Arman Schwartz

Prospero's isle and the sirens' rock

Luciano Berios Un re in ascolto is based on a complex web of sources – writings by Calvino, Barthes, Kafka, Auden, Shakespeare and others – themselves intricately interrelated through games of citation and revision. Linking all these texts is a scene in which a male artist is confronted by a voice outside of his control. This scene is re-enacted – unexpectedly – at the climax of Berios work. In this new context the unruly voice sounds like a revenant from a form long presumed dead: pure opera and absolute madness.

Puccini, in the distance

This essay charts the contours of a ‘second practice’ in Puccinis corpus. Whereas his operas from the 1890s are fuelled by a longing for unmediated access to empirical reality, his later works unleash a variety of distant sounds that unsettle the aesthetics of verismo opera. These sounds, which draw on the ontology of wireless transmission just as surely as his earlier works do on that of phonographic transcription, find their fullest expression in Suor Angelica . The notorious Marian apparition that concludes that opera has long been mocked and explained away, and no wonder: for, if we attempt to take the miracle seriously, we may (like Puccini himself, in the years following Madama Butterfly ) begin to doubt whether modernism ever was an art of confidence and disenchantment.