Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the book’s main themes and points out the consequences of its analyses for contemporary debates about performance, digital media, and the “culture of presence.” It highlights the ways hypermedial opera productively intervenes in these artistic and theoretical debates.

Liveness and Mediatization

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.

Allegory and Excess

Chapter 1 deals with the excess that opera always seems to produce in performance, which has mostly been associated with the physical, material aspects of the singing voice. Drawing on performative theory, this chapter approaches this excess as the result of a dialogic situation of meaning-making, where the audio-viewers strive to make sense of what they see and hear on stage or screen. The concept of allegory is evoked to approach the processes of meaning-making in hypermedial opera, drawing attention to how opera incites reading while at the same time withholds a coherent, univocal meaning. Allegory also helps recognize that the reading of opera involves not only text and image but also music and the voice. By contrast, the perception that the singing voice escapes signification is understood here as an effect of immediacy. Louis Andriessen’s and Peter Greenaway’s Rosa serves as the main case study.

Introduction

The chapter-length introduction situates the book’s subject matter within a broad interdisciplinary field, and specifically in relation to the theory of intermediality in theatre and performance, the burgeoning audiovisual studies, and the “material turn” in opera scholarship. Approaching opera as hypermedium draws attention to the continuity between operatic past and present, and between different media and art forms, old and new. Productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle by Robert Lepage and La Fura dels Baus serve here as a starting point for consideration of opera’s inherently hypermedial aspects. Pieces by Philip Glass, Michel van der Aa, and others help contextualize the book’s central case studies, the operas by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, which epitomize the ways these aspects are rethought today. To outline the book’s theoretical framework, the introduction revisits some classic nodes in the debates about presence and representation and about liveness and mediatization.

Synaesthesia or Anaesthesia?

Chapter 4 starts from the observation that hypermediacy elicits an embodied, multisensory mode of perception. At stake here is a mode of experience whereby the perceiver “loses oneself” in the perceived, and the question of how such experience may be critically productive. The chapter is intent on making a distinction between an effect of immediacy based on (over)saturation of the senses, and a physiological, intersubjective relationship with the perceived that harbors a political potential. Drawing on critical readings of Walter Benjamin, the chapter works with the twin concepts of synaesthetics and anaesthetics. The latter allows for developing a connection between the sensory effects of hypermediacy and the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, fostering a critique of the notions of immersion and embodiment associated with new media experiences. The former helps understand the political potential of the media of reproduction in terms of the possibility of sensory reconfiguration and a renewed sensibility to the perceived.

Theatricality and Absorption

Chapter 2 engages with the contention that a multiplicity of media offers audio-viewers a multiplicity of positions toward what is presented on stage or screen. What tends to be overlooked is the way audio-viewers’ attention is managed in hypermedia. This chapter concentrates on how points of experience are constructed in hypermedial opera, referencing the narratological concept of focalization. It is particularly attentive to situations in which the perspective that shapes the relationship between the stage and the auditorium is obscured, giving rise to an effect of absorption. The situations in which this relationship is openly acknowledged are approached through the concept of theatricality. Continuing the analysis of Louis Andriessen’s and Peter Greenaway’s opera Rosa, this chapter demonstrates how the effect of absorption is achieved by means of music within the multiplicity of visual representations typical of hypermediacy, focusing on the issue of temporality.