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APPROVAL PAGE FOR GRADUATE THESIS OR PROJECT GS-13 SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES BY Dan Terrence Belzer Candidate Theatre Arts Field of Concentration TITLE: The Sound and Music of Ibsen APPROVED: Susan Mason, Ph.D. Faculty Member Signature David Connors, D.M.E. Faculty Member Signature Jane McKeever, M.F.A. Faculty Member Signature Peter McAllister, Ph.D. Department Chairperson Signature DATE: October 13, 2011 THE SOUND AND MUSIC OF IBSEN A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance California State University, Los Angeles In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts By Dan Terrence Belzer October 2011 © 2011 Dan Terrence Belzer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Susan Mason for her advisement and guidance throughout my graduate studies and thesis writing. Her insight and expertise have been invaluable to me. Additionally, I thank Dr. David Connors and Professor Jane McKeever for serving on my thesis committee and for giving me so much individual attention during my directed studies with them. I also thank my mother, Geraldine Belzer, who has been completely supportive of and interested in my endeavors and pursuits throughout my entire life. Her encouragement to pursue a graduate degree and her interest along the way, including discussing several of the plays I read in my coursework, made this journey all the more memorable. iii ABSTRACT THE SOUND AND MUSIC OF IBSEN By Dan Terrence Belzer Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen included specific sound and music stage directions and details in his nineteenth-century realistic prose plays. The importance he gave to the aural element of his work—exclusive of the spoken word—and the manner in which he treated it marked a critical step in representing objective reality on stage. In this thesis I claim that Ibsen carefully used sound and music as realistic detail and as thematic enhancement in his realistic prose plays, and that its use over the last two decades of his writing reveals an increasingly nuanced and subtle integration. Ibsen is often considered the father of the modern drama. I contend an important aspect of what is modern about his plays is his innovative use of sound displaying an acute understanding of aural semiotics. His masterfully integrated sound communicates necessary information, delivers emotional content, informs character, and assists in advancing plot in a way none before him had achieved. Similarly, Ibsen employed music in a manner that illustrates the influence of popular melodramas from the first half of the nineteenth century, yet in a distinct departure from this form, he integrated it realistically. His skillful and strategic inclusion of music demonstrates an understanding of the emotional power of music as well as its ability to assist in both supporting and advancing plot. My thesis examines A Doll House (1879), The Lady from the Sea (1888) , Hedda Gabler (1890) , and John Gabriel Borkman (1896) that span nearly twenty years of iv Ibsen’s writing and illustrate his brilliant aural scoring of these prose plays, and by inference his others, with sound and music. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments …………………………………………...……...……………………………..……iii Abstract ……………………………………………………….…………………………………………... iv Chapter 1. Introduction ……………………………………………..……………………………………….. 1 2. Sound and Music in Nineteenth-Century Western Theatre ……………………………. 5 3. Henrik Ibsen …………………………………………………………………….……………... 12 4. Early Prose Years …………………………………………...………………………………... 17 Poetry to Prose …………………………………………………………...………………17 A Doll House ……………………………………………………...……………………... 18 5. Middle Prose Years …………………………………………………………………………... 30 Silence ………………………………………………………………………………….…. 30 The Lady from the Sea …………………………………………………………………. 30 Hedda Gabler ………………………………………………………………………...….. 35 6. Late Prose Years ………………………………………………………………………………43 More Silence …………………………………………………………………………….. 43 John Gabriel Borkman …………………………………………………………………43 7. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………..……. 54 References ……………………………………………………………….………………………………. 59 vi CHAPTER 1 Introduction Working primarily in the theatre as a professional musician, pianist and music director for many years, and with education and experience working as an actor, I am interested in the ways music and sound operate as communicators of information. How are sound and music used to enhance a scene or advance the plot of a play, and what do we learn about a character’s background or emotional state through the use of these elements? When I entered graduate school, I studied Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House in the Graduate Research in Theatre seminar taught by Dr. Susan Mason. I was immediately struck by Ibsen’s masterful integration of sound and music in his plays, and I was impressed by the height of the overall musicality of these aural elements. What was especially interesting to me was that, as Dr. Mason pointed out, the stage directions which include specific and detailed information regarding sound and music in the play were written by Ibsen himself. These instructions were not added after the play’s initial publication by a stage manager of a subsequent theatrical production. It appeared to me that with these aural elements, Ibsen had successfully composed a three movement theatre score of sound and music running through and supporting his three act play, A Doll House . I wrote my first graduate paper, “Nora’s Sonata,” exploring that. Throughout the course of my studies I regularly found myself reflecting back upon and considering Ibsen’s writing, and my continuing graduate work increased my interest. I was fortunate to have a directed study with Dr. David Connors, in History and Analysis of Lyric Theatre, which covered European theatre, opera, operetta and 1 melodrama in the 1800s, the period during which Ibsen was writing. My Theory in Theatre and Performance Studies seminar with Dr. Susan Kwan opened the door to semiotics and phenomenology for me, piquing my interest in examining and considering more closely the possible meanings behind words, actions and sounds. Additionally, an American Literature 1860-1914 course with Dr. Andrew Knighton examined the literary realism movement, and I discovered that many of the themes and issues present in the period’s literature reminded me of A Doll House. Although I intended to examine the sound and music of A Doll House more fully at some point, what interested me on a larger scale was how Ibsen used sound and music in all his realistic prose plays and how that implementation may have changed during two decades of writing. I decided I wanted to examine this for my graduate thesis and asked Dr. Mason, an Ibsen scholar, for her help in choosing which plays to analyze. Since Ibsen’s twelve realistic prose plays span nearly twenty-two years of writing, we decided that without examining all twelve of them it would be informative to examine plays from the beginning, middle and end of this period. I was fortunate in my final coursework to study the history of sound in European theatre in the 1800s with Professor Jane McKeever. This proved extremely valuable to me in researching my thesis and provided me with the opportunity to learn much more about this aspect of Western theatre. The study was the ideal platform on which to begin my thesis. In my thesis, “The Sound and Music of Ibsen,” I claim that Ibsen carefully used sound and music as realistic detail and as thematic enhancement in his realistic prose plays, and that tracking its use chronologically over the last twenty years of his writing 2 reveals an increase in nuance and subtlety in its integration. My original intention was to create a CD of the sounds and music in Ibsen’s four plays I discuss, but the number of cues involved—more than seventy-five in A Doll House alone—made that a significantly larger project than I had anticipated. In my thesis I examine Ibsen’s plays not as literature but as performance, and thus I utilize several key terms in specific ways. When I use the term “realism,” I specifically mean “realistic” or having the illusion of or appearance of objective reality on stage. Although Ibsen’s prose plays are sometimes categorized as “realism,” a description about which scholars do not completely agree, my thesis is not exploring the genre called “realism.” Rather, I examine the representation of objective reality on stage, such as pianos, doors, paper, walls and furniture, with particular emphasis on the presence of sound and music. This representation of objective reality on stage is also referred to as “illusionism”: giving the illusion or appearance of reality. I also use other terms that relate to plays in performance (as opposed to literature). The term “diegetic” means to be logically located within the believable world of the play, a part of the visible or understood circumstances of the environment. It can be used to describe sound and to describe music. For example, in a play the diegetic use of piano music would occur when the environment (seen onstage or imagined offstage) includes a piano that a character plays as part of the plot or action. Nondiegetic use of piano music in a play would occur when piano music is heard despite the absence of the instrument, similar to the way music is used in a film score. In addition I use the term “theatre score” for all aural events of the play excluding verbal language which, for the purposes of my thesis, includes human nonverbal vocal expression, such as laughter. 3 The structure of my thesis is to first describe the background of sound and music in Western theatre leading up to Ibsen’s work, followed by a chapter on Ibsen’s background prior to the time he began to write exclusively in prose. In the subsequent three chapters I discuss selected dramatic works from the beginning, middle and end of his realistic prose canon. These plays include A Doll House, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, and John Gabriel Borkman.