Doublereed Archive - Posting 000021.txt from 2004/02

From: PhilFrei@-----.com
Subj: [DR-L] Re: Interesting QOD
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 14:20:18 -0500

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) French semiologist
Mythologies

I recently read some essays from a book on opera, I can't recall the title of
the collection ("Sex and Opera"? maybe that obvious!), that claimed that
opera was a form of the sex (albeit quite "safe"), NOT an image or a vicarious
experience. He cited the ending trio in Der Rosenkavalier. I think his point was
not the content (where the third member of an affair recognizes the true love
between the other two, and lets go), but the manner and form of the music: the
loving and longing in the phrases, the build to climax and subsiding. More
often than not, actual plot sex takes place between the acts and offstage.

It's certainly an interesting notion. Maybe the line between a "vicarious"
and and "actual" experience is blurrier than we think.

I could go with the Barthes if he meant this: we want the music to convey the
passion, not the musician to enact it while doing a botch job of playing. But
that probably wasn't his point. More likely he thinks the images of passion
are sanitized of unpleasant elements more often than not, in art. But perhaps
the artists and public would disagree, saying the passion conveyed is thus in a
more purified state.

Phil Freihofner