- Levarie, Siegmund, and Ernst Levy.Musical Morphology: A Discourse and a
Dictionary. Kent, Oh.: Kent State U.P., 1983. x, 344p. ISBN 0-87338-286-2.
ML108 .L48.
This profound volume is a collection of stimulating essays that literally explain
what music is and how it achieves its unique effects. Opera is dealt with in
many of the essays, most cogently in “Opera,” p.200–203. It is noted that the
dilemmas of opera “can essentially be reduced to the difficulty of reconciling
dramatic speed and literary clarity with a musical unfolding of forms. Because
these two sets of postulates are incompatible, all operatic solutions have to be
based on some sort of compromise.” In practice, whatever composers and
librettists have claimed and intended, opera became an alternation of literary
and musical segments (obvious in the number opera, less so in Wagner). The
authors do not assert a superiority of text over music or the opposite, but they
observe that in such essential elements as characterization and overall unity of
structure, it is the music that controls the events. Musical form (and other
devices) may delineate a character, but the literary depiction of that character
does not create a musical form. A text may have its own unity of events, but it
does not hold that unity unless the musical elements, taking text into account,
impose their own structure on the whole. Useful bibliography of some 250
items, expansive index. - Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from “Phi-
losophy in a New Key.”New York: Scribner’s, 1953. xvi, 431p. BF458 .L28.
Langer’s writings on aesthetics are of landmark significance. This book brings
her ideas on all the arts into an elegant summary. A seminal belief is that when
two or more arts combine in a single work, one of them assumes a primary
role and assimilates the others; it bears the meaning for the entire work. For
opera, music is the primary art: it “swallows” the text and the spectacle and
creates whatever is valuable in the totality. In this respect, composers (except
Mozart) have not been helpful with their public statements, and their claims
for superiority of text must be disregarded. Music is motivated by text, not
subordinated to it. “The Gesamtkunstwerkis an impossibility, because a work
can exist in only one primary illusion, which every element must serve to cre-
ate, support, and develop.” That is what happened to Wagner’s operas in spite
of himself: they are music, and “what is left of his non-musical importations
that did not undergo a complete change into music, is dross.” (How this assim-
ilation takes place is discussed in #418.) - Kivy, Peter. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions, Including
the Complete Text of “The Corded Shell.” Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1989.
xvi, 286p. ISBN 0-87722-641-5. ML3845 .K595.
Musical expressiveness is real: we actually hear certain emotive qualities in the
music (apart from text). Music, like a face, can be expressive of an emotion (or
feeling: the terms are equivalent here), and the better it does so, the more
enjoyable it is. Emotive description of music is a valid analytic tool. Kivy
emphasizes that while music is expressive of emotions, it does not arouse those
emotions in the hearer; we respond to the expressiveness, although not with
Philosophy and Theory of Opera 87