Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera

Author(s): James Parakilas

Source: 19th-Century Music , Autumn, 1992, Vol. 16, No. 2, Music in Its Social Contexts
(Autumn, 1992), pp. 181-202
Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: [Link]

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 Political Representation and the Chorus
in Nineteenth-Century Opera
JAMES PARAKILAS

Don Carlo at the Verona Arena, 1969. The singing the chorus "Spuntato ecco il di d'esul-
thousands of candles with which the audience tanza."
lit up the arena before the opera began - a case Opera audiences do not often sing along with
of the spectacle being initiated by the spec-performances. The experience is hard to ima-
tators-have long since been blown out, gine anywhere but in Italy and with any operas
leaving the singers to enact their drama in abut the masterpieces of Verdi, which Italian au-
space ringed in darkness, an arena of apparent diences consider their national treasures. Even
privacy. But at the finale of act III, as the stagewith the right public and the right repertory, it
area is filled by the enormous chorus repre-takes exceptional conditions - the anonymous
senting the people of Valladolid assembling tovastness and starry darkness of an ancient
witness the auto-da-fe, voices from around the Roman arena, the atmosphere of communal
darkened arena quietly join with them in ritual established by the candles in the audi-
ence - to induce spectators to break through
the barrier of space and role that separates them
from
19th-Century Music XVI/2 (Fall 1992). ? by The Regentsthe actors in an opera.
of the University of California. These conditions at Verona are as ana-

I began this study while participating in a National Endow-

chronistic-as uncharacteristic of opera per-
ment for the Humanities Seminar on "Music and formance
Society in Verdi's day-as the singing-along
(1700-1910)," conducted by Richard Leppert at the
to Uni-
which they are conducive. Open-air opera, a
versity of Minnesota in the summer of 1990. I would like
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century as well as
to thank M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet and Mary Hunter, along
a of
with Richard Leppert, for their help at various stages twentieth-century
my practice, was hardly fea-
work on this article.
sible in the nineteenth century for grand operas

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 19TH
CENTURY
like Don Carlo (1867) that already pushed
briefly the
by themselves. In that moment the au-
MUSIC stage techniques and gas-lighting effects
dience of with the chorus, as it demon-
identifies
opera houses to their limits.' Furthermore, the
strated in Verona by singing along at precisely
appropriation of a Roman arena for the
that perfor-
moment. Though the crowd onstage is "re-
mance is itself a gesture that would notbyhave
strained halbediers," though it is singing of
made sense when the opera was new: by its loyalty to the king, though the auto-da-fie
marking Don Carlo as a monument of Italian can be seen as a display of royal and ecclesias-
cultural history comparable to the Roman tical power to keep the people intimidated, the
arena, this twentieth-century siting of the per- audience at this moment of identification with
formance defines the opera as part of the na- the chorus recognizes, paradoxically, what
tional past (although Verdi wrote it in French power the common people have in this story.
for the Paris Op6ra) and the performance as a That power is not the power to control their
ritual celebration of that past. own destiny: their one attempt to take events
Even so, no modern audience would feel so into their own hands, in the following act when
much as the instinct to sing along at the height they storm into the prison where Don Carlo is
of an intense drama if the librettists and com- being held, falters quickly. Their power is the
poser had not endowed that moment with themere fact that their destiny is central to a polit-
right dramatic and musical qualities in the first ical drama of interlocking destinies. If King
place. In fact, it takes a curious combination of Philip represents the self-conscious powerless-
qualities in the score to make spectators feel ness of the apparently powerful in this drama,
that they can take part in "Spuntato ecco il di the chorus of the people represents the unwit-
d'esultanza" at the same time that they feel theting power of the apparently powerless, made
number to be integral to the drama being evident in the first scene of the opera, when the
staged. On the one hand, the audience seated in wartime suffering of the French people, repre-
the darkness feels at one with the illuminated sented by the chorus of woodcutters and their
chorus onstage because it sees in them another families, influences Princess Elisabeth to ac-
mixed crowd of ordinary people ready to partic- cept a political marriage against her private de-
ipate in a ritual of spectating-in this case,
sires, thereby setting the plot in motion.2
to witness the public trial and punishment Within this plot the function of the grand en-
of heretics. The audience also feels at one trance of the Spanish people singing "Spuntato
with the chorus because the choral music at
ecco il di d'esultanza" is simply and precisely
this moment - a memorable, swaying, much- to bring King Philip's subjects onto the stage, to
repeated tune, sung at first largely in unison
let the audience hear and see and identify with
-is suited to a mass of untrained voices (see them,
ex. so that their central role, which other-
1). On the other hand, the authors of the workwise can only be inferred from the conversation
have made this appearance of the chorusofno their rulers, is realized in the experience of
mere act of bystanding, no diversion from the theaudience.
drama, but a stupendously dramatic intrusion Once the audience has felt this identifica-
tion with the Spanish populace in the auto-
(the stage directions say that the crowd "in-
vades" the plaza) at the midpoint of the opera.
da-fe scene, its response to even the most pri-
The intruders are the Spanish people, making vate struggles of conscience in the rest of the
opera-those of King Philip facing his isola-
their appearance in the opera for the first time,
a mass of singing humanity holding the stage tion and of Queen Elisabeth resigning herself
to the sacrifice of her love and her life - is com-
plicated and intensified by a now instinctive
'The modern tradition of open-air opera began at the turn
of the twentieth century. The summer festival of Beziers
(France), for example, commissioned operas expressly for
outdoor performance, beginning with Saint-Saens's De'ja- 2Verdi cut the opening chorus of the woodcutters and their
nire, performed in 1898. Opera at the Verona Arena began families from the original production in Paris when he was
with a production of Aida in 1913. See "Open-air opera" in obliged to shorten the work. See Julian Budden, The Op-
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, ed. Harold eras of Verdi, vol. III: From Don Carlos to Falstaff (New
Rosenthal and John Warrack (2nd edn. London, 1979). York, 1981), pp. 25, 39.

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 Allegro assai sostenuto JAMES
Sf 3 r-3---3 33 PARAKILAS
Political
Representation
in Opera
Spun - ta - toecco ii di d'esul - tan - za, O -

S3 3-- ___

3 r3 r--- 3 -- 3

no - re, o -nor al pii grande dei Re - gi!

Example 1: Verdi, Don Carlo, act III, sc. 2, "Spuntato ecco

and sympathetic consciousnessening

of action
the of the monks but by the contrasts
common
onethe
people who will be affected by choral group makes
outcome of with the other: the
those struggles. So while the actual
abrupt musical singing
changes (from the major key of
"Spuntato Arena
along of the audience in the Verona ecco il di"may
to its tonic minor and
from swinging
be alien to the auto-da-fie scene in thetriplet
sense rhythm to a funeral
march) and the sinister
that it is the product of anachronistic condi-effect of a small, uni-
formly dressed, all-male
tions of performance, the identification of thegroup appearing in the
audience with the chorus - the response
midst of that
the large mixed chorus - right after an-
other small, uniformed,
under those conditions of performance may all-male group, the
lead to singing along - is not halbediers, at all alien has already been seen, if not heard,
to the
scene, but on the contrary a crucial keeping theelement
people underincontrol.
its structure, and crucial not only Later in
tothe scene,
the when the six Flemish dep-
struc-
ture of that scene but to the manipulation
uties appeal to King Philipofto have mercy on his
sympathies and the rhythm of scenes in the is still divided, but
Flemish subjects, the chorus
opera overall. now the soloists are split along the same lines
If it can be a momentous dramatic event for as the chorus, the rulers along the same lines as
the chorus simply to appear onstage as the the ruled. The large chorus of the Spanish
Spanish populace at the beginning of the auto- people, the small group of Flemish deputies,
da-fi scene, the other choral actions in the and all but one of the soloists join together to
scene are also more than pageantry, all dra- oppose and plead with the king, who joins with
matic in their own way. The interlude in the monks in resisting their pleas. Where the
"Spuntato ecco il di d'esultanza" in which a earlier division of the chorus into people and
smaller chorus of monks sings while leading monks represents the fixed power relationships
the condemned heretics to the stake is dra- and standing tensions of that society, this alli-
matic in that it divides a small group off fromance of members of the royal family with the
the main body of the chorus - a division of thepeople against the king-this crossing of the
chorus that maps a division in the society. Thelines of power - represents a crisis in the state.
Verdi's music is at once complex in texture, as
divisive force is the hostile and controlling re-
lationship of the Church to the people, repre- it sets out the alliances and oppositions, and
sented here not only by the punitive, threat- powerfully simple in effect, as it focuses the

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 19TH
CENTURY
sympathy of the audience. By contrast, aestheticonce
idea. It is a political outlook not in the
MUSIC the king has faced down this appeal as well
sense as
that opera represents a particular side or
Don Carlo's threat of violence againstparty him, inthe
the political disputes of the age, but in
simplest of musical events-the reprise of the sense that the artists who created operas,
"Spuntato ecco il di d'esultanza" by the chorus whatever their politics, framed dramatic issues
-creates the most complex and chilling dra- as partisan political disputes. It is the outlook
matic effect of the entire scene, as the society of societies in which, after the French Revolu-
closes ranks, the people recrossing the lines of tion, all parties were learning to appeal to the
power and turning their backs on the sympa- ideal of "the people" in debates over social and
thies they have just evoked. This time, al- political questions, however they might con-
though the words and music are the same as test the definition of "the people." It is the out-
before, it would be a sign of extraordinary in- look of an age in which the ideal of "the
sensitivity if any audience sang along with the people" did not yet seem, as it would come to
chorus. seem in the twentieth century, necessarily at
Extravagant choral scenes have been a part of odds with the idealization of the individual. As
opera from its beginnings, and for the public in a result, nineteenth-century opera is equally
general, especially the larger part of it that adept at dramatizing crises of self-definition by
never goes to the opera, a scene like the auto- individuals caught up in popular or national
da-fi scene in Don Carlo epitomizes opera as a struggles and at manifesting the political impli-
whole. But in the history of opera, it is nine- cations of private or domestic struggles. Even
teenth-century opera that this scene epito- more than a drama of Romanticism- the aes-
mizes. It represents everything that marks the thetic ideology of individualism - it is a drama
chorus in nineteenth-century opera apart from of bourgeois liberalism in the broadest sense,
the opera chorus before or since, just as it rep- continually relating the happiness of the indi-
resents all the ways in which the chorus makes vidual to the freedom of the nation and its
nineteenth-century opera a distinct kind of people.
drama. It is not only nineteenth-century opera, of
For all the extravagance of some seven- course, that projects bourgeois liberal construc-
teenth- and eighteenth-century operatic tradi- tions of political struggle, but also the spoken
tions, hardly any opera chorus of that period drama of the same period. It was in reference to
has the independent dramatic identity of this the spoken theater, in his preface to Hernani
one (representing people who derive their iden- (1830), that Victor Hugo defined Romanticism
tity as a group from one another rather than as "nothing but liberalism in literature." But
from a god or ruler they serve); or participates opera had a great advantage over the spoken
in the crises of the action like this one (as op- theater in putting this political outlook on
posed to filling breaks in and marking stages of stage, because opera could recast for the pur-
the action with commentary and celebration); pose a dramatic resource that was already part
or divides and aligns itself like this one, map- of its tradition, one that spoken drama lacked
ping the struggles of forces in the drama (rather by definition: the singing chorus. The chorus
than choreographing the fixed relationships of a was a group of actors who could represent "the
social order). Twentieth-century opera cho- people" as a mass - exactly what the drama of
ruses may often be like the chorus of the auto- liberalism required - their voices organized, as
da-fe scene in these respects, but in other re- only music could organize them, into sus-
spects hardly any of them is like it: as a chorus tained, unified, and commanding utterance
that appeals simply and powerfully to the sym- that expressed their identity, independence,
pathy of the audience, that aligns itself with unity, and importance. The chorus divided into
sympathetic individual characters, and that it- opposing groups could enact the varied political
self acts like an individual in the complexity of struggles of the day. By mirroring the situations
its dramatic interactions. and sentiments of individual characters, it
Nineteenth-century opera is identified and could show the political dimensions of the
most
unified by a political outlook more than by any personal dilemmas. By giving the dra-

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 matic action a rhythm of public and private
varied repertory. But it does mean that these JAMES
PARAKILAS
scenes, it allowed the private sphere to be themes
por- are characteristic of operas from every Political
national repertory and from every period of the Representation
trayed as itself an object of political struggle.
in Opera
nineteenth century, and as characteristic of
If it was partly Schiller's liberal perspective
on historical events that interested Verdi in the comic operas, in their own way, as of serious
theme of Don Carlos, nevertheless when ones. It does mean that Verdi's Don Carlo typ-
Verdi's librettists devised an opera script from
ifies the themes, the dramaturgy, the role of the
Schiller's play of 1787, it was the resourcechorus,
of in nineteenth-century opera as a whole,
the chorus that allowed them to project even on as it bears all the hallmarks of the special
stage the drama of national politics that was
repertory-the mid-century Paris grand opera
only implicit in Schiller's drama of courtrepertory-to
in- which it belongs. To discover
trigue: the auto-da-f? scene, as Julian Budden
how this can be true, it is best to consider
puts it, "is pure grand opera owing nothing nineteenth-century
to opera from the vantage
Schiller, but a little to Cormon" [the authorpoint
of of earlier opera.
a French play of 1846 that served as a secondary
The first thing to be said is simply that
source for the opera].3 nineteenth-century operas almost all have a
This is not to say that Verdi's opera conveys
real chorus, that is, a group role that is more
Schiller's theme more effectively than Schil- than an ensemble of the soloists. In the eigh-
ler's own play does. But it is noteworthy that teenth century, by contrast, the chorus was not
opera remained occupied with bourgeois- a regular and universal part of the organization
liberal themes of national politics throughout of opera houses, and for most of the subjects
the nineteenth century (and that the plays of treated in both serious and comic opera a
Schiller, Pushkin, and Hugo provided subjects chorus was barely necessary. The Paris Opera,
for operas right through the century), while the with its standing chorus of up to fifty singers
spoken theater, in the hands of playwrights like and a unique repertory of works written to cap-
Ibsen and Chekhov, was turning increasingly to italize on that chorus, was exceptional on the
domestic dramas of individuals not explicitly European scene. Even within Paris, the royal
connected to political power or partisan polit- monopoly granted to the Op6ra (the Academie
ical struggle. To understand why opera alone Royale de Musique) meant severe restriction
should have remained occupied with the same on the use of a chorus by other opera com-
political themes, one would need to consider panies-the Op6ra-comique and Comedie-
the social status and political patronage of italienne-for most of the eighteenth century,
opera as opposed to spoken theater, as well as to so that in the opera houses where subjects other
consider how the medium-and in particular than heroic classical ones were presented there
the resource of the chorus-may have shaped were no means to render a story of mass polit-
operatic subject matter. But for whatever rea- ical struggle. But beginning around the time of
sons, opera within the overall dramatic milieu the French Revolution, in Paris and soon
of the nineteenth century was thematically throughout Europe, the popularity of operas on
specialized, concentrating on themes of the in- themes of political struggle created such a
terrelations of public and private struggle, and growing need for choruses - and such growing
that specialization colors twentieth-century demands on the singing and acting of the
notions of the operatic medium since nine- chorus members-that by the middle of the
teenth-century works form the core repertory nineteenth century for the first time there were
of twentieth-century opera houses. full-time choruses that took part regularly in
To call the nineteenth-century repertory rehearsals.4 At the same time, the greater avail-
thematically specialized does not, of course, ability of the chorus in nineteenth-century
mean that the same themes are present, or
equally important, in every opera of a huge and
4Hellmuth Christian Wolff, Oper: Szene und Darstellung
von 1600 bis 1900, vol. IV, no. 1, Musikgeschichte in Bil-
dern, ed. Heinrich Besseler and Max Schneider (Leipzig,
3Budden, The Operas of Verdi, III, 15. n.d.), p. 15.

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 19TH
CENTURY
opera houses - to say nothing of the need
enade tohero,
of the payErnesto. The serenade as an
MUSIC it whether it was used much or little or not at operatic genre belonged to the tradition of
all - in itself constituted pressure on the houses eighteenth-century comic opera, but there it
to commission works on subjects that called was an intrinsically solitary act of communica-
for substantial use of the chorus. tion. Donizetti's choice of this solitary act as a
The change to more chorus-intensive sub- moment to bring in the chorus is hard to com-
jects in opera from the eighteenth century to prehend except as a dramatic device invoking
the nineteenth can be seen as readily in comic identification and even a kind of political soli-
operas as in the historical tragedies like Don darity from the audience, very much as the
Carlo that replaced the Classical opere serie of chorus in the auto-da-f?e scene of Don Carlo
the eighteenth century. In eighteenth-century does. The intrusion of the chorus (a mixed
comic operas, class tensions are represented, chorus, at that) into the serenade turns the love
but as conflicts between individuals of different of Norina and Ernesto in effect into a widely
rank, not as challenges to rulers by their sub- supported social cause - the cause of marriage
jects; in these operas where subjects seldom freed from the parental purse, perhaps-and
gather en masse - as a chorus - there are plenty prepares the audience to regard the father figure
of nobles, but very few kings. In nineteenth- Don Pasquale, at his downfall immediately af-
century comic opera, on the other hand, not terward, not just as the victim of the lovers' in-
only did a changed political order make it pos- trigue but as the object of a general social con-
sible to mock the power of a king onstage (ei- demnation to which the audience feels it has
ther a human king, as in The Mikado, 1885, and consented.
Le Roi malgre lui, 1887, or a king of the gods, as The use of the chorus in nineteenth-century
in Orphee aux enfers, 1858), but the resource ofopera, in other words, reveals a pervasive and
a frequently appearing chorus made it dramat- revolutionary reconception of opera as a genre,
ically possible to depict a king whose powers a reconception as evident in comic operas as se-
were always subject to testing. rious ones, as powerful in the transformation of
In a more paradoxical way, one also sees the old operatic subjects as in the choice of new
impact of the chorus on operatic subject matter ones. The history of nineteenth-century opera
when one considers nineteenth-century operas in this sense can be said to begin with the
on old-fashioned subjects that do not naturally growth of the chorus - in size, in dramatic role,
call for a chorus. Donizetti's Don Pasquale, in institutional footing-at the Comedie-
italienne in Paris in the 1770s and 80s. This
written for the Theitre-italien in Paris in 1843,
to a text adapted from a libretto written more growth, which continued in the 1780s despite
than thirty years earlier,5 belongs in subject to an agreement the Comedie-italienne made in
the eighteenth-century opera buffa tradition of 1780 with its competitor, the Opera, to use no
domestic comedies about young lovers who "chorus in the strict sense," but only an occa-
outfox their wealthy parents or guardians. The sional ensemble of extras as the plot de-
chorus in this opera seems like a concession to manded,6 was epoch-making for European
the conditions of mid-century operatic produc- opera as a whole precisely because it occurred
tion and reception: it has no effect on the plot at the house that defined itself by its difference
and does not even appear until the last act. But from the Opera, where the repertory was far
then it invades the action in a bizarre way - not more stable and under greater obligation to re-
at its first entrance, when it appears as the ser- flect the royal outlook on the political order. It
vants of the house, alternately supporting the was epoch-making because in a decade of un-
intrigues of the heroine, Norina, and com- ending economic crisis in France, in the course
menting to itself, but later when it sings a of which the deepest-seated political assump-
backup part to "Com'd gentil," the offstage ser- tions were being opened to question, the
Comedie-italienne, with its frequent produc-
5That earlier libretto, Ser Marc'Antonio by Angelo Anelli,
was set by Stefano Pavesi in 1810. See William Ashbrook, 6David Charlton, Gritry and the Growth of Opira-
Donizetti and His Operas (Cambridge, 1982), p. 174. Comique (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 208-10.

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tion of new works and its relative freedom to steady stream of new works, created and pro- JAMES
PARAKILAS
experiment, had the opportunity, and with its duced in a period of political turmoil. The rep-Political
chorus the dramaturgical means, to create op- ertory of the theater and the political con-Representation
in Opera
eras that exploited and fed an extreme state of sciousness of the operagoing public in Paris
national political passion. The disorders that evolved in a symbiotic relationship in which
occasionally broke out in the audience at the the management of the theater and its creative
Com6die-italienne in the late 1780s, often in staff, eager to keep their operas at the center of
response to politically charged lines and situa- attention of a public increasingly preoccupied
tions in the operas being staged,7 were virtually with political crisis, felt their way into new op-
unprecedented as behavior at an opera house, eratic ideas that gave focus and direction to that
signaling the new identity that opera would preoccupation.
have in the nineteenth century as a politi- An episode related by David Charlton pro-
cally controversial and occasionally explosive vides a virtual paradigm of this process. In the
medium. original version of Richard Coeur-de-Lion by
The relationship between political atmo- Michel-Jean Sedaine and Andre Gretry pro-
sphere and operatic repertory at the Com6die-duced in 1784, the English king, imprisoned in
italienne in the 1780s is not reducible to simple the castle at Linz, was released in the end by
cause and effect. To say that the operas of that the governor of the castle, who needed little
repertory reflected the growing political ten- persuasion to agree to the release. This ending
sions of the time would be to miss the political was, according to Charlton, "universally criti-
importance of those works: by giving powerful cised"; the public was apparently incensed at
symbolic representation to political ideas, theythe governor's dereliction of duty. Gretry,
contributed to the shaping of public sentimentswriting to Sedaine that "all Paris is making de-
and the defining of political issues. The rescue nouements for Richard, " proposed a revision of
operas of the 1780s, for instance, need not be the ending in which the king would be rescued
considered a direct call to the Bastille to be un- by a band of knights under the leadership of the
derstood as part of the cultural movement that loyal troubadour Blondel. But Sedaine resisted
made political imprisonment a leading image this suggestion until his own second version
of the injustice of the old order and eventually proved as unsuccessful as the first, and even
made the fall of the Bastille the prime symbol when he finally adopted Gretry's idea in a third
of the Revolution.8 version that proved successful and definitive,
Yet to focus entirely on the act of creation as he distanced himself from it by publishing a
symbol making - to call music a prophecy of letter in the Journal de Paris saying that he was
new social formations, as Jacques Attali does,9 "following an idea that has always prevailed in
or to think of its creators, in Shelley's phrase the mind of my musician, that the king should
about poets, as "unacknowledged legislators of be rescued by force at the end of the third
the world," is to miss the give-and-take, the act."'1
collaboration between creation and reception, In this act of creation in which "all Paris"
that marks the formation of works as public as played a role, a powerful new image of political
operas. The Comedie-italienne before and action was not dictated by anyone's political
during the French Revolution was a commer- agenda, but fashioned through a process of ar-
cial opera house relying for its success on a tistic experimentation that was simulta-
neously a testing of what was politically toler-
7Charlton, Gritry and Opira-Comique, p. 277. able. Sedaine, who had already cast the theme
8Paul Henry Lang writes that opera-comique "actually pre- of cruel imprisonment into the form of the
pared the climate for the Revolution decades before its ad- rescue opera in 1769 (Le Diserteur), now was
vent." See Lang, "French Opera and the Spirit of the Rev-
olution," in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. raising the political stakes: this time the victim
Harold E. Pagliaro, vol. II, Studies in Eighteenth-Century of imprisonment was a king. But Sedaine clung
Culture (Cleveland, 1972), p. 106.
9jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1985; original French
edn. 1977). 'oCharlton, Gritry and Opira-Comique, pp. 248-51.

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 19TH
CENTURY
to the idea that the victim should be released
tury. by
These roles, and some of the musical in-
MUSIC a magnanimous ruler - an idea both operati-
novations that came with them, are explored
cally conventional and politically separately
conservative in the following pages.
- even though the plot did not lend itself to
that outcome. The Parisian public did not THE pro- CHORUS AS A PEOPLE
pose the eventual solution, but through its dis-
satisfaction prodded the composer Richard
and drama- Coeur-de-Lion begins with a scenic
overture,
tist to try a politically bold solution in which the chorus mimes the daily
that turned
out to fit the political mood of theroutines
day asand then sings the private celebrations
well
as it fit the structure of the plot: of peasants who
a crowd, notlive in the shadow of the for-
commanded by a noble ruler buttress [Link] opera ends (in its definitive
version)
artist, would take justice into its own with another scene of choral mime and
hands.
This solution and other dramatic innova- song: the storming of the fortress and the cele-
tions introduced in operas-comiques before
bration of King Richard's release from impris-
onment. The two scenes exemplify what would
and during the Revolution did more than feed
become two of the most characteristic uses of
local and temporary political preoccupations.
the chorus in nineteenth-century opera: the
Music historians, construing these innovations
as constituents of the rescue-opera formula,
first a scene-setting chorus, representing a cer-
tain group or kind of people in their home en-
have not generally attributed much influence
to them beyond Cherubini and Beethovenvironment,
and going about their daily lives; and
the Napoleonic years," but the same innova-the other an action chorus, representing a
crowd of people cast as a protagonist in a polit-
tions, considered independently of that for-
ical struggle, a crowd mobilized to take polit-
mula, can be seen to have constituted a dram-
ical action.
aturgical revolution that set the terms for opera
throughout the nineteenth century. That revo- These two uses of the chorus have some-
lution, because it is defined thematically by its been contrasted as representative of dif-
times
political nature, is focused dramaturgically ferent
on kinds of opera or different stages in the
development
the conception of the chorus. Accordingly, the of opera. Carl Dahlhaus, for in-
stance,
political nature of nineteenth-century opera is distinguishes the "picturesque cho-
ruses"
manifested in three dramaturgical characteris- that "function as musical extensions of
tics, all centrally involving the chorus: the
the stage decor" in the operas-comiques of
Boieldieu
casting of the chorus as a people whose status and Auber from the crowd scenes
that "had more than a decorative function to
or destiny is at stake in the drama; the treat-
ment of solo characters as representative of fulfil,"
the indeed were "crucial to the drama-
people; and the division of the chorus and ofturgy,"
the in the grand operas of Meyerbeer and
soloists into opposing groups so that the his
dra-contemporaries.12 Philip Gossett likewise
describes a gradual change in nineteenth-
matic issue is represented as a political dispute.
Although these three ideas all belong tocenturythe Italian opera from works at the begin-
same dramatic conception - they are all ning
at of the century with choruses that were
work together, for example, in the auto-da-f?e "decorative, subsidiary, musically neutral,
scene of Don Carlo- each plays a distinct with role a function analogous to the stage set" to
in the history of opera in the nineteenth cen- the later operas of Rossini and all of Verdi's, in
which the chorus has "developed a musical per-
"1An exception is Edward Dent, who described French
sonality, has acquired a dramatic force, has be-
come, in short, a people."l3 It is true that the
rescue operas (referring, however, to those of the 1790s,
like Cherubini's, not those written before the Revolution)
as the beginning of all Romantic opera. His account, deliv-
ered in lectures in 1937-38, still seemed "startling" to
Carl Dahlhaus when it appeared in print in 1976. See Dent, 12Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, pp. 66, 129 (cap-
The Rise of Romantic Opera, ed. Winton Dean (Cam- tion to fig. 28).
bridge, 1976); Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. '"Philip Gossett, "Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in
J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989; orig- Risorgimento Opera," Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990),
inal German edn. 1980), p. 19. pp. 44, 48.

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most explicitly political operas of the nine- vere demands on the singers' vocal capacity- JAMES
PARAKILAS
teenth century-operas on themes of political sometimes simultaneous demands on several Political
liberty and justice, imperial domination, and capacities - to produce a more strenuous vocal Representation
national self-determination - are characterized in Opera
tone than opera choruses had produced before.
by choruses that represent a politically mobi- This is the tone of political passion expressed
lized "people." In Fidelio (1805), for instance, by many nineteenth-century operatic crowds,
the chorus of prisoners represents - better than such as the crowd of people who burst into the
one prisoner could by himself - the political op- Council Chamber scene in Verdi's Simon Boc-
pression of a whole people; the union of men's canegra (revised version, 1881), singing fortis-
and women's choruses in the final scene of the simo, the sopranos reaching high B, as they cry
opera represents the restoration not only of po- out for vengeance and blood. The crowd-
litical liberty but of social wholeness to that chorus, a chorus that during the nineteenth
people. Choruses that represent whole nations century became large enough to represent a
struggling against oppression are also typical of people as an uncountable mass, singing with a
Italian liberation operas from Mose in Egitto passion reserved for the soloists in earlier
(1818) and Norma (1831) to Aida (1871); of opera, gave opera for the first time a choral
French grand opera, which "from Guillaume voice different in character from the sound of
Tell to Meyerbeer's Le prophete," according to any ensemble of soloists.
Dahlhaus, "was always political";14 and of op- But to identify political representation in
eras of nationalist history or legend, such as nineteenth-century opera entirely with the cho-
Smetana's Dalibor (1868) and Borodin's Prince rus of the politically mobilized, as Dahlhaus
Igor (1890). does, is to miss the political significance of the
The originality of nineteenth-century oper- "picturesque chorus" when it appears along-
atic dramaturgy is at its clearest in these cho- side the chorus of the politically mobilized, as
ruses: choruses that represent a whole people in Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and to miss the po-
or nation, not a single class or party or profes- litical significance of whole operas in which
sion; a people with a political destiny of its the chorus is never anything but picturesque.
own, not just a stake in the destiny of its ruler; The picturesque chorus is a more pervasive
a people whose political destiny is central to feature of nineteenth-century opera than the
the dramatic action, whether it takes up that chorus of the politically mobilized. Although
destiny itself, as in Guillaume Tell, or is the ob- Dahlhaus associates it especially with the
ject of action by others, as in Fidelio. opera-comique of the early nineteenth century,
An originality of musical sound is also evi- it appears just as characteristically in grand
dent in these choruses. To a limited extent, this opera (Don Carlo opens with the picturesque
originality is a matter of musical texture. Al- chorus of the French woodcutters and their
though choruses of the politically mobilized families) - in fact in every type, period, and rep-
generally took their musical textures from ertory of nineteenth-century opera. Like the
hymns and other church music, as opera cho- chorus of the politically mobilized, it has its
ruses had always done, they also introduced a distinguishing musical character, the character
few novel textures with political resonances, of "local color." In musical terms, that color
such as the unaccompanied male part-singing seldom amounts to much: studies of local color
of "O theures Vaterland" in Schubert's Fierra- in nineteenth-century opera isolate no more
bras (1823)- the sound of the politically liberal than a few musical details-a folklike melodic
German and Austrian Singvereine - or the turn (seldom a real folk melody), a character-
mixed-chorus unison singing of "Va, pensiero" istic rhythm, an unusual instrumental tim-
in Verdi's Nabucco (1842), sonically embody- bre- that serve, often vaguely, as ethnic or geo-
ing the political solidarity of a nation. More graphic markers within any musical number.'"
often, the originality of sound comes from se-

'"See Die "Couleur locale" in der Oper des 19. Jahrhun-

'4Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 128. derts, ed. Heinz Becker (Regensburg, 1976).

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 19TH
CENTURY
Yet when the number itself is a support. song or dance
Opera, along with other arts, was
MUSIC marking the character's or (moreturned often) crowd's
to the production of new images of order
ethnic or national identity, evenand the slightest
legitimacy. Before the word "nationalism"
local color in the music is being given
even became a apolit-
part of political discourse,18
ical role. opera began presenting images that defined na-
Dahlhaus's description of picturesque cho- tions from the bottom up, defined them by the
ruses as "musical extensions of the stage rootedness of a people in their land.
decor" echoes Hellmuth Christian Wolff's de- In the Russian opera Ivan Susanin, for ex-
scription of chorus and ballet in early opera as ample, whether in the version by Catterino
"more or less moving parts of the scenery."'16 Cavos (subtitled "Folk Opera with Choruses")
But picturesque choruses in nineteenth- written in 1815 (the year of Waterloo)'" or in
century opera are in their way just as original a that of Glinka produced in 1836 (for which the
feature of that repertory as choruses of politi- Tsar approved the new name A Life for the
cally mobilized crowds. They are different in Tsar), Russia as a nation and as a cause worth
meaning from the choruses in earlier opera, asdying for is represented almost entirely by
much because of the nature of the scenery theypeasant characters, by rural Russian settings,
played against as because of the nature of the and by Russian national culture in the form of
choruses themselves. The often generic sets of folk and folklike melodies. The action of the
earlier opera gave way in the course of the nine- opera is the struggle between Russian peasants
and invading Polish nobles, and although the
teenth century to sets designed specifically for
each opera, sets that located each scene in a Tsar is central to the plot in the sense that he is
specific place and time, sometimes by de- the object of the struggle, the peasant hero Ivan
picting particular European cityscapes with Susanin stands in for him on stage as the em-
considerable historical accuracy, sometimes by bodiment of the nation, at least until the very
supplying an identifying "local color."" Pictur- end.
esque choruses, which were often the numbers This operatic revolution is all the more re-
that introduced these sets, did not so much markable in that the Ivan Susanin operas are
"function as a musical extension" of the sets as works of nationalist ideology sponsored by and
connect the chorus to its setting. They drama- serving the political agenda of the Tsar, whose
tized the association of a people and a place - an claim to rule by divine right defined a vast em-
association that had new political implicationspire of many peoples (including Poles) as one
in the nineteenth century. nation.20 But if operatic nationalism had been
In fact, one of the most important political promoted exclusively by political revolution-
functions performed by opera in the nineteentharies, it could not have transformed opera as
century was to help reorient the politics ofquickly and thoroughly as it did. As it was,
place. At the beginning of the century, as the once the revolutionary leap into operatic na-
Napoleonic wars engulfed the whole continent tionalism was made in monarchist operas, it
of Europe, regimes both new and old, faced with
the crumbling of traditional systems of polit-
ical allegiance based on feudal relationships, 180On the novelty of the concept and terminology of nation-
alism in the nineteenth century, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Na-
scrambled for new means to mobilize populartions and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Re-
ality (Cambridge, 1990), esp. chap. 1, "The Nation as
Novelty: From Revolution to Liberalism."
16Wolff, Oper, p. 15. 19My information about this opera comes from brief de-
'7See the brief account of nineteenth-century operaticscriptions in M. C. Druskin and Ju. V. Keldy', Ocerki po
stage design by Manfred Boetzkes in "Opera," The New istorii russkoj muzyki 1790-1825 (Leningrad, 1956), pp.
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley 297-98; and Michel Maximovitch, L'Opdra russe 1731-
Sadie (London, 1980), vol. 13, pp. 629-34, and in History of 1935 (Lausanne, 1987), pp. 41-42.
Opera, ed. Sadie (London, 1989; New York, 1990), pp. 20Hobsbawm writes (in Nations and Nationalism, p. 84):
248-52. A splendid sample of trendsetting stage designs "The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary,
from the Paris Op6ra in the first half of the nineteenth cen- 'national' foundation for [monarchy] was felt in states as
tury is found in Cath6rine Join-Dieterle, Les Dicors de secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas
scene de l'Opera de Paris a l'dpoque romantique (Paris, I's Russia. And monarchies certainly tried to adapt them-
1988). selves."

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was actually a smaller step, both ideologically (1900).21 Charpentier's chorus of MontmartreJAMES
PARAKILAS
and operatically, to create operas of national street people, like Smetana's chorus of Czech Political
Representation
villagers, provides a politically charged local in
liberation and political revolution. After all, de- Opera
fining a nation in terms of land and people color (charged for the intended audience be-
makes it easy to think of constitutional ar- cause the color is native, for once) at the same
rangements as subject to dispute, rather than time that it gives political meaning to the do-
divinely and eternally ordained. And once the mestic struggle of the plot (marking Louise's re-
picturesque chorus was established on stage as volt against her parents' control as part of a
the symbol of a nation, it was a simple matter larger anarchist rejection of familial and state
to turn it into a revolutionary crowd, as it is in institutions of social control). Charpentier is
the relatively few operas that nineteenth- most effective politically not when he has the
century political authorities tolerated (and beggars of Montmartre cry "Gloire aux anar-
barely tolerated, at that) on revolutionary chistes!" (a cry that in any case he buries in a
themes, such as Auber's La Muette de Portici tumult of other cries), but when, extending the
(1828), Verdi's operas of national liberation, techniques of village nationalism, he stages a
Wagner's Rienzi (1842), and Smetana's Dalibor private exchange between the lovers-the
(1868). scene in which Julien appeals to Louise to run
No less political, and even more successful away with him - at a street corner, in the view
at promoting nationalist politics without pro- of passersby and with the cries of street vendors
voking the censors, are operas that stay entirely filling the air. The result is both a naturalistic
on the land, operas of village nationalism. image of proletarian life and a symbolic repre-
These works flourished especially after the sentation of the private intermingled with the
failed revolutions of 1848. They are operas political.
without any choruses of the politically mobi- The conventions of village nationalism also
lized, operas in which all the choruses are pic- provided the means for political satire. The
turesque. They are set entirely away from royal humor of the opening chorus of Gilbert and Sul-
courts and battlefields and the embattled livan's Mikado (1885)-"If you want to know
streets of capitals. They depict social hierar-who we are, / We are gentlemen of Japan"-is
chies without bringing kings onto the stage. that it fills the dramatic function of a scene-
Nevertheless, they functioned as a political setting picturesque chorus in an opera of village
complement to operas of high-level political nationalism, but inverts all the conventions. It
action: Smetana's village comedy Prodand is a chorus of gentlemen, not peasants; it is a
nevesta (The Bartered Bride, 1866) can be con- male chorus, not a mixed one; and instead of
sidered as a nationalist complement to his his- displaying the naturalness of village culture in
torical tragedy Dalibor (1868); the Italian folk folklike song and dance, these Japanese gen-
color of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana (Rus- tlemen make a self-conscious display of arti-
tic Chivalry, 1890) as an act of compensation fice, "standing and sitting in attitudes sug-
for the allegorical Italian nationalism of Verdi gested by native drawings" (according to the
operas set in ancient Babylon or Renaissance stage directions) and chanting a stiffly "Orien-
Spain; and Wagner's celebration of the German tal" chant (see ex. 2).
small town in Die Meistersinger (1868) as a na- This chorus plays on and reinforces Western
tionalist response to the image of Paris as the stereotypes of Oriental music and manners,
center of national life in French operas like Les of course, but it also plays on and rein-
Huguenots (1836). forces British stereotypes of the gentleman-
The techniques of village nationalism- principally the British gentleman - as someone
local color generally and the picturesque cho-
rus in particular-remained political even
when they were adapted to agendas other than 210n the expression of anarchist politics in Louise, see
Manfred Kelkel, Naturalisme, verisme et realisme dans
nationalist ones, as they were by Gustave Char-
l'opera de 1890 a 1930 (Paris, 1984), esp. pp. 189-90, 199-
pentier, for example, to project anarchist poli- 203. See also Jane F. Fulcher's essay on Louise in this issue
tics in the urban proletarian setting of Louise for a different reading.

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 19TH Allegro vivace
CENTURY
The costume in nineteenth-century opera is
MUSIC there to be seen as a costume; the musical color
r
is there to be heard as a marker. The drama-
If you think we are worked by strings
tic effect of specifying time and place is to
make the characters specific, to keep them
from seeming idealized, abstract, or remote.
Touched with local color, characters seem rep-
Like a Jap - a - nese mar - io - nette, resentative or characteristic of a culture. The
local color cannot be more than a touch, espe-
cially if the culture is exotic, without alien-
ating the audience. But no matter how exotic
You don't un -der - stand these things: the culture seems to the audience, a color of
cultural identity or rootedness gives characters
dramatic credibility. Paradoxically, the color
of exoticism lets characters like Aida and

It is sim-ply Court et - i - quette. Cio-Cio San, like S1lika and N6lusko in L'Af-
ricaine (1865), come across as among the most
sympathetic, down-to-earth, and familiar char-
acters in nineteenth-century opera, as charac-
Example 2: Sullivan, The Mikado, act I, sc. 1,
"If You Want to Know Who We Are."
ters with whom everyone in the audience can
feel a bond.

too bound by class etiquette to sing and dance INDIVIDUALS AS REPRESENTATIVES

with any art or spirit. The number is amusing OF THE PEOPLE
as a send-up of the picturesque chorus - giving
a picture of artless artifice where one of natural
Verdi's Aida (1871) offers a classic example of
songfulness would be expected - but it is more how nineteenth-century operas present even
interesting for implicitly reminding its audi- royal characters as representative of the com-
ence how nationalist opera had contributed to mon people. Embedded in the old-fashioned
the undermining of gentlemanly virtues by cel- love triangle of the plot is the fairy-tale assump-
ebrating rural, uncultivated virtues instead tionas that a princess cannot disguise her royal
the foundation of national character. nature even when she is disguising her iden-
Nineteenth-century opera is costume opera: tity: otherwise, how could Radames fall in love
its nature is to transport audiences to a specificwith the Ethiopian slave Aida, in preference to
time and place. An opera may use its "cos- the Egyptian princess Amneris? But Aida is
tume" as a patriotic banner (the Russian col- never presented in the opera as a fairy-tale prin-
oring of Ivan Susanin), as a mask of remoteness cess. When she faces her crucial political test,
protecting politically controversial works from in the Nile scene, she speaks as one of her
censorship (the Biblical or Scottish or other
non-Italian settings of national-liberation op-
side colorings of remote times and exotic places; what it
eras by Rossini and Verdi), or as a transparent could not make room for was the coloring of the universal,
veil of the exotic revealing the foibles of the fa-which subjects from classical myth and history had given
miliar (the Japanese coloring of The Mikado).to much of the operatic repertory before the nineteenth
century. When the classical world does appear in post-
Uniting all these uses of operatic color is an ide- Napoleonic opera, it becomes just another site of local
ology of the specific, the ideology of a culture color (as in Pacini's volcanic spectacle, L'ultimo giorno di
teaching itself a new form of political loyalty, Pompei, 1825) or a vehicle for satire (as in Offenbach's
Orphee aux enfers, 1858, and La belle Hielene, 1864); con-
namely a belief in the unique character and his- ceived in the traditional way, as the common history of
tory of a land and its people.22 mankind, the classical era was no longer an appealing
source of subjects for opera, since history in opera was
coming to mean the dramatic reenactment of events and
experiences that defined particular nations and nation-
22The ideology of the specific could make room, on the op-
alities.
eratic stage, for the here-and-now coloring of Louise along-

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 JAMES
people. At the beginning of the scene, she estab-is a faculty common PARAKILAS
to the meanest of the earth: to give it belongs
lishes her patriotic credentials by the nation- Political
only to the gods and to rulers.) Representation
alist device of associating herself with the land.
in Opera
In this case, the association is expressed Metastasio's
as lines, written in 1734, clearly sup-
homesickness:
port the absolutist ideology of his Hapsburg
patrons and other early eighteenth-century
O verdi colli ... O profumate rive ...
monarchies. Even Voltaire, Metastasio's exact
O patria mia, mai piul ti rivedrb!
contemporary but the ideologue of enlightened
(O verdant hills ... O perfumed shores ... monarchy, found in these lines an "eternal
O my homeland, I'll never see you again!) lesson for kings" and praised the scene as com-
parable or superior to the best of the Greeks or
Later in the scene, yielding to the terrible duty
of Corneille and Racine.23
that her father imposes on her, she expresses But by the time of the French Revolution, at
the sentiments of ordinary people when they
least in opdras-comiques, new images of rulers
are called on to sacrifice themselves for their
were being put on stage. In 1785, in Richard
country: Coeur-de-Lion, Sedaine and Gr6try presented a
king and one of his subjects as comrades in
Della mia patria degna saro. song. For a while, at the height of the Revolu-
tion, royal characters were avoided in French
O patria! o patria! ... quanto mi costi!
opera (subjects being drawn from current
(I'll be worthy of my fatherland. French events as well as from democratic
Greece and republican Rome),24 and other po-
O my country! ... What you cost me!) litically powerful solo characters were defined
in new dramatic relationships to the chorus, or
For Aida, as for nineteenth-century operaticpeople. Marie-Joseph Barouillet (known as
royalty generally, there are political situations Martin) prefaced his libretto to the opera Fa-
that only rulers find themselves in, but even in bius, which was first performed (with music by
those situations rulers feel and act and express M6reaux) at the Opera in 1793, with this de-
themselves like ordinary people. scription:
In earlier opera, rulers were defined differ-
ently. Pietro Metastasio, the primary operatic
In this work, as in the tragedies of the ancients, the
fashioner of royal images for eighteenth-
chorus is in the forefront, because the principal
century Europe, depicts rulers as self- characters being only the representatives or the
consciously unrepresentative of their people, proxies of the People, it is the people who must
constantly reminding themselves of their duty dominate, for everything relates to them.25
to feel and think and act more nobly than
common people. Here are the lines in which he In the wake of the Revolution, royal and
has the Emperor Titus stop himself from an act noble characters returned to the opera stage in
of revenge:

Vendetta! Ah! Tito, e tu sarai capace 23Voltaire, "Dissertation sur la trag6die ancienne et mod-
d'un si basso desio, che rende eguale erne" (preface to Simiramis), rpt. in (Euvres completes de
l'offeso all'offensor? . Voltaire (Paris, 1877): Thdatre, III, 491-92.
. Il t6rre altrui la vita 24Michel Noiray gives a list of operas created in Paris
e facolta comune during the Revolution in "Les Cr6ations d'Opera a Paris de
1790 a 1794: Chronologie et sources parisiennes," Orphie
al piiP vil della terra: il darla 6 solo
de' numi e de' regnanti. Phrygien: les musiques de la revolution, ed. Jean-R6my
(La clemenza di Tito, act III, sc. 7) Julien and Jean-Claude Klein (Paris, 1989), pp. 196-203.
25Marie-Joseph D6sir6 Martin Barouillet, preface to Fabius
(1792), p. iii; trans. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet in "The New
(Revenge! Ah! Tito, will you be capable Repertory at the Op6ra during the Reign of Terror: Revo-
of such a base desire, which puts lutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences," in Music
the offended on the level of the offender? ... and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge,
... To take the life of another 1992), p. 138.

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 19TH
CENTURY
plained: in
France, but in nineteenth-century opera "The queen of the opera is better re-
gen-
MUSIC eral, protagonists, whether they ceived
are royal
than the or
Queen of the French."27
noble or bourgeois or peasant characters, share royalty by making ordinary
Opera redefined
traits-the traits
a dramatic identity that neither Metastasio norof ordinary people-signs of
Barouillet imagined: they feel and speak and
extraordinary power onstage. Glamour in the
modern "in
act like ordinary people, yet they stand sensethe
was born in the nineteenth-
forefront," never merged into the century
mass of opera house when sex appeal was
ordi-
turned
nary people - the chorus - but, on the into an attribute of noble-born charac-
contrary,
thrown into relief by it. They are ters.
presented
As Robert asWangermee has written, "the
ordinary humans transformed intogreat something
singers of that time knew how to create
heroic, noble, larger than life. around themselves a halo of eroticism, such as
is found
It is striking, nevertheless, how many oftoday
the around the stars of the cin-
protagonists in operas of every repertory and
ema. "28 Limelight, introduced into opera in the
from every period of the nineteenth century
middle of the are
nineteenth century, made spot-
monarchs or nobles. This persistent taste
lighting forfor the first time,29 so that a
possible
monarchs in opera cannot be adequately ex-
character like Aida could be a visually com-
mandingthe
plained as a reflection of political reality, figurere-even on a crowded stage while
ality that monarchy persisted in all dressed
the asmajor
a slave. But it was also new relation-
European countries except Franceships
throughout
between the soloists and the crowd that
made
the century and even in France for the soloists powerful, by making them
two-thirds
of the century. For operas on historical subjects
seem to embody the spirit and power of a mul-
in the nineteenth century did [Link]
reflect - or simply sustain - the monarchical
Solo characters in nineteenth-century opera
traditions of Europe, but rewrote history
establish to are typical or representative
that they
create new images of royalty for the
of aage of
group the
- whether a class of people or a whole
"citizen king." In this age when public
nationrhetoric
- by associating with a chorus that itself
made "the people" the measure of all things,
represents that group. At its simplest, this asso-
ciation is manifested
operatic kings and queens who appeared to be in stage blocking: the
representatives of "the people" in nature
stage manuals and
from original productions regu-
spirit embodied the power of the people
larly showinstead
a solo character standing directly in
of power over the people. front of a chorus, so that each is seen as bound
In one sense, this was opera at the
up service of in nature and in destiny. In
with the other
complicated
conservative political forces, engendering scenes, different solo characters
polit-
ical sympathy for real monarchs by stand in front of the different choral groups
fashioning
stage monarchs of ordinary stuff, sothey are associated
that ordi- with, so that the conflicts
among the
nary people could identify with them.26 soloin
But characters are seen as part of
another sense, and by the same means, opera
larger political conflicts (see plate 1).
was capable of undermining any political
The music au-
of choral scenes corresponds to
the blocking.
thority monarchs had: when citizens are busyNineteenth-century choruses do
imagining themselves as kings and much of their
queens, singing in conjunction with the
real
kings and queens become mere symbols, figure-
soloists who represent them, often with the so-
heads. In 1831 Queen Marie-Amelie,loiststhe
out front
wife (in the sense that they initiate
of the "citizen king" Louis-Philippe, com- the music) and the chorus backing them up.

26The most intensive studies of the political control of

opera houses and the social makeup of opera audiences in 27Quoted by Join-Didterle in Les Decors de scene de
the nineteenth century have treated opera in Paris. On the 1'Ope'ra de Paris, p. 23, from Charles Maurice, Histoire an-
political control of the Paris Op6ra, see Fulcher, The Na- ecdotique du theatre, de la litterature (Paris, 1856) II, 32.
tion's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politi- "8Robert Wangermee, "Introduction A une sociologie de
cized Art (Cambridge, 1987). On the makeup of Paris au- l'opera," Revue Belge de musicologie 20 (1966), 159.
diences, see Steven Huebner, "Opera Audiences in Paris 29See Gosta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stock-
1830-1870," Music & Letters 70 (1989), 206-25. holm, 1977), pp. 273-77.

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 JAMES
PARAKILAS
Political
Representation
in Opera

f II
.W p AKNER1S ap I
MS
AMOKASRO RE R 'o
I r I I RR"FIS
Plate 1: Blocking for act II, sc. 2, of Aida, from the
Reproduced by permission of the University of Minnes
Opera in Letters and Documents, coll. and trans. H

Nineteenth-century choruses not

background for Norma's only
solo"30 (see ex. 3).play
Yet a
the chorus
generally larger role than actuallychoruses
opera converts the figure of of ear-
lier centuries did, but they
Norma, howeverintrude
briefly, from aninto
individualthe
music in places where who for private reasons
choruses is at odds with her
scarcely ever
intruded before. Less restricted than before to people into the symbol of her people's noblest
numbers of their own and to introductions, fi-political instincts. Mediating between the indi-
nales, and diversions, they regularly join in onvidual character and the audience, this tiny
the solo numbers -arias, recitatives, duets and choral refrain allows the audience to feel even
other small ensembles - that make up the heartthe character's private dilemma as the need of a
of most operatic scenes. The chorus may seem whole nation to find reconciliation with its
to be playing its humblest musical role when itenemy.
is singing a refrain or other backup to an aria, The simplest musical techniques and tex-
but dramatically that role constitutes one oftures serve for choruses singing in solidarity
the most powerful and original techniques ofwith soloists: repetitions, doublings, harmoni-
nineteenth-century opera, a sounding image ofzations, and refrains are the most common.
solidarity between the individual who standsEach is capable of a different range of dramatic
for a group and the group that stands with theeffects. When the chorus in Carmen (1875) re-
individual. This humble role, like virtually sponds to the first two stanzas of the habaftera
every other dramaturgical innovation in theby repeating the whole first stanza (under
use of the chorus, was taken over in all Carmen's descant), the audience is made to
branches of nineteenth-century opera from thefeel that although it is meeting Carmen for
late eighteenth-century ope'ra-comique. the first time, the people of Seville all know her
In Bellini's Norma (1831), the chorus of bel- tune and her game. In The Mikado, when
licose Gauls who join with their priestess in theNanki-Poo, the prince disguised as a minstrel,
refrain of her peace-invoking aria "Casta diva" introduces himself to the chorus of Japanese
are demonstrating solidarity with her by ac-gentlemen by singing a sampling of his songs,
knowledging her right to speak for them onand the chorus, after a few of these samples,
matters of war and peace, even if that solidaritybegins to round off each one with a refrain, the
is already dissolving in the cabaletta. The
simple strain of the chorus allows Norma to
stand out in glamorous descant: Donald Grout 3"Donald Jay Grout with Hermine Weigel Williams, A
calls this chorus "part of the quiet musical Short History of Opera (3rd edn. New York, 1988), p. 414.

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 19TH Andante sostenuto assai
CENTURY
MUSIC
CHORUS sotto voce Ca - sta Di - va, che i - nar - gen ti que - ste sa cre anti che

Ca - - - sta Di

dolce espressivo e pp sempre

NORMA

sen ....- .. za vel,

pian - te, a noi vol - giilbel sem - bian - te sen za nu be e sen - za vel.

- va, a noi, deh, vol -

, _ _ _

Example 3: Bell

audience is What
or a fisherman. encour
the chorus sings is closely
chorus, related
it may
to what not
the soloist initiates: singing the
knows his
same music style
is the principal operaticof sign that s
In great the choral
individual is by nature one of thetabl
group. But
scene of Don
choruses do not double the Carlo
soloists' parts for
are used long,
in any moreterrifica
than the soloists merge into the
changing choruscombinatio
onstage for long. Even when the soloist
the musical relations of soloists and chorus
and chorus are singing at the same time, the
whether the music is simple or complex. solo
Thevoice is generally given the means to stand
soloists lead more often than they followout,
the such as higher notes and faster rhythms.
chorus: operatic solidarity has its own hier-
Individuals can be heard as representative of
archy, one that is hardly any different whether
groups only if they are heard as distinct from
those groups. The chorus, on the other hand,
the soloist is a queen or a seamstress, a general

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does not need to stand out; the mass of voices vance its own political purposes. Most of the JAMES
PARAKILAS
makes the choral part audible even when it is choral groups never appear onstage together; in Political
"part of the quiet musical background" to fact, most of the scenes show just one or two of Representation
in Opera
brighter, more compelling sounds. In nine- the groups. But from the opera as a whole
teenth-century opera, this acoustical power of emerges a dramatic image of a national polit-
the chorus becomes a sign of political power, ical crisis in which all the constituent groups of
the power of a people to make its presence felt the nation-as defined by race, class, and
by sheer dint of numbers. occupation - compete for a share of the nation's
political power. Boris is characteristic of
nineteenth-century opera in that its subject is a
THE CHORUS DIVIDED conflict among social groups within a nation
and a conflict arising from the social differ-
When one side in the dramatic conflict of an ences among those groups.
opera is represented by a single character in sol- Even relations between women and men are
idarity with a choral group, then more than oneseldom worked out simply as differences of in-
chorus may be needed, along with more than
dividual nature in nineteenth-century opera;
one solo character, to stage the whole dramatic more often they are also represented as differ-
conflict. There remains, consequently, one ele- ences between two highly segregated social
ment to describe in the dramaturgical transfor- groups that are at odds. The separation of the
mation of opera in the nineteenth century: the chorus into women's and men's groups is so
division of the chorus into groups that embody pervasive in nineteenth-century opera, in fact,
that to modern operagoers in particular that
the conflicting political and social forces of the
drama. separation may come to seem like the natural
Before the nineteenth century, the operatic organization of the opera chorus; in fact it is a
chorus was not often divided onstage into dramatic device of social representation. It can
groups at odds with each other, and if the be observed at its most forceful in the works of
chorus represented different classes or groups Wagner, whose choral scenes are overwhelm-
of people in different scenes of an opera, the dif- ingly devoted to the representation of a sexu-
ferences between them were not often drama- ally segregated society.
tized as central dramatic issues of the opera. In The Flying Dutchman (1843), as in many
Even in a scene of exceptionally complex divi- nineteenth-century operas, the division of the
sions of the chorus, like the dance scene in thechorus into male and female groups ostensibly
act I finale of Don Giovanni (1787), with its represents the division of labor and social func-
groups of different social classes simulta- tion in a traditional society. The opera is set in
neously dancing their own dances to their own a traditional seafaring village, a community in
stage bands, the divisions of the chorus do not which work keeps men and women isolated
represent the principal sides in the dramaticfrom each other for long periods of time. But
conflict of the opera. None of those groups is at-the segregation of the choruses is maintained in
tached to Don Giovanni, and when Zerlina such a way that it also contributes to the con-
screams for help, they all unite, however inef- temporary social and political theme of the
fectually, to confront him; the dramatic issue is work. One can take it as a representation of the
between one reprobate and society as a whole. conditions of village life when Wagner presents
In Boris Godunov (1874), by contrast, the the men's chorus of sailors in the first act and
chorus represents a variety of groups all strug- the women's chorus of spinning maidens in the
gling for a role in determining the succession to second; but something more is needed to ac-
the Russian throne: nobles and commoners, count for the opening of the third act, in which,
soldiers and peasants, monks and pilgrims, even while the chorus of maidens is offering
Russians and Poles. Some of these groups have food and drink to the chorus of sailors, the two
their own spokespeople among the solo charac- choruses sing almost entirely in alternation. In
ters. In each act, one group or its spokesperson an opera full of choruses, there are just a few
pressures or manipulates another group to ad- seconds of mixed choral singing.

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 19TH
CENTURY
operatic
By providing this radically segregated seductions as new is the casting of a
choral
MUSIC scheme as the social backdrop to the liveschorus-in
group-a of the role of the seducer. It is
the principal characters in the opera,
womenWagner
as a class who are being represented as
seductive
implies that a social organization that blocksdemons. Nineteenth-century opera,
easy communication between women as and
a product
men of Romanticism, may in some
sense
in daily life is a precondition to such celebrate individualism, but it also treats
intense
love as the self-sacrificing devotion of Senta.
human In in terms of character types, and,
nature
that sense, he is not depicting any particular much more so-than seventeenth- or eighteenth-
ciety or prescribing a social organization, century but
opera, it presents character types as
dramatizing a general connection between so-There is no clearer example of this
group types.
cial organization and psychological nature. practiceBut
than the representation of the seduc-
by making this choral scheme represent tive woman
dailyby a chorus line.
life in a Norwegian village, he portrays Other themes besides sexual segregation and
it as the
traditional and therefore the natural model of sexual nature are treated in nineteenth-century
social relations. Wagner connects psycholog- opera by division of the chorus into women's
ical nature to social organization in this opera, and men's groups. Hardly any social division or
but without leaving room for anyone to feel political conflict is depicted without some divi-
that in other circumstances Senta might have sion of the chorus on gender lines. The reason is
been a happy person. not hard to find: no other division of the chorus
In The Flying Dutchman, although the so- is so striking, both visually and sonically, and
cial organization of the chorus sets the terms none evokes such sharply differentiated re-
for sexual relationships in the whole imagined sponses instantly and instinctively.
community, sexual attractions and attach- Political struggle, for instance, is often de-
ments are shown only among the solo charac- picted in nineteenth-century opera with a par-
ters. But it is also in nineteenth-century opera ticular gender division of the chorus: the oppo-
that the representation of group sexual sition of an all-male choral group to a mixed
encounters- choral seduction scenes- devel- chorus. A major political theme of nineteenth-
oped. The most influential of these scenes was century opera is liberation from political tyr-
in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831), the anny (more often depicted as liberation from a
scene in which the ghosts of nuns who once foreign tyrant, as in Guillaume Tell, than from
broke their vows seduce Robert, by dance aand native one, as in Cherubini's Lodoi'ska, 1791),
pantomime, into plucking a magic bough, and an that theme created a dramatic paradigm in
act expected to lead to his damnation. Succes- which the forces of tyranny, represented by a
sors to that scene include the Venusberg scene male chorus of soldiers, would be posed against
in Tannhduser (1845), in which the dancing and an oppressed people, represented by a mixed
singing nymphs create the seductive atmo- chorus of civilians, with or without a male
sphere from which Tannhdiuser can barely es- group of soldiers defending them.
cape, and the Magic Garden scene of ParsifalWhen the two groups are brought together to
(1882), in which the Flower Maidens begin the confront each other (as in a battle scene), the
seduction of Parsifal before leaving him for lines of conflict on a crowded and confused
Kundry to kiss. In both scenes, as in the scene stage are mapped by the distinction in sight and
from Robert, women as a group perform for sound
the between the male and mixed choruses.
seduction of a single man, and in all three cases concern for such dramatic clarity in
The
nineteenth-century
the women are represented as spirits living in a staging is shown especially
when
place removed from the man's daily life, sexual a split stage is used to separate the op-
demons from another world seducing him into posing forces, as in the prebattle scene of Le
an immoral life. Sueur's Ossian (1804) in which the mixed
chorus of Caledonians appears on the upper
There had of course been seduction scenes in
opera at least since The Coronation of Poppealevel while the all-male chorus of invading
(1642), and in other forms of drama for much Scandinavian warriors appears below. At the
longer. What marks these nineteenth-century same time, the distinction between male and

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mixed choruses serves to direct the sympathies ical life (and thereby legitimized) what was atJAMES
PARAKILAS
of the audience. The presence of women in one the time a new model of public assemblies still Political
being tested in politics.31 Representation
party to a struggle identifies that party as the in Opera
innocent victim, winning sympathy for its It is the divided chorus that allows nine-
cause, even in an exceptional case like Gretry's teenth-century opera to present this model of
Guillaume Tell (1791) in which the Swiss political life as a perpetual struggle among the
women fight alongside their men. In cases like constituencies of a society, united only in that
the auto-da-fe scene of Don Carlo, an all-male they come together to engage with each other.
chorus of monks makes the same dramatic ef- Even at moments when many different choral
fect and political point as an all-male chorus of groups come together peaceably in public as-
soldiers. semblies or rituals of social harmony (in scenes
In scenes of battle, public ritual, and political like the Council Chamber scene, the auto-da-fe
assembly, nineteenth-century opera presented scene, and the coronation scenes of Le Prophete
a new image of political struggle, an image of [1849] and Boris), the harmony is disturbed by
all the constituencies of a society (represented unexpected disputes or utterances. The very
by differentiated choral groups) assembling in placement of these scenes in the middle of an
one place to contend with each other for polit- opera rather than at the end suggests to the au-
ical power. A perfect example is the Council dience that the dramatic resolution of the work
Chamber scene of Simon Boccanegra, in whichcannot be expected to take the form of social or
the Doge, Consuls, High Constables, Noble political tranquility, but of ongoing social divi-
Councillors, and Councillors of the People are sion and death.
all arranged around the stage by rank (see plate The divided chorus allows nineteenth-
2). Here a nineteenth-century ideal of a repre- century opera to dramatize issues of irreducible
sentative assembly is being projected anachro- difference among social groups that have to live
nistically onto medieval Genoa. The historical with each other despite their differences. The
Simone Boccanegra presided over no such differences may be of gender, race or nation,
council of representatives from every class of class or profession, religion, or even age. No
Genoan society: his rule as Doge was marked matter which difference is being represented, a
by the exclusion of the nobility from political division of the chorus along lines of gender is
office. Before the nineteenth century, in fact, used whenever possible, precisely because that
the common model of European governments division signifies an irreducible difference.
was for every class or social group to have its Many operas, of course, depict attempts to dis-
own political institutions. In the English Par- solve or ignore the differences that nineteenth-
liament and French Estates General, the no- century European society accepted as insol-
bility and commoners had their own chambers; uble. These attempts most frequently take the
in the medieval Italian city-states, they had not form of love across racial or national or social or
only their own councils but also their ownreligious lines, although they also include as-
magistrates, courts, laws, and military organi- sumptions of political power by women, as in
zations. It was only in the nineteenth century Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans (1881) or
that it became standard for the constituent Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel (1909).
But the attempt is usually restricted to solo
classes and groups in a nation to send their rep-
characters, the divisions are maintained within
resentatives to the same legislative body. Like-
wise, it was in the nineteenth century that
formal political parties were organized and that
31On constitutional arrangements and class conflict in
members of legislatures began to seat them- Genoa under Simone Boccanegra, see the entry "Boccane-
gra, Simone" by G. Balbi in Dizionario Biografico degli
selves by party: the division of parties intoItaliani, vol. 11 (Rome, 1969). On the class-based political
"left" and "right" originated in the seatinginstitutions
of of Italian city-states, see Daniel Waley, The
delegates by political allegiance in the French
Italian City-Republics (2nd edn. London and New York,
National Assembly of 1789. In scenes like the1978), esp. the chapter "Internal Divisions." On the origin
of the political left and right, see the entry "Left and
Council Chamber scene, nineteenth-century Right" in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institu-
opera presented as an eternal formula of polit- tions, ed. Vernon Bogdanor (Oxford, 1987).

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 19TH
CENTURY
Pages Pages
MUSIC

Guards Guards

Off-stage.,.... ......
Chorus I/
PA O.
SAO. Bocc.
Chorus Master
PIE.

Off-stage
Chorus

Plate 2: Blocking for act I, sc. 2, of Simon Boccanegra, from the production book compiled by
Giulio Ricordi, as transcribed by Hans Busch.
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press from Verdi's Otello and Simon Boccanegra
(Revised Version) in Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Hans Busch (Oxford, 1988), II, 446.

the chorus, and the attempt fails. When an ject matter really took hold at all in opera. It
opera depicts a whole society constructed with- would be worth exploring the dependence of
out regard to the accepted social differences (as tragic endings in this repertory on themes of ir-
the classless, leaderless, cooperative world of reconcilably opposed social groups.
the Gypsy hideout is in Carmen), that society is
explicitly represented as inhospitable (as the AFTERWARD
Gypsy world is to both Don Jose and Micadla).
The chorus does not always end up divided Asking how opera represented politics to its au-
in nineteenth-century opera. The irreducible diences in the nineteenth century raises the
difference between mortals and fairies that question how operagoers today respond to the
ends tragically in Dvofik's Rusalka (1901) ends political representation in nineteenth-century
happily, in magical transformation and mar- opera. In particular, what does the representa-
riage, in Gilbert and Sullivan's lolanthe (1882):tion of politics in nineteenth-century operas
the men's chorus of British Lords sprouts fairy have to do with the popularity of those works
wings. But the political message of a ludicroustoday, with the centrality of the nineteenth-
ending may not be very different from that of century
a repertory in the late twentieth-century
opera house?
tragic ending: at the end of Iolanthe the law for-
bidding fairies to marry mortals is not abol-The most straightforward answer would be
ished but changed to a law requiring them on
to the lines of Antonio Gramsci's assertion
marry mortals. Tragic opera may be only part around
of 1930 that "if people like the novels of a
the nineteenth-century repertory, but it was hundred years ago, it means that their taste and
ideology are precisely those of a hundred years
only in the nineteenth century that tragic sub-

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ago."32 When the assertion is applied to people that nineteenth-century operas are no longer JAMES
PARAKILAS
today who like the operas of a hundred years received as they originally were, but departs Political
ago, there is something undeniable about it. from both Gramsci and Adorno in what he Representation
in Opera
The political themes pioneered in nineteenth- identifies as the difference: the political ide-
century opera still fit popular political ide- ology of the operas has been devalued so that it
ology: the political destinies of peoples, the simply does not matter to audiences any more.
nature of leadership when leaders are represen- From being a "mass art" in the nineteenth cen-
tative of their people, and the power struggles tury, opera has been purified into an "art of
of social groups that divide naturally against high culture," so that "opera lovers today are
each other. Gramsci's formula does not, how- first of all music lovers who expect satisfac-
ever, help us understand why twentieth- tions at the lyric theater on the same order as
century operas have not been able to compete those that concerts, recordings, and radio give
in popularity with their nineteenth-century them."3s The comparison of the experience in
predecessors. Do they really appeal to such dif- the opera house to the experience of recordings
ferent political ideologies, and what has and radio, from a musicologist who was a di-
prompted the change if the political ideology of rector of Belgian radio and television, is signif-
opera audiences has not changed in more than icant. In the course of the twentieth century,
a century? opera has been experienced through radio and
These are the questions that Theodor W. recordings more and more of the time. It has
Adorno addresses in the chapter on opera in his been experienced, that is, under conditions that
Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962). eliminate the political spectacle of opera: the
Like Gramsci, he associates the popularity of sight of choral crowds massing and moving and
an art with its political ideology, but in the case contending with each other, the repeated con-
of nineteenth-century opera he takes the appeal trasts of private and public tableaux, even the
of the ideology to be a matter of nostalgia, an political spectacle of the audience to which the
identification with nineteenth-century ide- viewer belongs.
ology precisely because it does not fit with con- In the half century or so when this sightless
temporary political life: "The force that ties experience of opera was most powerful (in
men to opera is the memory of something they America, the half century from the beginning
cannot possibly remember: of the legendary of the Met's radio broadcasts in 1931 to the ad-
Golden Age of the bourgeoisie, to which the vent of opera on videotape), opera theory and
Iron Age alone lends a glamour it never pos- criticism provided means for understanding
sessed." 33Twentieth-century opera cannot ap- opera as it was being experienced. When Joseph
peal in the same way because it does not evoke Kerman wrote in 1956 that "music articulates
the same memory. But it is not clear why the drama,"36 he was focusing attention on the
Adorno thinks opera is now received "as some- kind of drama that could be experienced
thing altogether different" from what it was, at through speakers; his Opera as Drama has con-
the same time that he claims that "opera tributed enormously to the analysis of the dra-
awakens a sense of belonging to a fictitious matic power of music, but at the expense of at-
status of the past."34 Are not nostalgic fictions, tention to the power opera has shown to
after all, written into the texts of nineteenth- dramatize political experience. Other theorists
century operas, in fact, of operas in general? in this period have treated opera as more a lit-
In his classic "Introduction to a Sociology of erary than a theatrical experience, in Peter
Opera" (1966), Wangermee agrees with Adorno Conrad's words as "more musical novel than
musical drama."37
32Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, ed.
David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William35Wangermee, "Introduction a une sociologie de l'opera,"
Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 207. p. 165.
33Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of 36Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), p. 22.
Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1976; original 37Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Ber-
German edn. 1962), p. 81. keley and Los Angeles, 1977), p. 1. See also Gary
34Ibid., pp. 81, 83. Schmidgall, Literature as Opera (New York, 1977).

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 19TH
CENTURY
Even critics deeply aware of nineteenth- made most explicit, usually-in modern pro-
MUSIC century discourse about nineteenth-century ductions of classic works-through some pa-
operas have been less responsive to the drama tently anachronistic twisting of the scene, cos-
of political representation than to the drama of tume, and staging directions of the score. By the
character and personal relations in those same token, it is hard to imagine anything that
works. Budden, for instance, describes the would contribute more to the investigation of
auto-da-f? scene of Don Carlo with some em- political representation in nineteenth-century
barrassment. Even while acknowledging that opera than to twist a nineteenth-century opera
critics of the day, and Verdi himself, called it house back to its original state, including its
the greatest moment in the opera, he writes original lighting and other technical resources,
that "modern taste has been in general un- and reconstruct original productions there.
enthusiastic about this finale"38-but what Some recent critics, meanwhile, have fur-
about the taste of those modern spectatorsthered
who the investigation in their own ways:
sang along at the Verona Arena? He doesHerbert
not Lindenberger by treating opera as a
conceive of the chorus as a character, doesform
not of theater with unique means of con-
treat it with the wonderful sensitivity he gives
structing history;40 Catherine Clement, even in
to individual characters, does not attend toa work
the devoted almost entirely to solo charac-
ters,
dramatic effect of its silent presence as well asby an acute awareness of the political na-
of its utterances. Yet it is nothing other than
ture of psychological structures.41 There is also
the silent presence of the chorus-the peopleincreasing interest in this investigation within
-in this scene that makes Don Carlo's threat the discipline of musicology. An increased
on his father's life an event of political signifi-
awareness of the processes of political represen-
cance, a point of no return, in the drama. tation in opera may not, in itself, explain the
Effects like this that are lost on the radio or
continuing popularity of nineteenth-century
on recordings can come across powerfully on operas with the public, let alone affect their
video. To that extent, the video medium can popularity. But it can provide a new frame of
help redirect the attention of the operatic reference for discussions of the repertory. As a
public to the political themes projected in medium of political representation, nine-
nineteenth-century opera and the role of the teenth-century opera paved the way for all the
chorus in projecting them. But opera on video is popular dramatic media of the twentieth cen-
still an armchair experience; it still deprives tury, movies as well as musical theater; com-
opera lovers of the social-political experience of parisons to those media can contribute to our
operagoing. And simply going to the opera understanding of nineteenth-century opera as a
house does not re-create the social experience "mass art" in its own day, as well as to placing
of the nineteenth-century operagoer - does not nineteenth-century opera in the history of the
restore what Adorno calls "that acte de pres- mass, or popular, arts. To place nineteenth-
ence that took place at the opera in the heyday century opera in this frame of reference re-
of nineteenth-century liberalism"39 - any more quires study of its musical as well as dramatur-
than it allows any twentieth-century operagoer gical, verbal, and visual resources, since it was
to understand the political meaning of an opera a musical resource - the chorus - that turned
the way a nineteenth-century operagoer would. opera into a mass art in the nineteenth century
Nevertheless, any insight into opera as a
by enabling it to represent the experi- ,
medium of political representation is highly de- ence of a people en masse.
pendent on the visual experience of the me-
dium. The staging, after all, is the realm of
opera production in which political meaning is

40Herbert Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art

(Ithaca, N. Y. 1984).
38Budden, Operas of Verdi, III, 119. 41Catherine C16ment, Opera, or the Undoing of Women,
39Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988; original French edn.
pp. 79-80. 1979).

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