Flying a Wagner Kite: Subjunctive performances of a Rheingold scene based on a dramaturgical sketch by Carolyn Abbate

Cambridge Opera Journal

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 159-180

  Parly, Nila ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77952486734     PISSN: 09545867     EISSN: 14740621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0954586710000066     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. In Friedrich Nietzsche's pamphlet Nietzsche contra Wagner he scornfully called Wagner: 'the most enthusiastic mimomaniac, perhaps, who ever existed, even as a musician . . .' (der begeistertste Mimomane, den es vielleicht gegeben hat, auch noch als Musiker . . .). He accused Wagner of being obsessed with staged gestures. The drama might have been the end, and music its means in Wagner's theories, but in his practice the pose was always the end, he said. The Wagnerian music drama was in Nietzsche's eyes a mere 'occasion for many interesting poses!' (eine Gelegenheit zu vielen interessanten Attituden!). Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstücke eines Psychologen (1899), in Der Fall Wagner, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 132-3
2. Mary Ann Smart has written a whole book about opera inspired by Nietzsche's term: Mimomania, Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, 2004)
3. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices, Opera and the Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991)
4. Carolyn Abbate, '"Das Rheingold": A Sketch for Dramaturgy' written directly for a creative seminar at the Royal Danish Opera, April 2006, 1-3. The sketch is here being published for the first time. I have chosen to spread its chapters over my article to increase the chances of discussing its content in detail, but I have left nothing out; Abbate's 'Sketch for Dramaturgy' is printed in its entirety
5. Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the 'Ring': An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Robert L. Jakobs (Cambridge, 1983)
6. originally published as Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (1881-96), 38-9
7. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Musikdramen (1971; 2nd edn, Zurich, 1985), 108-10
8. Jürgen Schläder, 'Kontinuität fragmentarischer Bildwelten. Postmoderne Verfahren im Stuttgarter Ring von 1999/2000', in OperMachtTheaterBilder. Neue Wirklichkeiten des Regietheaters, ed. Jürgen Schläder (Berlin, 2006), 195-97
9. And Klaus Zehelein, 'Zum Stuttgarter Ring 1999/2000' in Der Stuttgarter Ring, ed. Staatsoper Stuttgart and Klaus Zehelein (Stuttgart, 2000), 5
10. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone, first published as Versuch über Wagner (1952; London, 2005), 32
11. Abbate, 'Sketch for Dramaturgy', 3
12. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, Vollständige kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich, 1977), 36-7
13. Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988), 470-1
14. See, for example, Richard Wagner, Beethoven-Festschrift (1870), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Julius Kapp (Leipzig, 1914), VIII, 188-9
15. 'Bass-baritone', in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1992), I, 345
16. See, for example, Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington, 1992)
17. For example Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main, 2004)
18. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (New York, 2005), 17-26. Fischer-Lichte mentions that in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) he explained that, in the Greek theatre, the community-creating Dionysian principle and the individuating Apollonian principle collided, producing a transformation in which the boundaries separating individuals dissolved; his proposal for a modern equivalent was, not surprisingly, performances of Wagner's music dramas
19. Clemens Risi, 'Swinging Signs, Representation and Presence in Operatic Performances', in Arcadia. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 36 (Berlin, 2001), 364
20. Hans-Thies Lehmann, 'Die Gegenwart des Theaters', in Transformationen. Theater der neunziger Jahre, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Christel Weiler (Berlin, 1999), 17
21. In Schechner's view no social performance takes place for the first time, always for the second to nth time. As theatrical performances on stage are marked, framed, or heightened behaviours separated out from just 'living life', they could even be termed 'restored restored behaviours'. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York, 2002), 28-9
22. Adorno In Search of Wagner (see n. 9), 27
23. Adorno In Search of Wagner (see n. 9), 50
24. Nila Parly, Absolut sang. Klang, køn og kvinderoller i Wagners værker (Copenhagen, 2007), 32
25. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, 'Dismembering Mozart', this journal, 2 (1990), 187
26. See also Risi 'Swinging Signs' (see n. 19), 363-72, where the tactile perception of the music caused by extreme duration and repetition is discussed at length