29-Jan / Eternal Dilemma-Historical Acting-NERD ALERT! / 2 COMMENTS

 

Reading the chapter of Acting from Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, I came across these lines that caught my attention about the challenges of portraying tragedy in opera.

“The opera, which adds the power of music to the grandest tragic subjects, in order to awaken pity and terror… is the utmost effort of dramatic illusion. And were not the difficulties almost insurmountable, which impede its perfect execution, the opera would rank above tragedy itself.”

Austin starts then to describe the usual surmountable difficulties that producing an opera might entail, but then he writes the following:

“…others [hindrances] arise from the nature of the opera itself. The principal of these is the narrow limits to which the dialogue is restricted on account of the necessary prolongation of the music. Hence the sentiments… do not admit of that variety of expression and of imagery which brings them with such vivacity to the feelings and understanding in tragedy:

but for all this they principally depend on the vague and doubtful expression of the music. They are abridged in the expression of language,… and they are dilated in the expression of the music, which is limited to the obscure and dubious representation of few sensations. Love and pity, sorrow and joy, terror and valor, are perhaps  the principal passions to which musical expression can give considerable additional force.”

Reading this is a bit of a mind boggle. I’m trained principally as a musician- I’m a singer for god’s sake. I was taught all my life that music is this international language that connects people all over the world, that music goes deeper than words- that it goes to your heart. Yet, here’s Austin saying in 1806 that it’s one of the fundamental hindrances to what’s keeping the drama aback in opera. An eternal dilemma? Abandon ship?