Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

摘要

Previous articleNext article FreePeculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment MimesisRoger Mathew GrantRoger Mathew GrantPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore"They're laughing at the opera, they're splitting their sides with laughter!"1 Or at least so claimed Paul H. D. d'Holbach, whose words would have been no small matter when they were penned in 1752. The Paris Opéra had been "profaned," he satirically wrote, by "senseless laughter and indecent gaiety."2 As the home of sung French tragedy, or tragédie en musique, the Paris Opéra was a most unusual place for comedy.3 A space for gods and heroes, for love and death and classical ideals, the opera treasured there was nothing to laugh about. But that summer a small traveling group of Italian opera buffa performers took up residency at the Opéra, bringing to Paris for the first time a new form of comic opera that was slowly spreading across Europe from its origins in Neapolitan theatres. This new form of comic opera lampooned the traditions of its tragic counterpart. Its stories concerned aspirational servants and hapless old misers, bumbling, pretentious losers and the tricksters who could hoodwink them with outrageous disguises. Though smaller in cast and in duration, it specialized in the overblown. Everything about it was exaggerated: the stage action and gesture, the inappropriate sentiments, the antics of the plot, and, most of all, the music.Comic opera presented a challenge to the Enlightenment aesthetic doctrine of mimesis. Until the mid-eighteenth century, critics had seen opera as a union of poetry with music on the stage. Each moment in the drama employed these forces together to create a coherent image and action, using stock musical figures and procedures to amplify the intended affect of the drama. Especially in the case of French criticism, music was understood to be subservient to the poetry of the libretto; even in passages without singing, the music of the opera was tied to the expression of its text.4 Using these procedures, opera fell into accord with the neoclassical doctrine of mimesis, in which the goal of art was the imitation of the natural world. Comic opera originated, in part, as a parodic, metatheatrical critique of this operatic aesthetic.5 Composers of comic opera adopted several new mimetic techniques that mocked the ossified musical procedures of serious opera and, further, the neoclassical mimetic doctrine itself. These composers employed mimesis in exaggerated, excessive, and rapidly changing forms; they also began to use poetry and music as autonomous signifying systems, engaging in musical mimesis to suggest something other than what was expressed in the opera's poetry and thereby subverting the meaning of the text. These practices bolstered the relatively new notion that music had the power to act as a sign independent of poetry.The growing awareness of comic opera's peculiar use of mimesis and of its distinctive musical style facilitated a transformation in operatic aesthetics. Curiously, instead of creating a more expansive mimetic theory to accommodate the new Italian style, critics explicitly turned away from this neoclassical doctrine in favor of a new view in which music, independently, was said to attune its audience to an affective state. In the domain of aesthetic theory, then, the extreme mimesis in this music was no longer mimetic. It was instead affective.Precisely because the historiography of comic opera is tightly associated with the aesthetics of mimesis, the important role that this musical idiom played in catalyzing a reassessment of the mimetic doctrine has not always been apparent. Instead, historians and theorists of this repertoire have traditionally emphasized its contributions to the development of mimetic techniques in music.6 But one result of the critical quarrel on comic opera was the theoreti