- Hanning, Barbara. “The Influence of Humanist Thought and Italian Renais-
sance Poetry on the Formation of Opera.” Ph.D. diss., Yale U., 1969. 374p. - Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton U.P., 1999. x, 192p. ISBN 0-691-00408-0. ML3858 .T66.
“Opera’s history can be mapped and partitioned according to various super-
sensible realms it has brought into audible perception and the changing ways it
has done so.” Tomlinson connects opera with philosophy; it reflects the para-
digmatic views of its time—in particular, views of the mind/body relation.
Early opera had no unconscious; it was not yet dualistic. Philosophers looked
for ways to make soul and substance one. Then the dualism of Descartes was
accepted and expressed in absolute monarchs who shared human and divine
attributes; they became central to operatic stories. Mozart, and comic opera
generally, attacked that absolutism, forecasting Kant’s subjectivity. Don Gio-
vanni is a self that refuses to be transcended. Kant’s worldview resonates in
Verdi and his 19th-century contemporaries. Notes, expansive index. - Corse, Sandra. Opera and the Uses of Language: Mozart, Verdi, and Britten.
Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson U.P., 1987. 163p. ISBN 0-8386-3300-5.
ML1700. C7.
“In opera, the aesthetic function of language is reduced in the text because it is
redistributed to the music. Librettos are literary works in which the literary
qualities have been to some extent stripped away, so they tend to emphasize
the communicative function of language rather than its aesthetic function.”
Thus the “composer reinvents, with a different medium, the ambiguity and
multiple relationships of literary texts.” As this happens, “music often
attempts to rescue and resurrect meaning, making meaning possible as a coop-
erative venture between music and text, composer and librettist, singer and
audience.” To demonstrate this thesis, Corse offers long program notes on six
operas. Le nozze di Figarogoes smoothly, with partly acknowledged assistance
from Siegmund Levarie (#1322), but trouble brews with the ever recalcitrant
Die Zauberflöte. Music is there found to “undermine or contradict the text.”
Things are worse in Falstaff,where “the opera itself often works to subvert the
meaning of Falstaff’s words.” Deconstruction seems forced here, outside its
comfortable literary demesne. Sometimes music is said to do more than it
really can, as in Death in Venice,where it is said to describe Aschenbach as “a
person who is easily led by his emotions into irrational behavior.” Musical
examples, backnotes, bibliography, index. - Kerman, Joseph. Opera as Drama. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U. of California Press,
- xvii, 232p. ISBN 0-520-06273-6. ML3858 .K4.
First edition, 1956. This edition adds material on Idomeneo,a new chapter on
operatic criticism, and revisions passim. Kerman gives to music “the central
articulating function” and judges its quality by how well it “articulates the
drama.” Since drama in this context equals text, his view places music in the
service/support role. Kerman’s insistence that music “bears the ultimate
responsibility for articulating drama” leads him to a favorable evaluation of
Philosophy and Theory of Opera 83