Medievalism in Contemporary Opera

在过去的四十年里，以中世纪生活为舞台的歌剧数量激增。在贵族(哈里森·比特威斯尔的《加文》[1991年]，乔治·本杰明的《爱与暴力的教训》[2018年])、吟游诗人(本杰明的《皮肤》[2012年]，凯贾·萨里亚霍的《L的爱》[2000年])和圣人(奥利维尔·梅西安的《圣弗朗索瓦·达西斯》[1983年]，罗伯特·萨克斯顿的《明爱》[1991年])之间，这个项目接近六部这样的作品。在后现代时期各种中世纪主义的背景下，我主要问的是为什么这些文本复活了中世纪。暗示歌剧的强烈音乐剧可能是探索中世纪声音、身体和欲望的思想的一个特别丰富的媒介，然后我会问中世纪的思想可以为歌剧研究提供什么洞察力，到目前为止，它几乎是缺席的。通过转向早于现代性二元论的世界观，这个项目将探索前现代和后现代思想之间的深刻亲缘关系及其对当代歌剧实践的影响。在其输出中，该项目将从神学、批评理论和文学研究的最新工作中汲取跨学科的见解。现有的与中世纪主义的理论对话是不同的，但却是丰富的。在《前现代条件》(2005)中，布鲁斯·霍尔辛格揭示了它对巴黎先锋派的直接影响，从乔治·巴塔耶的古法国古文字学训练到马丁·海德格尔对新托马斯主义神学的研究。更明确的是，激进东正教的神学借鉴了包括托马斯·阿奎那和河马的奥古斯丁在内的中世纪作家，以便刻意绕过启蒙思想，并在自20世纪90年代以来的几本出版物中以超越的上帝(而不是被认为是虚无主义)为中心的后现代理论。卡尔·富格尔索的《中世纪主义研究》系列和路易丝·达森的《中世纪主义的剑桥伙伴》(2016)收集了跨学科的见解。然而，这些文献中的大部分都强调流行文化的中世纪美学，因此这个项目偏离了这一趋势。在音乐学领域，对当代中世纪主义的研究还处于萌芽阶段。詹姆斯·库克、亚历山大·科拉萨和亚当·惠特克的《重组过去：早期音乐在舞台和屏幕上的表现》(2018)涉及从古代到巴洛克时代的更广泛的旧概念，但它对舞台和屏幕的关注与这个项目有很多相似之处。第二卷正在编写中，还有一本牛津音乐和中世纪文学手册。音乐分析将被用来探索如何在这些作品中培养中世纪主义，不断向外引用语言学、哲学和神学背景。Birtwistle的后瓦格纳主义叙事结构、主题和纹理，以及Messiaen在更多德彪西声乐中对比使用主旋律，将有助于阐明过去40年的中世纪歌剧如何与歌剧《帕西法》(1882)或《佩利亚斯与梅利桑德》(1898)区分开来。相反，本杰明和萨里亚霍歌剧的插曲形式采用了独特的离析模式，歌曲与他们的叙事截然不同。萨克斯顿的大型正式建筑，让人想起布里顿和伯格，将朴素的片段融入到受现代主义词汇设置比喻影响的演唱对话中。欲望的动态及其在歌词和乐谱之间的表达在这些案例研究中尤其重要，并将形成我的分析例子的焦点。三个主要章节将根据歌剧所代表的人物进行配对：贵族、吟游诗人和圣徒。我会问，如何给予13世纪和14世纪的圣徒传记、传记、诗篇浪漫故事和历史记录以声音，这些构成了这些歌剧的原始文本。研究这些文本的文献史，从源头到剧本，将阐明适应的过程。

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.