On Truth and Semblance in an Operatic and Extra-operatic Sense: Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage

Abstract

This essay proceeds from the assumption that there is a reality specific to opera and that the most real operas, those that engage most intensively and productively with the possibilities of the genre, may be those that, from the viewpoint of extraoperatic reality, appear to be the least realistic. In this sense, I want to argue that Michael Tippett’s first full-scale opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1955), is a fully realized opera, and this by virtue of the consequentiality with which, turning against the general tendency of the contemporary European avant-garde toward ever-increasing rationalization and disenchantment, it pits its own reality against the extra-operatic reality of opera. By “the extra-operatic reality of opera” I mean two things: first, the world outside the opera as it appears reflected or refracted within the opera; second, the ensemble of staging and framing devices—be they institutional, cultural-political, socioeconomic, logistical, musical, or dramaturgical— that make the reality of opera possible in the first place. My argument, then, will be that in The Midsummer Marriage the reality of opera is put to the test through its exposure to the other realities that limit and delimit, validate and invalidate, realize and derealize that reality. Before turning to Tippett’s opera, I want to touch on two interrelated objections that immediately suggest themselves. The first contends that art is real to the same extent that it mirrors a reality that is both external and anterior to it. Those who subscribe to this platonic doctrine are likely to have little patience with opera’s flagrant improbabilities, sheer impossibilities, vocal and emotional extravagances, pageants and panoplies, follies, intrigues, and histrionics—in short, the serial violations of the reality principle that are part and parcel of the experience we call “operatic.” There is a rich tradition of novelistic accounts of nights at the opera, from Flaubert and Tolstoy to Heinrich Mann, which inflate their own pretensions to realism by puncturing the artifice of this most artificial of artistic genres. Like