VOICES OF THE INVISIBLE

Just as the operatic voice has fascinated us, in the West, continuously for four hundred years, so we have felt the need again and again to formulate explanations of its force. Two recent scholarly developments suggest that the time may be ripe for a new such formulation. First, the notion of voice in opera has grown increasingly complex and rich in recent years. It has been scrutinized from enough perspectives—from narratology to post-Freudian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, from feminist theory to queer sensibility—that we must think twice before presuming to know just who expresses what as a singer portrays for us a dramatic role. Musicologists in particular have tried out on the operatic voice a wide array of the approaches to utterance and self that have emerged from other academic disciplines. In the process voice has seemed at times almost to displace the musical score at the heart of operatic study. It has done so provocatively and, often, productively.

The second development is the anthropological impulse, broadly speaking, that drives many of the human sciences these days, which I would sum up as the quest for a knowledge of others that can alienate even as it illuminates, a knowledge that is of ourselves in its being of others. In musicology, in the wake of this impulse, an assertion such as Carl Dahlhaus's from some years back that "the task of historical hermeneutics is to make alien material comprehensible" no longer seems self-evident. The prevailing winds have shifted, far enough indeed that the historian's aim may at times seem fully the opposite of Dahlhaus's—an aim, precisely, of making comprehensible material alien. At the very least the hermeneutic task seems now to require a joining or reconciliation of the two trajectories, a distancing of materials that somehow brings with it new familiarity in them and new knowledge of ourselves.

This defamiliarizing impulse has grown strong enough in musicology that we may now see that our tendency to describe our operatic commitment as "fascination" is no happenstance choice of words. It signals processes set in motion by operatic singing and enactment that remain for us mysterious in their distance from our self-conscious, rationalized conceptions and in their proximity to some more atavistic wellspring in us of sensibility and emotion. We tend to forget the precisely magical entailments of fascination, its invoking of hidden forces that inhabit the history of the word and characterize the phenomena it has conveyed at least as far back as the Latin fascinum of late antiquity. As we overcome this forgetfulness, we might begin to sense—or sense anew, since it is a connection that has been more often noted than ignored over the last four centuries—that opera is inevitably and rightly implicated in a magical history. "Fascination" is an apt watchword for the genre's links, throughout its history, with extravagance, un- or hyperreality, and irrationality.

In global perspective this association connects opera to a wide, deep, and cross-cultural mainstream of vocal functions. The effects of operatic singing constitute one subspecies within a huge family of human experiences brought about by heightened utterance—chanting, shouting, singing, incantation, whatever. These experiences are found in countless different cultural settings—probably, indeed, they are determining features of all cultural settings. They extend across a span of time that, were we in a position to measure it, would likely be found to equal the whole history of human society. In them, voice, employed in exceptional ways and in special, carefully demarcated circumstances, opens to perception invisible realms. Voice connects its bearers and hearers to ordinarily supersensible realities.

The essay that follows in the first place advances a claim that opera, through its history, has been a chief staging ground in elite Western culture for a belief in the existence of two worlds, one accessible to the senses, the other not. Operatic singing has supplied for the elite societies of early modern and modern Europe a potent experience of a metaphysics as well as of a physics, of an immaterial as well as of a material world.

Opera, needless to say, was not the first and has not been the only important European singing to bring about such an experience. Another, the liturgical chant of the Middle Ages, always walked a fine line between the revelation of a Christian supersensible and some other, more mundane display. (In the religious context this was a problem. Augustine worried famously about the tightrope act, and a millennium later Erasmus and many others were still worrying.) But opera is unique in elite European culture of the last four centuries: unique in its extraordinary history of sustained creativity from the late Renaissance on; in the central, ritualistic functions that changing societies have accorded it across that time; and even (if we include under its aegis various outgrowths such as musical comedy) in the dramatic staging altogether of the act of singing.

Across this influential history, opera has not always envoiced the same invisible realms or envoiced them in the same ways. Instead the genre has witnessed, registered, and indeed helped to define several fundamental changes in the arrangement of perceived and imperceptible worlds. Opera, in other words, has embodied not one Western metaphysics but several. As Adorno once put it (in a gnomic tone reminiscent of his colleague Walter Benjamin), operatic metaphysics "is absolutely not a realm of invariance which one could grasp by looking out through the barred windows of the historical; it is the glimmer of light which falls into the prison itself." The four-hundred-year history of the genre is measured off by these shifting, shimmering metaphysics. Though we habitually conceive it as a unitary progress, operatic history might rather be rethought as a set of diverse manifestations, differing at fundamental levels of cultural formation, of the older, deeper, and broader impulse to voice an ordering of the world that includes invisible terrains. Opera's history can be mapped and partitioned according to the various supersensible realms it has brought to audible perception and the changing ways it has done so.

These differing hidden realms, it should be understood, are posited here not as absolute supersensible realities but as cultural constructions. They are what is presumed by a particular society to lie beyond the limits of its sensate perception. But by virtue of this marking of boundaries, this setting-off of a place beyond the liminal extremes granted to perception, the hidden realms become real indeed. They answer to deep conditions of possibility of knowledge, imagination, and aspiration in the cultures that give rise to them. They reflect the deepest ways in which a culture plots its place, and the places of the individuals that constitute it, in the world.

And, to repeat, these realms are time and again rendered...