Abstract
The principle of the compossibility 1 operative in music, science, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture on the Baroque formulation of consciousness does not necessarily signify that, for instance, music has an extra-musical meaning, or that painting has an extra-painting meaning, or even that science has an extrascientific meaning (although all of that may indeed be the case, e.g., technology in the case of science, moral instruction in the case of the arts2), or that the one must necessarily entail the other (which in no way rules our their often quite obvious mutual influence). Nor is this to deny that music, science, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture have a reference to what is going on in theatre, church, court, society required by the listener, viewer, participant, actor on the social, political and religious scene.
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References
See above, pp. 94f..
See Cohen, The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry, pp. 191ff., 198ff.
See above, p 102. It should be added that the warrant for the “real” decreed on the Baroque formulation of consciousness is allowed for by the ungrounded ontic conviction of daily life. There is no implication here that Baroque music, is in any sense “absolute” in the meaning of the term in the nineteenth century, for which see Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, Chapter 2.
The method of “counter examples” is so fraught with difficulties that it can be introduced only with the most elaborate conceptual apparatus; see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, pp. 26ff. (the difficulty of counter examples in the controversy of Goodman and Ziff), and Chapter 4 for still other conceptual difficulties. The problems of analysis by “counter example” is part of a much deeper set of problems concerning the very nature of hypotheses and experiments in the rise of modern science; in this connection, see Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, pp. 187ff.
Thus they serve the same purpose as the discussion of Zuccaro, above, pp. 121 ff.
Below, pp. 239ff.
The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, Volume Four, pp. 65–102. For a thorough and detailed study of Berkeley’s criticisms, see Douglas M. Jesseph, Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics, especially Chapters 4 and 6.
Ibid. pp. 87ff., 67ff. See also Berkeley’s “A Defense of Free-thinking in Mathematics” where he says that Newton’s authority is “converting the republick of letters into an absolute monarchy... even introducing a kind of philosophic popery among a free people,” ibid., pp. 115f.
See above, pp.163f., 206f.
For the most recent textbook version, see Enrico Fubini, Music & Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe. A Source Book, pp. 39–47; see also Robert S. Freeman, Opera Without Drama. Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1625–1725), pp. 22 ff., who examines Muratori’s ideas in the light of his correspondence with Apostolo Zeno in the context of the reform (especially of Venetian) opera as a response to French criticism. See also Edward Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, pp. 139ff.
Fubini, pp. 42, 43.
Cf. Auden, cited above, p. 5.
Fubini, pp. 44, 45.
And it is precisely the lack of mimetic representation which is at issue; Muratori takes as one of many examples the “arrieta:” “I say simply that it is a travesty of verisimilitude to want to imitate real people, and then interrupt their serious and heated dialogues with such ariettas: the other singer has to remain idle and silent, listening to the former’s beautiful melody, when in fact the very nature of the situation and of civil conversation would have him go on with the matter at hand” (p. 45). Music, then, does not preserve the center of social action but rather is the haunt of its boundary situations, such as laughing and crying, but now become laughable and ridiculous.
Fubini, pp. 37–38.
Ibid., p. 38.
Fubini, p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 41, 42.
For Gottsched, see Dora J. Wilson, “Johann Adolph Scheibe’s Views on Opera and Aesthetics,” pp. 49–56; Lippman, op. cit., pp. 180ff. As a consequence, the Baroque idea of meraviglia and the “poetics of wonder” take on a pejorative meaning in the eighteenth century, revived only in a positive (or “neo-Baroque”) meaning at the end of the century when associated with the idea of the sublime; see Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, pp. 50f.
Ibid., pp. 52f. Similar attempts were made elsewhere to defend opera but within the framework of rationalism, e.g., in similar controversies in France; see Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment, pp. 35ff. (where, in some cases, besides recitative, the aria is also defended because it appeals to reason, p. 35). See also Giorgio Pestelli, The Age of Mozart and Beethoven, Chapters 17, 18.
See Rodolfo Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, pp. 17ff.
Ibid., p. 198.
See above, p. 129; and Celletti, pp. 7, 9, 23f.
See Dahlhaus, op. cit., p. 49 for the different meanings of “natural” in the eighteenth century.
See above, pp. 133f., and Schrade, p. 57.
For the specific kind of self-reflection involved here, see above, pp.195f.
See above, p. 136.
Cited and summarized by Julian Budden, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi. Volume 2, From Il Trovatore to La Forza del Destino, p. 15. Budden discusses in detail Boito’s solution to this problem, pp. 21ff. in terms of Boito’s libretto to Faccio’s Amleto and Boito’s own Mefistofele of 1868.
See above, pp. 96f., 183f..
For the positive meaning of “hedonism,” see Celletti, pp. 3f. For the negative or pejorative use of “hedonism,” which we can equate with the charge of “effeminacy” in eighteenth-century criticism, see ibid., pp. 10f., 12.
Ibid.., pp. 4f. See pp. 116ff. for very specific examples.
Ibid., p. 6. See pp. 30ff. for detailed discussion of the devices of the “florid” style by different composers in various works. See also Rodolfo Celletti, Voce di Tenore. Dal Rinascimento a oggi, storia e tecnica, ruoli e protagonisti di un mito della lirica, pp. 13ff.
The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, pp. 117f. See Celletti, A History of Bel Canto, pp. 6f.
Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni d’cantori antiche e moderni of 1723 is probably as instructive an example of the codification of the two styles as any. And it is interesting to note, as Celletti has emphasized (ibid., p. 6), that one of the subtitle’s of Tosi’s book informs us that what he has to say about the “florid” style is “Useful for all Performers, Instrumental as well as Vocal.” (Translation by Mr. J. E. Galliard, Observations on the Florid Song; or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers, London, 1743).
A History of Bel Canto, pp. 136f.
Cf. Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature, pp. 136f. To be sure, Fiedler is not talking about the Baroque, but the Classical formulation of consciousness; but what he says is much more apt for the eighteenth-century criticism of the Baroque formulation; see above, pp. 181f., 188.
But always through the use of the epic style of “tertium comparationis.” See also Fred Kersten, “Phenomenology, History and Myth,” loc. cit., pp. 245ff.
Celletti, p. 67. See p. 115: “bravura singing, which consists specifically in the execution of full-voice coloratura, as opposed to plaintive, flute-like execution known as graceful or ‘mannered’ agility.” According to Celletti this sort of singing arose at the begining of the eighteenth century, as part of the “elegiac-pathetic” style, and was replaced at the second half of the century by overdone virtuosity ruining the expressiveness of the singing. Thus the story about the Emperor Charles VI and Farinelli, when the latter was admonished to stop trying to astonish his audience and become more expressive, engaging the emotions of his audience, returning to the “pathetic” style.
See Wilhelm Dilthey, Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik: Aus den Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes, pp. 275–295. Cited by Alfred Schutz, “Mozart and the Philosophers,” Collected Papers, Vol. II, pp. 190f.
Leonhardi Euleri, Opera Omnia, Series Tertia, Opera Physica, Vol. II., pp. 376ff. (The translation is mine.) For a discussion of this essay of Euler, see Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice, §40.
See below, pp.235 and 237f..
Translated in Verba, op. cit. , pp. 128–137.
In this connection see Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance, Chapter III, for a discussion of music learning “to paint,” i.e., of “musical pictures” and music “which sounds like” what it imitates. (For the inverse operation, painting music, where painting “learns to make music,” see Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken. Schriften zur Form- und Gestaltungslehre, pp. 285ff. which explains how to paint a three-voice composition of Bach.)
Alfred Schutz, “Mozart and the Philosophers,” loc. cit., p. 182. Reading Rousseau’s article of 1768 one wonders if, by chance, he had not already read Francesco Algarotti’s Saggio sopra l’opera in musica of 1755, which traces the history of opera from the Greeks in a similar way, deplors the usurpation of authority by music rather than content itself with disposing “the minds of the audience for receiving the impression to be excited by the poet’s verse, to infuse such a general tendency in their affections as to make them analogous with those particular ideas which the poet means to inspire,” and then draws the same analogy between music and painting (see Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History. The Classic Era, p. 90. See also Drummond, op. cit., pp. 164ff. It could well be that Algarotti was acquainted with Euler in Berlin at the court of Frederick the Great, where Algarotti resided until 1750 (where he was between then and 1755, when he returned to Italy, is not known, although the story is that he was in Vienna where he could well have hung out with Gluck and Gluck’s librettist for Iphigénie en Aulide, du Roullet, then attaché at the French Embassy in Vienna. Gluck was in Vienna from 1752 as Konzertmeister, then Kappelmeister, for the Prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen’s orchestra). See Pestelli, op. cit., pp. 71ff., especially p. 78.
In, e.g., the Preface to Alceste of 1769. (Translated in Music and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 364–366.) See Pestelli, op. cit., who notes that in Gluck’s music timbre “assumed crucial importance for the first time and, rightly or wrongly, it is with Gluck that one begins to speak of an orchestrator separate from the composer. But this is the case because Gluck’s choices of sounds were derived not from the field of the sonata form but from theatrical considerations” (pp. 76f.)
See above, pp. 143f. for yet another analogy with “painting” in Descartes.
Of course, it is possible to proceed by suggesting that precisely what comprises, or should comprise, the human condition consists of a socially derived and approved stock of knowledge at hand defining, in turn, ideas and actions at the center of the life-world appropriate for human behavior.
See above, pp.33ff.
See above, pp. 121f.
We should hastily add that the distinction between the non-mimetic and mimetic is not invented in the eighteenth century, but in the Renaissance; see Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, Chapters 12 and 13.
Cited by Celletti, op. cit., p. 135f.
Cited ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 137.
And it is when a melody becomes merely “descriptive” rather than “evocative” that the dreaded hydrophobia sets in.
Ibid., pp. 140f.
Ibid., pp. 141, 145, 151f. In this connection, for the idea of “melody born ornate” see the report of a conversation of Bellini with Agostino Gallo in 1832, cited by Celletti, pp. 191f. (also mentioned in Friedrich Lippmann, Vincenzo Bellini, in The New Grove Masters of Italian Opera, pp. 168f.)
Ibid., pp. 144, 210.
In the seventeenth century, 64th notes.
Ibid., pp. 142f.,144,145, 152, 155.
Ibid., pp. 135, 145. A familiar example is the music of the Overture to Il barbiere di Siviglia which was first used in Aureliano in Palmira then in L’Elisabetta, each time shaped and reshaped stylistically and rhythmically for the individual character and idiom of each opera; the elaboration of the music in each case is differently developed—for example, the violin figure in the duet between Zenobia and Arsace in prison in Aureliano is so developed as to express a lamentation, while in Il barbiere it is developed to have a comic effect at the beginning of the calumny aria. See also Richard Osborne, Rossini, pp. 129, 156f.
Tullio Serafin. Alceo Toni, Stile, Tradizioni e Convenzioni del Melodramma Italiano del Settecento e dell’Ottocento, pp. 111, 113f. For Italian “comic opera” in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Pestelli, op. cit., pp. 45ff., 86ff., 187f.
The Baroque distinction between the icastic and the fantastic does not immediately disappear with the new formulation of consciousness, such as Romanticism. One example which comes to mind is the recent study of the role of narration in Romantic opera which proves to be a “self-reflexivity of narration” (Abbate) closely resembling the Baroque idea of self-interpretation (see above, pp. 195ff.); see Abbate, Unsung Voices. Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, Chapter Three (examples of which are found as much in Marschner’s Der Vampyr as in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro). What marks the transition from the Baroque to the Romantic fomulation of consciousness would seem to lie rather in the merging of the fictive into the “real world” (see Abbate, p. 76).
Celletti traces the course of the fate of opera through Romanticism and its final “demise” at the end of the nineteenth century in verismo, which, in a strange way, is similar to the “reform” of the eighteenth-century when music becomes the servant of language, but now of the “natural” language of “Plebeian tragedy:” the “adoption of vocal patterns derived from the spoken language such as imprecations, invectic, blasphemous interjections, tavern slang” leading to “amateur” singing as much as “amateur” music (pp. 199, 201f.), ultimately losing sight of the fact that “opera is theatre in music and that theatrical values are just as important as musical values” (p. 202). In short, the dramma musicale regio e politico, along with the Graeco-Roman world, has disappeared in veristic Plebeian tragedy and “conversational singing” (pp. 189f.) See also Schrade, op. cit. pp. 61ff.; Pestelli, op. cit., pp. 254ff.; Dahlhaus, Chapter 4.
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Kersten, F. (1997). The Enclave of the Eccentricity of Ordinary Life. In: Galileo and the ‘Invention’ of Opera. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_8
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