Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera Musical Meaning and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten, editor YAYOI UNO EVER ETT Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2015 by Yayoi Uno Everett All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Everett, Yayoi Uno, author. Reconfiguring myth and narrative in contemporary opera : Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun / Yayoi Uno Everett. pages cm — (Musical meaning and interpretation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-01799-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01805-2 (ebook) 1. Operas—21st century— Analysis, appreciation. 2. Golijov, Osvaldo, 1960– Ainadamar. 3. Saariaho, Kaija. Adriana Mater. 4. Adams, John, 1947– Doctor Atomic. 5. Tan, Dun, 1957– First emperor. I. Title. II. Series: Musical meaning and interpretation. MT95.E84 2016 782.109’05—dc23 2015019678 1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15 To Hideo and Shoko Uno La barbarie, ce n’est pas “l’Autre”; elle est en nous, en chacun de nous, tapie comme un fauve, prête à bondir, et c’est à nous de la débusquer et de la dompter. Il me semble que la musique, la littérature, et l’art en général, ont un rôle essentiel à jouer dans ce combat qui ne s’arrêtera jamais. Barbarism is not the Other; it resides in us, in each of us, lurking like a wild beast ready to jump, and it’s up to us to uncover and tame it. It seems to me that music, literature, and the arts in general have a vital role to play in this never-ending battle. Amin Maalouf, Adriana Mater Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv List of Abbreviations xvii 1. Toward a Multimodal Discourse on Opera 1 2. O svaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar: A Myth of “Wounded” Freedom 41 3. Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater: A Narrative of Trauma and Ambivalence 81 4. J ohn Adams’s Doctor Atomic: A Faustian Parable for the Modern Age? 124 5. The Anti-hero in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor 166 Epilogue: Opera as Myth in the Global Age 197 Glossary of Terms 201 Notes 205 Bibliography 219 Index 229 This page intentionally left blank Preface The inspiration for writing this book came from lively debates I have had with friends and colleagues following performances of new operas at various venues over the course of ten years. Often, the underlying questions centered on whether the opera was successful in its treatment of music, portrayal of characters, narra- tive proportion, and staging. Back in 2003, I recall debating the profound stasis and circularity in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin at its premiere in Amster- dam’s IJstheater; while my Dutch colleague dismissed the opera on the basis that “the music goes nowhere,” I defended the absence of teleology as an essential fea- ture of the musical drama. At the Lincoln Center’s 2005 premiere of Brian Fer- neyhough’s Shadowtime, my friends and I similarly debated whether this con- cert-opera, chronicling Walter Benjamin’s war trauma in a fragmented sequence of dialogues, monologues, and instrumental pieces, constituted a legitimate op- era; the booing and hissing from the audience at the end of the performance indi- cated that an opera awash in angular, atonal language without flowing lines, and lacking narrative continuity could not be called an opera. Following the Lyrical Opera of Chicago’s 2007 premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic in Chicago, a composer colleague and I disagreed on the theatrical excesses and the lengthy proportion of the second act in Peter Sellars’s mise-en-scène. “Why does it have to go on for so long?” she asked, to which I replied that it had to do with creating a portal into the mythic experience of an operatic apocalypse. These diverging responses to live performances attest to the fact that opera in- volves a complex negotiation with the libretto, music, action, lighting, and other aspects of the production. Considering these issues, this book addresses new de- velopments in operatic production that have become commonplace since the 1980s; while music and libretto constitute the initial source material, they operate in counterpoint with variable production components of the director’s mise-en- scène, including choreography, lighting, props, and filmic projections. The signi- fying capacity of music and text may be greatly altered by the performative com- ponents of an opera’s mise-en-scène. But why have these new operas stirred up hours of heated debate? What lies at the root of our disagreements in our inter- pretive experience of opera? In the last two decades, scholarship on opera has expanded its range of critical discourse by taking into account gender, cultural, literary, psychoanalytic, and media theories. In Unsung Voices (1991), Carolyn Abbate examines the perfor- mative dimensions of opera by exploring what she calls the “narrating voice.” In Feminine Endings (1991), Susan McClary offers a gender-based discourse cen-