A Note from the Guest Editor

Abstract

One’s writing is always a working through of echoes. “Echoed Elsewhere” gathers operatic echoes. The issue thematizes opera’s preoccupation with returning sounds as well as operatic resonances within other fields: literature, history, cinema, philosophy, mysticism, and non-operatic music. Jean Starobinski’s “Ombra Adorata” follows the trajectory of the aria “Ombra adorata,” the music for which has long been lost. Starobinski traces a path of the aria’s various revivals from its first performance in 1796 until 1839. He tracks the aria through singers’ repertoires, and across eras and cities, registering its effects in recollections, memoirs, novels, and plays. The aria’s echoes are its afterlife and its identity constituted in the recounting of its many pasts. In “Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee,” Carolyn Abbate posits that interpretation is itself the work of following the trails left by echoes. Abbate traces out operatic citations hidden in film, establishing a crucial difference between a real echo—a material, acoustic phenomenon composed into a piece that occurs in the architectural space of live performance—and representations of echoes, e.g., hallucinations, or other uncanny repetitions. For Abbate, film shares with opera the surprising aptitude to generate real echoes.