MDDM23: Italian Opera

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Wait, wait, this other Duck,-- it's male? 
female?  For that matter, which are you?'
   "'Moi?  Female, as it happens.  The other, being
yet sexually unmodified, is neither,-- or, if you
like, both.  Any Problem?'
   "'The arrangement you wish me to make for
you...'twould fall, I regret, in a realm of the
Erotick, where, alas, I've no experience,--'
   "'For a Frenchman, this is refreshing.  Unhappily,
my 'Morphosis ever proceeding, I enjoy as little
choice of a Broker, as of a Partner.'
   "'Why should Vaucanson agree?  If he is your enemy,
he may also demans a price, such as your return to his
Atelier.'
   "'Details for you to work out.  In Italian opera,
the young Soprano's Guardian may always be deceiv'd.'"
 (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 377)

""... if Angels be the next higher being from Man,
perhaps the Duck had 'morphosed into some Anayine
Equivalent, acting as my Guardian,-- purely, as an
Angel might....  Or, perhaps, as Ducklings, when their
Mother is notavailable, will follow any creature that
happens along, so might not an Automaton, but newly
aware of its Destiny as a Duck, easily fasten upo the
first human, say, willing to remain and chat, rather
than go running off interror,-- and come to define
this attachment as Love?...Or, was it something she'd
glean'd from some Italian Opera,-- that an
Intermediary in the Employ of a Soprano Character
might soon find herself in her Embrace as well?  These
and other speculations swiftly carried me close to a
dangerous Ecstasy, in which Vaucanson's 'erotic
Apparatus' never occur'd to me as a possible Cause. 
My coleagues of course saw ev'rything." (M&D, Ch. 37,
p. 379)

"that final superaddition of erotick Machinery ..."
(M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

"As I watch'd, it began its long glissade, directly
toward me,--" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 375)

"a curious Accent" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 375)

   "'Be assur'd of the total Safety, when I am
present, of ev'ry excellent feather,' surpriz'd to
hear a strange Flirtatiousness in my voice, 'yours, I
must say, being most uncommonly-- '
    "'Attend, Flatteur,--'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 376)

glis·sade  
gli-'säd, -'sAd
intransitive verb
glis·sad·ed; glis·sad·ing
French, n., slide, glissade, from glisser to slide,
from Old French glicier, alteration of glier, of
Germanic origin; akin to Old High German glItan to
glide
1837
1 : to perform a ballet glissade ...

glissade
noun
1843
1 : a gliding step in ballet
2 : the action of glissading

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

>From Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the
Pleasure Prnciple in Opera (trans. Arthur Denner, 
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), Pt. 2, "Words and
Music: Sense, the Trans-sensical, and Jouissance," pp.
31-112 ...

"The Italian opera, which had built its fortunes on
the trans-sensical voice of the castrato, now
reinvested its appetite for vocal jouissance in the
double, sexually didvided figure of the soprano and
the tenor, the soprano's voice carving out the lion's
share here ...." (pp. 68-9)

Pt. 3, "Angel, Woman, and God: The Sexual, the
Trans-sexual, and Jouissance," pp. 113-212 ...

   "In several articles dealing with infantile
sexuality, Freud identifies and analyzes the
unonscious fantasy that forms the basis of the genital
organization of the child, or, more properly, that of
the boy, Freud having confessed to his puzzlement with
regard to the girl.... the little boy at first
imagines that, like himself, everyone has a penis. 
Then he discovers there is an entire category of
beings, 'little girls,' whom he imagines not as having
a sex organ different from his but as lacking one....
it is because it has been removed, cut off; it is
because they have been castrated ....  this phantasmic
construct yields the notion of the Woman as unsexed
and therefore trans-sexual ...." (p. 146)

"... if the Woman is envisioned as lacking a sex
organ, then she, like the angel, is trans-sexual." (p.
147)

   "At this point there emerges another element: the
similarity between the structure of the object,
resulting from the way it is constituted, and the
structure of certain fantasies ... concerning the
Feminine.  This parallelism permits a particularly
precise overlapping of these unconscious constructs,
with the Woman, thus embellished, taking on the same
contours as the object--in this case, the vocal
object.  Elusive and inaccessible, evanescent or
nonexistent, the cause of desire, the locus of lack,
and the nullification of lack, locus of jouissance
both infinte and impossible, alluring and forbidden,
death-ridden and deadly, trans-sensical and
trans-sexual, heavenly voice or hellish cry, angel or
demon, The Voice an The Woman come together in these
tightly woven fantasies ...." (p. 156)

castration ...

Freud, Sigmund.  Three Essays on Sexuality.
   Trans. James Strachey.  NY: Basic Books, 1962.

jouissance ...

http://www.ouc.bc.ca/fina/glossary/j_list.html
 
>From Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women,
Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French
Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), Ch. 4,
"The Bird of Artifice: Singers, Angels, and Gender
Ambiguity," pp. 84-117 ...

   "Several changes in operatic style in the
nineteenth century created  more important role for
women.  One of these was the gradual phasing out of
the castrato voice, which had dominated Italian opera
until then....  The hegemony of the castrati can be
attributed to several factors: their superior muical
education ...; a certain taste for the artificial
during the period that tolerated, better, appreciated
travesty; and the apparently remarkable suppleness,
agility, and singular tone the castrati voices were
capable of achieving." (p. 87)

glis·san·do 
gli-'sän-(")dO
noun
plural glis·san·di  /-(")dE/; or -dos
probably modification of French glissade
circa 1854
: a rapid sliding up or down the musical scale

"The castrato voice is typically heard as both sexless
and inhuman ... compared to the sound of a flute or a
bird ... called uncanny." (p. 88)

http://www.marcdatabase.com/~lemur/dm-vaucanson-flute-english.html

Freud, Sigmund.  "The Uncanny."  Standard Edition,
   Vol. XVII.  Ed. and trans. James Strachey.
   London: Hogarth, 1953 [1919].  219-252. 

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~tabitham/uncanny.html

http://www.westga.edu/~pmorgan/gothic/freud_uncanny.html

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html

   "There seems to have been a definite appreciation
for sexual and vocal reversals in the opera of the
seventeenth century...." (p. 89)

   "Over time the castrati ... began to decline .... 
Consequently, the soprano and tenor voices assumed
greater importance: in the first part of the century,
the lead male part was increasingly handed over to
women, or else the part was transposed for tenor. 
Eventually, the soprano and tenor voices took on their
familiar prominence, and the baritone voice emerged as
a vocal role.  These modern categories were not
codified as we know them until the end of the
eighteenth century ....
   "In the new dispensation of the romantic bel canto,
the soprano voice took on particular importance,
replacing the castrato voice as operatic 'high point'
... and as the subject matter of romantic opera placed
the figure of the woman in a new and central
position." (pp. 89-90)

"The romantic topos of the woman as angel is central
to the argument that Michel Poizat makes about the
voice in opera.  In the context of the progression he
traces from intelligible word toward pure 'cry' in
opera, Poizat argues that operatic taste developed in
favor of the highest, most piercing voice.... Poizat
ascribes the dominance of the castrato voice to the
interdiction against women singing in th church.  Out
of the need for high, clear voices to fill waht he
calls the 'angelic function' in the liturgy emerged
the practice of making castrati.  The advent of opera
naturally entialed use of these unnatural singers:
they were the most accomplished musically an possessed
the qualities Poizat idnetifies as desired in its
principle singers: a voice of sexual indeterminacy
that soars to the heights.  The voice of the angel is
what made for the operatic amateur's delectation in
the voice as erotic object.  Poizat underlines the
metaphoric associatio of emotional or spiritual height
and the vocal 'height': angels, children, birds, and
castrati share in common their purity, their
sexlessness, their essentially 'inhuman' quality.
   "The highest voice, traditionally that of the
principal role, once the domain of the castrato,
becomes in romantic opera divided between that of the
soprano and tenor voices, with a marked preference
given to the soprano voice.  For Poizat then,
'operatic romanticism establishes Woman as the last
avatar of the Angel, makes her the privileged ground
of the quest for the vocal object' (Poizat, 132).  The
voice of the angel becomes that of the woman ....
   "In romantic opera ... the woman singer with her
particularly intense affective power occupies a
prvileged position.  She seems in part to owe this
special role less to any transparently natural power
of the human voice ... than to something more complex,
even paradoxical: the castrato's legacy of the
fundamentally erotic pleasure (for the 'music lover'
[amateur]) to be had from a voice not merely ambiguous
in gender quality but even sexless--the inhuman voice
of the angel." (p. 98)

castrati ...

Heriot, Angus.  The Castrati in Opera.
   New York: Da Capo, 1974.

Farinelli.  Dir. Gerard Corbiau, 1994.

http://www.spe.sony.com/classics/farinelli/farinelli.html

But, again, anyone have any idea which (if
any)specific "Italian operas" are being alluded to in
the passages from M&D above?  Let us know ...

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