Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (review)

Leonardo J. Waisman

Notes, Volume 66, Number 3, March 2010, pp. 540-542 (Review)

Published by Music Library Association DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/not.0.0270

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/376416

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 540 Notes, March 2010

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND BEYOND

Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth- Century Musical Theater. By David J. Buch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. [xxvii, 450 p. ISBN 9780226078090. $50.] Music ex- amples, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index.

“Magic-heroic-amatory, with a touch of tioning acceptance” of the eighteenth- the tragic” (di stile magico-eroico-amoroso, toc- century philosophes’ determined opposition. cante il tragico): Antonio Salieri’s choice of Buch has found that, notwithstanding these terms to describe his own opera, Armida, re- thinkers’ rationalistic strictures, the mar- veals the complexity of eighteenth-century velous and the supernatural enjoyed great style and genre definitions (later in the popularity on the eighteenth-century stage. same phrase the composer equates “style” In different genres and occasions it could and “genre”). It is much to David Buch’s either buttress the social status quo (when credit that he has undertaken, with a large used by characters in authority) or function measure of success, to unravel one of the as allegorical social critique (when it was threads that make up this tangled web. the powerless who wielded the magic Although the book resulted from Buch’s wand). interest in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, it is by The bulk of the book is devoted to fol- no means the story of Mozart’s precursors, lowing up the manifestations of the mar- culminating in a glowing account of how velous in operatic libretti and ballet plots of the genius from Salzburg outdid them all. the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, Although Mozart gets a chapter of his own, identifying in their musical settings a spe- Buch’s writing never suggests that he repre- cific musical grammar and vocabulary. The sents the ideal towards which previous com- area covered includes German-speaking posers were groping. Interestingly enough, lands, France, and Italy (this last, alas, more the high points of the volume occur in the selectively). Casual references are also made fairly slim preface and three-page post- to England; as usual, Spain is ignored, in script. These two constitute a conceptual spite of its strong theatrical tradition. One frame enclosing the 358 pages devoted to cannot complain, however, about such limi- substantiating the strong hypothesis made tations: the amount of material that Buch at the beginning, and providing the basis has examined and organized is absolutely for the even stronger corollary that the staggering. writer springs at the reader in the last para- An introductory chapter, “Precedents graphs. Buch postulates the continued exis- and Sources of Magic and the ‘Marvelous,’ ” tence, coherence and temporal develop- presents the main classical and Renaissance ment of a cluster of themes revolving sources, mainly mythology and epic ro- around the idea of “the marvelous” that mances, before sketching the main lines of constitute “a forgotten chapter in the his- seventeenth-century literary and musical tory of music” (p. x), to which “not a single handling of the fantastic. Perrault’s fairy book has been devoted” (p. xvi). Although, tales, Italian commedia dell’arte, court and by and large, Buch is correct about the public opera, court ballet and tragédie pointed ignorance of his subject in the lyrique are the main lodes where Buch scholarly literature—inadequately replaced, mines for magic and the supernatural. A for example, by Sturm und Drang in Ratner’s central concept here is that “music in and list of topics (Leonard Ratner, Classic of itself connoted a magical presence by Music: Expression, Form and Style [New York: virtue of its inherent allegorical nature” Schirmer Books, 1980], 21)—he inexplica- (p. 23); therefore no special style or vocab- bly neglects Reinhold Hammerstein’s sub- ulary is needed to represent the marvelous. stantial study, Die Stimme aus der anderen In apparent contradiction to this statement, Welt: Die Darstellung des Numinosen in der the author lists several specific devices, Oper von Monteverdi bis Mozart (Tutzing: some of them employed all over Europe, Hans Schneider, 1998). He attributes much others more characteristic of Italian and of the responsibility for musicology’s silenc- French genres: especially elegant instru- ing of the magical genre to the “unques- mental music, the use of trombones or Book Reviews 541

flutes, special tonal areas such as C minor, arsenal for musical depictions of this terri- unusual modal changes, descending octave bilità, which the author links to the emerg- leaps in the voice, rapid scales and re- ing aesthetic concept of the sublime. peated notes in the strings, accompanied More than half of the chapter on recitative, and low-pitched string accompa- German musical theater is given over to niments are some of the basic items devel- fairy-tale operas, with a substantial section oped before 1700 to express the marvelous. on Der Stein der Weisen (Vienna, 1790), the As it turns out, not many other musical collective piece which includes some con- signs were added to this stockpile in the tributions by Mozart, as Buch himself next hundred years, covered in the follow- revealed some years ago. Two of the traits ing five chapters. Buch assigns exceptional most emphasized for the genre are the importance to the musical theater and bal- hegemonic influence of opéra comique and lets produced by the Académie royale de the “romantic” style, consisting of text set- musique. It is there, around 1750, that he tings with few repetitions. The author’s in- places the most momentous development terpretations of Don Giovanni and Die in the history of the marvelous: the defini- Zauberflöte are informed by his preceding tive breaking up of the older association be- survey of topics and genres, although not tween music and the supernatural that fos- limited by it. They represent a fresh but not tered the expansion and codification of a heterodox view of the two masterworks dedicated musical language. The large in- against the background of the large canvas strumental, choral, and vocal forces em- painstakingly designed and filled out in the ployed, and the creation of scene com- previous chapters. plexes, were operative in enriching this In the hyperconcentrated postscript, a tradition. Chapter 3 reviews the French portentous derivation is postulated: in tak- comic genres. The element of parody ing up the practice of representing the seems to be one of the main contributions transcendental, “the composer took on made by the writers and musicians of the the attributes of the magus, casting sonic fair theaters, the Théâtre italien, and the spells,” and eventually “assumed the cre- puppet shows. The emergence of the aristo- ative force associated with the divine” cratic fairy story, which Buch differentiates (p. 359). The tradition of the terribile, devel- from the older fairy tale, and the rise of the oped for the representation of the mar- Gothic in the final decades of the century velous, could end up supplying not only are also credited with further inputs to the the techniques (Buch includes Haydn, repertory. Mozart and Beethoven as beneficiaries) but Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Italian opera, also the romantic construction of the com- seria and buffa. Conventional music- poser as a demiurge. Or, from a different historical wisdom has it that the Arcadian angle, it was the combination of the galant reformers succeeded in banishing the fan- and the terribile that gave rise to the classic- tastic and the supernatural from serious romantic musical style. opera. Buch acknowledges the decreased If, upon reading the final pages of incidence of magic in the genre, but ex- Buch’s book, the reader is left thrilled, plains that storms, battles and sacrifice pondering major issues of Western musical scenes were effective substitutes, inviting history, he experiences quite a different similar musical responses; festive genres feeling while perusing the main body of the ( feste teatrali, pastorals, ballets) were not af- book. The author’s method for proving his fected by the new austerity; and imaginary main point is basically enumeration. Many ghosts and fake magic were set to the same pages seem to be filled with lists of titles, kind of music as their “real” counterparts. authors, plot summaries, and descriptions He deals rather briefly with the Italian late- of musical devices that are necessarily repe- baroque composers, concentrating instead titious: the point is precisely that those ele- on Handel before arriving at the nodal ments are present in hundreds of operas point in this part of his narrative: the and ballets. This means that reading Franco-Italian synthesis launched around through the book becomes rather tedious. midcentury, which included, as a major de- If the author is to be thanked for the parture, the emphasis on terrifying events: wealth of information provided, he might tempests, furies, infernal scenes. Blasts of have made it easier on the reader by writ- the brass are added to the already familiar ing a more terse account of the processes 542 Notes, March 2010 involved, highlighting the main points by Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio centering upon a limited number of works, Vivaldi. By Bella Brover-Lubovsky. and gathering the rest of his useful, de- Bloomington: Indiana University tailed information for hundreds of pieces Press, 2008. [xix, 357 p. ISBN in suitable appendices. Including this im- 9780253351296. $44.95.] Music exam- mense number of operas within the main narrative also means exposing oneself un- ples, illustrations, bibliography, necessarily to oversights and errors. I may indexes. point out but one: Buch states that in L’arbore di Diana (Vienna, 1787), the com- Musicologists who work on repertories of poser Vicente Martín y Soler “limited musi- the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of- cal evocations of the supernatural to the ten give their own account of pertinent ensembles for women’s voices” (p. 237). In principles of harmonic usage, because stan- fact, the score contains a number of occur- dard accounts may not do justice to varied rences of Buch’s “marvelous” and “terrible” practices that occur within the “tonal pe- topics, specially in the second finale, which riod” (from roughly 1690 to 1910). Yet it is includes incantations, storms, pedal points, tacitly acknowledged that the tonal lan- recitative that interrupts an ensemble, guage of, say, Corelli and the tonal lan- “elegant” heavenly music and so forth. guage of Brahms have little in common. Moreover, I have suggested in the foreword The tidy constructs of theorists exist more to the modern edition (Madrid: ICCMU, elegantly in the mind than in the messy ter- 2001, pp. xxiv–xxv) that this celebrated rain of music. Bella Brover-Lubovsky’s Italian opera is a major source for Mozart’s study explores the messy terrain in a study Die Zauberflöte. A consideration of this that is both deeper and broader than its ti- proposition might have given a different tle suggests. She takes generous account of twist to Buch’s definition of that master- a great range of harmonic theories before, work: “a kind of ambitious German version during, and after Vivaldi. of recent opéra comique with an oriental Her Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio fairy-tale text” (pp. 345–46). Vivaldi has many strengths. It is rigorous, Finally, given the wealth of intercon- systematic, comprehensive, and original. It nected concepts to which the author re- can be differentiated from studies of earlier sorts, a theoretical discussion of how he un- repertories devoted to the emergence of derstands the semantic functioning of tonality (Lowinsky, Dahlhaus); of modal- these earmarks would have been desirable. tonal relationships (Powers, Judd); and of Included here and there are brief explana- other Baroque repertories (McClary, Chafe, tions of the genre’s designators: fantasy, Silbiger, Barnett). In contrast to a large supernatural, marvelous, magic, terrible, body of historically oriented music theory in and so on. But the relation of these to, for which one posits a precept, then shows a example, the affect of fury or the descrip- few pertinent examples to “prove” its valid- tion of a storm is not made clear, at least ity, Brover-Lubovsky’s study is based on the for the music of the earlier part of the cen- examination of almost all of Vivaldi’s avail- tury. Perhaps more importantly, “genre,” able works, currently numbered at 808. This “style,” “topic” and other analogous cate- includes substantial quantities of vocal gories are apparently used interchangeably music, some of it still unedited. In contrast and without a methodologically necessary to a widely held view that all of Vivaldi’s clarification. music is written to one formula, she finds In the end, no matter what quibbles one endless variety and nuance in his proce- might pose, this book is an indispensable dures. She does not force the facts to sup- tool for anyone who pretends to under- port any one view. Whatever is, is. How well stand eighteenth-century music, and the Vivaldi’s tonal plans fit any particular the- rich insights it offers more than make up ory of eighteenth-century harmony is re- for its minor imperfections. evaluated over and over again. One of the most fascinating things about Leonardo J. Waisman the study is its clever juxtaposition of con- CONICET/ Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, cepts from practical theory manuals of Argentina Vivaldi’s time and milieu—notably those of