Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera: Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun

265 Pages·2015·4.145 MB·English

by  Yayoi Uno Everett

Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera
Musical Meaning and Interpretation
Robert S. Hatten, editor
YAYOI UNO EVER ETT
Reconfiguring Myth
and Narrative in
Contemporary Opera
Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho,
John Adams, and Tan Dun
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2015 by Yayoi Uno Everett
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Everett, Yayoi Uno, author.
Reconfiguring myth and narrative in contemporary
opera : Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John
Adams, and Tan Dun / Yayoi Uno Everett.
pages cm — (Musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01799-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) —
ISBN 978-0-253-01805-2 (ebook) 1. Operas—21st century—
Analysis, appreciation. 2. Golijov, Osvaldo, 1960– Ainadamar.
3. Saariaho, Kaija. Adriana Mater. 4. Adams, John, 1947–
Doctor Atomic. 5. Tan, Dun, 1957– First emperor. I. Title.
II. Series: Musical meaning and interpretation.
MT95.E84 2016
782.109’05—dc23
2015019678
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To Hideo and Shoko Uno
La barbarie, ce n’est pas “l’Autre”; elle est en
nous, en chacun de nous, tapie comme un fauve,
prête à bondir, et c’est à nous de la débusquer et
de la dompter. Il me semble que la musique, la
littérature, et l’art en général, ont un rôle essentiel
à jouer dans ce combat qui ne s’arrêtera jamais.
Barbarism is not the Other; it resides in us, in each
of us, lurking like a wild beast ready to jump, and
it’s up to us to uncover and tame it. It seems to me
that music, literature, and the arts in general have
a vital role to play in this never-ending battle.
Amin Maalouf, Adriana Mater
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
List of Abbreviations xvii
1. Toward a Multimodal Discourse on Opera 1
2. O svaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar:
A Myth of “Wounded” Freedom 41
3. Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater:
A Narrative of Trauma and Ambivalence 81
4. J ohn Adams’s Doctor Atomic:
A Faustian Parable for the Modern Age? 124
5. The Anti-hero in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor 166
Epilogue: Opera as Myth in the Global Age 197
Glossary of Terms 201
Notes 205
Bibliography 219
Index 229
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Preface
The inspiration for writing this book came from lively debates I have had with
friends and colleagues following performances of new operas at various venues
over the course of ten years. Often, the underlying questions centered on whether
the opera was successful in its treatment of music, portrayal of characters, narra-
tive proportion, and staging. Back in 2003, I recall debating the profound stasis
and circularity in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin at its premiere in Amster-
dam’s IJstheater; while my Dutch colleague dismissed the opera on the basis that
“the music goes nowhere,” I defended the absence of teleology as an essential fea-
ture of the musical drama. At the Lincoln Center’s 2005 premiere of Brian Fer-
neyhough’s Shadowtime, my friends and I similarly debated whether this con-
cert-opera, chronicling Walter Benjamin’s war trauma in a fragmented sequence
of dialogues, monologues, and instrumental pieces, constituted a legitimate op-
era; the booing and hissing from the audience at the end of the performance indi-
cated that an opera awash in angular, atonal language without flowing lines, and
lacking narrative continuity could not be called an opera. Following the Lyrical
Opera of Chicago’s 2007 premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic in Chicago, a
composer colleague and I disagreed on the theatrical excesses and the lengthy
proportion of the second act in Peter Sellars’s mise-en-scène. “Why does it have
to go on for so long?” she asked, to which I replied that it had to do with creating
a portal into the mythic experience of an operatic apocalypse.
These diverging responses to live performances attest to the fact that opera in-
volves a complex negotiation with the libretto, music, action, lighting, and other
aspects of the production. Considering these issues, this book addresses new de-
velopments in operatic production that have become commonplace since the
1980s; while music and libretto constitute the initial source material, they operate
in counterpoint with variable production components of the director’s mise-en-
scène, including choreography, lighting, props, and filmic projections. The signi-
fying capacity of music and text may be greatly altered by the performative com-
ponents of an opera’s mise-en-scène. But why have these new operas stirred up
hours of heated debate? What lies at the root of our disagreements in our inter-
pretive experience of opera?
In the last two decades, scholarship on opera has expanded its range of critical
discourse by taking into account gender, cultural, literary, psychoanalytic, and
media theories. In Unsung Voices (1991), Carolyn Abbate examines the perfor-
mative dimensions of opera by exploring what she calls the “narrating voice.” In
Feminine Endings (1991), Susan McClary offers a gender-based discourse cen-