Edward Said and the Music of Opera

Colonization and Les Troyens

Only once in the course of these chapters does the specter of orientalism arise: in his discussion of Les Troyens. Berlioz’s opera deals explicitly with the colonization of North Africa, and the composer even tosses in an exotic ballet to meet the expectations of his Parisian audiences. Said duly notes the obvious caricature of African music in this scene (“like the silliest golliwog stereotypes Debussy would later exploit,” p. 72), but he does so in passing. To Said, dismissing a work of this magnitude on such grounds would qualify as irresponsible. He focuses instead on the cultural work performed by the opera as a whole and especially on the multivalent power of Berlioz’s libretto and music.

Unlike other adaptations of Virgil’s epic, which restrict themselves to the tragic love affair with Dido, Berlioz attempts to cover the action in Troy as well as Carthage. To be sure, Aeneas appears in both segments. But he is oddly marginalized: in Act I he makes a brief appearance to report the horrendous death of Laocoön, though he fails to grasp the event’s message. Instead, the ill-fated Cassandra dominates the first two acts, first vainly warning her fellow Trojans, then inspiring the women of Troy to commit mass suicide rather than facing sexual servitude to the victorious Greeks. Berlioz ascribes all agency to her.

Act III opens with the people of Carthage paying homage to Dido, their adored queen. A refugee from Phoenicia, she has worked as an urban planner to enrich the city through her knowledge of agriculture, architecture, law, international trade, the arts, and much more. Alas, she falls in love with the ship-wrecked Aeneas who benefits from her generosity, then abandons her to get on with his quest. He does have a rapturous love duet with Dido—one of the most beautiful in the entire repertory, notable for the way Berlioz presents the lovers as equals. Otherwise, Aeneas contributes very little. This is a very odd way of rendering one of the foundational heroic epics of European civilization.

Aeneas does have a musical calling card, however. As his native city falls prey to the Greeks hidden inside the Trojan Horse in Act II, Aeneas gathers up his troops and flees. Yet he brings with him a slightly tacky march theme, the one that accompanied the hapless Trojans as they hauled the horse inside the city walls. When Aeneas show up in Carthage, his march does so as well, and it will lead the way to Rome, even though requiring that the hero leave Dido to her own suicide.

Said focuses particularly on the way this march presses the project of imperial expansion. It stands to the side of the characters—no one onstage delivers the imperative in words, yet it continually propels Aeneas to action:

the various calls to empire that animate Aeneas throughout the opera all come from an out-of-the ordinary, normally inaccessible source or place. . . . Berlioz is careful to represent Aeneas’s imperial obligations to keep moving on toward Italy as out of history in some way, unconscious perhaps (as when he is addressed by ghosts in his sleep), above all as something he cannot in the end question or engage with except by obedient compliance. (73)

Berlioz composed Les Troyens (1856–58) as the French were busy colonizing North Africa: Egypt in 1798, Algeria in 1830, Morocco in 1844, Guinea in 1849. And Berlioz, like other artists of his cohort, received their support from the state. Indeed, much of the musical activity in Paris at the time occurred in the context of huge public spectacles celebrating the French nation; the government commissioned works and even underwrote the invention of new musical instruments capable of projecting sonic power in outdoor venues (Adolphe Saxe of saxophone fame counted as among the foremost beneficiaries of this largesse).3

Aeneas’s march resonates with the state-sponsored propaganda of this period.

Empire is not only a way of life, but also a calling that cannot be served by mere self-enrichment or acquisition; it requires the continuity and system of institutions, undeterred strength and sustained purpose, moral elevation above satisfaction and appetite. But there is a startlingly modern quality to it as Berlioz represents the authority of the idea itself as it would activate thousands of colonial servants during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Anticipating Joseph Conrad, Berlioz isolates the reminders of imperial obligation in such a way as to exact service and loyalty on the one hand, and on the other hand, ‘not too much looking into it.’ (73–74)

This helps explain why our heroic founder of Rome has so little agency in this opera. He, like Berlioz’s contemporaries, sleepwalks through this gargantuan enterprise of gobbling up much of the rest of the planet, urged forward by that threadbare, kitschy march—one of the least inventive musical ideas Berlioz ever put down on paper. If we were to rely on Aeneas’s contributions, the opera would sink without a trace. But, as Said argues, it’s the triviality of this theme and its strategic placement that produces the dramatic fulcrum of Les Troyens.

As suggested above, Berlioz poured his energies into his female characters: Cassandra in Troy, Dido in Carthage. Both heroines fall victim to Trojan military arrogance, just as North Africa was falling victim to France, which had inherited the imperialist mantle from Rome. “The overall theme is the obligation to serve the idea of imperial destiny, no matter the terrible human costs, which, I think, even Berlioz realized were not so easy to slough off.” (68) Said writes in conclusion:

Far from simply subordinating Dido’s experience to the imperial quest, it is her presence on stage that Berlioz leaves us with even as he lifts the imperial image to the status of deferred, distant realization. He had hoped that Napoleon III would first read the manuscript and then attend a performance of Les Troyens, but . . . it was just as well for Berlioz’s fortunes that he did not. Surely the final scene of the opera . . . impresses the audience with a powerfully affective image of a supremely grieving woman whose death symbolizes a sense of waste and sorrow implanted forever at the heart of transcendently victorious success. (76)

Not once in the course of this discussion does Said mention Palestine. He didn’t need to; the parallels are self-evident between Aeneas’s agenda, France’s nineteenth-century conquest of North Africa, and the circumstances leading to his own status as an exile. His indictment is all the more powerful as a result.4

Così fan tutte and the Dark Side of the Enlightenment

The first of the chapters in Said on Opera focuses on Mozart’s Così fan tutte. First introduced to this opera at an early age in a staging that featured stilted characters in powdered wigs, Said explains how Peter Sellars’s now-legendary series in the late 1980s transformed how he thought about this work as well as opera production in general. Indeed, Sellars’s translations of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas (Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così) permanently changed the face of opera internationally, as he located each of these in contemporary America: Figaro in the Trump Tower, Giovanni in Harlem, and Così in a beach-side diner. Many critics responded to these with scorn or indignation.5 But Sellars’s productions led Said to think deeply about eighteenth-century moral philosophy, especially as manifested in this apparently trite sex farce.

What makes Sellars’s productions of the three operas so powerful is that they put the viewer directly in touch with what is most eccentric and opaque about Mozart: the obsessive patterning in the operas, patterning that has little to do with showing that crime doesn’t pay or that the faithlessness inherent in all human beings must be overcome before true union can occur. . . . These operas, in fact, are much more about power and manipulation than they are given credit for by most opera directors or audiences. (3)

Unlike Mozart’s other operas, Così does not draw on a previous play or literary source; Da Ponte and Mozart seem to have invented it themselves. It presents only six characters: two pairs of lovers, a worldly older man, and a maid. Don Alfonso sets the action going by challenging the two young men to a wager: that their beloveds will cheat on them if each attempts (in disguise) to seduce the other man’s fiancée. Confident in themselves and in their ladies, both eagerly accept the bet. Alas, both women succumb to the enticements of their new lovers, to the dismay of the double-dealing young gamblers. At the end, all four young lovers have to face their betrayals and faithlessness, their confidence in social relationships and humanity in tatters.

Nineteenth-century critics often found this opera morally repugnant; Said argues in this and the following chapter that Beethoven was compelled to write Fidelio in part in response to Così, and Wagner also found it loathsome. But we have long agreed to overlook the tensions in canonic texts, substituting adoration for understanding—thus those cute, vacuous performances of Cosí Said grew up with. Occasionally someone tries to salvage the piece by blaming the problems on Da Ponte, leaving Mozart innocent of any charges.

But as Sellars and Said realize, the ethical dilemma of the opera involves precisely the juxtaposition of cynicism with some of the most beautiful music ever penned. To embrace the music while rejecting the dramatic context is to miss the point of this cruelly brilliant work. “Mozart depicts an immoral Lucretian world in which power has its own logic, undomesticated either by conditions of piety or verisimilitude.” (4) Yes, accepting this position demands that we give up the image of Mozart that adorns boxes of Viennese chocolates. If we think we hear untroubled order in Mozart’s music, we are not really listening.6

Said rightly situates Così in the context of his literary contemporaries. The opera’s “natural world is in part Rousseau’s, stripped of sanctimonious piety, volatile with fancy and caprice, made rigorous with the need to experience desire without palliatives or conclusion.” (23) He also writes at some length comparing the machinations of the opera with those of Sade as understood by way of Foucault. This is the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment—the elements we prefer to hide behind the white wigs and stately minuets.

But Said also delves into the ways Mozart deploys his musical imagination in this opera. The intricate counterpoint he had learned in his recent study of Bach shows up everywhere in this score—not as evidence of purely musical skill but as a crucial aspect of his dramaturgy, especially in the ensemble numbers: “It is as if Mozart wanted the counterpoint to mirror the lovers’ embarrassment in a closed polyphonic system, and also to show how though they think of themselves as shedding all ties and memories, the music, by its circularity and echoic form, reveals them to be bound to each other in a new and logically consequent embrace.” (16)

Mozart also calls harmony itself into question. One of the most horrific moments in all of opera occurs when Don Alfonso leads the deluded women in a sweet farewell to their sweethearts, who they believe to be heading off to sea. The lyrics describe only the benign seascape and their waves of desire, and the three voices sing together much of the time in almost hymn-like unity in one of the most gorgeous pieces Mozart ever wrote. But therein lies the problem. As the bass, Don Alfonso provides the foundation for this fantasy, determining its sense of utter security and quiet motion, Fiorabella and Dorabella sing in sweet consonances as supported and directed by the bass. But we know that this entire scenario is but part of Alfonso’s ruse, that he is leading the clueless women to their destruction. And we can do nothing about it except bear witness to this most beautiful of entrapments. What does it mean to deploy all the rhetorical strategies needed to produce such rapture for purposes we recognize in advance as deeply injurious and corrupt?

Said mentions the echo-chamber effects that appear throughout this opera. “Soave sia il vento” makes use of mirror images: when Alfonso’s line moves down, the women arch up as if to create perfect balance and symmetry. Eventually their confidence in Alfonso’s safety net grows to the point where they can allow themselves solo roulades of pleasure. As they approach the end, the three work together to postpone closure, singing over and over “ai nostri desir” (Alfonso even produces the reassuring I-vi-IV-V-I progression that underpins standard doo wop). Here are all our favorite sentimental clichés (like pictures of Baby Mozart), all lined up to make us swoon, even while we realize how truly sadistic the trio is. Brecht needn’t have look further for examples of his alienation effect than this combination of musical perfection and moral dissonance.

Peter Sellars’s mis-en-scène of this trio introduces yet another component. To be sure, he shows us Alfonso apparently in harmony with the women, and he makes visual the mirror images and symmetries of the music in the physical arrangements and gestures of the three performers. But in his interpretations, Sellars always holds out the possibility of redemption, even for the basest of characters. Toward the end of the trio, Alfonso (the late Sanford Sylvan) steps aside briefly as if to rethink his actions. And as the orchestra’s outro fades, Sellars has the camera dwell on his face with an expression that resembles that of classic paintings of Saint Peter contemplating his grievous sins and betrayals. His Alfonso will not repent, though he and co-conspirator Despina will end up as shattered as their victims by this hideous game. Sellars shows him here at the crossroads, as a human being wondering what the hell he’s doing.7 Said concludes his chapter thus:

Mozart never ventured so close to the potentially terrifying view he and Da Ponte seem to have uncovered of a universe shorn of any redemptive or palliative scheme, whose one law is motion and instability expressed as the power of libertinage and manipulation, whose only conclusion is the terminal repose provided by death. That so astonishingly satisfying a musical score should be joined to so heedless and insignificant a tale is what Così fan tutte accomplishes with such unique virtuosity. But I think we should not believe that the candid fun of the work does any more than hold its ominous vision in abeyance—that is, for as long as Così fan tutte’s limits are not permitted to invade the stage. (26–27)

Sylvan’s face says it all.

Beethoven’s Ideological Allegories

The influence of Theodor Adorno hovers over all of Said on Opera, especially in his chapters on Beethoven and Wagner. Like many of us labeled in the 1990s as “New Musicologists,”8 Said found in Adorno’s music criticism ways of addressing the ideological resonances of musical practice, of moving beyond issues of plot and character to grapple with the sonic mechanisms that animate and produce the deep affective reactions that bring us to opera.

Writing between the world wars, Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School sought to understand how German Enlightenment culture could have devolved into the dystopia of National Socialism. Adorno took the German musical canon from Bach through Mahler and Alban Berg as his principal focus. In his books and essays, he attempted to demonstrate that musical idioms based on individual voices or subjects began to surrender that autonomy to a single process that featured teleological progress above all. He identified in Bach’s fugues the moment of compromise, showing how Bach in his Well-Tempered Clavier undertook the task of performing the compatibility of seventeenth-century imitative counterpoint with the tonal conventions of Vivaldi’s concertos, which had taken European musicking by storm.9 Repertories of the eighteenth century (Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart) celebrate the conviction that individual freedom and rationality may co-exist: the specific materials of a movement may seem to operate on their own accord, but they all follow a stock background trajectory. The materials themselves, in other words, have little effect on the movement’s unfolding.

Beethoven plays an outsized role in Adorno’s historiography, for Beethoven both brought to a kind of perfection the narrative vector cemented by Vivaldi and also came to regard that convention—that sonic simulation of Reason itself—as a lie. Said locates Fidelio as the turning point in Beethoven’s career and in European ideological self-consciousness.

Said had already laid the groundwork for his discussion of Fidelio in his Così chapter. For all that he idolized Mozart’s musicianship, Beethoven found Così deeply disturbing—disturbing enough that he set to work writing his own opera as a kind of response. In direct contrast to Da Ponte and Mozart, he chose to celebrate conjugal faithfulness; he also wanted to dramatize moral defiance of social oppression. And he thought he had found the perfect vehicle in Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s rescue play Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal.

But Beethoven struggled for years in his attempt to transferring his musical proclivities onto the stage. Although he produced versions of this project in 1805 and 1806, he continued to worry at it for years until he delivered his final version as Fidelio in 1814. Part of his difficulty came from his very different skill set from that of Mozart: he did not share Mozart’s nearly preternatural gift of melody. His talents lay elsewhere—most obviously, in his genius for producing instrumental works of unparalleled rhetorical power, especially the long-range heroic struggles of the Third Symphony, which traces a flawed protagonist’s self-constructed arrival at triumph. He invented the paradigm for post-Revolutionary self-fashioning, a paradigm that shaped not only the nineteenth-century symphony up until Mahler but also the action movies that continue to mesmerize teenage audiences. It’s our favorite story, and Beethoven figured out how to tell it without words. In other words, he ought to have been the ideal composer for Leonora.

But something didn’t work. Fidelio is admired but rarely loved. It features an opening act in full opera-buffa mode, with Leonora in drag as Fidelio, then pivots to a dungeon where political prisoners—including Florestan, Leonora’s husband—are tortured and often murdered. Suddenly a trumpet sounds, and Florestan is delivered by a hitherto unnamed force. Fidelio offers many highly effective numbers and beautiful moments. But taken as a whole, we might well characterize it as a hot mess.

Beethoven last grappled with his ill-fated opera during the 1810s, a fallow period in which he composed very little. Most of the music we regard as Beethovenian—the heroic symphonies and concertos—dates from the previous decade. When he returned to full-scale production in the 1820s, he unleashed the still-bewildering late piano sonatas and string quartets, pieces that bear scant resemblance to anything he or anyone else had previously imagined. If fragments of familiar conventions appear in these works, their patchwork arrangements defy interpretation. Most nineteenth-century musicians chose to ignore these works, much as one might try to overlook signs of dementia in a beloved elder. Even today they stand as sphynx-like enigmas to those who would perform and listen to them.

Musicologists have long attempted to account for this radical shift. Did the composer’s deafness so alienate him that he could no longer communicate? Did his well-documented traumas take a drastic toll on his mental processes? Adorno developed a theory of “late style” to try to account for such swerves into borderline incoherence not only in Beethoven but many other artists, including Goethe (think of Faust II!). Said followed Adorno in the quest for understanding such phenomena in his own book Late Style.

In his chapter on Fidelio, Said offers a brilliant interpretation that pulls these different versions of Beethoven together. Most Beethoven scholars focus on instrumental works, leaving Fidelio to the side; and opera critics usually do not bring complex music analysis to bear on their discussions of stage works. Said knows Beethoven’s piano sonatas well, but he also finds the composer’s opera compelling enough to think seriously about it.

He concludes that Beethoven seems to have believed initially he could transfer onto the stage the techniques he had used to produce the heroic narratives he had developed in his instrumental music. But those narratives had assumed the self-sufficiency of the protagonist. He eschewed extraneous material that might interfere with the logic of organic growth demonstrated most perfectly in the Eroica. Said quotes Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon:

The sonata distinguished itself from all other fantasy forms by its containment of its own fantasy-content, its molding of the improvisational, its suppression of the extemporaneous, its rationalization of the irrational. It was with this development that the sonata became a closed, rational, musical system, a “principle” of composition rather than just another musical form.10 (49)

In other words, those astonishing performances of liberation that Beethoven creates in his Middle-Period symphonies operate in a different realm from that of the social, political world. Beethoven’s genius leads us to take those performances as somehow real—affectively and intellectually satisfying, with no loose ends trailing out beyond the final cadence. But they all take place within that self-contained bubble manufactured of harmonic relationships and formal processes inherited from a long line of tonal composers.

When Beethoven tried to tell a similar story in the medium of opera, he discovered that his fundamental premises were incompatible with the real world. Said writes:

We must therefore be prepared to grant that the supposed creative subject behind Fidelio is not a unified, but a fractured and only partially coherent thing, surrounded by uncertainties and incapacities, facing problems it cannot resolve and solutions it cannot pull off. Fidelio’s political undercurrent is a perfect case in point. Dictatorial tyranny and benevolent redemption operate more or less as equivalents in Fidelio. They can be substituted for each other by the miracle, or “myth,” as Adorno calls it, of prompt arrival; Pizarro’s police and Fernando’s trumpet are in fact interchangeable. Florestan’s explanation for his plight is that the state has moved against him, but we never learn—nor can we—what sort of state it is. Who are the other prisoners? Are they also unjustly punished intellectuals, or do they include thieves and murderers? All strive for freedom and light, but is it clear that they are all moved by principles (like Florestan) or fidelity to a loved one (like Leonore)? Yes, it is the case, as Maynard Solomon has argued, that the opera moves in act 1 from the above-ground light of Rocco’s quarters in the castle to the underground gloom of the prison, and in act 2 from the darkness of Florestan’s dungeon to the sunny, liberating atmosphere of the yard; but what can Beethoven do to guarantee that the whole story will not repeat itself—that tyranny will not victimize just people all over again? (46–47)

Fidelio ends with a deus ex machina—a device that violates the very premises of his intensively organic process.11 Florestan and Leonora, regardless of their moral fiber and mutual fidelity, cannot effect by themselves the glorious conclusions that Beethoven achieved effortlessly in instrumental music. “It is as if Beethoven snatches the characters up from the dreary prison—so laboriously described and explored earlier in act 2—into another, higher, and even metaphysical realm where language and ordinarily declarative communication seem almost impossible.” (38–39) As a result, Beethoven came to recognize his own heroic trajectories—however powerful and emotionally effective—as false. And he spent the rest of his career dismantling them. Said brilliantly locates this turn-around in the composer’s only attempt at opera, where the contradictions became too evident to ignore.

Although Said does not do so, I might mention here the Ninth Symphony—Beethoven’s attempt at performing the heroic narrative one final time, now buttressed with chorus, soloists, Turkish percussion, and Schiller. In 1824, Beethoven still knew how to wield overwhelming rhetorical power, evidenced in our continued adoration of this piece, 200 years after its premiere. But the doubts and fissures that disrupt Fidelio also show up here, in the unprecedented violence required to achieve closure—closure invariably marked as provisional and even imposed. And the fact that political authorities of all ideological stripes can lay claim to Beethoven’s glorious display—witness Furtwängler’s performance celebrating Hitler’s birthday in 1942—underscores the flimsiness of the links between the magic bubble of purely musical devices and the real world. The late quartets and sonatas refuse to tell that story anymore.

As Said shows in his discussion of Fidelio, the heroic sweep Beethoven himself had brought to perfection in his major symphonies could not be deployed on an operatic stage that purported to represent some semblance of reality. In subsequent publications, Adorno took on the ways composers—Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg—grappled with this fundamental contradiction between individual agency and an unyielding trajectory of instrumental reason: a contradiction he understood to have produced the toxic culture he had inherited.

The “Holy German Art” and Antisemitism in Die Meistersinger

Discussions of Wagner are always fraught, and Said begins his chapter on Die Meistersinger with this:

Never distant from any discussion of Wagner since World War II has been the vexed question of his anti-Semitism and its relationship to his music. . . . I have already written about this elsewhere, so I do not want to repeat what I have said before, except to say that I do not think that Wagner’s highly problematic social, political, and racial theories (which he himself changed many times in the course of his extremely prolific career) can be surgically separated from the music dramas. . . . In view of the elaborate and finally genocidal consequences of appropriating and distorting some of Wagner’s ideas, and also in view of aspects of his portraits of Beckmesser and Mime, simply to avoid the anti-Semitism in what can seem to be its alliance with the magical power of Wagner’s theatrical and musical craft is insufficient. (80–83)

Yet even though Adorno and Said deplore Wagner’s amply-documented anti-Semitism, “Adorno confesses that his ‘own experience with Wagner does not exhaust itself in the political content, as unredeemable as the latter is, and I often have the impression that in laying it bare I have cleared away one level only to see another emerge from underneath.’” (84) Adorno writes that we should try to describe how, “without borrowing,” Wagner’s forms “express, develop, and create themselves with compelling necessity from within.” (84) Said expands:

This decision involved Wagner in the forging of an infinitely plastic and detailed style that was responsive to each particular action, situation, and changing character in his work, hence endless melody, the elimination of “numbers,” and the invention of leitmotifs, which run an extraordinary gamut of rhythmic, harmonic, aural, and coloristic elements, that show his amazing gifts as a technician of sound in which an almost miraculous capacity for constant change—“irregularity” Adorno calls it—assures that the music is always interesting, never routine. (85)

Is this not just another way of sidestepping the political for the sake of unhampered musical enjoyment? Not if we place this argument in the context of Adorno’s larger project, which seeks to trace the ways in which human subjectivity continually strives for agency in a world hemmed in by the conventions and conformity imposed by capitalism. From his examination of how Bach dealt dialectically in his fugues with the exigencies of particular subjects and an increasingly mandatory background structure to his studies of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg, Adorno wrestled with what he regarded as the central ideological problems in culture since the Enlightenment. And to the extent that Wagner resisted the formal constraints that previously had regulated opera, he counts as someone to be reckoned with—not dismissed out of hand.

In this chapter, Said addresses two ideological problems commonly addressed in Die Meistersinger. First, the character Beckmesser—a pedantic critic within the guild—has often been seen as an anti-Semitic stereotype. Said weighs carefully and sympathetically the arguments that have been brought forth, but he resists accepting this alone as a reason to cancel the opera.

More important for him, the intellectual and ethical leader of the guild, Hans Sachs, lauds near the end of the opera “die heilige deutsche Kunst” (the holy German art). It is hard for many of us to hear this without flashing forward to slogans of the Third Reich. Yet Wagner had no part in Hitler’s world, even if much of his work—including Sachs’s ode—provided powerful fodder for National Socialist propaganda. Said writes concerning Sachs’s speech:

His warnings against the threat of foreign rule are not likely to endear him to proponents of hybridity and multiculturalism. Yet what he warns about is the extremely commonplace fear of the loss of authentic tradition; to today’s audience this presents no particularly unfamiliar aspect of public discourse since it seems to be there in every kind of nationalist and/or identity politics. To ascribe to it something uniquely German, and therefore protofascist, is insidious to say the least, since no nationalism that I know of can escape criticism on that score. The question is whether the opera is parochially only about German art and tradition or whether to non-German audiences it makes more universal sense than that . . . Yet in Sachs’s pleas for art and a flexible understanding of its rules we are well-placed today to discern a countertruth coexisting with the putative xenophobia that Sachs seems to be upholding. (103)

Said, Sellars, and Capitain all assure us that Said was not a “professional musicologist.” And I would concur—not in order to consign him to the category of the amateur but rather because a card-carrying musicologist would have been disciplined not to write the way Said writes or to ask the questions he poses (my status as a “professional musicologist” is similarly shaky). Long ago, Adorno decried the fact that musicologists have so little to do with music, and this continues to be the case. We operate in a strange academic world in which we scorn “the music itself,” thereby leaving it to interdisciplinary scholars like Said who have the skills necessary to grapple with how this medium produces its effects. Universities across North America are dropping courses focusing on the European canon, justified in part with the trickle-down-Said argument that regards classical music as complicit in colonization.

Said himself would have fought this trend with all his intellectual and rhetorical might. After weighing the pros and cons raised by Die Meistersinger (and, indeed, all he operas he had discussed over the course of this lecture series), he concludes with an effective summary of his deeply ethical approach to cultural criticism: “For the modern interpreter it suffices to see the two possibilities, and then to emphasize the more humane one over the other without obliterating what still unsettles and disturbs us about this complex, bristling work of genius.” (103) Anyone who wishes to cancel a work on ideological grounds should not cite Edward Said for support.

Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, McClary received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1995. Her work has been translated into at least twenty languages.

Notes

1. 1. Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken Books, 1984). In addition to his beautiful novels and powerful libretti, Maalouf has also written extensively about the problems of identity politics. The original production by Peter Sellars of L’amour de loin is available on YouTube.

2. 2. See, however, Said, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” in his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

3. 3. See Samuel Nemeth, “‘Ces Magnifiques Instruments’: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869,” PhD dissertation (Case Western Reserve University, 2023).

4. 4. Much of Said’s best writing on classical music addresses the nuances of performance, but there had been no stagings of Les Troyens by the time he died. Consequently, he had to rely on scores and recordings for his account of the opera. But an extraordinary production finally appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in 2015, and it may be viewed on the Met’s website.

5. 5. For more on Sellars’s productions, see McClary, The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). Said’s obvious admiration of Sellars’s work led Wouter Capitain to invite him to write the foreword to Said on Opera.

6. 6. I have been arguing this point for a very long time. One of my first publications—in this journal!—dealt with Mozart’s performances of arbitrary power. See McClary, “A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement II,” Cultural Critique 4 (Fall, 1986): 129–69.

   Cultural Critique championed my work when all musicology venues rejected it. It also published my “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 57–81. I am profoundly grateful to this journal.

7. 7. See the performance of this trio at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ul6ucSq6B4. Years after completing my book on Sellars and watching endless hours of his productions, this is still the image that most haunts me. The trio itself begins at 1:00, but the recitative leading into it shows Alfonso drawing the women into his trap. Sylvan also performs the role of Klinghoffer in John Adams’s and Sellars’s The Death of Klinghoffer.

8. 8. Rose Rosengard Subotnik introduced Adorno into North American musicology in her brilliant “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptoms of a Fatal Condition,” Journalof the American Musicological Society 29, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 242–75. Said and I drew heavily from her understanding of Adorno; she also inspired Richard Leppert to compile his irreplaceable Essays on Music by Theodor Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), with translations by Susan Gillespie. Subotnik was denied tenure at the University of Chicago for writing on Adorno.

9. 9. See Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against His Devotees,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 133–46. For a fuller discussion of this essay, see my “Adorno Plays the WTC: On Political Theory and Performance,” Indiana Theory Review 27, No. 2 (Fall 2009): 97–112.

10. 10. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977). In addition to his definitive biographies of Beethoven and Mozart, Solomon also edited Marxism and Art (New York: Knopf, 1973). At the time of his death in 2020, he was completing a decades-long work on Schubert. Solomon’s research sparked the controversy concerning Schubert’s sexuality in the 1990s.

11. 11. Following E.M. Forster in Howard’s End, I have explained how these doubts had begun to appear even in the Fifth Symphony, in which the gothic horror of the third movement suddenly reemerges from its crypt in the middle of the triumphant finale. See my “In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory,” Music Theory On-Line (January 2010).

Works Cited

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