Busoni And The Reinstatement Of Disbelief

Abstract

Abstract “There is no doubt that no one ever spoke singing” wrote Peri, the first composer of opera (seep. 15), and so all the early operas were steeped in mythology: where you have the supernatural anything is possible, even song instead of speech. Yet skepticism never really died. “Is it to be imagin’d that orders in time of battle are given, singing; and that men are melodiously killed with swords and darts?” asked Saint-Evremond sarcastically (p. 53). Italians accepted the basic operatic convention even with the advent of realistic subject matter, as in opera buffa. The French and Germans were more reluctant: the dialogue in opera comique and singspiel was spoken, not sung. Then romanticism brought back the supernatural, “yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 14). Busoni came at a time when romanticism was exhausted and opera they yearn. And the stage grants them these conflicts without the accompanying dangers and unpleasant consequences, without compromising them and, most important, without any effort on their part. For there is one thing the public doesn’t know and doesn’t wish to know: that in order to be receptive to a work of art, the receiver must do half the work.