Movement

Summary

Who has ever seen a soul? Not even the devil in Goethe's Faust can grasp it:

Und wenn ich Tag’ und Stunden mich zerplage,

Wann? Wie? Und wo? Das ist die leidige Frage.

For hours and days I rack my brains,

When? How? And where? – the puzzle remains.

(Goethe: Faust: Der Tragodie zweiter Teil, Act 5, lines 11,630–1)

The soul can express itself only through the breath that animates both body and voice. And these are the two basic elements of opera. So it's all the more surprising that only one of these – the voice – is subjected to many years of strict training, while the other – the body – is completely neglected, even though it is by far the older instrument of the two. The un-trained, un-controlled body can play nasty tricks on the soul that yearns to express itself.

What actor or singer doesn't remember the agony endured during their studies when their body and voice refused to express what they felt so vividly inside? Regrettably, as far as the body is concerned, this state of affairs often remains the norm with opera singers for the rest of their career. That's because their body was never given the rigorous training it needs. Goodness knows how they can expect to express anything properly amidst all their straddle-legged pressing, their uncontrolled gesticulating and fidgeting, and their soul hiding in the most impossible places – their shoulders, elbows or knees.

If the soul is located anywhere, then it's in the solar plexus, at the centre of the gastric nervous system, our ‘second brain’ that in evolutionary terms is far older than the cerebrum and so functions far more unconsciously and animalistically. It refuses to obey the brain. The nervous singer about to go on stage can order his stomach ‘Be calm’ a hundred times, but it won't help, for the stomach does what it wants. It's at this ‘life-point’, the body's ‘core’, that feelings emerge and then move up into consciousness. Mozart composed this process superbly in the introduction to Donna Anna's recitative when she recognizes her father's murderer in Don Giovanni. This terrible awareness rises up from an unconscious, primeval source over the space of two bars until it explodes into consciousness: it is neurology and psychology expressed as one in music.