Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera by Mary Ann Smart

Review by: Anya Suschitzky

Notes, Second Series, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 336-337
Published by: Music Library Association
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336
devoted to The Dream of Gerontius, 19 to
Elijah. The whole is written in a clear, ele-
gant, and notablyjargon-free style.
All in all, this volume is an outstanding
achievement, both in its own right and as
the final installment of The History of the
Oratorio.The four volumes together stand
as an invaluable survey of the oratorio
genre over five centuries, to be read with
profit and pleasure by musicologists, music
Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Edited
by Mary Ann Smart. (Princeton Studies in Opera.) Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2000. [vi, 301 p. ISBN 0-691-05814-8 (cloth);
0-691-05813-X (pbk.). $55 (cloth); $17.95 (pbk.).]
Opera has long provided challenging
questions for anyone wishing to develop
feminist, gay, lesbian, or other (relatively)
new musicological methodologies. Siren
Songs, the latest collection of essays on
opera, gender, and sexuality, makes a sig-
nificant contribution to these projects. But
it does so with an important and refreshing
difference. Leaving behind the fashion for
autobiographical and confessional narra-
tives, defensive postures, and "essentialist"
binary oppositions, most of these essays are
based on the kinds of documents used in
what is now being called "traditional" his-
torical scholarship. Music analysis and
examinations of literary sources, staging
manuals, composers' letters, and social and
political contexts are the basis for fascinat-
ing observations about representations of
gender and sexuality, many of which also
yield broad perspectives on the relationship
of opera to history.
Catherine Clement, whose book on the
fate of women in opera librettos launched
one important strand of feminist musicol-
ogy more than twenty years ago (Opera, or,
The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988]; originally published as L'opera,
ou, la defaite des femmes [Paris: B. Grasset,
1979]), opens with a meditation on the im-
pact of real and imagined histories on
Austrian stagings of Fidelio in the 1930s
and 1940s. Like the panel of contributors
to "Staging Mozart's Women" (Gretchen
Wheelock, Mary Hunter, and Wye Jamison
Allanbrook), Clement highlights possible
tensions between historicized readings of
musical styles and operatic conventions,
and the social and sexual politics of per-
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NOTES, December 2001
students, social historians, and the general
musical public. Smither and his publisher,
the University of North Carolina Press, are
to be congratulated on the successful com-
pletion of one of the most important musi-
cological projects of recent times.
PHILIPOLLESON
Universityof Nottingham
forming operas in modern settings. A re-
cent opera performance also provides the
starting point for Katherine Bergeron's es-
say on Pelleas et Melisande, although this
time the stage is set in the composer's own
time, in a psychodrama where the charac-
ters are all symptoms of Golaud's emotional
distress. Bergeron focuses on Melisande's
hair, symbol of unfettered desire and a
Freudian fetish; she also suggests that cer-
tain repeated ideas in the music chart the
ebb and flow of Golaud's desire and repres-
sion. The resulting network of observations
about visual effect, musical detail, and psy-
choanalytic symbolism highlights a com-
plex core of eroticism and psychic distress
in an opera that has often confounded crit-
ics by its apparent restraint and evasiveness.
Two other essays adopt psychoanalytic
frameworks, one by Lawrence Kramer, who
calls on Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud,
and Jacques Lacan in a dizzying theory of
opera and sexuality, the other by Peter
Brooks. Brooks's work on melodrama and
the body has already influenced recent
opera criticism. Here, in an essay on Eboli's
role in Don Carlos,he develops another very
suggestive idea: that of "the hystericized
voice" (p. 125), a kind of "acting out" in
which singing is both an exploration of
symptoms and a passionate, talking cure.
Brooks and Kramer illustrate theoretical
models for understanding sexuality in
opera by means of relatively brief examples
from the repertory and its reception. Other
authors examine the meaning of a whole
work by placing it within its immediate
historical context. Linda and Michael
Hutcheon unearth a wide array of literary,
artistic, and medical connections between
Book Reviews
Salome and fin de siecle female sexuality;
Joseph Auner examines gender in Jonny
spielt auf, modernism, and mass culture;
and Philip Brett proposes a new reading
of the libretto for Peter Grimes,viewing it as
a symptom of postwar British debates on
social policy.
But operas may also stand in oblique re-
lationships to their contexts, perhaps even
encouraging revisions of accepted histori-
cal narratives. Roger Parker suggests that
in Don Carlos, Elizabeth's last aria resists
nineteenth-century trends toward interior-
ity by adapting references to the past from
earlier in the opera, remaking history and
challenging patriarchal authority. And
Martha Feldman and Heather Hadlock
view uses of operatic convention as barome-
ters of historical change. Feldman exam-
ines the centrality of patriarchal power in
opera seria librettos and eighteenth-
century social hierarchies and listening
habits. Noting the demise of the father and
sexualized representations of the mother in
literature and opera after the French
Revolution, she argues convincingly that,
rather than opera simply reflecting context
(or vice versa), both illuminate the devel-
opment of modern subjectivities. Heather
Hadlock also reveals an important histori-
cal shift, this time by tracing the changing
significance of the trouser role. Whereas
Mozart's Cherubino is excluded from
erotic encounters and remains a figure of
fun, Massenet's Cherubin is a serious erotic
partner with a Tristanesque love duet, in
which "his" body is removed from view, the
result being two female voices performing
all the conventions of musical eroticism.
Fears of fin de siecle lesbian cross-dressing
probably motivated the decision to hide the
disguised body; but such strategies were no
longer necessary in Der Rosenkavalier,where
the page boy is less shocking than titillat-
ing. In different ways and by different
means, both Feldman and Hadlock urge us
Music and Cinema. Edited by James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David
Neumeyer. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of
New England, 2000. [vi, 397 p. ISBN 0-8195-6410-9 (cloth); 0-8195-6411-
7 (pbk.). $70 (cloth); $24.95 (pbk.).]
In the introduction to this collection of
essays on film music, editor David Neu-
meyer makes an interesting and essential
observation. "It [is] gratifying," he writes,
This content downloaded from 185.2.32.46 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 02:52:58 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
337
to consider the historical specificity of an
opera's recurring themes and provide mod-
els for understanding opera through his-
tory and history through opera.
Finally, Mary Ann Smart's marvellous in-
troduction signals the book's concern with
history of yet another kind. Beginning with
an account of feminist musicology, she
shows how early concerns with visual objec-
tification have blossomed into the prolifer-
ation of means and methods enjoyed in re-
cent studies of opera, the body, voice, and
history. She also observes that by paying
attention to "what is differentabout opera"
(p. 7), namely that meaning can be located
not only with the composer but also with
the characters, performers, and audience,
recent critics draw inspiration from femi-
nist studies even as they move into other
scholarly territories to prompt a radical re-
thinking of authorial authority and the
adoption of "new historical" approaches to
music and its contexts. Smart's essay on
Aida, a fascinating study of the musical and
visual gestures used to represent the hero-
ine, captures well her interest in feminist
debate as well as her desire to build on that
legacy through critical and imaginative en-
gagement. Thus her introduction to Siren
Songs concludes, with some justification,
"this new work on gender and sexuality has
shaken up the historical and analytical
tenets of opera studies, so much so that it
has become impossible to write about cer-
tain aspects of opera without taking ac-
count of gender" (p. 16). Siren Songs cele-
brates the fact that, rather than an "other"
hovering on the fanciful periphery, consid-
erations of gender and sexuality have be-
come crucial to opera studies, as well as to
debates about the past, present, and future
of musicological disciplines.
ANYASUSCHITZKY
MertonCollege,Oxford
"to see the extent to which ... film-music
scholarship is now a discipline with a past;
none of us exploring the subject confronts
a blank page" (p. 8). As Neumeyer rightly