reverses, and by the end, as Higgins sings some of her motifs,
she is creating a new character for him.^7
These are valid points, but they center on dramatic charac-
ter in the usual sense, and I would look to a third way of under-
standing the shared motifs. It is not so much that the charac-
ters learn from one another’s musical motifs as that they sing
their way into the “voice of the musical”—a voice that is not
exactly their own but in which their voices can join. I am bor-
rowing Carolyn Abbate’s phrase “voice of the opera” here, for
Abbate catches the key idea that a musical drama is disrupted
by moments of vocalese and can thereby attain a kind of narra-
tive voicing, a melodic and harmonic world into which various
characters enter at various times, not so much because they are
like one another psychologically (although they may be), but
because they belong to the same aesthetic design.^8 The simi-
larities of melody and harmony shared among different char-
acters are not psychological or sociological similarities. They
are aesthetic similarities.
Take Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady. His songs have rhyth-
mic similarities to the songs of Higgins and Eliza, as Geoffrey
Block has noticed.^9 Doolittle is a problem for the character-
68 CHAPTER THREE
(^7) See Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical fromShow Boat to
Sondheim, pp. 235–40. Swain, The Broadway Musical, p. 200, makes a similar
point.
(^8) See Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century. Abbate is dealing with Edward Cone’s sense of voice in The Composer’s
Voice, rejecting the transcendent implication of that meaning in favor of a post-
structuralist definition. I am borrowing from her discussions of singing charac-
ters in opera, especially in chapters 1 and 3. Her discussion of narrativity in
musical sonority itself (chapter 2, especially) results in a single voice that is not
Cone’s “composer’s voice” but does not step entirely free of the transcendental
nevertheless. I do not engage the argument at that level, although I do wish to
record the penetrating sentences that sum up this position: music has “a terri-
ble force to move us by catching us in played-out time. When music ends, it
ends absolutely, in the cessation of passing time and movement, in death” (Ab-
bate, p. 56). In answering to this aesthetic quality, nineteenth-century opera
remains distinct from the musical. In Kierkegaard’s terms, which I call on in
chapter 8, “recollection” is being caught “in played-out time.” The musical
seeks what Kierkegaard called “repetition” instead.
(^9) Block, Enchanted Evenings, pp. 238–40.