Medievalism in Contemporary Opera

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In the past forty years, there has been a proliferation of operas that stage medieval lives. Between nobility (Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain [1991], George Benjamin's Lessons in Love and Violence [2018]), troubadours (Benjamin's Written on Skin [2012], Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin [2000]), and saints (Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise [1983], Robert Saxton's Caritas [1991]), this project approaches six such works. Within the context of the heterogeneous Medievalisms of the postmodern moment, I primarily ask why these texts resurrect the Middle Ages. Suggesting that opera's intense music-dramaturgy might be a particularly rich medium for exploring medieval ideas of voice, body, and desire, I will then ask what insights medieval thought can offer into opera studies, from which it has so far been almost absent. By turning towards a worldview that predates modernity's dualisms, this project will explore deep kinships between pre- and postmodern ideas and their implications for contemporary operatic practice.While musicological in its output, this project will draw interdisciplinary insights from recent work in theology, critical theory, and literary studies. Existing theoretical dialogues with Medievalism are disparate but rich. In The Premodern Condition (2005), Bruce Holsinger reveals its direct impact on the Paris avant-garde, from Georges Bataille's training in Old French palaeography to Martin Heidegger's study of neo-Thomist theology. More explicitly, the theology of Radical Orthodoxy has drawn from medieval writers including Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo in order to circumnavigate enlightenment thought deliberately, and to centre postmodern theory around a transcendent God (rather than a perceived nihilism) in several publications from the 1990s onwards. Karl Fugelso's series 'Studies in Medievalism' and Louise D'Arcen's The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016) collect interdisciplinary insights. Much of this literature emphasises pop-cultural medievalist aesthetics, however, and this project consequently departs form that trend.Within musicology, studies of contemporary Medievalism are nascent. Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (2018) by James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, and Adam Whittaker deals with a broader conception of oldness from Antiquity to the Baroque, but its focus on stage and screen as sites for 'dialogues between old and new' shares much with this project. A second volume is in development, as is an Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism.Musical analysis will be used to explore how Medievalism is cultivated in these pieces, constantly referring outwards to philological, philosophical, and theological contexts. Birtwistle's post-Wagnerian narrative structures, motifs, and textures on one hand, and Messiaen's contrasting use of leitmotif within more Debussian sonorities on the other, will help articulate how operatic Medievalisms of the past forty years might be distinguished from those of such operas as Parsifal (1882) or Pélleas et Mélisande (1898). Conversely, the vignette forms of Benjamin and Saariaho's operas employ distinctive modes of diegesis, with songs set apart from their narratives. Saxton's large-scale formal architecture, reminiscent of Britten and Berg, incorporates plainchant fragments into sung dialogue influenced by modernist word-setting tropes. Dynamics of desire and their expression between libretto and score are particularly dramatically significant in these case studies, and will form the focus of my analytical examples. Three main chapters will pair the operas according to the figures they represent: nobility, troubadours, and saints. I will ask how voice is given to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hagiographies, vitae, verse romances, and historic records that constitute these operas' source texts. Studying these texts' philological histories from source to libretto will illuminate the adaptational process.