In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic
performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas
from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by
musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly
bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She
seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as
the phenomenon that brings opera into being.
Weaving between opera's "facts of life" and a series of works including
The Magic Flute, Parsifal, and Pelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum
of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric
visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as
lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so,
she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem;
coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of
disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of
musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious
unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense
physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the
genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can
engender in listeners.
In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be
passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a
complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to
historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the
ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is
best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read
this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.
