Sounding the Past: Canadian Opera as Historical Narrative

• Main Author: Renihan, Colleen
• Other Authors: Lee, Sherry
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: music; musicology; Canadian history; opera; historiography; narrative; 0413
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/31915

The intriguing parallels between musical and literary forms have long been a focus of musicological inquiry, particularly in recent debates concerning music’s narrative properties. However, parallels between musical and historical forms and processes remain under-examined. Indeed, while historically-based operas continue to be prominent in the repertoire, there has been little if any attempt to interrogate how the unique structural, temporal, and narrative dimensions of the operatic form might render a representation of the past that is unique in comparison to those in other modes. This dissertation takes up this issue, and probes it on musical and aesthetic levels, asking the following questions: Given recent inquiries into history’s creative nature in historiography, what kind of historical account does opera represent? What elements of historical experience, knowledge, or memory are accessed in these works? How do music’s temporal, dramatic, and narrative dimensions interact with what we presume to be the objective realm of history? And most importantly: Can these works be seriously considered historiographical in any sense? In this dissertation, I investigate these questions with a focus on Canadian historically-based opera specifically. Applying a hermeneutical approach that connects current threads in musicology, narrative theory, theory of the sublime, film theory, and philosophy of history, I define and theorize the powerful discourse that music contributes to Canadian historiography in six of Canada’s most prominent historically-based operas: Harry Somers and Mavor Moore’s Louis Riel (1967); Harry Somers and James Reaney’s Serinette (1991); John Estacio and John Murrell’s Filumena (2005) and Frobisher (2007); and Istvan Anhalt’s Winthrop (1986) and La Tourangelle (1975). The conclusions of this study are, however, not limited to this repertoire. Rather they are applicable to the canon of historically-based works as a whole, and speak directly to some of the most critical and current aesthetic issues in musicology and historiography. As an art form that reopens the space between past and present by reaffirming history’s subjective and temporal nature, and by exploring the ephemerality it shares with living memory, opera validates itself as a truly distinct historiographical mode.