Opera as Worldmaking
Chair(s): Claudio Vellutini (University of British Columbia)
Based in the speculative tradition of science fiction, “worldbuilding” refers to crafting detailed alternate realities as a means of exploring the possibilities, and limitations, of the “real” world. “Worldmaking,” in turn, describes a similar process as carried out through representations of the “real” or lived world, often via history, myth, and other modes of cultural knowledge production. Opera has long engaged in such projects of worldmaking, inviting us—even commanding us—to temporarily enter into its other worlds through song, scenography, staging, and more. The question is, how and why has operatic worldmaking in particular attempted to re-shape operagoers’ relations to the “real” world?
The three papers in this session stretch across four centuries in order to explore opera in different historical moments as a vehicle for mapping, encountering, dominating, knowing, or otherwise experiencing some version of “the world.” Drawing on definitions of worldmaking from both postcolonial history and performance studies (Getachew 2019; Kondo 2018), we interrogate operatic worldmaking as a process enacted through representations of gendered and racialized bodies; reconfigurations of historical, national, and colonial-imperial narratives; experiences of live performance; and (re)mediations in printed texts and audio technologies.
Our three case study operas are all differently oriented with regard to time: the first looks to a mytho-historical past, the second to its own present, and the third to an imagined future. Yet all three point to a markedly global world through their shared imagery of ships and seafaring. Ships are not merely the setting for these works. More importantly, as transhistorically recognizable vehicles for navigating, conquering, and establishing hegemony over far-flung places, they symbolize opera’s worldmaking aims. It’s no coincidence then that the subgenres we take up in these papers—eighteenth-century Italian heroic opera, nineteenth-century English ballad opera, twentieth- and twenty-first-century radio opera—were (and are) all “travelers” themselves, bringing their internal logics of worldmaking to audiences and readers across time and space. All told we ask what opera, both historically and presently, can tell us about imagining, hearing, and making different—if not necessarily better—worlds.
Presentations of the Symposium
Generating the Globe Through Abandoned Dido
Jessica Gabriel Peritz
Yale University
In 1747, a production of Pietro Metastasio’s beloved Didone abbandonata (orig. 1724) premiered with an unusual dedication. An anonymous sonnet in the libretto addressed “la donna rabbiosa” (the rabid woman), cautioning ladies to “retract [their] claws” and calm the “volcano” inside them lest they end up sharing Didone’s tragic fate. By illustrating the physicality of women’s emotions with imagery from the natural world, the sonnet adumbrated Metastasio’s characterization of Didone in the ensuing opera. More specifically, these metaphors—the rabid tiger’s claws and the erupting Etna’s lava—reveal the two foundational tropes undergirding Didone’s poetics of alterity: animality and geography. Or, as they would have been understood by Metastasio’s contemporaries, biology and geology, the twin domains of eighteenth-century “natural history.”
This paper takes up natural history as a lens for examining how Didone abbandonata mapped an expanding eighteenth-century world through the fertile yet volatile body of its heroine. The Carthaginian queen Dido had long been an emblem of both spatial and temporal mobility in ways that vexed early modern European fantasies of global domination. Despite being female and racially liminal, Dido sought to rule over three continents: her native Asia, her (adopted) home of Africa, and the Europe of Aeneas’s future. What’s more, though the “historical” Dido had lived three centuries after the fall of Troy, she appeared in Virgil’s Aeneid as what Metastasio called a “happy anachronism.” In Metastasio’s opera, Didone’s geographically hybrid and historically unmoored body moved audiences through famously impassioned song. Yet, at the same time, the opera emphasized how that body put history itself at risk when Didone begged to bear Aeneas’s future generations, not for Rome, but for Africa.
By comparing the dual sexual and political desires of his Didone to exotic animals, untameable landscapes, and maps of the world, Metastasio dramatized the growing epistemic frictions between a globally-oriented natural history and the long-standing Eurocentric notions of national history derived from Virgil’s Aeneid. Reading moments from Metastasio’s libretto alongside key paratexts and coeval natural-historical texts, the paper explores how opera navigated a representational power struggle between poetry, history, and science--embodied and envoiced by the anachronistic, abandoned Dido.
A New Musical Cosmography: Freedom, Nation, & Song in <The Travellers> (1806)
Devon J Borowski
Harvard University
After years of anticipation, the Anglo-Italian pedagogue Domenico Corri premiered his ballad opera, The Travellers, or Music’s Fascination, in January 1806. Corri’s explicit goal was to trace “the progress of music” over time and space, beginning in Imperial China and reaching its zenith in the newly minted United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the charming Prince Zaphimiri and his companions on a Grand Tour from Peking to Portsmouth, with stops at a Turkish seraglio and Neapolitan villa, the opera traces a civilizing process founded on Enlightenment notions of climate and national character.
This paper explores the opera’s treatment of song and the body (individual and politic) reflecting early nineteenth-century theories of history, race, and civilization. Questions of racial and musical essence are central to the plot and mythos of The Travellers, with the evolution of song as the polemical basis for the opera itself. The journey begins with the revelation that the prince’s companion Koyan (sung by the famed Jewish tenor John Braham) is partly descended from English nobility. Beyond a sentimental plot point, the character’s mixed-race status mirrors Braham’s dual vocal lineage in the bel canto and cantorial styles, reinforcing longstanding Orientalist beliefs about Judaism. And while the libretto by Irish playwright Andrew Cherry depicts the prince’s voyage to discover newer and better (i.e., Western) ways of rulership, Corri’s setting seeks after musical origins—first through a characteristic overture incorporating everything from gongs to castanets and then through a series of diegetic songs witnessed through the moralizing ears of the eponymous travelers.
More than pentatonic harmonies and characteristic dance tunes, The Travellers dramatized imagined trajectories of culture and society from East to West, and from South to North. By the final act, the liberal society celebrated by contemporary Britons has been thoroughly equated with their advanced practice of song, combining the supposedly untaught artistry of the East with the harmonic science of the South. Corri’s opera sketches a kind of Hegelian musical cartography in which movement westward is also movement forward in historical time, and where sophisticated harmony resounds as the hallmark of enlightened civil society.
Theater In and Of the Mind: The Resonant Worlds of Radio Opera
Danielle Simon
Middlebury College
Yvette Janine Jackson’s Swan (2015) transports listeners across space and time through three scenes: the tall ship Swan carries enslaved Africans across the brutal waters of the Middle Passage, transforming into a spaceship seeking liberation beyond the stars. Jackson describes her electroacoustic works as both “radio operas” and “narrative soundscapes.” This paper argues that the narrative soundscape is central to radio opera, where all sounds—musical or otherwise—carry essential information about the opera’s world. In Jackson’s radio operas, live instruments and electronics evoke settings through recognizable sound effects, including a pulsing radar blip, breathing, and clock-tower chimes. These sonic elements guide listeners through transitions from a cargo hold to transit, and finally into open space, compensating for the absence of visual aids.
This paper traces the history of such sound effects in radio opera—works created for the ether rather than the stage, their worlds conjured in the theater of the mind. These sonic gestures draw on two traditions: the verismo operas of the late nineteenth century, where realistic sounds like church bells in Puccini’s Tosca rendered the sacred tangible, and early radio drama, where sound effects formed the narrative foundation, as in the first radio play set in a collapsed coal mine. These traditions shaped the auditory landscapes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century radio operas, evoking settings as varied as rural homes, prison cells, spaceships, and even the interior of the human body.
This paper demonstrates that the concept of the “narrative soundscape” has defined radio opera from its inception. Early composers for the medium sought to immerse audiences fully, inviting them to co-create narrative worlds. While the incorporation of electronic sounds after the 1950s expanded the genre’s sonic possibilities, the utopian aspiration of total immersion has always been at the heart of radio opera.
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