The Singing Voice and the Delighted Listener

Abstract

This article focuses on the way in which cinema in recent decades has been listening to the operatic voice and exploring its perception. It is suggested that this interest has been stimulated by Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970), which, like Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrazin, centers on the moment when the listener encounters and admires the sing- ing (operatic) voice. The connection of this S/Z fragment with the chapter Admiration in Fragments of a Love Speech and with Barth’s experience as a listener, reflected also in his other works (The Grain of the Voice), is emphasized. Barth’s S/Z is considered in line with the reflection on music set by Søren Kierkegaard in his treatise Either/Or (1843). In this line, the author includes Charles Baudelaire’s letter to Richard Wagner (1860) and its analysis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Musica ficta (1982–1991) to indicate the “operatic climate” of the 1980s and the intensity of the discussion of the phenomenon of opera in which the cinema has become involved. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) is considered as an example of a response to Barthes’ text; the criterion for the selection of other films (by Fellini, Herzog, Szabó, Russell, Demme, Darabont, Almodóvar) is the captured encounter between the (operatic) voice and homo audiens. It is a cinema that observes “the gaze of our hearing” (Alexander Mikhailov), reaches a new level (a new depth and intimacy) of relationship with opera and looks for ways to the very core of operatic magic, exploring the point of erotic encounter between voice and hearing. The article dis- cusses the opposition of the “intellectual vs sensual and erotic” in the performance, perception and exploration of music (Roland Barthes, Caroline Abbate, Vladimir Yankelevich) and the ability of cinema to offer the listener in front of the screen a musical experience similar to that of the listener on screen and allow the listener to be “delighted” himself — passive and “captivated,” according to Barth. The process of listening unfolds in time, structured by the musical form, which cinema is also able to reflect in its movement, that is, it is able to convey “the tensions of feeling” (Lacoue-Labarthe).