The author is Martha C. Nussbaum, and the subtitle is Opera & Political Freedom. Martha decided she did not wish to do a podcast after all, so since I put some real prep time in I thought I would offer some thoughts on the book directly, in part because it is not receiving substantive reviews elsewhere. I suspect the number of people qualified to review the book, on the musical and philosophical and historical fronts, is pretty small.
Overall the book is very good, and if you think you might be interested you should buy and read it. It shows a significant knowledge of opera, in part from Nussbaum’s own efforts as performer and singer. Some of the operas considered at length include the major Mozart pieces, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Benjamin Britten (Albert Herring, for one), and John Adams’s Nixon in China. For Nussbaum, “political freedom” is not exactly that of the classical liberal kind, but for at least eighty percent of the book those differences do not matter.
I do have some objections to her points. While each seems to be a smaller matter, I fear they reflect a larger reality where Nussbaum subordinates her understanding of the operas to her broader political and social agenda.
She is highly suspicious of Don Giovanni, considering it a “problem opera,” which for her I suppose it is. She cannot bring herself to admit that fair numbers of women might actually be attracted to the Don, instead suggesting it is their baleful economic plight that leads them into such liasions. That seems to me a grossly rigid misunderstanding of the work, at variance with centuries of high-level commentary on the piece. Kierkegaard’s understanding remains ahead of hers, as does that of the ordinary theatergoer.
More generally, she is highly suspicious of romanticism, and she works hard to resist the notion that romanticism was a natural and perhaps even inevitable outgrowth of the classical spirit in music. Not surprisingly, Tristan is anathema to her — “I think Tristan is a tedious opera and that the view of love in it — all unsatisfied longing and no reciprocity — is adolescent and boring.” I would agree that virtually all Wagner operas, except perhaps Das Rheingold, are too long and thus have an element of tedium. Yet that is hardly an accurate understanding of the libretto or the love connection (no reciprocity??).
One would do well to supplement Nussbaum with Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat. GPT Pro had a good summary of some of Koestenbaum’s quite contrasting perspectives:
“The operatic voice exceeds ordinary speech: it is too loud, too stylized, too bodily, too artificial, too emotional. That excess makes it politically charged because it disrupts norms of restraint, masculine self-control, realism, and “proper” social identity. Opera gives form to things that respectable culture often requires people—especially queer people—to hide: longing, hysteria, theatricality, shame, glamour, grief, fantasy, and desire……it is a place where identity is unstable, theatrical, mediated, and excessive. Opera is full of secrecy, codes, hidden meanings, displaced passions, and voices that say indirectly what cannot be said directly.”
By no means are those entirely illiberal tendencies, but they complicate any identifications of opera with liberalism or indeed any other foundational political set of views. In some fundamental fashion, opera is usually going a bit askew from strictly classical principles.
I take Beethoven to be modestly less liberal than she does, as I am concerned with the repeated sense of “culmination” in his work, and the implied notion of total communal integration as the final good. It is not Beethoven’s fault that even the Nazis staged Fidelio, but it does point to the poliitically Romantic strand in his music, a strand that Nussbaum pushes off center stage.
Why so little Rossini in this book? (He gets a brief mention on pp.303-304). He is arguably the essence of opera, and the carrier of the Mozartean tradition, yet he also was a supporter of the French monarchy and its restoration. Even Verdi was a conservative and monarchist, which puts his Don Carlo in a slightly different light. I am reminded of Carl Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism, namely that it could transfer loyalties so readily from revolutionary republicanism to reactionary monarchism. 19th century opera is not altogether innocent of this charge, and a deeper look at the material would have confronted this issue. Mazzini wrote a whole book on opera and saw it as supportive of nationalism above all else. A look at the history of Auber’s La Muette de Portici, the performance of which spurred Belgian nationalism and a revolt in 1830, is consistent with this view.
Nussbaum is too concerned with her own classificatory impulses, and insufficiently aware of how much opera itself — most of all the music — keeps on diverting our attention in other directions.
Overall, this is a very thought-provoking book, full of deep knowledge of both opera and philosophy. If it is afraid to follow down the path of where the music itself — and most of its major purveyors — were leading us, that makes it thought-provoking all the more.