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‘The Blue Note’ and ‘The objectified voice and the vocal object’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Michel Poizat
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Extract

We publish here, by permission of Cornell University Press, two excerpts from Michel Poizat's L'Opéra, ou le cri de l'ange, a book that first appeared with the Parisian publisher A. M. Métailié in 1986. The extracts are taken from Arthur Denner's translation, which is due out with Cornell University Press in the spring of 1992 under the title The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Poizat's book is an ‘essay on the jouissance of the opera lover’ – an exploration of the experience of being an opera ‘fan’. It begins with interviews that the author conducted on the steps of the Paris Opéra in 1985. On the night before the première of Marek Janowski's production of Tristan und Isolde, Poizat spoke to some fans devoted enough to wait all night for a standing-room ticket, and asked them what motivated their dedication. In both our extracts, we hear more from these fans – Claude, an art history student, and Renaud, a twenty-one-year-old judo instructor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , November 1991 , pp. 195 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Note this repeated reference to something not making sense, to something that cannot be mastered (‘what's happening to me?’ … ‘It's idiotic’), which signals a failure of the signifying order.

2 The sale or on-site rental of opera glasses is an indication of the importance of the visual, even if the binoculars tended originally to be trained more often on the audience than on the stage.

3 Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire. Livre VII. L'éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1986), 155.Google Scholar

4 Remember what Claude said about the singer whom he had thought ugly: ‘and when I heard her sing, I didn't say “she sings well”, I said “she's beautiful”.

5 As Claude pointed out, the image can sometimes be ‘optional’.

6 Of course, these emotional moments are not confined to great lyricism: each of us, like Renaud, can cite a few bars, vocal or instrumental, that have the power to stir us to the depths of our soul every time we hear them. Each of us must look to his own historical unconscious for the roots of the specific impact of these passages. None the less, what happens in the aria or in the lyrical development associated with it is so profound and general as to have itself been constitutive of an art as well as to have determined its evolution. It is also clear that this rare and intense jouissance is never provoked by recitatives (which is why opera recordings sometimes dispense with them altogether).

7 The ‘Blue Note’ in this instance is not to be confused with the blue note or ‘inflected’ pitch in jazz and the blues.

8 And by extension, in any musical creation. Poised before his empty staves, what does the composer do if not improvise? The composer merely has the additional advantage of being able to revise.

9 Didier-Weill, Alain, ‘Quatre temps subjectivants dans la musique’, Ornicar?, 8 (1976–1977).Google Scholar

10 In legal discourse, the French jouissance and English ‘enjoyment’ are precise equivalents, in such expressions as avoir la propriété et la jouissance des biens et droits, ‘to have the ownership and enjoyment of properties and rights’ [translator's note].

11 English translation under the title Observations on the Florid Song, trans. Gaillard, J. E. (1743; rpt. London, 1926)Google Scholar; the 1874 French translation by Théophile Lemaire is entitled L'Art du chant. The last quotation is Lemaire's footnote on the state of contemporary singing in France.

12 Verne, Jules, Le Château des Carpathes, trans. as The Carpathian Castle ed. Evans, I. O. (1963; rpt. London, 1979), 182–4.Google Scholar

13 Verne, , 181.Google Scholar

14 Verne, , 112.Google Scholar

15 Verne, , 111.Google Scholar

16 Verne, , 116.Google Scholar

17 Verne, , 179–80.Google Scholar Incidentally, the cry does not figure in the initial description of La Stilla's death; it is as though Jules Verne invented this cry when he came to describe hearing the recorded and thus objectified voice.

18 If Jules Verne ‘invents’ the tape recorder and even the video here, he is none the less not the first to have fantasised the voice as a detached object: Rabelais had already imagined words that froze as they left the mouths of those who ventured into frigid lands and that could subsequently be heard in the air when freed from their icy solidity by a thawing ray of sunlight or the warmth of the hand.

19 I draw directly on formulations of the psychoanalyst Gérard Pommier in a France-Culture broadcast of 24 May 1984 (‘La voix’) and in a France-Musique broadcast of 2 March 1984 (‘Psychanalyse et musique’).

20 Infant: from the Latin ‘in-fans’, one unable to speak.

21 The word ‘want’ in this instance should not be interpreted as a matter of conscious volition.

22 The term ‘response’ is of course inappropriate because, properly speaking, no ‘demand’ has actually been made.

23 Pommier, ‘La voix’ and ‘Psychanalyse et musique’ (see n. 19).

24 Lacan insisted that the term not be translated. For further explanation, see Sheridan's, Alan note in his translation of Lacan's Écrits: A Selection (New York, 1977), xi.Google Scholar

25 Pommier, Gérard, D'une logique de la psychose (Paris, 1982), 40.Google Scholar

26 In his Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud calls this relationship one of ‘mutual comprehension’.

27 When we speak of the ‘lack’ of an object, it is a question less of its absence than of its being ‘bungled’.

28 Andréossy, Victor, L 'esprit du chant (1949; rpt. Plan de la Tour, 1979), 122.Google Scholar

29 Andréossy, , 122.Google Scholar

30 Andréossy, , 125.Google Scholar