A Philosophy of Operatic Storytelling
Abstract
This dissertation presents the first theoretical model for understanding narration
and point of view in opera, examining repertoire from Richard Wagner to Benjamin Britten.
Prior music scholarship on musical narratives and narrativity has drawn primarily
on continental literary theory and philosophy of the 1960s to the middle of the 1980s.
This study, by contrast, engages with current debates in the analytic branch of aesthetic
philosophy. One reason why the concept of point of view has not been more extensively
explored in opera studies is the widespread belief that operas are not narratives.
This study questions key premises on which this assumption rests. In so doing, it
presents a new definition of narrative. Arguably, a narrative is an utterance intended
to communicate a story, where "story" is understood to involve the representation
of a particular agent or agents exercising their agency. This study explores the role
of narrators in opera, introducing the first taxonomy of explicit fictional operatic
narrators. Through a close analysis of Britten and Myfanwy Piper's Owen Wingrave,
it offers an explanation of music's power to orient spectators to the points of view
of opera characters by providing audiences with access to characters' perceptual experiences
and cognitive, affective, and psychological states. My analysis also helps account
for how our subjective access to fictional characters may engender sympathy for them.
The second half of the dissertation focuses on opera in performance. Current thinking
in music scholarship predominantly holds that fidelity is an outmoded concern. I argue
that performing a work-for-performance is a matter of intentionally modelling one's
performance on the work-for-performance's features and achieving a moderate degree
of fidelity or matching between the two. Finally, this study investigates how the
creative decisions of the performers and director impact the point of view from which
an opera is told.
Type
Other articleSubject
opera performanceopera staging
narrative
narration
point of view
work ontology
intentions
analytic philosophy
Benjamin Britten
Richard Wagner
Peter Sellars
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12942Citation
Penner, N (2016). A Philosophy of Operatic Storytelling. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12942.Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Nina Penner
Research Associate
Nina Penner is a musicologist who is at Duke for two-year postdoc, funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her work lies at the intersection
of opera studies, analytic philosophy, and literary theory. Her first book A Philosophy
of Operatic Storytelling (under contract with Indiana University Press's Musical Meaning
and Interpretation Series) theorizes how opera tells stories in comparison with other
media. Her next book project will be on

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