‘I don’t like your tone of voice’: The Power Dynamics of Vocal Drag in George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill
This was my first-year extended essay project. I have learned a lot since!
George
Benjamin’s ‘Lyric Tale’ Into the Little
Hill (ItLH) features a cast of
six characters and a chorus, all of whom are performed by just one alto and one
soprano. In it, a variety of gender roles are brought into play by a complex
network intertwining the voices and bodily presences of the soprano and alto, the
discursive nature of Martin Crimp’s libretto, the gestures and semiotic codes
in Benjamin’s score, and—perhaps most importantly—an audience’s ability
to navigate these complex and multifaceted presentations of gender, vocal
register, and character. When interrogated, this network reveals the work’s
potential to subvert gender norms in each individual performance; performances
in which two women give voice to interacting roles created not just by a
librettist and composer, but by the society in which those roles were
conceived.
Of ItLH, Crimp writes that, ‘the
original story is the famous one of the Rattenfänger
von Hameln’.[1] In this twenty-first-century retelling, a
minister enlists the help of a mysterious piper, who will rid the town of its
rat infestation and ensure his re-election. When “the Minister” does not pay
the piper, he enacts revenge by leading all of the town’s children away ‘into
the little hill’ forever. Benjamin writes that he and Crimp ‘wanted to tell
[the] lyric tale in the most direct and authentic way possible’, citing his
casting of two women into varied gender roles as the ‘solution’ to
‘acknowledg[ing] at all times the artificial nature of sung drama, while still
permitting dialogue and characterisation’.[2] This tension between ‘authenticity’ and
‘artificiality’ is fundamental to unpacking the gendered hierarchies both within
ItLH and surrounding its conception
and reception.
Gender Troubling Into the Little Hill
The
adult human voice is a secondary sexual characteristic, and has binary sex and
gender mapped onto it in much of everyday life. High voices are expected to
belong to women, low voices to men, and anything falling outside of this
paradigm is usually deemed to be anxiety-provoking. As Joke Dame writes,
‘gender confusion tends to make one nervous … the need to … assign sex to the
voice has not ceased’.[3] Biological determinism sees the voice as a
site primed for gendering, failing to take into account the complex
intersections between gender roles, sexualities, identities, and bodies.
Therefore, to conflate sex and gender is problematic both in the pursuit of what
Judith Butler terms ‘the unity of the subject’, and in the disputation of ‘the
biology-is-destiny formulation’; it projects Lacanian symbols onto subjects,
splitting them between the Real and the Signified.[4] Butler
advances on notions of gender constructions, writing that ‘even if the sexes appear
to be unproblematically binary … the presumption implicitly retains the belief
in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is
otherwise restricted by it’.[5] She then radically suggests that sex, too,
is a social construct, and ‘that the distinction between sex and gender turns
out to be no distinction at all.’[6] In light of this, to write of “male” or
“female” voices is problematic on a number of levels. Dame writes that ‘both
the denaturalization of sexual difference and the denaturalization of voice
difference make it in their own ways possible to sever the link between sex,
voice pitch, and timbre’; that the pitch of the human voice is not entirely
biologically determined and cannot be assigned a definite sex is clear.[7]
While
Butler’s “troubling” goes some way towards explaining the constructions of
gender in ItLH, Elisabeth Angel-Perez
sees the configuration of its roles as that of ‘circulating and fluctuating
identity’ which is ‘spectralised’ through ‘nomadic voices’ and ‘only exists
through and inside the others’ voices’.[8] She writes that the Minister:
is never sung out
loud by a biologically corresponding voice. His ‘inscape’ is made accessible to
us … by de-centred voices … that suppose an obliteration of the narrator behind
the character’s words.[9]
This
‘post-Beckettian’ de-centring is realised through Crimp’s libretto’s sometime
rejection of the first person, in conjunction with voices ‘whose tessitura does
not correspond to the subject that is sung.’[10] In Lacanian terms, Angel-Perez writes of
this simple negation of the gendered ‘essentialism of the voice’ resulting in a
paradoxically intimate condition, which is achieved by the character’s voice’s
being ‘exported in an exteriority: “extimated”.’[11] That the genders of the singers in ItLH are not only performative, but also
canvasses for their theatrically performed characters’ genders, adds a fresh layer of
complexity to their configuration.
Genders are only performative
insofar as the ‘culturally intelligible construction’ of them is ‘constituted’
and made as ‘generative political structures’ which are meaningful to its
audience.[12] As Michelle Atherton writes,
for gender to be
recognized it has to be shown to another person. Hence gender relies upon being
performed. It is the playing out of specific characteristics.[13]
Because
of this essentialist, culturally-engrained symbolism, the performativity of the
genders of the singers in ItLH is ‘the necessary scene for agency’; an embodiment of
and site for the paradoxically conscious performance of gendered symbols. Since
the perceived genders of the singers have a crucial effect on the level of tension
between an audience’s understanding of them both as bodies and the characters
whom they embody, and in order to avoid the presumption that the soprano and
alto performing this work are necessarily “female” (which would ignore any
previous problematizing of the gendering of the human voice), the only
performers on whom this essay will focus are the alto Hilary Summers and the
soprano Anu Komsi. Summers and Komsi performed both the work’s premiere and its
subsequent recording. The recording of ItLH
concretises aspects of the score’s enactment, which through the lens of a
performativity-focused reading can in turn be treated as a text. In this
complex interplay between societally-constructed female singer-subjects and the
‘culturally intelligible’ characters whom they embody, both Summers and Komsi
perform vocal drag in ItLH.[14]
Butler
sees drag as a ‘subversive bodily act’ and a ‘fantasy of a fantasy’.[15] She writes that ‘the parodic repetition of
gender exposes the … illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth’.[16] In drag—and its displacement from sex—it
is impossible to ignore that gender is not object, but an act. It ‘is open to
splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of
“the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally
phantasmatic status.’[17] In light of this, Benjamin’s seemingly
paradoxical claim to the ‘artificiality’ and ‘authenticity’ of situating ItLH’s characters within a drag context
result in intimate “extimation” which exposes the audience and calls their
preconceptions fraudulent.[18]
The Minister
Vocal
register-theory immediately reveals ItLH’s
most obvious vocal gendering: the Minister, its central and only explicitly
“male” character, is voiced by a very low alto. Elizabeth Wood writes of
certain female singers possessing ‘a powerful, “masculine” sound … [with] vocal
authority’ in this register, calling vocal gender norms into question.[19] When heard in soliloquy in the middle of
the ternary form of ItLH’s opening
“scene” (Sections I-III of Part One), the pitch (which verges on tenor
register, hovering around G3) of the Minister’s voice is in stark contrast with
the high (and implicitly female) fortississimo
A5s of the Crowd surrounding it.[20] The Minister constitutes something of a voice of
reason at this point, singing that ‘we believe—intelligently believe/ in
nothing’, ‘please—think’, and ‘even this baby…/ May owe its life to a rat in an
experiment’. These textual gestures are set with two ‘non espressivo’ (and by implication detached, rational) basset
horns, whose long phrases dovetail into one another (example 2.1). Player one begins at bar 22 on an A sharp,
the enharmonic equivalent of the B flat sung by the alto to the word ‘vote’ in
the previous bar (‘kill and you have our vote’). Benjamin describes ‘a link
between enharmony and the perception of movement’, which in this case both
signifies a shift of perspective from external and public (‘The Crowd) to
internal and private (‘Inside the Minister’s Head’) in an act of musical
“extimation”, and obliquely betrays the Minister’s ambition to gain
institutional power.[21] This pushes his reasoning further into
Machiavellianism—an attitude gendered male since its advent in Il Principe—in its reliance on the
attainment of power through shrewdness. This condition echoes the ‘stereotype … relating
man to language and authority’ of which Hannah Bosma writes.[22]
 |
| Example 2.1 |
Both
tonally and harmonically, The Minister achieves a rational distance from the
Crowd’s bloodlust. The crude, rhythmically simple parallel fourths and fifths
between the singers throughout Section I are accompanied by aggressive sforzando string stabs, rendered yet
harsher by the attack of a guiro (example 2.2), and stark in their contrast
with the tranquillo, thinly-scored, pianissimo start of Section II (example
2.1).
 |
| Example 2.2 |
At
figures 3 and 4, the basset horn and voice create suspensions with one another,
in a counterpoint based strictly upon an octatonic scale rising in a
tone-semitone pattern from G sharp. The implied symmetry of this scoring and
the way in which the voices intertwine infer a Socratic, maieutic
discussion—especially given that the octatonic harmony renders the section’s
opening tritone (A sharp/E, bar 23) contextually stable. This reading is
especially pertinent given Section II’s situation between the first statement
of ‘kill them, they bite’ and its recapitulation, for although the singers’
lines are largely Phrygian, the accompaniment is chromatically saturated, with
approximately seven different pitches on each interjection, and almost no
oblique movement. In his analysis of Benjamin’s Viola, Viola, Philip Rupprecht remarks upon ‘the importance of
common tones for smooth chord progression’ in Benjamin’s music. When this is
considered, these ‘stabbing’ clusters containing doubled semitone clashes
appear ever more jarring and irrational.[23] The opening scene of ItLH therefore presents a masculine rationale ‘Inside the Minister’s
Head’ which is appropriately contained between the two expressions of an
external, implicitly feminine body of hysteria.[24] This dichotomised agon enacts a power
struggle, in which there is a reflexive relationship between the Crowd’s
ability to make demands of the Minister (‘kill and you have our vote’) and his
cool pursuit of institutional power.
Agency
As
‘the very terms in which agency is articulated’, Butler’s conception of drag is
a ‘strategy of subversive repetition’. It holds a Lacanian “mirror” to binary
gender constructions, creating an uncanny “reflection” which brings their
tensions to the surface:
Paradoxically,
the reconceptualization of identity as an effect,
that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of
“agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity
categories as foundational and fixed.[25]
In
the context of an opera which was written by somebody other than those who
perform it, however, this conception of drag raises the pressing question of
whose agency is being performed.
Rachel
Beckles Willson articulates interactions with music in terms of the ‘triangle of
composer, performer, and listener’.[26] The question of authorial and performer
agency is alluded to by Benjamin in a 2010 interview, when he says: ‘I’d like
to say more than I wrote it for them; I designed
it for them, I sculpted it for them’.[27] This statement would imply that aspects of
these singers’ performance of ItLH
which would appear to be theirs, are really more due to Benjamin’s
appropriation of their voices as specific tools— ‘a hand-within-a-puppet
effect’ which ‘raises the spectre of mechanism, the performer as an automaton’;
the ‘ventriloquist effect’ of ‘the diva’s voice emerging silently from the
pages of the… writer’.[28] Bosma views the composer-performer
relationship as a gendered paradigm that ‘relates woman to body, performance,
tradition, nonverbal sound and singing, and man to … technology, innovation, language
and authority.’ [29]
These
automata are another articulation of the ‘familiar Romantic cliché’ which
Abbate terms the ‘collapsing’ of ‘dead instrument and live performer … in
particular when the performer is female—hence assumed more amenable to manipulation,
paralysis, or control.’[30] Despite her initially essentialist
presentation of the gendered voice, Bosma attempts to subvert this power
dynamic later in her article, writing that ‘the female singer … is not only
performing the composer’s work, but is interpreting and creating, and is
responsible for the music.’[31]
The
fluid relationship between each of the members of Beckles Willson’s “triangle”
is perhaps at its most transparent in this opera at points of recitative.
Benjamin notates these semi-aleatorically as “free bars”, in which all the
other parts have a fermata, and the pauses between the singer’s notes are
graded in approximate length from ‘short’ to ‘very long’ by between one and
four dashes. He writes in the performance notes that ‘vocal rhythms during free
bars should be close to natural speech patterns, and, above all, not strictly
metrical.’ Although a performer’s responses to this could vary somewhat,
Benjamin’s directions render the bar far from ‘free’, and his instruction that
the singer mimic ‘natural speech patterns’ actually invites her to mimic
prescribed societal norms.
The Stranger
The
question of whether the various power struggles at the core of ItLH can be mapped onto gender becomes
more intricate and complex as the opera unfolds. While the Minister has
self-constructed and societally perpetuated masculine authority in scene one,
it is utterly eclipsed by the arrival of “the Stranger” in scene two (Section
IV). The Stranger’s transcendent, supernatural, and manipulative power is expressed
as something obscene and occult, and highly threatening to the Minister by
virtue of its seductive attraction. He directly contradicts the Minister’s
rationality (‘But the world – says the Minister – is round. / The world – says
the man – is the shape my music makes it’). The Stranger’s “music” attributes
him the power to break natural boundaries, his is adorned as a dark Orpheus,
able to use music to traverse between the over- and underworlds and to ‘open a
heart as easily as you can open a door and reach right in’. Furthering the
reaches of the Stranger’s command, Martin Crimp’s libretto here is euphemistic,
rife with allusions to penetration and seduction (‘reach right in’, ‘I charmed
my way in’). This is particularly pertinent in light of the Stranger’s having
‘no eyes, no ears, no nose’, suggesting that he is not receptive, only
creative. He ought neither to be able to hear nor see evil, only to speak it.
The image of something feminized which retains creative power while
simultaneously being impenetrable plays on several masculine insecurities.
Although contradicted by his dialogue with the Minister, this complication
affords the Stranger another layer of impenetrability, and the feminine
inferences of creation, with the implicit vagina
dentata of a mouth in the middle of a blank face, render him ever more
uncomfortable for an audience.
When
the Stranger’s facelessness is first mentioned in bar 171, the harmony is
corrupted by the doubled parallel fourth movement between the second basset
horn and the flute and first viola, played a semitone apart. The Eb/Ab
relationship usurps the fourth-based E/A/D/G harmonic climate in this bar,
facilitating an enharmonic shift from A flat to G sharp (followed by F sharp)
played by the cornet a bar later, which in turn forms another semitonal clash
with the trombone’s G natural and F natural (example 4.1). The fluid nature of
this harmonic progression, which uses the common tones described earlier by
Rupprecht not for ‘smoothness’, but for destabilisation, couples with the
beating overtones of the close semitone clashes to create a fitting harmonic
underpinning for the mysterious and subversive Stranger. Furthermore, in light
of compound semitones being noticeably prevalent throughout ItLH, the now close semitones which are
almost ubiquitous resonate distinctly with Benjamin’s later opera Written on Skin, in which Agnés and the
Boy touch each other illicitly, and their actions, words, and the semitones
which surround them are all, literally, ‘too close’.[32]
 |
| Example 4 |
Benjamin’s score is dispersed with suggestions that the Stranger is both sexless and somehow obscene; the canon played by the basset horns which foreshadows him at figure 17 is at the minor second, with the voices crossing often and their semitone clashes rubbing against each other (example 4.2). This canon is literally inverted, and could even constitute an oblique allusion to sexual ‘inversion’, metaphorically extendable to a view of sex itself as a counterpoint between the Lacanian Real and Symbolic. Although he is referred to as ‘the man’, the Stranger’s sex is ambiguous. He is voiced by the soprano, who sings markedly broader and more adjunct phrases than those heard previously, and become more so as the Stranger goes on to describe the omnipotence of his Orphean ‘charm’ between figures 24 and 26. Komsi reaches the extremes of D6 twice in this scene, both at points of text which describe a rationally impossible act: ‘I can open a heart… and reach right in’ and ‘I can make death stop or rats stream and drop from the rim of the world’ (example 4.3).
 |
| Example 4.2 |
 |
| Example 4.3 |
Benjamin remarks upon the vocal extremity of this role, commenting on Komsi’s ability to sing ‘incredibly high notes diamond clear and so soft’, joking that she is ‘almost like a Martian’.[33] Strikingly similar comments have been made on the castrato voice’s supposed other-worldliness: Dame acknowledges this, writing that, ‘ultimately the castrato is effectively excluded from the category of humanity at all. His pitch leads him to be called “angelic,” “mechanical,” “constructed,” “artificial,” “a singing machine”’, invoking Abbate’s ‘automaton’.[34] However, Dame goes on to highlight a tension between this and the way in which the quality—as opposed to the pitch—of the castrato voice is described. She quotes Franz Haböck writing in seemingly phallic terms, that ‘no one could surpass the castrato in force, flexibility, penetrating quality, and fullness of voice and breath control’, herself adding that ‘the voice of the castrato is depicted as powerful and strong; it penetrates the accompaniment, it rises above all instruments’.[35] Next to the assertion that castrati are passively ‘constructed’ and ‘blank canvases on which either sexual role could be projected’, the active authority implied by phallic imagery seems doubly conflicted when the castrato voice is being produced by a woman’s body as in Komsi’s case. As Dame writes, ‘what you hear is not simply a certain pitch, you also hear a body. As Barthes would say: you especially hear a body.’[36] Dame therefore uses Barthes’ writing to suggest that sonic phallic imagery is displaced in the castrato voice:
An erotic
substance, the voice was produced a
contrario (according to a strictly symbolic inversion) by singers without
sex… as though, by selective hypertrophy, sexual density were obliged to
abandon the rest of the body and lodge in the throat…. Thus, emitted by a
castrated body, a wildly erotic frenzy is returned to that body: the star
castrati are cheered by hysterical audiences, women fall in love with them.[37]
In
the case of the Stranger in ItLH, this
‘lodging’ of ‘sexual density’ in ‘the throat’ is pushed further, and extended instrumentally.
Benjamin scores the bass flute in order to represent the Stranger’s pipe, which
(like his sex) is only coyly referred to: his pipe is his “music”. It then
follows that his meeting with the Minister is a seduction. Similarly, in Bartes’
reading of Zambinella, Dame reports that ‘the male subject… has been placed in
the female position: passive, overwhelmed, and overpowered’.[38] In other words, the Stranger emasculates
the Minister; ‘castrated he castrates’.[39] That this process is engendered by a
female singer only serves to heighten its potency.
Abbate discusses the extreme heights of the coloratura soprano range in similar
terms of emasculation. In reference to Die
Zauberflöte, she writes of the Queen’s ‘incarnation as musical voice, as
chimerical being’ and the ‘misogynistic anxieties concerning female power’ which
she inspires—Abbate cites Mladen Dolar’s writing of the ‘seductive’ and
‘intoxicating powers’ of ‘voice without the anchor of logos’.[40] Although the Stranger’s words do not
‘revert to irrational shrieks, soulless birdsong’ as the Queen’s do, the setting
of them is disjointed (example 4.3) and their premises nonsensical (‘I can …
unravel the clouds’). The contrast between this mode of text delivery and the
‘natural speech patterns’ of Benjamin’s recitative is stark, and heightens the
Stranger’s transcendence over comfortable rationality.[41]
Totentanz
The
Stranger’s various transcendences of gender and rationality manifest themselves
in the score as exoticised and dangerous Otherness at figure 27, where the
cellos pass a pizzicato, dance-like vamp between one another (example 5.1).
Outlined by the cimbalom’s and bass flute’s unfamiliar timbres, the harmony is
corrupted by the trombone’s F sharp as it oscillates between two dyads (Ab/Eb
and G/D) as if around an invisible pole. The agon between the two, which is
both a playing-out of the Minister’s lust for power versus his better judgement
and of the Faustian negotiation between him and the Piper, is perhaps best
characterised as a perverse tango.
 |
| Example 5.1 |
The use of dance rhythm here is an allusion to the medieval trope of the Totentanz; a staple of the Rattenfänger myth. Sophie Oosterwijk writes of ‘a firm link between music and death that dates back to Antiquity’ and ‘tales … told of creatures who used music to lure the living to their deaths, from the sirens whom Odysseus successfully resisted, to the more modern legends of the Pied Piper’.[42] Given the sirens’ overt seduction and the piper’s implicit seduction, the Totentanz is an amalgamation of sex and death; the destructive consummation of transient, hedonistic pleasure. Oosterwijk scrutinises the ways in which this has been both gendered and sexualized in late-medieval culture, observing in Danse macabre des Femmes that ‘Death's words … carry strong sexual overtones’ when ‘the wife of the knight is ordered by Death to strip quickly to take part in his danse’.[43] Oosterwijk also identifies morbid sexual allusions projected onto Death himself in Hans Holbein’s woodcut “Death and the Empress” in the form of ‘withered, pendulous breasts’ (figure 5.2).[44]
 |
| Figure 5.2 |
The Totentanz as a manifestation of eroticism is a familiar trope in opera, with Strauss’s Salomé’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ being an oft-cited example of fetishized, exotic Otherness. Susan McClary writes of the “Habañera” in Bizet’s Carmen in similar terms (‘physical impulses of exotic, pseudo-gypsy dance’) connoting power and lust:
[Carmen] arouses
desire; and because she apparently has the power to deliver or withhold
gratification… she is immediately marked as a potential victimizer.[45]
This
power, more than the Minister’s Machiavellian scheming, is perceived to be
evil. The Stranger’s use of ineffable vibrations (his “music”) both to
manipulate and to make his victims and the listener ‘aware… of their own
bodies’, brings cultural anxieties about the sensuality of music to the fore.[46] In light of this, Komsi’s performance of
this Totentanz section plays out
layers upon layers of half-drag and subversion: a seeing audience is
simultaneously aware of her female body, yet distanced from by her holding a
pastiche Grecian mask; a listening audience hears an almost inconceivably high
voice referred to with male pronouns coming from a faceless being. This
disjunction between sight and sound is another manifestation of “extimation”,
and in turn has had binary gender mapped onto it by societal mores. ItLH’s subversion of this dichotomy was
subtly expressed by the use of lighting in the premiere, in that bright light
(often gendered male because of its Apollonian implications) ceases to imply
“masculine”, rational enlightenment, and instead throws light upon the
exterior: it illuminates and exposes the Crowd’s bodies, is all but engulfed
inside the Minister’s head, and eventually consumes the Children so that they
cannot be seen, but only heard, or rather felt as an unsettling tympanic
vibration.
The
paedophilic implications of children being led away by a sexually Othered male
seducer are perhaps so taboo that Benjamin’s setting of such for two adult
female voices could be seen as a necessary distancing for the audience. One of
the earliest accounts of the Rattenfänger,
The Lüneburg manuscript (c. 1440–50), reads:
Dorch einen piper
mit allerlei farve bekledet
gewesen CXXX kinder verledet binnen Hamelen gebo[re]n to calvarie bi den koppen verloren. |
By a piper, clothed in many kinds of
colours,
130 children born in Hamelin were seduced, and lost at the place of execution on the hill.[47] |
Although
this translation is explicit in its mention of seduction, its matter is
consistent with most retellings of the legend. A stained glass window in
Hamelin’s Marktkirche dated circa
1300 and destroyed in 1660) depicted the children in virginal white, while a
hedonistically brightly-coloured piper commands their praise (figure 5.3, reconstruction).[48]
 |
| Figure 5.3 |
Mother
and Child
Innocence
paradigms permeate ItLH, both through
the words of the Stranger (‘your sleeping child – unlike your god unlike your
word unlike your smile – is innocent’) and through the Minister’s child’s
envoicing in Section V. There, the soprano sings pecked simple triplet rhythms
in midrange over a confused quaver texture, in which the Mother hums a
counterpoint t0 the bass flute, implicitly duetting with the Stranger (example
6.1).
 |
| Example 6.1 |
Komsi
uncannily imitates the breathy quality of a treble’s voice, yet her seduction
by the Stranger is never staged. Only the mother’s reaction to the trauma of
the children leaving is heard as Komsi moves off-stage into blindingly bright
light. Mother and child becoming physically, oedipally detached by sex is
deemed too obscene even for the unliteral but heightened gestures passed
between the singers earlier in the opera. Even the narrative voices, previously
so aloof in their clipped, anapaestic rhythms, break down into gibbering
despair at figure 88: ‘The Minister’s Wife says- says to the Minister- Minister’s
Wife- says- ah ah says to the Minister’.
This
breaking down of rationality comes at the point at which the audience hears the
only utterance from the Minister’s Wife (who in turn is the only explicitly
female character) which does not essentially consist of a restatement of what
has been heard before (for example ‘a rat only steals’ in bar 382 after the Crowd’s
‘kill them they steal’ in bar 4). Her cry of ‘where is my child?’ at 753
creates a sweeping, disjunct phrase over a texture of persistently repeated
viola tritones, a cold, glassy cello D harmonic pedal, and densely chromatic
scales sent from the second cello to the top of the violin (example 6.2).
This
would be heard as a ‘shriek’ similar to the Queen of the Night’s, but is
suppressed by Benjamin’s quiet dynamics and soft articulations, as if the
volume has been turned down on a radio, because the sheer pitch of the mothers’
raw despair would otherwise be unbearable.[49] A similar detachment can be found at the
climax of Written on Skin, where
Agnes’ consummating suicide is deemed too obscene to be heard. The audience
instead hears the softly unnerving vibrations of the glass harmonica, and is
presented with a page illuminated by her lover detailing the incident—a visual,
male impression of female sex and death.
 |
| Example 6.2 |
Given
that the Minister is enacted to the audience by two women who assume all of the
roles—and by extension, all of the blame—and perform them under the direction
of male composers and librettists, Catherine Clément’s assertion that opera is
‘The Undoing of Women’ would seem a fair one.[50] It is the Minister’s supposed rationality
which pushes ItLH into the realms of
the taboo. While his bargain is ostensibly Faustian, the Minister’s willingness
not to sell his own soul, but that of ‘an innocent’, is his most obscene act.
And yet, in spite of ItLH’s reticence
to show it explicitly, it draws the taboo out sonically. The audience never
hears the amount of money that the Stranger asks for, but instead hears a
hushed, metallic clash of C, C sharp, and D alongside the previously-established
A tonality, played by alien-sounding mandolins, banjos, and cimbaloms (example
6.3). The same cluster is heard in the final bars, floating like so many lost
souls, morendo al niente (example 6.4).
The specifics are left to the audience’s imagination, which will invariably be
more terrible than anything more material. Thus the obscene is banished from
the stage and into the audience’s heads, the irrational becomes internal, and
gender—the most irrational and intimate concept of all—becomes something that
can be put on and (even more powerfully) taken off.
 |
| Example 6.3 |
 |
| Example 6.4 |
ItLH confronts an audience with a nuanced configuration of vocal
drag above and beyond opera’s traditionally codified “trouser role”. While
there is scant literature on Crimp’s narrative devices (Angel-Perez 2014 and
Angelaki 2012), on any of Benjamin’s work at all is conspicuously scarce. There
are two significant published articles which harmonically analyse his instrumental
music (Rupprecht 2005 and Lack 2001), but despite his operas’ highly gendered
discourses, there appears to be little or no musicological writing on them.
Nevertheless, a close gendered reading of the intersections of power between
agency, construction, and seduction in ItLH
illuminates many of its tensions, scrutinizes its very conception, and offers
new insights into women’s position in twenty first century opera.
Bibliography
Abbate, Carolyn. In Search of Opera. Princeton University
Press, 2001.
Angel-Perez, Elisabeth.
“Martin Crimp’s Nomadic Voices”, Contemporary
Theatre Review (Vol. 23, 2014): 353-362.
Angelaki, Vicky. The Plays of Martin
Crimp: Making Theatre Strange. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Atherton, Michelle. “Feminine
and Masculine Personas in Performance: Sade Huron: A Drag Queen with a Dick.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 2, no. 2/3
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[5] Ibid.
[6] Bosma 2003, 16; Butler 1990, 9; Ibid. 10.
[8] Bosma 2003, 16; Butler 1990, 9; Ibid. 10.
[10] Saying I No More: Subjectivity and
Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1999) cited in ibid, 362; ibid, 357.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Dame 1994, 201.
[13] Atherton 1999, 230.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid, 188.
[16] Ibid, 200.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Benjamin 2006; Angel-Perez 2014, 357.
[19] Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Cornell university Press,
1986), 174-77, cited in Wood 1994, 30.
[20] Wood 1994, 30.
[21] Nieminen and Machart 1997, 15.
[22] Bosma 2003, 9.
[23] Rupprecht 2005, 36.
[24] Benjamin and Crimp 2009.
[25] Butler 1990, 201.
[26] Beckles Willson 2009, 25.
[27] Morris 2010, 00.46.
[28] Abbate 2001, xiv; Angel-Perez 2014 352;
Guarracino 2006, 9.
[29] Bosma 2003, 9.
[30] Abbate 2001, 7.
[31] Ibid, 13.
[32] Rupprecht 2005, 36; Benjamin 2012.
[33] Morris 2010, 00.56.
[34] Dame 1994, 143.
[35] Franz Haböck, Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangkunst (Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1927),
135 cited in Dame 1994, 144; Ibid, 144.
[36] Ibid, 143.
[37] Dame 1994, 144.
[38] Dame 1994, 142.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Abbate 1991, 69; Mladen Dolar, “The Object
Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds.
Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Duke University Press, 1996), 17 cited in
Abbate 1991, 69.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Oosterwijk 2004, 62.
[43] Martial d'Auvergne (attrib.), Danse Macabre des Femmes (MS 1482), 80,
cited in ibid.
[44] Hans Holbein, Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort (MS 1538), cited in ibid.
[45] McClary 1991, 57.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Mieder 2007, 32.
[48] Hans Dobbertin, Quellensammlung zur Hamelner Rattenfängersage (Schwartz 1970), 9
cited in ibid, 5.
[49] Abbate 1991, 69.
[50] Clément, 1989.
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