‘The Blue Note’ and ‘The objectified voice and the vocal object’

Abstract

We publish here, by permission of Cornell University Press, two excerpts from Michel Poizat's L'Opéra, ou le cri de l'ange, a book that first appeared with the Parisian publisher A. M. Métailié in 1986. The extracts are taken from Arthur Denner's translation, which is due out with Cornell University Press in the spring of 1992 under the title The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Poizat's book is an ‘essay on the jouissance of the opera lover’ – an exploration of the experience of being an opera ‘fan’. It begins with interviews that the author conducted on the steps of the Paris Opéra in 1985. On the night before the première of Marek Janowski's production of Tristan und Isolde, Poizat spoke to some fans devoted enough to wait all night for a standing-room ticket, and asked them what motivated their dedication. In both our extracts, we hear more from these fans – Claude, an art history student, and Renaud, a twenty-one-year-old judo instructor.