Book Review

Bourgeois opera:Death in Veniceand the aesthetics of sublimation

“…For Kerman, Tosca epitomised a tendency to put lyricism before dramatic integrity; the shepherd's folk song and church scene, in particular, were mere pretexts for melody, inserted 'not for any dramatic end, but for the display of floating lyricism'. 83 As Eric Salzman has explained, this view of opera as 'above all obsessed with voce, voce, voce' resided at the centre of anti-operatic discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. 84 Just over a decade after Kerman denigrated Puccini's indiscriminate lyricism, Boulez lamented opera's penchant for 'voice for the sake of voice alone': 'I like the human voice very much, although I think that the voice in opera must be part of the whole -sometimes more, sometimes less'.…”

“…Tosca leaps, and the orchestra screams the first thing that comes into its head; this loud little episode is for the audience, not for the play. 87 For Adorno, writing just a year before Kerman, it was precisely this deference to its audience that compromised opera's dramatic integrity. 88 Bending to the whims of 'an audience that always wants to hear the same thing' had made for a musical language that stressed momentary gratification; instead of challenging and persuading its audience by its structural logic in the manner of a philosophical argument, opera seduces through grand rhetorical gestures and repetition.…”