Opinion

Bálint Veres is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Head of the DLA/PhD-in-Practice program at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest, Hungary. His fields of interest include contemporary aesthetics, design culture theories, music, media and architecture. He is the author of a book on contemporary Hungarian music (Hangszövedékek, ‘Sound Webbings’, 2015) and has published numerous articles and book chapters representing viewpoints from hermeneutics, pragmatism and philosophical anthropology. He was co-editor and curator at the Arcus Temporum Art Festival of Pannonhalma (2005-2014) featuring Gubaidulina, Furrer, Kancheli, Sciarrino, Silvestrov, Sørensen and many more high-profile contemporary composers. See http://balintveres.com/

1. Introduction

When twenty-first-century theorists attempt to define the specificities of distinctive artistic phenomena, they tend to do so under the far-reaching shadow of Hegel’s influential philosophy of art. Various aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century, from Dewey to Heidegger, Adorno to Danto, despite their different aims and presuppositions, are all attached to Hegel who provides an unavoidable and specifically rational pattern of thinking about art.[1] However, when one endeavors to grasp the essence of theatricality, and of the operatic in particular (I shall elaborate on their differences later), this Hegelian heritage turns out to be quite unsettling and confusing.

            The reason for this confusion is not to be found directly in Hegel, as in this regard he was continuing an aesthetic discourse that emerged in the preceding century and in full harmony with the spirit of Enlightenment. The prime examples of the influential aesthetic thinking at that time are Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, both of whom held the ambition of mapping all varieties of the arts in a systematic and indeed encyclopedic way.[2] Although their approaches were dissimilar in their conceptual bases – Lessing speculated along the time-space divide by identifying temporal and spatial art forms while Mendelssohn took the human sensorium and the semiotic nature of the respective art forms as his starting point – both shared the view that theory’s task was to execute some sort of conceptual reduction in order to regain the essence of the individual arts. This task can be considered as bold, revolutionary and heroic when compared to the ubiquity of the late Baroque culture of their time, which, crudely put, was devoid of both essentialism and purity. What’s more, the encyclopedic approach that permeates the art philosophies of Lessing and Mendelssohn has proven to be very successful, and later generations, including Schelling and Hegel, took this approach for granted as the only and seemingly most natural way of theorizing about differences and commonalities between all art forms. The sought after definitive essence of art forms is explored in Mendelssohn's related writings both when he defines their specificities and enquires after the cooperative capacities of the separate arts:

[W]hat do the various objects of poetry, painting, rhetoric, and dance, of music, sculpture, and architecture, what do all these works of human invention have in common that enables them to harmonize for the sake of a single final purpose?[3]

            This question actually refers to two imperatives, both of which cannot be avoided when one seeks to capture the essence of theatricality or the operatic: on the one hand, to define each separate art form in a necessary and sufficient way; and, on the other hand, to explain the potential of their cooperation and their joint ability to create a ‘higher’ harmony, assuming this ‘natural compatibility’ as their innermost essence.

            The first imperative, that of classification, works in full force in Hegel’s philosophy of art and that of his followers, but the second has faded into the background of Hegelian discourse and most modern aesthetic theories. The difficulties of defining what is theatricality, or what is operatic, emerge for this very reason, and the goal of this article is to provide brief suggestions for tackling this imbalance and thus arriving at a more nuanced yet comprehensive understanding of the efficacious nature of opera and theatre within Western culture.

 

2. ‘Genuine’ and ‘synthetic’ art forms

Mendelssohn, in his 1757 study, differentiates between what he calls ‘main arts’ and ‘auxiliary arts’, raising the potential of and the rationale behind complex art forms as follows:

Up until now, we have spoken merely of the nature of individual arts and treated their particular and shared objects. But often two or more arts have also been combined in order to make the expression even more sensuous and to storm our minds, as it were, from all sides. These combinations have their particular rules which are to be explained on the basis of the nature of the composite perfections. In a composite perfection, that is to say, an assembled whole, a single main objective must dominate, and the particular objectives must be in harmony as means to that main objective. Where many final purposes have an equal share in the organization of a thing, interest is divided, the multiplicity is not in harmony, and one finds no reason why these diverse final purposes have been gathered together.[4]

            Thus, conceptually speaking, Mendelssohn grasps and evaluates combined art forms on the basis of how satisfactory they relate to ‘the Reason’. In other words, he defines combined art forms according to the extent to which the distribution of main and auxiliary goals are hierarchical within them (and at the same time virtually excluding those stupendously complex forms that have been proven viable only much later, such as in the operas of John Cage).[5] However, he also stipulates that

each art has a particular final purpose, [and] the artist who intends to combine arts must choose the final purpose of a single art as the main objective and subordinate the remaining arts to the latter in such a way that they can be regarded as means to the main purpose.… Particular rules flow from the particular final purposes by means of which each art is determined in its group, and these particular rules belong to each art respectively as its own, prior to all others. These particular rules can conflict with one another in the composition of the arts, and then exceptions are unavoidable.[6]

            It is possible, however, that the exceptions mentioned by Mendelssohn are not really exceptional; rather, they are the rule.[7] Nonetheless, instead of immersing ourselves in recent critical discourse on hybridity in the arts, let’s turn our attention to Hegel who continues the lineage of Lessing and Mendelssohn when he treats both drama and opera as ‘synthetic’ art forms – as opposed to the five ‘genuine’ forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. However, Hegel judges these two kinds of synthetic art forms in sharp opposition. Drama is understood as ‘the highest stage of poetry and of art generally’,[8] whereas opera is considered ‘a sign … of the growing decadence of genuine art … what is utterly devoid of any intelligible connection’.[9] Here, it is obvious that a cultural judgment – potentially based on the issue of taste – looms behind his reasoning, though his argumentation seems to follow on first sight merely medial and generic considerations of the specificities of various art forms. However, Hegel’s contradictory assessment of the two synthetic arts can be resolved if we take into account his stipulation regarding the guiding principle of the dramatic arts, which designates the place of their ‘proper’ and ‘derivated’ or ‘transitional’ forms. Hegel posits that ‘in principle, [dramatic art] consists in calling on the aid of gestures, action, declamation, music, dancing, and scenery, but in giving overwhelming preponderance to speech and its poetic expression’.[10] 'Preponderance to speech', that is the dominance of the verbal/discursive, is unavoidable in spoken theatre; but, as for opera, this aspect is hardly able to seriously regulate the expressive heterogeneity ubiquitous within the operatic arts.

            Although Hegel contends that ‘transitional’ or ‘hybrid’ artistic forms (such as gardening, dancing, etc.) are only worthy of ‘mention in passing’, as opposed to genuine art forms and their only worthy combination, drama,[11] he attaches a remarkably substantial framework to these categories by borrowing a conceptual model of the biosphere:[12]

[I]n nature the hybrids, amphibia, transitional stages, announce not the excellence and freedom of nature but only its impotence; it cannot hold fast to the essential differences grounded in the thing itself and they are blurred by external conditions and influences. Now the same is true of art with its intermediate kinds, although these may provide much that is enjoyable, graceful, and meritorious, even if not really perfect.

Art reduced to homogeneity and purity, both in operation and in teleological rationale, means artistic perfection in Hegel's eyes. It is a stance that bears striking resemblance to the classical Pythagorean mathematics that appreciates pure integers immeasurably higher than fractions; or, indeed, to protestant visual art, which values clear outlines and contours much more highly than the endless transitions and folds between borders. But why does Hegel consider transitional art forms not only imperfect but impotent in nature?

            From the perspective of the comprehensive Hegelian program, this question can be answered easily. His judgment on ‘imperfect arts’ follows logically from what is laid down as the necessary path for dialectical self-knowing of the Absolute Spirit, and this means that the transitional art forms divert the progression into a dead end without adding anything particular to self-knowledge. However, this response can be complemented by another interpretation, which considers Hegel’s negative opinion as the suppression of certain lived experiences that nevertheless surface in passages like: ‘these [hybrid art forms] may provide much that is enjoyable, graceful, and meritorious;’ and even more so when Hegel notes in connection with ballet (but equally fitting to opera as well): ‘we have left far behind us the logic of prose and the distress and pressure of everyday life.’[13]

            When Hegel devalues synthetic art forms, he seems to be stubbornly restricting his own experiential spectrum, even though the protagonist of his overall philosophical narrative, the Absolute Spirit, also transcends the everyday and leaves its pressures behind. The related problem is whether the irregularly hybrid and therefore swirling forms of art, among them opera as their most striking example, could be a legitimate way of transcending the everyday; or perhaps the only legitimate means of transcendence is  that which progresses through distinct art forms: from architecture through sculpture, then painting, music, poetry, and finally to philosophy.

        

3. The culmination of arts in drama and opera

Although Hegel’s words, above, try to suppress it, they articulate an experience that is quite reminiscent of the perception about drama and opera of his later great opponent, Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘The greatest influence of all the arts could be exercised through the theatre’: Nietzsche echoes the Hegelian tenet,[14] but, unlike Hegel’s view on opera, he places Wagnerian music drama at the pinnacle of all dramatic genres. In Nietzsche’s wording, the term ‘influence’ means much more than mere impressive power, but implies the means by which a fulfilled human life, Die große Gesundheit, as he called it,[15] becomes achievable.

            Nietzsche agrees with Hegel that there are substantial differences between theatrical forms. The old and the new dithyramb, Attic tragedy, renaissance opera and the new music drama do not provide the same ‘transcendental’ performance in the least: only Attic tragedy and Wagnerian music drama attain the most impressive powers of art, while the other theatrical forms, which are completely immersed in aimless imitation (mimesis), ‘degenerate into an empty, amusing distraction.’[16] However, while for Hegel, the discrimination between various theatrical forms lies in the way the genuine art forms are combined in a composite form, for Nietzsche, evaluation does not depend on the degree of rational coordination of medial elements. For him, the classifying taxonomic approach is swept aside by its opposite: here everything depends on and is valued for its vitality, effect, inspiring power and the ability of enchantment. The highest powers of art that manifest themselves in drama and opera stem precisely from this complexity, never from homogeneity.[17]

            In the Nietzschean conception, artistic complexity can be born out of the duality of two artistic powers which he calls the Apolline and the Dionysiac. Although they culminate in their merger, both form a distinct paradigm by their respective manifestations. The former appears as a dream, semblance, measure, individuation, distance, self-knowledge, clarity and beauty; the latter as intoxication, deepness, immersion, excess, ecstasy, self-oblivion, myth, suffering, and bliss born of pain. These two paradigms are alien to each other. Their merger can be interpreted as the highest artistic challenge, at ‘which point the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed of all art, is attained.’[18] In Nietzsche’s theory, then, it is more appropriate to speak of duality rather than compositeness. A philosophy of art must begin with the assumption of this dual origin o(the Apolline and the Dionysiac); thus the highest form of composite art, music drama, is born out of the productive interconnection of opposing powers:

In contrast to all those who are determined to derive the arts from a single principle, as the necessary source of life for every work of art, I have kept my gaze fixed on those two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos, in whom I discern the living and visible representatives of two art-worlds which differ in their deepest essence and highest goals. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis, through whom alone release and redemption in semblance can truly be attained, whereas under the mystical, jubilant shout of Dionysos the spell of individuation is broken, and the path to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost core of things, is laid open.[19]

            From this premise of art’s fundamental duality, it is clear that if the various arts have a common essence, this essence should be sought after and fought for in practice and by artistic means, in theatrical forms or elsewhere, rather than discovered by logic or what is even more dubious, through a theoretical misconstruction of a vague past – like some say of the Florentine Camerata.[20] For this common essence of the arts is not an organic core but, rather, it is the result of a blissful state of equilibrium attained by a fertile configuration, in which the following much quoted sentence can fully resonate: ‘the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon’.[21] This requires something of a supernatural compatibility between artistic powers, as opposed to the hierarchical fit under the rule of language, an idea that was shared by both Mendelssohn and Hegel. Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, believed that this supernatural means of compatibility between artistic powers is granted by music, more specifically the German musical lineage of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner. His dualist thinking does not disappear here, however, for he stresses that the powers of music are to be kept within bounds, channeled by the Apolline aspects of tragedy, ‘by means of which we are to be saved from oneness with Dionysiac music’: that is, from abysmal frenzy and boundless intuition.[22]

            Nietzsche openly declares that art, especially music drama, can have no other purpose than the metaphysical. ‘Art [does] not simply imitate the reality of nature but rather supplie[s] a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature.’[23] This metaphysical ambition might seem exaggerated today, but leading scholars agree that by ‘combining the power of meaningful action with the beauty of musical order, poetic drama could capture two exquisitely precious different kinds of aesthetic value not easily synthesized in a single form.’[24] This exquisite combination in the hybrid forms of art can release – again borrowing a metaphor of scale beyond the human sphere – ‘great new force and energy as by fission or fusion.’[25] However, the significant, sensuous, intellectual and psychosocial energy thus generated needs not to lead to collapse or disorder for it originates from a balance between the two opposing factors that make up the aesthetic experience. These factors are what Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht describes as ‘presence effect’ and ‘meaning effect’, new names for the older Nietzschean ideas.[26]

 

4. Theatrical and operatic works, and the issue of equilibrium between components

A similar state of equilibrium appears in Schelling’s monumental Philosophy of Art which, compared to Hegel’s work, maintains a theoretically more appreciative stance regarding opera and potentially every other highly synthetic art form; although Schelling, too, is inclined to be scornful of some manifestations of opera. Most importantly, he also believes that the dramatic arts are not genuine but derived. Schelling writes:

the most perfect composition of all the arts, the unification of poesy and music through song, of poesy and painting through dance, both in turn synthesized together, is the most complex theater manifestation, such as was the drama of antiquity. Only a caricature has remained for us: the opera, which in a higher and nobler style both from the side of poesy as well as from that of the other competing arts, might sooner guide us back to the performance of that ancient drama combined with music and song.[27]

            Apparently, Nietzsche, beyond his admitted commitment to Schopenhauer, was also unconsciously influenced by the earlier German idealist tradition, which is duly represented by Schelling in the above passages. And just as Schelling’s lines above anticipate Nietzsche’s position, likewise Mendelssohn prefigures Schelling’s position on the operatic when he writes:

The most difficult and almost impossible combination of arts takes place when the arts that represent beauties alongside one another are supposed to be combined with arts that represent beauties successively. Nature has almost kept this secret to itself alone. In its immense plan it combines the beauties of sounds, colors, movements, and figures in the most perfect harmony by means of infinite times and unbounded spaces. By contrast, human art can unite painting, sculpture, and architecture with music and dance only in an inauthentic way, that is, by means of adornments. In an opera, for example, about some well-known fable, one can have an entire city or a beautiful building arise by the magic power of the harmony, or place the dancers as immovable pillars, which, gradually animated by the music, express their first sentiments in joyous movements. But who does not see that these cannot be called connections except in some inauthentic sense?[28]

It is also clear from this passage that in fact the pressing cultural issue of the era was not primarily the theoretical foundation of genuine and composite art forms, although that may have seemed to be a priority for some. The real issue was the cultural value, social legitimacy and the individual cultivation of each and every art form, including the composite ones, regardless of their actual or virtual, concrete or imagined nature. The arts made an impact on human life on more immediate levels than rationalist philosophical constructions might have indicated, and their obvious significance urged for their evaluation, especially for the most impressive and socially endorsed ones, such as opera. Hidden behind the discourse on the essence and branches of art, issues of ‘why?’ and ‘what for?’ loomed large.[29] These questions can be examined from within the pragmatist tradition in aesthetics, which leads this article towards its conclusion.

 

5. Art as dramatization – dramatization as art

‘The concept of drama embodies and unites two of the deepest, most important conditions of art and may therefore hold the key to a useful definition of art as a whole’ – states the leading pragmatist art philosopher of our time, Richard Shusterman,[30] seeking a concept that is flexible enough to encompass as many artistic phenomena as possible and that defines some basic features of every art form, at least potentially. By these two ‘deepest conditions,’ he refers to what he calls ‘naturalism’ and ‘historicism’.

            The former is associated with Nietzsche’s idea presented in The Birth of Tragedy, which conceives of art as deeply grounded in natural forces, energies and rhythms, a manifestation of an ‘overflowing health’ and an ‘abundance of existence.’[31] ‘Naturalism’ also includes the conviction that aesthetic phenomena are to be understood and valued on an anthropologic and existential level, in a deeper and fuller way than along the dimensions of social life full of symbols and interpretations. Nietzsche refers to this when he stresses that the most effective and most vitalizing artistic phenomena – the ‘countless illusions of beautiful semblance’ as he calls them – ‘make existence at all worth of living at every moment and thereby urge us on to experience the next.’[32] From this point of view, the decisive factor is the experiential potential that a work of art can trigger, either by its reductive purity as in modernist paintings or by its multimedial tour de force as in operas. Its class, type, contextual embeddedness and technical parameters are secondary, which is not a very promising position for those seeking definitions.

            This is not the case for the second condition of art, ‘historicism,’ which refers to the primacy of cultural, institutional and societal contexts of those human activities and objects labeled as ‘art.’ Art provides a meaningful ‘experiencing’ of its own simultaneous and diachronic sociocultural parameters, in which class, type, style, genre, mode, label, channel, etc. and, above all, medial conditions play a pivotal part. This view, represented by Bourdieu, Danto and Dickie, among others, is thoroughly analyzed and fairly criticized in Shusterman’s writings.[33]

            Following Shusterman’s reasoning, one can easily arrive at the insight that a dependence on either the living, ‘organic substratum’ – as Dewey puts it[34] – or the institutional embeddedness and social mediatedness of art proves to be insufficient in the search for defining art forms. For the point is that the aspects of ‘naturalism’ and ‘historicism’ are to be reconciled and taken into equilibrium, which can happen not in theory but in actual aesthetic actions realized eminently in theatrical and operatic art forms.

            ‘Natural life without history is meaningless, just as history without life is impossible’[35]: Shusterman connects the competing paradigms of naturalism and institutionalism with the twofold nature of drama by a single summarizing statement. The constitutive elements of the social framework – which determine the way any given work of art should be experienced, through the circumstances and techniques of ‘staging’ – when paired with the intensity of the lived and heightened experience of an ‘act’, cooperate and coexist in the most emphatic sense in dramatic and operatic works, indeed, in every art generally. According to Shusterman, to define the arts in their differences and commonalities is to grasp and locate them in a conceptual and experiential spectrum that follows the model of drama, since drama is the genre which best serves the main interests of art: to unite humans (in society and with nature), to elevate us out of the ordinary, to enhance the experience of the Self and of being-in-the-world, and to stimulate a zest for life in a meaningful way.

            The idea of ‘art as dramatization’ developed from the outlines of ‘drama’ in its narrower sense, meaning ‘to put something on stage:’[36] that is, to suspend the course of everyday life and to (re)frame something or someone, perhaps an event, an object, a person, a community, a relation, a situation and so forth. Yet the term ‘to dramatize’ also refers colloquially to a heightened intensity or vividness of experience, which is a result of intense ‘action’ (as the Greek etymology of ‘drama’ suggests). This intensity takes effect not by framing, but precisely despite it. In opera, for instance, the heightened experiences produced despite a stark framing occurs in a powerful way: mise-en-scène renders artificiality into the utmost naturalness thanks to the operatic voice that functions in effectuating the feel of immediacy. However, the elements of the means of expression in opera are not binary: the natural and the conventional aspects transfigure each other. Although it uses highly stylized expressions in all sensual dimensions and openly exhibits its artificiality by the explicit, intrusive segmented-ness of the eventful plot, opera succeeds in enchanting its public almost viscerally and putting in parentheses the everyday. This happens for the sake of a higher ‘naturalism’ and aim to articulate, transfer or trigger unruly passions and liminal experiences. In doing so, the medial and structural frames help channel the psychocultural ‘Dionysiac’ energies released, thus the restraining frame which separates the field of art from the ordinary life, ‘paradoxically intensifies our passionate involvement by removing other inhibitions to lived intensity,’ the ones which are ingrained in our social habits.[37]

            Now, the question regarding theatrical and operatic forms – the perennial question of every art from the perspective of ‘art as dramatization’ – is how active intensity and strict framing can fit together, or, how to achieve their Mendelssohnian natural harmony, let alone their Nietzschean supernatural union. ‘They seem to pull in different directions, especially when we accept the popular presumptions that lived fervor cannot tolerate formal staging and that art's distancing frame conversely subverts real-life intensity of affect and action’ – says Shusterman on the challenge.[38]

            Framing and setting on stage meet the challenge in four ways: (1) a frame concentrates everything it surrounds and highlights; (2) it also demarcates certain phenomena or events from the ordinary course of life, (3) temporarily suspending the logical oppositions and practical dichotomies that are ubiquitous in everyday life (like ‘being and appearing’, ‘individual and society’, ‘me and my role’).[39] But, miraculously, (4) while doing so, staging does not alienate art from life, but rather, in the dialectics of 'mediated immediacy',[40] renders the experiential spectrum of humans more intense, more vivid. ‘Art's apparent diversion from real life may be a needed path of indirection that directs us back to experience life more fully through the infectious intensity of aesthetic experience and the release of affective inhibitions,’ concludes Shusterman.[41]

            Framing and putting on stage can be realized by many ways in theatrical art forms; what we call ‘framing’ can range from built and symbolic spatiotemporal structures to the use of conventional means of audiovisual representations, from the application of a given set of social/ritual rules, proposals and guidance for unusual epistemological perspectives or subversive behaviors. In each case, this is done in a way that follows the logic of ‘as if’ and of the ‘it can be otherwise’.

            Although the analysis of theatrical and operatic art forms – including their many derivatives from rock concerts to organized flash mobs, from performance art to multimedia events – may and should go deeper than I've attempted here, for the moment it is sufficient to sum up: from the perspective of contemporary cultural theories based on pragmatism, we can be freed from the evaluation of drama and opera either as worthless or overrated per se, instead discovering a general model of the 'aesthetic force field' in these art forms. This model is constituted by the quest for meaning on the one side and somatic commitment on the other. Conceptualizing art by the model of drama provides a coordinate system for past, present and future in refining and improving our aesthetic activities, which are our prime assets in living a fuller life. The model provided by drama and opera is highly significant, because it presents a successful combination of fundamental motifs that are crucial in maintaining the health of our human existence, cultural and social life.

            A closing comment: we started by following the Hegelian trail, with the goal to define theatrical and operatic art forms based on the idea of art in general and distinctive genres specifically. However, it became apparent that the most important task might not be to define dramatic and operatic arts once and for all, but to evaluate them according to how they realize their potential. Drama and opera should offer us experiential relief and an expansion of understanding at the same time. Finally, we concluded with the idea that since we do not have a sufficient definition for art in general, which is a commonplace for more than a century, we should perhaps act inversely, in full harmony with the spirit of pragmatism: the praxis of art itself could be re-oriented in a meaningful way through the model of drama and opera that successfully combines the values of naturalism and historicism.[42]

 

Notes

[1] Hegel’s philosophy of art has proven to be a model of aesthetic thinking in many regards, but primarily as the propagator of the teleological conception of art. According to this conception, art stems from an absolute origin (the Spirit) and is heading towards a goal while undergoing various stages as manifest in its different forms. In art the Absolute Spirit is directed towards immersing into materiality that which is totally alien to it; and, again via its different branches, art transforms from materiality and internalizes in its identity everything that had been alien to it previously. This structural pattern of thesis, antithesis and synthesis underlies not only Hegel's dynamical conception of art (see his famous thesis on the 'End of the Art') but also most modern narratives. The crucial premise of this line of thinking is the assumption that specific art forms are naturally evolved givens, although this assumption can be challenged. 

[2] Although the Laocoön (1767) deals only with the relation between fine arts and poetry, Lessing’s original plan also included the conceptual separation of music, dance and various literary works of art. See Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 5.

[3] Moses Mendelssohn, ‘On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences’ [1757], in Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 184.

[5] Herbert Lindenberger, Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 104-5. John Cage's series of Europeras (1987-1991) realizes simultaneous (“independent but coexistent”) performances of preexisting cultural materials while rearranging aspects, hierarchies and communication styles (examples of stage design, movement, lighting, orchestral and vocal music, etc.) of the European operatic tradition through chance operations. Thus Cage suspends the reigning status quo between the various means of expression in opera. (See Stefan Beyst, 'John Cage’s Europeras', 2005: http://d-sites.net/english/cage.html.)

[6] Mendelssohn, ‘On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences’, pp. 184-85.

[7] W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 98 and 104.

[8] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 1158.

[9] Ibid.  p. 1191.

[10] Ibid. p. 1185ff.

[11] Ibid. p. 627.

[12] Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 382; and vol. 2, pp. 627-28.

[13] Ibid. p. 1192.

[14] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,’ in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge University Press, 1997), sect. 8, p. 227.

[15] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2001), sect. 382, pp. 246-47.

[16] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 93.

[17] See ibid. p. 77.

[18] Ibid. p. 104.

[19] Ibid. p. 76.

[20] Ibid. p. 91; also see K. L. Pfeiffer, The Protoliterary: Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 182ff. Elsewhere I have explained that the aim of the Camerata in Florence was not musical in the first place, but was rather to revitalize the language of poetry by enriching it with its forgotten musical qualities. (See Veres, ‘Intermedia and Intermittency’, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies, 9 (2014), p. 164.) However this literary intention resulted in a serious historical misinterpretation of the then less disclosed Antique Greek heritage of mousikē. Pfeiffer confirms this claim when stating that 'Historically, opera can be seen as the almost accidental byproduct of textual unease, of a felt lack of power in the poetical language available in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century.” (See Pfeiffer, pp. 183-84.)

[21] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 8.

[22] Ibid. p. 111.

[23] Ibid. p. 113.

[24] Richard Shusterman, ‘Art as Dramatization’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59/4 (2001), p. 363. See also Pfeiffer, The Protoliterary, pp. xix; 28-35, 173-224.

[25] Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 48ff.

[26] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford University Press, 2004). On the usefulness of Gumbrecht’s viewpoint for analyses of contemporary multimedial/’operatic’ phenomena, see Veres, ‘Intermedia and Intermittency’, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, pp. 155-69.

[27] F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art [1803; 1859], trans. and ed. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 280.

[28] Mendelssohn, 'On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences’, p. 190.

[29] A century later these questions were put in a highly radical way by Max Weber, somewhat surprisingly in his seminal lecture on science. See Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’, in Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations [1919] (New York: Algora, 2008), p. 41.

[30] Shusterman, ‘Art as Dramatization’, pp. 363-64.

[31] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 4.

[32] Ibid. p. 115.

[33] Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); and Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

[34] John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1980), p. 25.

[35] Shusterman, ’Art as Dramatization’, p. 367.

[36] Ibid. p. 367.

[37] Ibid. p. 370.

[38] Ibid. p. 369.

[39] Veres, 'The Operatic Principle’, in E. Sheinberg and W. Dougherty (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification (New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 329.

[40] Helmut Plessner, Levels of the Organic Life and the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), pp. 298-316; Plessner, ‘Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 399–418.

[41] Shusterman, 'Art as Dramatization', p. 370.

[42] Dewey suggested that a definition be considered 'good' ‘when it is sagacious, and it is that when it so points to the direction in which we can move expeditiously toward having an experience’ (Art as Experience, p. 216). Shusterman’s idea of ‘art as dramatization’ is, I believe, such a promising option; however, further alternatives are also conceivable, one of which is discussed in my essay ‘Rethinking Aesthetics through Architecture?’ in R. Shusterman, ed., Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 87-100.  

 

Bibliography

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