This essay addresses the materiality of voice in opera production, proposing a shift away from methodological models that posit voice as silent and disembodied towards one in which the body figures central. Comparing the voice in opera with the voice of the performative utterance, the article assesses the relevance of performativity to opera studies. A distinction between Derrida's critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and the presence of performance leads to a discussion of the ‘force’ of the vocal utterance and its relationship to the real via Shoshana Felman's The Scandal of the Speaking Body. The central argument is that voice upsets the model of distanced reason upon which enlightened subjectivity depends.

Opera is rich in works that construct visions of the non-Western world and its inhabitants: Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles, Verdi's Aida, Strauss's Salome, Puccini's Turandot. In these operas the representation of what recent critical theory calls ‘the Other’ is most clearly announced in the basic plot, in characters' names, and in costumes, sets and props. But to what extent do the libretto and the music also participate in this project?

The question easily lends itself to a narrower formulation: to what extent do these operas signal Otherness – Turkishness, Indianness, Chineseness and so on – through musical materials that depart from Western stylistic norms or even reflect specific musical practices of the region in question? Scholars and critics have repeatedly posed the problem in these terms, only to find themselves frustrated by three limitations: general stylistic aberrations are often applied indiscriminately by composers to vastly different geographical settings; borrowed tunes and the like tend to lose distinctive features by being uprooted and transplanted; and whole stretches of these operas are written in an entirely Western idiom.

Among the more remarkable events of recent intellectual history is that Edward Said, famous avant-garde literary critic, passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, has begun to write about music. Moreover, not just about any kind of music, but about classical music in the élite (and canonical) European tradition – the symphonies of Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the chamber music of Schubert and Brahms. Several years ago Said took over the music column in The Nation magazine, and more recently he has published a book, Musical Elaborations, based on a series of invited lectures at the University of California at Irvine.

Just as politics can be analysed as a cultural and symbolic enterprise (that is, as theatre in the broadest sense), so too can theatre or opera (in a narrower sense) be analysed as political. Jonathan Dollimore identifies various conflicting processes at work in Renaissance English theatre: the ‘consolidation’ of power by a dominant order; the ‘subversion of that order’ and the ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’. We need not accept Dollimore's essentially Marxist analysis of these processes in order to recognise the validity of his assertion that ‘the theatre [is] a prime location for the representation and legitimation of power’. But the way such power is consolidated, subverted or contained depends on the political and social systems in which the theatre operates. The issues are complex enough when one focuses on plays produced in Elizabethan or Jacobean London. They become even more difficult to sort out when single works or groups of related works are performed over a period of time in various locations, each with its own societal configuration, as in the different political entities that comprised the Italian peninsula during the first half of the nineteenth century (to which might be added the other European and even American audiences to which they were played). Under such circumstances, how can we measure the political implications of these works? Where does their meaning reside? How does that meaning change as a function of time or geography?

From time to time the question has been raised: ‘Is the character of Beckmesser an embodiment of Wagner's notorious anti-semitism?’ Theodor Adorno, who stated with reference to Beckmesser, Alberich and Mime that ‘all the rejects of Wagner's works are caricatures of Jews’, is frequently invoked, but the question is generally brushed aside, or answered summarily in the negative. Yet neither Adorno nor, to my knowledge, anyone else has examined the question in the depth it deserves. A fuller investigation of the evidence leads, I submit, to the conclusions that anti-semitism is woven into the ideological fabric of Die Meister-singer, and that the representation of Beckmesser incorporates unmistakable antisemitic characteristics. If this is indeed the case, then the implications for our understanding of the opera are profound.

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.

In the attempt to construct the ‘story’ of post-Rossinian Italian opera it has been standard practice to identify as the central plot the dissolution of traditional structural types and genres. The charting of those musical ‘facts’ that illustrate this dissolution is a familiar musicological endeavour, and there remains a persistent temptation not merely to notice the ever-weakening pull of convention but also to identify it with the notion of ‘historical progress’: a move towards the mature virtues of dramatic complexity, idiosyncrasy and flexibility. Considerations of established conventions and their modifications tend to encourage anti-generic evaluative positions, judgements which are then bolstered by appealing to influential aesthetic systems. Thus Benedetto Croce: ‘Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics’. Or Theodor Adorno: ‘Actually, there may never have been an important work that corresponded to its genre in all respects’. Or Hans Robert Jauss: ‘The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity […]. A masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching’? So bewitching is this image of genre dissolution that artistic production is often assessed by the degree to which it rebels against the idées reçues of tradition or encourages the momentum of the ‘historically inevitable’.

‘Dramaturgy’ is one of those vogue words to which frequent use lends the appearance of being increasingly well understood, whereas the wear and tear to which it is subjected actually makes it ever harder to understand. When a word has lost almost all meaning through overuse, the simplest way to make it usable again is, of course, to try to restore its original meaning. It should be possible to agree that dramaturgy is the composition of dramas tout court, and there can be no serious objection if that basic definition is understood to include the theories and principles of dramatic composition (as Lessing did in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie). In that sense ‘dramaturgy’ is to drama what ‘poetics’ is to poetry: it denotes the essential nature of the categories that form the basis of a drama and can be reconstructed in a dramatic theory.

In Act III of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the chaplain Raimondo appears at the wedding celebrations to tell the assembled guests that Lucia has murdered her husband Arturo. While the chorus expresses shock, Lucia enters, dishevelled and deranged; the crowd turns towards her, murmuring ‘Par dalla tomba uscita!’ This image of a figure emerging from the grave, certainly apt by nineteenth-century poetic standards, also suggests itself as a contemporary metaphor: a shift in critical reception. Traditionally, a noisy chorus of operatic critics has regarded Lucia with a mixture of fascination and horror, emphasising the sepulchral aspects of her madness. Recently, however, a rather surprising resurrection has been effected through the notion, popular among some feminist critics, that Lucia's mental decline could be interpreted as positive, even liberatory. This view has been expressed most flamboyantly by Catherine Clément, for whom madness is one of the few ways an operatic heroine can escape the near-inevitable plot process of seduction and death. Her effusions on Lucia's mad scene illustrate this position vividly: ‘Lucia dances with her desires: listen how joyful, airy and peaceful it is. Who says anything about unhappiness? Madwomen's voices sing the most perfect happiness’

It has become commonplace to assume that language and style in Italian opera are not a unified phenomenon, easily comparable with the language and style of a purely musical work. Rather they constitute the various elements of a plurilinguistic interplay in which the opposite pole from ‘the author’ is the characters: those figures whose personality, function and social condition command an individual musical language. Musical expression is determined by an interaction of the author's discourse with the fictive discourse of characters; even when one or the other seems to dominate, there remains an important, implicitly dialogic element, one that can sometimes be inferred solely from a sense of discordant context. In many instances, therefore, operatic discourse suggests analogies with the ‘dialogic’ nature of the modern novel posited by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Various commentators on Aida express disappointment that the music for the opera’s main characters is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. Others argue that exotic style is mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Much of this commentary draws on the same limited selection of data and observations: the exotic style of those few numbers, the opera’s plot, and the circumstances of the work’s commissioning (by the Khedive of Egypt).

The present study aims to broaden the discussion. Most unusually, it dwells on various aspects of words and music that are not in themselves ‘markers’ of exoticism or Orientalism but that nonetheless here manifestly announce traits of this or that character (or group) and thereby communicate indelible impressions of what Egyptians and Ethiopians supposedly ‘are like’ (or were like in an earlier era). For example, the music of the priests is mostly not, as commentators regularly claim, marked by imitative counterpoint; rather, it engages in several distinct archaicising tendencies, some of which characterise the priestly caste (and hence the Egyptian government) as rigid and menacing.

In addition, this study calls on such varied evidence (rarely if ever examined in this regard) as costume designs, directions in the disposizione scenica for the opera’s first Italian production, relevant remarks by Verdi and early commentators (including two Egyptians writing in 1901 and a late interview with Verdi about European imperialism), some early sound recordings, and Western fears/knowledge of the Wahhabist strain of Islam then expanding across the Middle East. While such a multifaceted exploration certainly cannot be definitive, it can point to new possibilities for exploration.

To what degree does late seventeenth-century English opera contain politics? Some recent critics have assumed that political commentary conveyed by allegory is a pervasive feature of ‘Restoration’ masques and operas. Is this true? Quite a few political interpretations of particular works have been published but no one has systematically enquired to what extent allegory and/or ideology was presumed to be built into operas mounted in late seventeenth-century London. Theoretical statements of the time about opera are scant and contradictory, their authors disinclined to take up political issues. Some of the political content is glaringly obvious (the allegory in Dryde'ns and Grabu's Albion and Albanius); some of it is sharply disputed. How should we read a work like Dryden's and Purcell's King Arthur? Is it essentially a muddled adventure story? An expression of British nationalism rising above current politics? A piece of covert Jacobite propaganda?

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeare's play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘that's a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.

The train of thought that I wish to pursue here was initiated by Edward T. Cone's recent essay ‘The World of Opera and its Inhabitants’. To the extent that my views diverge from his I suppose I may be taken for a critical adversary. But I prefer to think of the present effort as more a continuation and development of Professor Cone's ideas than an attempt to refute or criticise them. It is in the spirit of ongoing research rather than the more common one, in my profession, of philosophical confrontation that I offer remarks on the general questions, as posed by Cone: ‘How does the world of opera differ from other dramatic worlds? Who are the people that inhabit it, and what sorts of lives do they lead there?’ More particularly, my question is: What is the nature of operatic utterance? How are operatic characters ‘saying’?

In the first section of my paper I will present Professor Cone's answers to these questions. In the second I will go on what will appear, no doubt, to be a completely tangential excursion into R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of art. But in the final two sections I will try to weave these two seemingly disparate strands together into an answer of my own to the questions that Professor Cone has so insightfully raised. Perhaps ‘an answer of my own’ is too strong a phrase to use, implying something more like disagreement than is actually the case. So a better way of describing my whole enterprise, and the final sections especially, is ‘variations on a theme by Cone’.

In their different ways, a series of Germanic artists and thinkers – the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagner – all espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a life of striving and suffering.

This essay originated as a contribution to a symposium organised by the Dallas Opera and Southern Methodist University around the Opera's production of Boro-din's Prince Igor in November 1990. Since many Soviet guests had been invited, the poster and programme book were printed in English and Russian side by side. I found that the word ‘orientalism’ in my title had become tema vostoka – ‘the Eastern theme’ – in translation, even though orientalizm, or more commonly, orientalistika, are perfectly good Russian words (well, Russian words, anyway). It was a sensible precaution. ‘The Eastern theme’ is neutral: from a paper with that phrase in the title one expects inventories, taxonomies, identification of sources, stylistic analysis. ‘Orientalism’ is charged. From a paper with that word in the title one expects semiotics, ideological critique, polemic, perhaps indictment. The translator was quite right to err on the side of innocuousness, rather than saddle me with a viewpoint I might not wish or manage to live up to.

We are used to thinking of ‘opera singer’ as a profession. But no such profession existed when opera emerged as a genre at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, or for three or four decades after that: operas were too few to occupy most of anyone's time. In the early seventeenth century not even ‘singer’ was as yet a clearly defined trade. Many singers were also instrumentalists: some accompanied themselves (and some also composed their own music), while others switched between singing and playing; the commonest Italian term for them all was musici. Others again were actors or actresses who could sing, like Virginia Andreini, drafted in an emergency to create the title part in Monteverdi's Arianna of 1608.

One of the great accomplishments of seventeenth-century culture was the development of a vocabulary by means of which dramatic characters and actions could be delineated in music. The techniques for emotional and rhetorical inflection we now take for granted are not, in fact, natural or universal: they were deliberately formulated during this period for the purposes of music theatre. Monteverdi's descriptions of how he invented the semiotics of madness for La finta pazza Licori or of war for the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda reveal how very self-consciously he designed methods for ‘representing’ affective states.

Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?