Opera Singing and Fictional Truth

Abstract

This paper concerns the ontological status and authorship of the music in opera, refining and expanding the work of Edward T. Cone (1989) and Peter Kivy (1991, 1994). Their proposal that opera characters live in a world fundamentally different from ours, a marvelous place where one’s every thought and deed passes to music—and where song rather than speech is the normative mode of communication/expression—has not received the attention it deserves in opera studies. According to the prevailing understanding of operatic metaphysics, proposed by Carolyn Abbate (1991), the majority of an opera’s music is not part of the ontology of the opera’s fictional world. Music is used as a medium to represent non-musical communicative/expressive acts. Abbate’s theory is predicated upon the assumption that it is possible to separate the linguistic and musical components of characters’ utterances and accord them different ontological statuses. The former is a part of the fictional world, but the latter is not, and thus characters do not have epistemic access to it. The problem is that song is the fusion of words and music. An adequate account of the meaning and illocutionary force of such an utterance can only arise from the consideration of both constituent components. Denying characters epistemic access to the musical portion of the utterances they and others make hinders their ability to understand these utterances, and leaves the interpreter unable to explain how they gain the knowledge that causes them to act in the manner that they do. My extension of Cone’s and Kivy’s work offers a more comprehensive examination of the orchestral music, and addresses several neglected phenomena that are important to the study of modern opera.