The Domestication of Opera

Author(s): Barry Emslie

Source: Cambridge Opera Journal , Jul., 1993, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), pp. 167-177
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/823801

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 5,2, 167-177

The domestication of opera

BARRY EMSLIE

At the end of the last century opera started to shed elements of its many-sided
and hybrid character. Of course there are numerous exceptions, but in general
the genre becomes tighter, the expansive five-act form that triumphed at Paris
in the middle of the nineteenth century is rejected and several elements, such
as the ballet, dismissed as distractions. Musical structures, influenced - among
other things - by Wagner's leitmotif system, become denser and even large scores
exhibit an exceptional thematic homogeneity. Most striking, all those bandits,
pirates, gods and gypsies make way for more conventional figures in mundane
urban and rural settings. The fantastic is displaced by the domestic - or, if the
old stage-figures survive, they do so, as I will suggest below, in an altered and
diluted form that makes them proper subjects for 'play'.
In many ways it is the latter aspect - the marginalised survival of the 'grand',
the not entirely lost feel for the polyphonic character of this once most pluralistic
of forms - that is particularly interesting. For it is a 'survival' in which the exotic
is housetrained. We may watch the process by which these atavistic elements
are castrated so as to make them amenable, which is to say non-threatening, to
the culture of the new industrial European bourgeoisie. It is a striking characteristic
of the general development, most notable in operetta, that a dominating ambiva-
lence enables the new middle class to play with old - and now almost forbidden
- elements without being carried away by them. Thus a stage world evolves in
which the gypsy is really a baron, the student a prince, the nobleman from the
Far East (in Vienna for an industrial fair!) almost a Western oriental gentleman,
and the simple carpenter no less than the Tsar of all the Russias. But irrespective
of the exciting notions they may evoke, these grand figures will ultimately be
quite ordinary. The fantastic is shown to be out of place. To put it aphoristically,
this essay is about the manner in which Isolde's philtre turns into Arabella's
glass of water.
To bracket Arabella and Isolde is to be reminded that the former's glass of
water celebrates - well-nigh annoints - the sanctity of marriage, while Isolde's
magic potion makes clear the utterly privileged moral superiority of the adulterous
relationship it initiates. Furthermore, the abandon of Tristan and Isolde is expressed
with unprecedented clarity. These two people are most unambiguously carried
away; not surprisingly, one notes that the exotic elements of the genre are most
profoundly evocative of sexual license, even when - particularly when - they

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168 Barry Emslie

are marginalised. Consequently the domestication of opera is an expression of

the taboos and restrictions on sexual practice imposed on the modern urban bour-
geoisie. Thus it is to be expected that these works simultaneously express, however
implicitly, the wish to violate exactly these restrictions. Freedom, when equated
with sexual desire, becomes increasingly a site not only of legal proscription but
of personal neuroses, and it is this society's most original theorist who notes
'the inverse relation holding between civilisation and the free development of
sexuality'l and who argues that 'we have created difficult conditions for our sexual
life in marriage'.2 How appropriate then that bourgeois marriage, either at the
point at which the happy couple are about to enter into it, or at the point when
its disturbed equilibrium is restored, becomes the standard happy end of nearly
all operetta and a good deal of opera in the twentieth century. And how equally
appropriate that many of these works involve 'play' with the idea of violating
the sexual laws on which marriage rests. However, before looking at specific
aspects of the development, one overriding theme can be identified. If there is
one characteristic of the genre that is manifest in the nineteenth century and
the object of a fierce strategy of containment in the twentieth, it is the role of
the foreign and the asocial.

One of the ironies of the development of modern industrial society, especially

marked in the first half of this century, is that it has simultaneously celebrated
individual liberties - increasingly enshrining them in constitutions and written
law - while exhibiting considerable difficulty in holding on to them when faced
with a plurality of life styles. Industrial habits of production place a high priority
on shared values. The knitting together of the modern state, the interactive close-
ness of the province and the metropolis, produces a respect for sameness, a shared
national identity so strong that local customs - in every sense marginalised -
are reduced to the decorative. At times of stress such societies often exhibit a
violent hostility to anything that can be characterised as alien. A feeling of cultural
homogeneity encourages violations of the very liberties that are otherwise held
up as fundamental principles upon which the modern state rests. This ambivalence,
which is also in a narrower sense the ambivalence of the appealingly exotic vis-a-vis
the threateningly foreign, is again today causing serious problems in Europe, and
is especially prevalent in Germany, where one often notices a contradictory 'tourist
mentality'.
When overseas, Germans are enchanted by the exotic, glad to eat foreign foods
and wear foreign clothes. Back in the 'Heimat' - gushy and nostalgic songs about
the 'Heimat' are a standard feature of the German language operetta - many

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays, International Psycho-Analytical Library No. 57 (London 1935),
109.

2 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, International Psycho-Analytical Library No.
17 (London, 1930), 25.

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 The domestication of opera 169

of these same people are uncomfortable with foreigners, especially if they 'flaunt'
alien dress and manners. This same contradiction appears when the liberal asylum
laws of the modern German state are placed alongside its 'racial' definition of
Germanness. The Germany Constitution guarantees asylum to all those who can
prove that they are victims of political persecution. Moreover, arriving at the
German border and claiming to be a political refugee is sufficient to gain entry.
The claimant will also be housed while the case is examined. However, Article
116 of the Basic Law defines what it means to be German not in terms of place
of birth but, implicitly, of race - or 'Volkszugehorigkeit'. It is thus exceedingly
difficult for any foreigner to become a German citizen. In fact, for the overwhelm-
ing majority of Germans, the notion of a non-Caucasian with a German passport
is, for good reason, a self-evident contradiction. Thus the 'aliens' stay on the
basis that they remain aliens, while the Germans feel increasingly threatened by
the growing numbers of non-Germans in their midst. In such a context the foreigner
is too easily simplified into a double-headed beast: the smiling host elsewhere,
the potential enemy at home.
As industrial society develops in this century one would expect to find in the
bourgeois opera house an expression of this uncertain relationship between dom-
estic culture and the attractive/dangerous external. Lisa, the heroine of Das Land
des Lachelns, is almost a paradigmatic example. She loves her 'far eastern Prince'
and he most assuredly loves her - he gets the operetta's greatest hit, 'Dein ist
mein ganzes Herz'. He is also a modern figure in the European sense. However,
once the lovers are in the 'Far East' we see that local customs (here tied up with
local politics) still count for something, and when Prinz Sou-Chong takes a 'second
wife' - although it is merely pro forma - Lisa realises that the two worlds cannot
be reconciled and heads for home. Yet what an odd but apposite collection of
signifiers the operetta displays: Vienna and an industrial fair; a foreign country
that cannot be named except by the work's kitschy title; a failed relationship
despite undying, and extremely tuneful, love; local customs that are both threaten-
ing and dismissed as irrelevant; and the standard nostalgia ('Ich mocht' wieder
einmal die Heimat sehn') - but in this case nostalgia for the modern European
metropolis and not the exotic: it is usually the other way around. And therein
lies an interesting feature of Lehar's operetta. The exotic is not so threatening
because it can be utterly enjoyed elsewhere. It does not matter that the experience
is shown to fail, for it retains its bitter-sweet quality as remembrance. The problem
for European culture is much sharper when the multi-cultural threatens to become
an intrinsic feature of domestic society. Then the exotic must be tamed and dressed-
up in order to pre-empt any evocation of the enemy within..
Before looking at further examples of the contradictory manner in which the
alien and the exotic, in the popular sense, are handled in the twentieth century,
it is worthwhile noting the role the 'asocial' played in the past. Nineteenth-century
opera tended to be inclusive by nature; its hybrid character as a genre encouraged
plurality. In such operas the asocial may be recognised as such, but it is fore-
grounded rather than marginalised. Furthermore, this polyphony of content and
the corresponding variety of social life presented - and celebrated - on stage,

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170 Barry Emslie

mean that the characters often appear to have a greater range of freedom; their
actions cover a wider imaginative terrain. The 'grand' tradition, because of its
absurdities - 'absurdities' as they appear to the contemporary audience for whom
nineteenth-century operatic plots are a byword for the risible - reminds one of
Freud's assertion that, despite what we may want to believe: 'the liberty of the
individual is no gift of civilisation. It was greatest before there was any civilisation'.3
Among the classic examples of the asocial there is Verdi's early opera, I masna-
dieri, based on Schiller's first play, Die Rduber. It is remarkable how many Anglo-
Saxons try to lock the 'hero' (Karl Moor) into the English tradition of the good
criminal with a social conscience. Verdi's and Maffei's Carlo is, however, no Robin
Hood. Although simplified textually, he remains in essence Schiller's utter outsider,
committed to butchery and plunder. He is also stamped by a mode of behaviour
which, in the context of fin-de-siecle culture, is unconvincing and alien. In the
world of domesticated drama, Carlo's murder of Amalia - what a drama teacher
would call his 'motivation' - is preposterously irrational and self-indulgent. But
it was no problem for Verdi. It was exactly such elements that appealed to his
imagination.
This same taste for the 'absurd' and the 'grand' is notable in another Verdi-
Schiller opera, Don Carlo, in which Verdi and his librettists add Gothic elements
to the original. Germans have often noted that Schiller's tragedy is essentially
a family drama set in an imperial court. In the opera this familial aspect is underlined
but, paradoxically, it is a way of introducing the fantastic. The figure of the Monk
(and/or Charles V), which in this form is not in the play and brings the opera
to a wholly ambivalent end, certainly increases the number of Habsburg family
members who appear on stage, but it functions in a purely macabre manner.
The Monk/Charles V is, in effect, a ghost; a character brought back from the
dead by virtue of an authorial wilfulness that violates all later notions of credibility.
Dramatically, he functions exactly like Count Moor, who has to be rescued from
his own tomb in the earlier Schiller-Verdi work. It would appear that Italian
opera holds onto the fantastic for somewhat longer than bourgeois drama.
None the less, what becomes of these bandits and ghosts as the genre 'develops'?
In general the ghosts simply evaporate, or if they survive they do so (consider
The Turn of the Screw and the living ghost of all those 'dead' E. M.s in TheMakropulos
Case) as explicit, knowing representatives of modern sexual neuroses. But the
bandits remain attractive, and are acknowledged as such. The passions that allegedly
drove young ladies to hysteria and fainting at the premiere of Schiller's Die Rduber
are repressed but not erased. However, it becomes imperative that the glamorous
criminal be divested of any overt threat. He turns into someone to play with
- sexual fantasy made respectable. For instance, in Mill6cker's operetta Gasparone
it is clear that a Sicilian bandit may bite your ear - in fact the lady who

3 Freud, Civilisation, 32.

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 The domestication of opera 171

imagines she has run across him in the dark clearly hopes he will - but he is
hardly likely to chop it off and send to your relatives with a ransom demand.

In the context of this general development, Wagner is particularly interesting

in that he combines the fantastic with the domestic in a unique manner. At first
glance no composer would seem more fascinated by the exotic. But not merely
the overriding notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, nor the specific, highly integrated
compositional technique he evolved suggest the domestic. More tellingly, one
notes that the plots, in particular the massive story of the Ring, are in essence
domestic tragedies writ large. The gods find themselves restricted by utterly
'modern' bourgeois notions of propriety. The mightiest of all these figures, Wotan,
whom one would expect to be most at liberty, is compelled to destroy his own
creation in accordance with laws and taboos of which he is the personification,
but which he none the less cannot respect. Furthermore, many of the plots that
Wagner constructed provide a variety of rationales whereby taboos - above all
the incest taboo - may be violated. What is ultimately beyond Wotan is shown
to be the rightful inheritance of pairs of lovers, couples dedicated not to a world-
view but to the realisation of their own sexual desires. Moreover, these unconven-
tional liaisons are not only placed in opposition to bourgeois morality, but gra-
dually evolve a highly sophisticated intellectual basis, ultimately being presented
as the highest embodiment of the very laws and taboos they in fact traduce and
blaspheme.
In the early music dramas the heroes claim for themselves large fields of action.
But the naivete of the Dutchman and Tannhauser is so great, and their manifest
foreignness so marked, that they make no real contact with the societies into
which they blunder. They remain outsiders. Lohengrin is more interesting:
although he arrives in Brabant every inch a mystical incarnation, he means not
merely to stay, but to marry and stay. None the less, he sets conditions that
enshrine his mystical, privileged status and that, as a result, cannot be reconciled
with the mundane nature of marriage. Elsa is compelled to violate these conditions,
and in doing so she asserts the importance of the sexual couple as a collective
identity over that of the single male hero. All subsequent young Wagnerian heroes
do not come whole and ready-made on to the stage. Rather they attain completeness
through a sexual encounter that privileges the power of the female. It is these
encounters (Siegmund with Sieglinde, Siegfried with Briinnhilde, Tristan with
Isolde, Parsifal with Kundry) that Wagner is determined should not be bound
to, or within, conventional notions of marriage. Thus incest and adultery are
not only foregrounded as the premises of narrative tragedy but are also, and at
the same time, elevated; they are shown to be heterosexual, non-promiscuous
liaisons superior to the heterosexual and supposedly faithful marital relationships
that conventional society asserts and defends by virtue of exactly those taboos
we observe Wagner abusing.
Parsifal carries this development to a remarkable but wholly logical extreme.

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172 Barry Emslie

Here the dominant religious ideology that imposes the taboos is invaded and
remade in the form of a quasi-oratorio, placed around a central act wholly depen-
dent on the revelatory power of sexuality. The most far-reaching violations of
religious laws are thereby underpinned. Ultimately the hero, via his sexual awaken-
ing in the arms of a female who collectively embodies his mother, the eternal
whore and the Virgin Mary, attains a status that can be equated only with Christ.4
It is no wonder that Wagner's characters became such enticing figures for twentieth-
century audiences, repressed by sexual restrictions that are, in the operas, gloriously
violated.
With Wagner, the gods leave the stage and are replaced by bourgeois men and
women whose representatives the gods, despite outward appearances, always were.
However, not only the bandits, as noted above, make the transition from the
nineteenth to the twentieth century. Another group also survives and undergoes
a similar change of status reflecting the domestication of opera. But in this case
the process by which the exotic is enfeebled and housetrained is rich with bitter
ironies.

There is no more marginalised yet visible group in the general context of the
development of bourgeois Europe than the gypsies. Mobile to an unequalled degree,
holding on to concepts of culture and race that openly defy national boundaries,
rejecting the habits and highly inflexible non-seasonal patterns of industrial work,
the gypsies are a 'colourful' reminder of the past. Moreover, the survival of theatri-
cal gypsies - the most striking and revealing (a)social group in the context of
the domestication of opera - is highly compromised, in part reflecting the tragedy
that the actual gypsy communities undergo.
The 'colourful' character of the gypsies - as it is popularly perceived - is always
regarded as ambivalent in the 'host' societies, and this ambivalence is highly appro-
priate in a theatrical context. Firstly, their exotic appeal is obvious. They are
not only on the move but, as their daily 'theatrical' costumes declare, blatantly
alien. It is imagined that they can fulfil no worthwhile function in modern pro-
ductive life. Certainly the charge that they are 'asocial' was a regular feature of
German society long before the Nazis made it a basis for organised persecution.5
Thus the appeal of the gypsies follows from the attraction of something that,
in modern capitalist societies, is characterised as inessential. They come into contact
with stable communities in much the same way as does the circus - appropriately
a phenomenon with which they are closely linked. Were they to be seen as even
partially open to economic and social assimilation, they would utterly lose their
identity. Assimilated gypsies have not interested composers, and have concerned
4A fuller account of this argument can be found in my article: 'Women as Image and Narrative
in Wagner's Parsifal', this journal, 3/2 (July 1991), 109-24.
5 See Reimar Gilsenbach, 'Die Verfolgung der Sinti - ein Weg, der nach Auschwitz fiihrte',
in Feinderkldrung und Privention: Kriminalbiologie, Zigeunerforschung und Asozialenpolitik,
Wolfgang Ayaif et al. (Berlin, 1988), 19. Gilsenbach also notes how the language used about
the Gypsies was later employed against the Jews.

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 The domestication of opera 173

racists only in that they raise the fear that one might not be able to identify
the alien/enemy within. In both the popular and the artistic imagination, the
gypsy identity still depends upon 'non-European' dress and adornments, the sup-
posed temperamental behaviour, the association with a non-suburban notion of
passion. A gypsy taking the 8.15 to work in the City is a contradiction in terms;
it is therefore the non-gypsy, above all, who is keen to keep the Carmen-Micaela
dichotomy as simple as possible. These two figures must remain polar opposities.
The perceived refusal to give up what is necessary for a place in modern society
makes the gypsy not only attractive but also dangerous, an itinerant identity
simultaneously envied and feared. 'They' steal from good citizens. They may
even abduct children, who are otherwise fascinated - something that must be
outgrown - by promises of adventure. Worse still, having rejected all modern
'values', gypsies are assumed to perpetuate medieval practices that 'we' have left
behind but most assuredly not forgotten. It is a small imaginative step from the
tent with the crystal ball to necromancy. And if the creation of the unconscious
is seen as a historical event, then what is repressed - as a result of 'growing up'
to become fit for a place in modern society - takes on the character of the past,
of things not only once desired in the psycho-sexual history of the individual,
but quite possibly practised by the forebears of the race. Thus the stereotypical
gypsy becomes, in more than one sense, the contemporary personification of
notions and desires that have supposedly been 'outgrown', and thereby an implicit
promise that certain things - always unconventional and often wicked - are still
to be had.
Clearly in the development and domestication of opera these figures fulfil many
functions. They may, like Verdi's gypsies, be the dangerous witches of the grand
tradition; or they can be reduced to the more frivolous and decorative figures
of central European operetta. The first underline the wilder and polyphonic char-
acter of opera while the latter indicate how its social themes become narrower
and tamer. However, in both cases what is generally forbidden in the drawing
room is allowed on the stage, and thereby the repression necessary for civilisation
or culture, in the sense that Freud intends in Civilisation and Its Discontents,
is violated in the marginalised world of a visit, after working hours of course,
to the opera house.
Nevertheless, as opera becomes increasingly domesticated, the gypsy figure
becomes enfeebled. A distancing takes place that allows the bourgeoisie to play
with the notion of the foreign and the forbidden, but not, in the end, to be
carried off by it. This development is, potentially, already present in two operas
Verdi wrote almost simultaneously: II trovatore and La traviata. Azucena is the
typical outsider, closely associated with abduction and murderous dark deeds.
However, as we follow the progress of opera through the last century, Azucena
and her sisters gradually fade. In Otello, Verdi's penultimate opera, the ersatz
gypsy figure (a sorceress) is absent from the stage altogether, while what she repre-
sents - the magic weave of the handkerchief in which the exotic non-European
hero so completely and foolishly believes - is contained within the context of,
essentially, a family tragedy. Yet in La traviata (significantly an opera of interiors

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174 Barry Emslie

or semi-interiors) this marginalising process is already clear. The gypsies who

turn up for Flora's party are adding nothing more than a touch of exoticism
to entertain the Parisian bourgeoisie and provide an opportunity for the obligatory
'colourful' ballet music. In fact many directors, instinctively appreciating their
bogus status, have them 'played' by some of the party guests letting their hair
down.
There is one operetta that presents the problem of the ambivalent character
of the gypsies very clearly. In Lehar's Zigeunerliebe the heroine is strongly tempted
by the gypsy life, and this temptation is overtly erotic and explicitly linked, via
the dream sequence that constitutes the second act, to magic. However, the heroine
comes to her senses, rejects the peripatetic life and, truly appreciating the greater
values of 'rest and quiet', marries the dependable and sedentary male. But the
strengths of the operetta, its chief melodies and its glamorous appeal, lie unambi-
guously with the 'rejected' gypsy lover, while the painful triumph of common
sense - which is the belated victory of Micaela over Carmen - merely points
up how unsatisfactory the formerly correct conclusion is. It resolves the plot
but leaves all the erotic elements unsatisfied.
If the bourgeoisie follows the implied message of Zigeunerliebe it must conclude
that there should be no place on the stage for gypsies. For if they cannot be
genuinely emulated there are dangers in rejecting them, largely because, when
rejected, they prove more potent than the domesticated life to which they lose
out. Under these circumstances the only way the gypsies, and what they represent,
can be retained is by making them a suitable subject for imitation; a strategy
that allows one to play with the attractions of the forbidden group while always
insisting that there is no reason to worry because it is not for real.
However, there is a contradiction at the heart of the process that leads to all
those stage characters who 'play' at being gypsies. The bourgeoisie has other options
open to it besides castration in the form of imitation. The profound sense of
national belonging and cultural homogeneity that characterises the modern state
means that the asocial - the word that always surfaces in twentieth-century docu-
ments about the gypsies - can be perceived, in times of national crisis, as a danger
so great as to justify organised and legalised savagery on the part of the state.
'Civilisation's' need for a group within the nation that can be stigmatised as alien
and employed as a focus for aggression was anticipated by Freud when writing
about the general repression on which culture rests.6 Roland Schopf, recording
the history of the gypsies, remarks: 'The greater the uncertainty of the bourgeoisie
as to its own worth, the greater the mistreatment of minorities'.7 While this
is true in respect of the European bourgeoisie in general, it applied in particular
to Germany during a time of extreme national self-expression. The gypsies, who
between the wars could neither economically nor socially be characterised as major
players in German national life, were nevertheless ideal candidates as cultural
outsiders and victims. Therefore, the ideology that takes us from the operatic-
6 Freud, Civilisation, part V, passim.
See Roland Schopf, 'Biirgerfluch und Biirgersehnsucht', in Zigeunerleben, ed. Joachim S.
Hohmann and Roland Schopf (Darmstadt, 1980), 64.

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 The domestication of opera 175

sounding title Gypsy Blood to the racial theories of, most notably, Dr Ritter (who
saw no possibility of their redemption precisely because of the 'degeneracy' of
that blood) is entirely logical.8
In the end, this ambivalent fascination with the gypsy reaches its climax with
the gypsy camp at Auschwitz, and with Dr Mengele, who initially exhibited such
a tender interest in the children that their parents called him 'Vaterchen' and
kissed his hands in gratitude.9 On the night of 1 August 1944, with Mengele
presiding in full uniform and high boots, all remaining gypsies at Auschwitz were
gassed.10 But the devastating unambiguity of the final solution is, paradoxically,
an appropriate reflection of a wider and deeper cultural ambivalence.

Before the final catastrophe at Auschwitz, a shift - consistent with the dilemma
mentioned in respect of Zigeunerliebe and the tendency already noticeable in La
traviata - had taken place in the presentation of theatrical gypsies. They become
the most popular subjects for play and parody and lose whatever legitimate status
they might have had. The witch is replaced by the fancy-dress outfit. It is as
if treating the exotic as simply a costume that one puts on - like Countess Maritza,
Rosalinda, et al. - permits an encounter with the forbidden without truly calling
the domestic into question. All the better if the lover is tricked. It is all harmless;
the audience is in the know and everything will be returned to respectability
at the end. Operetta as a genre, and twentieth-century operas with domestic themes
(Strauss's most notably), are rarely denied happy endings. It is no accident that
the decay of the grand-opera tradition leads to a corresponding decline in the
tragic. Certainly spectacular murders and suicides become increasingly inapposite.
Flora's guests and the celebrated Cszadas of Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus point
up the appropriate prominence of gypsies in party scenes. The carnival atmosphere
that so often characterises the central acts of bourgeois operas and operettas is
striking in several respects. That these parties/carnivals are overtly anti-domestic
is self-evident. Characters leave their overfurnished houses or - in the case of
Arabella - hotels; they dress up - often in disguises and dominoes - and arrive
in well-planned chaos at the ballroom, where only the exotic (bored Russian counts,
etc.), or figures who overturn the social order ('noblemen disguised as coachmen
and coachmen as noblemen', as Mandryka rages), may rule. In such a setting
the man of the house can attempt to seduce his wife's maid without injuring
the moral code that so torments and restricts him at home, although we are
often expected to believe that he does not know that it is the maid with whom
he is dealing. Certainly it is no surprise that the sexual shattering of the master-
servant relationship, above all in respect of the male master and the female servant,
plays a prominent role in the party/carnival scenes. There is a long line of male
8 Gilsenbach, 'Die Verfolgung' (see n. 5), 23.
9See Jercy Ficowski, 'Die Vernichtung', 107, and Gerhard F. Riidiger, 'Jeder Stein ist ein
Blutstropfen: Zigeuner in Auschwitz-Birkenau', 143; both in In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute
verfolgt, ed. Tilman Ziilch (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1979).
10 Ficowski, 109.

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176 Barry Emslie

figures who, in their more modern, urban circumstances, have regretted just as
bitterly as the Count in Mozart's Figaro the loss of old feudal privileges. And
a good many bourgeois domestic lives have been thrown into chaos as a result
of violating this - the social 'incest' taboo of adult, settled existence; a taboo
that becomes a psychosis of the outwardly well-ordered communities of the Euro-
pean bourgeois in the early twentieth century.
But of course the violation in the theatre is - with regard to the overt claims
of the plots - highly conditional. Things will be sorted out the morning after,
maybe at the police station when everyone has sobered up, or back at home
when the disguises are removed, or in the foyer of the hotel when the hero from
the country discovers that his betrothed is not, after all, a typical - i.e., occasionally
decadent - city girl. But the carnival context also recalls an aesthetic theory that
cannot be jettisoned simply by virtue of the orderly final denouement and the
attendant promise of a secure resumption of everyday life.
However, while Bakhtin's notion of the 'carnivalesque' is implied by these scenes,
it is not realised by them. These carnivals are tame affairs that ultimately do
not so much upset bourgeois order as provide a framework by which fantasies
can be indulged and then 'put right'. The true carnivalesque, in the Dostoyevskian
sense that Bakhtin has in mind, is much more a feature of the polyphonic operas
of the nineteenth century. Of course, if we extend Bakhtin's problematising of
language into the realm of modern French deconstructive thought, the distinction
between 'play' and 'reality' can be erased so that 'to pretend, I actually do the
thing; I have therefore feigned pretence'.11 And certainly the twentieth-century
operatic carnivals, by throwing the new restrictions overboard for a brief period,
occasionally allow the lost figures back on to the stage, but only in the sense
that we might 'discover' a Cleopatra or a Bacchus at a masked ball. For instance,
in Ariadne auf Naxos we can see the manner in which the potentially polyphonic
- the re-entry of the gods and the mixing of the commedia dell'arte with the
'tragic' - is contained not only within the house of the richest man in Vienna,
but also within his timetable. In that sense these shows intimate the sort of thing
Bakhtin was writing about, but not in a direct one-to-one relationship. The stage
carnivals are a faded recollection of a lost textual complexity and many-sidedness.
In fact they are, like the 'misunderstandings' and excessive consumption of cham-
pagne on which they depend, transitory and fake. The richness they imply but
cannot realise could now be recovered only through deconstruction; a process
that would, on principle, expose a multiplicity of meanings irrespective of the
presence of carnivals. Nevertheless, when we look at the earlier operas it is easy
to see how there has been a shift, in the Schillerian sense from the presentation
of a character to the representation of a type; and how diluted, as a result, the
theatrical expression of sin, vengeance, love and fun have become.
The intense discrepancy between the carnival/party scenes as they superficially
appear and what they imply is clear - painfully clear - in the middle act of Arabella.

11 Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1980), 139; quoted in Michael
Holquist, 'The Surd Heard: Bakhtin and Derrida', in Literature and History: Theoretical
Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, 1986), 143.

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 The domestication of opera 177

The heroine chooses exactly this supposedly liberating setting to make her declara-
tion of love to the man who wants nothing other than a conventional marriage,
albeit one cushioned, as is customary with Strauss-Hofmannsthal, by an unconven-
tional amount of money. But Arabella's quietly radiant vows are not in the least
vague as to what 'love' in this context means. It has nothing to do with passion;
rather it means total obedience, an absolute sharing that extends to, and includes,
the grave. It is the most limiting and single-minded assertion of devotion imagin-
able, and the fact that all Arabella now wants is to have a few glasses of bubbly
and dance for the last time with old admirers, exposes the tentativeness with
which writers and composers approach this potential pandora's box of desire.
These parties are only to be played with if it is made absolutely clear that they
are not in the least threatening.
Perhaps the domestication of opera is over. Encouraged, if unintentionally, by
Wagner, it probably reached its climax with Strauss's Intermezzo. Indeed a compari-
son of the theatrical furnishings of Wagner's Wahnfried with all those comfy
couches and cushions that cluttered Garmisch provides a striking if frivolous pic-
ture of the overall development. Contemporary opera composers - one thinks
of Henze and Tippett - while far from unmoved by the neuroses of the bourgeoisie,
do not automatically incline to the drawing room. Meanwhile the operetta appears
to have died. In Germany and German-speaking Middle-Europe it has been replaced
by an ever growing wave of TV 'Folkmusic Shows', in which country maids
in dirndls and men in exaggerated anachronistic local costumes mime badly to
songs about mountains and valleys. These ditties - the composition of which
is now an industry - often seem to be little more than technical exercises as
to how many rhymes can be found for the word 'Heimat'. One cannot help
speculating on what the gypsies think of it all.

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