A Note from the Guest Editor

Abstract

In a revealing paragraph of Bourgeois Opera, Theodor W. Adorno asserts that Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is the first “authentic” opera and “that it is hardly too much to claim that all opera is Orpheus.”1 Earlier in his essay Adorno adopts the same qualifier “authentic” for operas such as Der Freischütz, Die Zauberflöte, and Il trovatore (thereby intentionally excluding Wagner's works), which he characterizes as “prototypes of the theatrical.” The theatrical element of authentic operas consists of “that aura of disguise, of miming, which attracts children to theater,” and manifests itself in cloak-and-dagger scenes. The indispensable presence of costumes in any operatic staging, writes Adorno, reflects the audience's basic, childlike delight in dissimulation—gestures and voices working, in this respect, like costumes. Opera, however, does not merely display mimetic components but also preserves magical elements, even in the midst of a disenchanted world. The meaning of opera as a product intended for a judging audience of bourgeois consumers—a function that the genre shares with cinema—is inextricably tied to myth, as the earliest operas show. This link with myth, however, is characterized not so much by sheer imitation of the plots but by music's intervention and transformation of “fate's … ties to nature.” In the attempted rescue of Eurydice through music, the myth of Orpheus becomes, in Adorno's view, the “archetype of opera,” and the correction of mythological plots that often characterizes the genre reveals the Enlightenment's aspiration to subjective freedom. Despite their courtly contexts of production, the first Florentine and Mantuan operas already display this bourgeois and rationalistic element.2 Opera, in fact, Adorno observes, first truly flourishes in Venice under the “social conditions of an evolved bourgeoisie,” in an environment in which Monteverdi figures among “the great opera composers.”3