Opera

This chapter aims to combat common philosophical and aesthetic reservations against opera by investigating opera’s potential for gaining insight into subjectivity, understood as a way of living reflexively. First, it shows that operatic heroes and heroines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rarely succeeded in self-determination and self-realization against superior powers, often residing in themselves. Second, it demonstrates that Rousseau’s and Diderot’s advocacy for increasing operatic expressiveness left audiences little time for reflection, once composers put it into practice. Third, it reconstructs Wagner’s endeavour to provide his operatic-political Gesamtkunstwerk with Schopenhauerian metaphysical meaning and investigates its demolition by Nietzsche, for whom Bizet’s Carmen became the source of absolute knowledge about the emotional self. Fourth, the chapter engages with theories of emotion from analytic philosophy as they relate to opera. In conclusion, it promotes the cultural value of opera in a near-valueless society, while arguing against the endowment of some canonical operas with metaphysical importance.