Dramatic Time and Operatic Form in Wagner's Tannhäuser

Extract

Everybody can imagine the following kind of operatic scene: many characters are on the stage, all singing, pronouncing different words, and expressing contrasted emotions simultaneously – but nothing happens. Action is suspended, the music goes on. The music does not need to be carried forward by action or even text; it has its own formal logic and extension. The last section of Mozart's second finale of Le nozze di Figaro, for instance, takes no less than fourteen pages in the vocal score. Its text consists of only two quatrains of four lines each, which are pronounced and repeated by one group of actors each. The piece comes at the end of a long finale that is full of action; but after the ‘colpo di scena’ provided by the entry of Marcellina, Dottor Bartolo, Don Basilio, with their marriage contract, nobody is able to act or even to speak coherently any longer, nobody causes the other to react to his words, nobody seems to hear the other – and they are all singing loudly and clearly. Not only does the surprise justify the standstill of actions and reactions on the stage: it is typical that in such operatic ensembles the characters behave as if they were not listening to each other.