Q&A: Carolyn Abbate

Carolyn Abbate, acting department chair of the music department, has been teaching at the University since 1982. Her books include "Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century" and "In Search of Opera." She is currently co-writing "History of Opera."

Abbate teaches the music department's popular introductory opera course, MUS 201. Her husband, Lee Mitchell, is master of Wilson College and a professor in the English department.

'Prince' staff writer Leslie Hook asked Abbate about her works.

'Prince': In "In Search of Opera" you spoke about opera representing the transcendent. What does that mean?

Abbate: Well, I had this idea that there's a category that existed of the transcendent — this isn't my idea, this is an idea that comes from philosophy, religion.

My special interest is in the 18th through 20th centuries. So there are these ways that, especially in Europe, writers have of thinking about the unthinkable, of things you can't grasp. There's a lot of writing in philosophy, even in theology, and so, I just got interested in the idea of whether there were ways actually of making a kind of image of this transcendent thing.

You may know this, but in the 19th century, music got identified with that unknowable object or unknowable sound or discourse. So the music gets really attached to that idea, and really I started out saying, well, since everyone talks about music as being the symbolic language that expresses this transcendent idea, did anybody actually try to do this in music?

I wrote about that in my first book as well. I just thought there were places in opera where composers were making an attempt to do something which was actually impossible, which is to represent or actually have this kind of transcendent voice take on real musical sound, but that was actually where I started.

P: What are the specific philosophical antecedents for this idea?

A: As far as music goes, specifically, the philosopher who's always associated with this idea is Schopenhauer, because he was the person who directly spelled it out. He put music into this privileged category, and made it a sort of untouchable object, beyond thinking almost.

And so, if you were going to say, what is a well known source for this kind of transcendent thinking about music, it would be Schopenhauer.

The composer who was really influenced by Schopenhauer was Wagner. Wagner's operas have always been the place where people go to seek out this idea of musical transcendence. Wagner's pretty good at doing that. He has ways of making things appear to be illusory or magical or not of this world. So Wagner — which is where I started out, my dissertation was on Wagner — Wagner was a usual suspect for that kind of trick in music.

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P: What are the specific qualities of this trick or this illusion? If you're reading a musical score, or sitting in an opera, what do you look for to identify this?

A: Well I wouldn't do it with a score, because actually one of my real prejudices is that you have to experience opera live, and as a temporal experience, and you can't get to it through mute scripts that you lie out on a table.

One trick you can think of — and sometimes these do take really technical form, and composers will use these moments, certainly — is to orchestrate in such a way that the instruments that are playing the music don't sound like themselves. They sound like other instruments. And so you have a funny effect of thinking that you can recognize the sound source, but then say no, that's not quite right. "I think that that's a harp, actually I can tell it really isn't a harp, but I can't tell what it is."

That's a good concrete example of a specific acoustic trick that composers can use to suggest this imaginary object. That's one that's particularly audible when you experience it in a theater if your ears are a little bit attuned to the instrumentation.

P: What are the implications of this approach for the way that modern opera is performed or experienced?

A: This is sort of an interesting idea intellectually, and it may well have to have a certain amount of impact on the way conductors choose to emphasize certain things in the score. There are conductors who are better at bringing out these qualities, or who seem to be interested in bringing them out.

And then there are conductors who are a little more realistic in their approach to how they make the sound happen. But in that book, "In Search of Opera," I decided that there's a funny gap between this metaphysical thinking about opera, this maybe interesting idea that operatic music might strive toward some sound that is categorically unknowable, or that it tries to represent the idea of unknowability.

That seemed a very interesting idea, but I've also always been really fascinated with performance, which is very material and very grounded, and not metaphysical at all. And part of what I wanted to do in that book was see how things really clash, or collide, and maybe the most interesting performances of opera are those that are aware of that tension between the metaphysical aspirations of the works themselves, and the fact that it's really very ordinary singers, and real orchestral musicians, and human beings who are full of error and compromise, that actually have to put these operas on and to give them their real life. So in the second book I got more interested in the side of performance and the concrete reality of opera.

P: What ground did you find for reconciliation between this material aspect and the immaterial aspect?

A: I'm not sure that there is something in the operas themselves that reconciles these things, because dealing with operas that work in the abstract is very different from dealing with performances, as the two things are actually quite different.

And one thing that people who write about music are sometimes not aware of is that they're very often talking about — especially academic writers — the abstractions, the piece, or the work, or "Verdi's Aida" in the abstract.

And the way you talk about that may have to be completely different from the way you would confront the real "Verdi's Aida," which would be a specific performance of Aida at a certain time and place, it happens only once, and then it's gone.

For example, one thing I like to tell students is, when you're playing music or listening to it, is it actually possible to think about it in the same ways that you can when you're only considering it as an abstraction.

And in some of the theoretical writings I've done, I actually come to the conclusion that the two things may not have to do with one another. Talking about the metaphysical abstractions may not have a whole lot to do with the way you confront the real pieces when you're actually listening to them or playing them.

And so, on the other hand, what's happened sometimes with my work is that directors or people who are doing productions of opera will stumble across some things that I've written, because I write a lot for, obviously, nonspecialist audiences, and they actually ask me, well, is there some way of making some of these ideas real on the stage when you stage opera.

So maybe that's the place where there's a kind of intersection between the abstractions and the realities of opera.