Mai, Chih-Yuan (2008) Sacrificial form: the libretti in English 1940- 2000. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/437/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Sacrificial Forms: The Libretti in English 1940 - 2000 Alex Chih-Yuan Mai Degree of Ph.D Department of English Literature University of Glasgow 1 Synopsis This thesis focuses on the genre of libretto, the sung words for music theatre. The “little book” which accompanies every operatic performance is not just an extended program note to the spectacle, but in fact a substantial literary form in its own right. However, despite the immense influence of Wagner, the output from librettists in an operatic collaboration, has been serious ignored; indeed in opera the aesthetic function of language is frequently diminished and foreshortened, because it is often re-directed by and within the music. The result is that librettists are often seen as offering words to be “decomposed” by composers in the process of operatic collaboration. Opera, in the English language, finally achieved its rightful status, alongside its European counterparts, during the second half of the twentieth century. The thesis is intended to encompass something of the vast diversity of this genre and discusses a number of individual works as constituting legitimate literary artefacts in their own right. There will be five chapters featured in the thesis and each chapter is devoting to a specific theme. The first chapter concentrates on the systems, codes and traditions which are required in the genre of music theatre paying special attention to the deployment of mythic themes and structures in their realisation. The Dionysian nature of music theatre suggests that there are powerful contending forces within the genre and that there is a corresponding necessity for the deployment of novel musical, linguistic and expressive means to maintain an effective balance in engaging the audience's attention. In chapters two and three, the thesis will discuss the sacrificial function of both male and female protagonists in music theatre. Both heroes and heroines have a complex relation of representation and engagement with the audience’s fantasy, and ultimately, transport their paying spectators into an emotional height, jouissance . However, while heroes are featured to be idealistic and fearless, heroines are portrayed as social victims, whose entire raison d’etre is to please not only their chauvinistic counterparts but also to satisfy their audience. 2 Libretti can also convey political messages like all other literary genres. The two operas which are presented in chapter four, fully demonstrate their potential. Alice Goodman and John Adams’ two collaborations, have successfully encapsulated the major political agendas in the second half of the twentieth century. The audience can be submerged in political debates through an operatic performance no matter whether it is a confrontation between two superpowers or an everlasting regional feud. Marriage and sacrifice are the binding force of a union between two individuals. Music theatre can also be interpreted as a product of a union between words and music. The four works in the final chapter represent different aspects and stages of marital union. Like marriage, artistic collaboration is not always smooth. There will be factors, some personal, some external, which may cause friction and even a threat of divorce. Libretto encapsulates a double sacrifice in music theatre, a religious offering of the protagonist and an artistic offering of the words. To read such unique literary works, is to recognise the librettists’ contributions to an extraordinary art form, which has been bringing its audience excitement and knowledge for at least three hundred years. 3 Contents Introduction p. 1 1. Forms of Perfecting p. 39 2. Unnerved Heroes p. 79 I. Energetic Madman II. Grimes’ Exercises p. 92 III. Lawless Frenzy p. 103 3. Worse Things p. 116 I. Sheltered Beauty; Sheltered Lives II. Refulgent Games p. 126 III. Fancy That! p. 139 4. Dangerous Liaisons p. 149 Messages from a Red Libretto An Everlasting Quarrel p. 168 5. A Marriage of True Minds p. 191 Unlearning the Lie The Light for an Outsider p. 208 A Merry Garden? p. 218 IV. Love Alone Reigns p. 229 Conclusion p. 241 Bibliography p. 243 4 Introduction SPHINX 1 & 2 You enslave whip beat and oppress. You are so alone and pathetic. Love from you means enslavement .1 In Mark-Anthony Turnage’s two act opera, Greek (1989), an adaptation of Steven Berkoff’s play of the same title, the composer invites readers to associate the piece with an ancient legacy. The work revisits the Oedipus myth and transposes it into the East End of London in Britain in the 1980s. The surreal confrontation between Eddy, the protagonist, and the two man-eating Sphinxes highlights the hero’s destiny. After successfully solving the monsters’ riddle prior to destroying them, the victorious hero finally realises that the woman to whom he has been married for ten years is, in fact, his biological mother. There follows the gruesome mime scene in which the protagonist seems to tear out his eyes and subsequently appears to die. This leads to a mock funeral procession in which the playwright attempts to set the piece in a tragic fashion in the manner of his predecessor. 2 However, in simply transplanting the Greek myth into a twentieth-century background, Berkoff fails to recreate any vital analogue of the mythic structure and its related social functions. Furthermore, the narrative style in Greek is inconsequential, in the sense that the various parts do not actually connect. Greek is in fact fundamentally a reflection on the playwright’s own experience and consequently has only a tangential connection with the mythic source. This rather severe judgement clearly rests on a number of foundational concepts and presuppositions that will have to be examined in some detail and indeed the latter parts of this Introduction as well as parts of Chapter One will be devoted to this matter. For now it can be said that one important function of a mythic narrative is to explain the formation and efficacy of certain social features. The legitimacy of 1 See Mark-Anthony Turnage and Jonathan Moore, Greek Act II scene iii, the booklet accompanies the opera recording, Argo 44-368-2, p. 34. 2 See Stephen Pettitt, “Mark-Anthony Turnage and ‘Greek’”, Musical Times , cxxix (1988), p. 397. 5 kingship, for example, is frequently constituted in terms of a sacralised role for the ruling family or class in which the authenticating principle is constructed in the terms of mythic narrative which presents itself as a quasi-explanation of the mystery of origin and election. As the ruler, a king should also act as the representative of his nation both with regard to his society and towards the gods and is consequently required to bear the symbolic burden of its social upheaval and crisis. It is in this context that in order to resolve its social problems, the monarch will have to perform and offer various types of sacrifice to placate the gods or forces of nature. In Oedipus Rex , the protagonist’s ultimate self-sacrifice is not due to the fact that he is a man who has committed a crime but because he is the king of Thebes who happens to have killed his father and married his mother. In these crimes against nature Oedipus has lost the right to rule the city state and his subjects have to suffer the consequences. In any attempt at constructing a modern version of such a myth, some plausible analogue of the original narrative motivation must be found if the functional or explanatory elements are not to be lost. Mythic narratives are not simple material objects that can be just moved about from one room to another. They are deeply embedded in a rich social context and if simply removed without compensating adjustments being made they die. This point needs to be widened: as we shall see, the myth of the founding of Thebes is also a central theme in Hans Werner Henze, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s The Bassarids (1966). This opera provides a different example of a modernist interpretation of the ancient mythic narrative. Unlike the narratively incoherent and thematically confused Greek , The Bassarids not only stylistically updates the ancient myth through the eyes of modern psychoneurosis but also retains its original’s mythic origin via its symbolic and allegorical functions and their obvious connections to recent European history. In its moral and theological perspectives it thus harks back to a Greek theatre which seems to have had its origins in staged religious choral events, and whose connection with religion and the Dionysa persisted for some considerable time. As well as the plays themselves being quasi-religious events, the mythological stories that form so important a part of the canon also have some grounding in civic religion. Further, although neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever had sacred books in the sense that the Bible or the Vedic hymns are sacred, mythic narratives were accepted as authoritative in their own right and in consequence would have been seen as telling some kind of truth, even if that truth is 6 uncertain or obscure.