of Gluck’s operain Italian and in French; for
castrato, countertenor, or mezzo; with the refurbishments by Berlioz or in the
edition by Ricordiremind us that operatic texts are fluid and changeable, even
as we attempt to fix them in critical editions and “complete” recordings.
Although it is the first, Italian-language version (mounted in Vienna in 1762) that
serves as the basis for Kupfer’s production, the existence of multiple Orfeos callsinto question the very notion of a fixed or stable original. Kupfer’s production
plays up this tension between the fixed and the changeable, the already scripted
and the spontaneous.
The action is set in the present day: Orfeo (played by Jochen Kowalski) is a
leather-jacketed rock musician whose lover, Euridice (Gillian Webster), is killed in
an accident. Kupfer is known for his tendency to emphasize psychological narra-
tives and hidden motivations; this production, which had its premiere in East
Berlin two years before the wall fell, is no exception, and in many ways it is repre-
sentative of his status as a darling of the Regietheater crowd. Set designer HansSchavernoch, Kupfer’s collaborator throughout the 1980s, was likely responsible
84 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 5/15
for the sparse landscape of the stage and the focus on revolving stage machinery,
which featured larger-than-life photographs and walls of mirrors. The stark,
radical look of Kupfer’s Orfeo made it both highly successful and controversial
and, as we might expect, the production drew a certain amount of criticism forits modern orientation.16 However, the choice to set the action in a kind of
abstract “present” has other, more interesting consequences. With its prominent
television set, portable tape player, and even scores, which the performers consult
at crucial moments in the drama, Kupfer’s production seems preoccupied with
technologies of inscription and recording (see figs. 1 and 2). Indeed, during
Orfeo’s attempt to escort Euridice back from the dead, the television set becomes
something more than a prop. Pushed onstage by a member of the chorus, the set
remains still, anticipating Euridice’s arrival, and it flickers to life only when she
is revived by the gods. Crucially, the music of the recitative (“Vieni, segui i mieipassi”) seems to emerge from the set, as if turning it on has activated the scene.
Amor ensures that Orfeo grasps the set, and then the god places his own hands
on either side of Orfeo’s head. Both Orfeo and Euridice writhe in pain, as if the
return to life (or perhaps the conversion to video) is a kind of torture.
Throughout the long journey out of Hades (which includes both a duet for the
Figure 1 Amor’s body double with the tape player from which singer-Amor’s voice
emerges.
opera, liveness, and the televisual 85
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 6/15
principals and Euridice’s aria “Che fiero momento”), Euridice pleads with her
husband to look at her and embrace her, while Orfeo carries the television, dis-
playing a live-feed image of Euridice, across the stage. He does not look at the
set; in fact, Kowalski’s every gesture is an embodiment of the injunction “Don’t
look now!” At best, television is perhaps an incomplete or unsatisfying replace-
ment for his lover, yet he also seems burdened with it, hauling it around, fraught
and troubled, pained by the presence of both the televised and the live Euridice
(figs. 3 and 4).It would be easy to read the televisionstarring as it does in a scene that
traces the borders between life and death, presence and absenceas a symbol of
loss, of Orfeo’s forced separation from his beloved.17 Those who are familiar with
the final scene of Kupfer’s Gotterdammerung (staged at Bayreuth the year after
Orfeo), which famously showed the destruction of Valhalla via television sets
watched by a well-heeled onstage audience sipping champagne, perhaps cannot
help but read this television as yet another symbol of callous distance from, and
disregard for, the suffering of others.18 To be sure, one could argue that here,
mediation is configured as a kind of death: Orfeo has no access to the “real”Euridice, he cannot look at her or touch her, and she remains trapped in the
Figure 2 Amor and Orfeo consult the score.
86 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 7/15
netherworld of the not-here. Instead, he can only lug around her simulacrum.
The television could thus be construed as a barrier to joyful immediacy, a kind of
emblem of the insufferable distance that Orfeo must endure. At times, the ges-
tures of Kowalski and Webster explicitly acknowledge this distance, as they reach
for each other but never touch. Euridice is present yet absent, the way a televised
image is both there and not thereits source always removed in space and some-
times in time as well. The fact that Orfeo does not look at the image on the
screen perhaps only underscores the fact that the televised is a poor substitute, abarrier to the real.
However, there is another way of viewing the televised Euridice, one that
emerges when we compare the new burden Orfeo clutches with this production’s
other fetish objects. After Euridice’s death, Kowalski carries around several mate-
rial traces of the missing woman: a high-heeled shoe, her pocketbook, and a wig
of dark, teased hair that she wore at the opening of the opera. The rather overde-
termined symbolism clearly portrays Orfeo as a man unable to accept his lover’s
death.19 He retains those objects most closely associated with her, taking them
out of his jacket from time to time to hold them and sing to them. The classicFreudian account of the fetish, however, is less concerned with particular objects
Figure 3 Orfeo’s agony and the televisual Euridice.
opera, liveness, and the televisual 87
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 8/15
than it is with a kind of magical thinking, a double consciousness in which the
subject “knows very well” something disturbing is true or real, “but all the same”
pretends it is not so.20 Orfeo, of course, knows very well that Euridice is gone,
but by clinging to her material traces, the staging suggests, perhaps he is able to
imagine that she has not disappeared forever. But the contractual thinking that
characterizes fetishistic attachment also reminds us of the oath Orfeo makes to
the gods in order to win his lover back. Orfeo knows that Euridice is a living
woman when she is restored to him in the underworld, but he must act as if sheisn’t. In fact, he must effect a reversal of his previous fetishistic thinking: he
knows she has been brought back from the dead, but in order to retain her, he
must act as if she is still gone, at least until they exit the underworld. Orfeo,
unlike Freud’s classic fetishistic thinker, is aware of the doublenesshence his
pain. Read this way, it is Orfeo’s tragic inability to accept the televisual Euridice
as a temporary substitute for the real that causes her second death.
Orfeo, who agrees to act as if Euridice is not there, is perhaps the inversion of
the television viewer, who, although knowing the figures on the screen are not
“real,” is caught up in their story and reacts as if they are. Kupfer thus neatly transforms the contract dramatized in Gluck’s opera into a parable about the
Figure 4 The journey from the underworld.
88 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 9/15
fantastical, fetishistic thinking of the modern television viewer. This small detail
opens up another interpretation of the television set onstage. Perhaps the televi-
sion is not entirely or merely a symbol of corruption and loss, a barrier to real
immediacy. On the contrary, this may be a moment where, as Auslander hasargued, the presence of mediating technology is itself what creates the impres-
sion of liveness. Even the use of the television in this scene is a kind of clever
imitation of split-screen or picture-in-picture effects: when the camera focuses on
Orfeo’s anguished reaction to Euridice’s pleas, we can see both her face and his,
despite their physical distance from each other. The onstage television also makes
reference to the viewers at home watching their own sets. In this sense, the televi-
sion, despite its status as an obvious symbol of loss, is perhaps the most strik-
ingly real, material object onstage: it places in the scene a piece of technology
that most viewers probably possess and devote significant attention to. Whereaselaborate backdrops, red curtains, and gilded woodwork may serve to distance the
spectator ( perhaps even pleasurably), the homely television set (and modern
dress) draws in even those watching the production at a distance of several
decades.
It seems fitting, then, that in order to watch Kupfer’s production, which my
library only had available on VHS, I had to resurrect a piece of antiquated technol-
ogy from my attic and haul it downstairs to my office, its cord trailing behind me.
The no-name all-in-one TV/VCR upon which I watched Kupfer’s Orfeo was ubiq-
uitous a few decades ago, and it created some uncanny nesting effects, as whenthrough the frame of my own small-sized, somewhat portable television I watched
Orfeo embrace his own television screen framing Euridice’s face. Moreover, the
fractious materiality of my little set made for some interesting echoes or amplifica-
tions of the drama unfolding on screen. I’ve long since lost the remote for this
machine, so I was forced to sit quite close to it in order to control the volume or to
rewindat times it felt as if the set were in my lap, a burden only slightly less
onerous than Orfeo’s. I also had to touch the set much more than normal, feeling
the cranky “plick” of the cheap buttons and praying that it would actually decide to
operate without eating the tape. Whenever I pressed rewind or play, perhaps six times out of ten there was an ominous pause, followed by the sound of mechani-
cal vomiting as the tape was ejected. I would pull out the videocassette only to find
that the fragile ribbon of tape was still caught within the guts of the machine. I
had to work my fingers inside the player to delicately disengage the ribbon and
then carefully rotate the cassette wheels to draw the wrinkled tape back into its
case. After several viewing sessions and several interludes like this, the tape, not
surprisingly, was slightly the worse for wear. This meant that, at certain moments,
the image would flicker and catch, and narrow horizontal bands would travel up
the screen for several seconds, then disappear. When Euridice died and Orfeo’stelevision flickered and expired in concert, the trauma and intensity of the
opera, liveness, and the televisual 89
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 10/15
moment was only amplified by my real fear that soon my machine would do the
same, destroying the tape once and for all (fig. 5).
I don’t mean to be flippant here. On the contrary, Rick Altman’s work on
cinema as event has taught us the importance of taking account of the physical
experience of spectatorship.21 Moreover, Kupfer’s meditation on the nature of tele-
visual presence suggests that technologies of reproduction are the very means we
use to access the real. Perhaps it’s not quite as simple to draw distinctions as
we’d like it to belive versus recorded, real versus fictional, here and now orgone forever. As Auslander and others have argued, the cultural dominance of tel-
evision means that it can no longer properly be understood as simply an element
in our visual environment: it is an environment.22 And since television has
defined itself as a live medium, it has become the realm of the livethe place
where the live happens. In an interview published in 1988, Kupfer acknowledged
that he believed the televisual Euridice brought the scene’s trauma somehow
“closer” [naher ] to the spectator: “For me, Orpheus with the television in his hand
is today closer and more comprehensible than if he had the living actress in his
hand.”23 Kupfer seems to gesture toward the intense immediacy of the televisualenvironment by radically eliminating it at Orfeo’s end. The gods have relented
Figure 5 Euridice’s second death, televised.
90 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 11/15
and restored Euridice to her husband, but Kupfer’s staging works against
this happy ending by splitting Orfeo in two: one Orfeo ( played by a body
double) commits suicide in a phone booth after “Che faro,” while the other
Kowalskicontinues to sing, but out of character.24 Kowalski briefly steps off-
stage, reemerging in tuxedo jacket and tie. He is joined by Euridice and Jeremy
Budd, the boy soprano who sings the part of Amor, who steps onstage for the
first time to replace his double. Euridice is tellingly dressed in the same black
robe she wore in the underworld. Her wig is in place now as well, no longerfetish but appropriate attire. The three sit in plain chairs onstage, standing to
sing their parts in turn, faces expressionless (fig. 6).
The choir trumpets the triumph of love, but it seems a curiously hollow
victory. We remember that we have seen one Orfeo (the body double) kill
himself, and, though the chorus sings of the gods’ decision to bring Euridice
back to life, the lovers seem to be united in death. This death is not any recogniz-
able Elysium but rather a cold, imageless placethe realm of slavish fidelity to
the work. The three singers in concert attire sit stiffly in a row and sing their
parts from scores. The drama, it seems, is over, though the music continues. Theperformers have become automatons, puppets animated solely by the score,
Figure 6 The triumph of love as recital.
opera, liveness, and the televisual 91
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 12/15
merely reenacting, repeating, reiterating what has already been written; their
detachment makes the happy ending ring false. It is tempting to read the very
intensity of the singers’ commitment to performing from the score as yet another
moment (like Orfeo’s earlier attempts to appease the Furies by singing by the
book) that exists only because it is necessary to represent Gluck’s opera faithfully
for the audience. Throughout the final scene the television set now lies cold and
still on the edge of the stage. Such an ending suggests that perhaps the most
problematic technology of reproduction is the work concept itself. No surprisethat the chorus sings of love’s tyranny, of the painful bondage that is preferable to
freedom, and the enslavement to which we willingly submit.
One visual detail of this final scene is particularly compelling. Kupfer has
called for the rotating panels at the back of the stage to roll around, revealing mir-
rored facets that reflect the opera audience back to itself (fig. 7).25 Fantasy, illu-
sion, and distance have been abolished. The space of the stage has collapsed, and
the work is presented as a recital for the delectation of the spectators, implicating
them (and us) in this different kind of death. It seems that the distance
affordedor representedby Orfeo’s television (Fernsehen in German) wasactually necessary to create the illusion of immediacy. It was what allowed us to
Figure 7 The production’s final gesture: mirrors collapse the stage space.
92 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 13/15
see far beyond the mere realization of the workit actually opened a space
between the two characters, a space that could be filled with Orfeo’s grief and
Euridice’s longing.
The collapse of distance between Orfeo and Euridice brings to mind apassage of Jean Paul: “Ah, how much we love one another in the distance,
whether it be the distance of space, the distance of the future or the past, or,
more than all, that double distance beyond the earth!”26 Jean Paul’s meditation
on the distances of time, space, and death brings us full circle, back to the
Romantic distance I argued that critics of opera film were so keen to maintain.
Kupfer’s production encourages us to rethink simple distinctions between media-
tion and immediacyhere the up-close presence made possible by televisual
technology is steeped in poignant and productive distance (because the real
object is absent, unattainable), while live, unmediated presence is stripped of fantasy, closing the distance so necessary for operatic illusion. In Kupfer’s retell-
ing, the Orphic myth is yet again a story about the origins of opera, and it relies
on the televisual to make sense. Watching televisually, we have the sense that
things are happening for the very first time. Faced with the unsettling spectacle
of mediated opera, we, like Orpheus, have been urged “Don’t look now.” But
everyone knows that “Don’t look now” is not a prohibition but an invitation: to
look intently and look closely, because something important is happening. Like
Orpheus, we can’t help turning our heads.
n o t e s
Melina Esse is an assistant professor of musicology at Eastman School of Music. Herresearch interests include opera and melodrama,film sound, performance theory, and genderstudies. She has published in the CambridgeOpera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music , andCurrent Musicology.
This essay is based upon a paper presented at
the Syracuse International Film Festival Forum onMusic and Sound in Film in October 2009. Iwould like to thank Theo Cateforis and StephenMeyer, organizers of the symposium, as well asAlessandra Campana, Sam Dwinell, David Levin,David Rosen, Mary Ann Smart, and HollyWatkins, for their assistance.
1. Philip Kennicott, “Opera and Film: Can ThisUnion Be Saved?” Washington Post, January 9,2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/articles/A56556-2005Jan7.html (accessed January15, 2010).
2. Henry Pleasants, Opera in Crisis (New York:Thames and Hudson, 1989), 45. Pleasants alsocites a 1988 letter from Robert Donnington to the
Musical Times: “Jessye Norman was giving atechnically and musically magnificentperformance . . . and half the time she was beingbrought so close, with her vocal apparatus all toovisibly at work and her mouth (naturally) open,that she might almost as well have been doing acommercial for toothpaste.”
3. Jennifer Barnes associates this “hyperrealist”
turnin particular, the taste for reality showswith the decline of operas written expressly fortelevision. See her Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television (Woodbridge,Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 99– 100.
4. Philip Auslander, Liveness (London:Routledge, 1999), 12 –16.
5. Kennicott, “Opera and Film.”6. See the discussion of Benjamin and
proximity in Auslander, Liveness, 34 – 35. WalterBenjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” can be found inBenjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51.
7. Auslander, Liveness. 7 .
opera, liveness, and the televisual 93
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 14/15
8. The literature on this topic is growing andincludes scholars with widely varying agendas, as across-section of recent publications demonstrates.See Carolyn Abbate, “Wagner, Cinema, and
Redemptive Glee,” Opera Quarterly 21, no. 4(2005): 597–611; Michelle Duncan, “The OperaticScandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence,Performativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3(2004): 283–306; David Levin, Unsettling Opera:Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);Stephen C. Meyer, “Parsifal’s Aura,” 19th-CenturyMusic 33, no. 2 (2009): 151 –72; Fred Moten, “ThePhonographic Mise-en-scene,” Cambridge OperaJournal 16, no. 3 (2004): 269–81; AnthonyJ. Sheppard, “Review of the Metropolitan Opera’sNew HD Movie Theater Broadcasts,” AmericanMusic 25, no. 3 (2007): 383–87; Mary Ann Smart,“Defrosting Instructions: A Response,” CambridgeOpera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 311–18; AlexandraWilson, “Killing Time: ContemporaryRepresentations of Opera in British Culture,”Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 3 (2007): 249–70.
9. For a discussion of the different versions of the Orpheus myth and their incarnation in opera,see F. W. Sternfield, The Birth of Opera (Oxford andNew York: Clarendon Press [Oxford UniversityPress], 1993), 1 –30. See Marcel Detienne’s TheWriting of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2003) for an in-depth examinationof how stories of Orpheus both shaped and wereshaped by the culture of ancient Greece.
10. See Patricia Howard, C .W. von Gluck, Orfeo(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),37–38.
11. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.
12. Ibid.13. Ibid.14. Ibid., 249.15. Ibid., 18.
16. Critics complained that Gluck’s music wasmade superfluous by the staging (or that the operawas no longer Gluck’s but an entirely differentwork), and one claimed that the production was “arepulsive example of artistic error.” See AnnySchlemm, “Harry Kupfer im Meinungsstreit: AmBeispiel seiner Inszenierung von ‘Orpheus undEurydike,’” in Harry Kupfer : Musiktheater , ed.Hans-Jochen Genzel and Eberhardt Schmidt(Berlin: Parthas, 1997), 138.
17. Compare Kupfer’s use of television with, forexample, the stage productions discussed in Greg
Giesekam, Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2007).
18. See John Rockwell, “Review/Opera: The Final2 Parts of Bayreuth’s Ring ,” New York Times, August5, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/05/arts/review-opera-the-final-2-parts-of-bayreuth-s-ring.
html?pagewanted=all (accessed January 15, 2010).19. Linda and Michael Hutcheon have described
this portrayal of Orfeo as particularly modern in itsmedicalization of grief. See their Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2004), 112.
20. See Laura Mulvey, “Some Thoughts onTheories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture,” October 65 (1993): 3–20.
21. Rick Altman, “Cinema as Event,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992),1–14.
22. Auslander, Liveness, 2.23. See Michael Lewin and Harry Kupfer, Harry
Kupfer (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1988), 42. Thiscomment emerges from Kupfer’s description of his effort to portray “the meeting of a living manwith a shadow, whom he wants to bring to life.”Kupfer states that he wanted to suggest that theconflict between Orfeo and Euridice might be takingplace inside Orfeo. The television, inspired by theradio in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphee, assists in thisinteriorization, Kupfer maintains, because it can be“presse[d] . . . to one’s body”: “Orpheus can haveher directly in the middle of his body, one can
provide an image of that which is really found inhim.”
24. One of the most talked-about aspects of theproduction (after the modern setting) was Kupfer’ssplitting of Orfeo into “man” and “artist”: whileOrfeo the man gives in to his despair, Orfeo theartist transforms his pain into art. See EberhardtSchmidt, “‘Mein Kunst ist mein Leben’: DerRegisseur Harry Kupfer,” in Genzel and Schmidt,Harry Kupfer : Musiktheater , 21. To me, thistransformation feels anything but triumphant.Before the appearance of the suicidal double,Kowalski sings as “artist” (in tuxedo jacket or with a
score) a number of times, and it is as if he turns tothe score to find direction (or to placate theFuries)there is always a predetermined quality tothese moments, thanks to Kowalski’s deliberatelywooden gestures.
25. Michael Lewin has discussed a different kindof mirroring in the final scene of Kupfer’sGotterdammerung , staged soon after Orfeo ed Euridice; there an eerily lit cityscape became, inLewin’s words, a “hall of mirrors,” reflectingcontemporary concerns about urban apocalypse.See Lewin, Der Ring: Bayreuth 1988–1992
(Hamburg: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1991),107–8 (photographs on pp. 305–12). Clemens Risihas written about the use of techniques (including
94 melina esse
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om
8/7/2019 Opera Quarterly-2010-Esse-81-95
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/opera-quarterly-2010-esse-81-95 15/15
similar “mirroring” final tableaux) that make theaudience part of the spectacle in his “SheddingLight on the Audience: Hans Neuenfels and PeterKonwitschny Stage Verdi (and Verdians),” Cambri-
dge Opera Journal 14, nos. 1–2 (2002): 201–10.
26. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian StanislausSiebenkas, trans. Edward Henry Noel (Boston: James
Munroe, 1845), 26.
opera, liveness, and the televisual 95
at T
ar t u U ni v er s i t y on S ept emb er 4 , 2 0 1
0
oq.ox f or d j our nal s .or g
D ownl oa
d ed f r om