The phonographic mise-en-scène

Abstract

For Adorno, the graphic reproduction of operatic performance means that the primary scene of audition has shifted as well: from the theatre – and the telic determinations towards which the natural history of the theatre tends – to the living room, where people gather to listen to what they no longer concern themselves to perform. The phonograph allows the vagaries and vulgarities of the visuality of (operatic) performance to be held off or back by an auditory experience whose condition of possibility and whose end is the illusory recovery of something literary – and thus essentially visual. What remains is to begin an attempt to see and hear what might be gained by moving through the opposition of the denigration of the recording in the discourse of performance and the denigration of performance in the discourse of ‘classical’ musicology. This attempt is made by way of the 1993 recording of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, starring Jessye Norman as the opera's single character, Die Frau, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of James Levine. It is an attempt that has required reading with and against Adorno – which is to say, listening to and for the sound that works in and against him.