The Limits of Operatic Deadness (original) (raw)
2016, _Cambridge Opera Journal_ Special Issue: Remaking the Aria
The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? 1 Angela Gheorghiu's 2011 studio album Homage to Callas includes an unusual musical offering. In addition to a number of 'favourite arias', the CD cover promises 'exclusive online access to a ground-breaking duet': a video of Gheorghiu singing the 'Habanera' from Carmen with Maria Callas. 2 A one-off experiment within the realm of opera, posthumous duets have been a significant trend in popular music since the early 1990s and are becoming increasingly common due to the extended possibilities of audio-visual digital manipulation. They are also attracting a healthy amount of scholarly attention. 3 In a particularly influential and far-reaching analysis, Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut have argued that duets between the dead and the living can provide a new model for understanding all manner of performance, complicating 'an unhelpful and overvalued schism between presence and absence that undergirds much literature on performance '. 4 Stanyek and Piekut's particular target is 'liveness', a cultural logic thatas Emanuele Senici, Martin Barker and others have notedhas imbued much opera on screen, over the last sixty years, with a rhetoric of presence, authenticity and televisual immediacy. 5 The sense in which posthumous duets may offer an alternative model for 15 There would be much more to say, of course, about how the posthumous duet relates to Maria Callas's rich afterlife. Michal Grover-Friedlander speaks beautifully about the death and life of Callas's voice in Operatic Afterlives (New York, 2011), 45-75.
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