Better the Puppet?* 

By James Robert Currie 

I. 

It is dangerous to unmask images, since 
they dissimulate the fact that there is 
nothing behind them. 
(Baudrillard 1983:9) 

Herod: Dance, Salome, dance for me. 
(Wilde 1981:421) 

In the fourth of Rainer Maria Rilke's DuinoElegies, written in November of 
1915, we are asked rhetorically if we have not all sat afraid before our 
heart, as if it were a stage whose curtain then rises. What do we find there? 
In the elegy it is a dancer, and this provokes the following reaction: 

Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves, 
he's costumed, made up-an ordinary man 
who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen. 

I won't endure these half-filled human masks; 
better the puppet. It at least is full. 
I'll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face 
that is nothing but appearance. Here, I'm waiting. 
Even if the lights go out; even if someone 
tells me "That's all"; even if emptiness 
floats toward me in a gray draft from the stage. (Rilke 1982:169)1 

The passage is dense and charts a tortured· chain of logic. We look 
within out of an existential fear because, as it is written earlier in the poem, 
"we never know the actual, vital contour of our own emotions-only what 
forms them from outside" (ibid.).2 We are strangers unto ourselves. The 
spaces within then open themselves up to us and they reveal a human 
presence, a man, "an ordinary man," one whom we can locate specifically, 

Current Musicology, no. 74 (Fall 2002) 
© 2004 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 



6 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

hurrying home and walking in through the kitchen door. He is real; he is 
familiar. What could be more comforting than to find such a figure within 
ourselves in times of need? Approachable and artistic, for he is a dancer, 
and dance of course is the universal solvent. For the elegy's persona, how­
ever, this figure is but a hired performer of the soul. The mixing of artifice 
with the distracting realities of the flesh is disgusting, the ingredients 
curdled. 

Something has failed to materialize itself here, something we might 
refer to as a real presence. This does not imply any kind of crass realism: 
"the fruit in that painting was so real I could have eaten it." That would 
amount to kitsch. Rather, the phrase has its roots in the religious experi­
ence of consubstantiation. Consubstantiation is a magical paradox, refer­
ring to the moment within the celebration of the Eucharist when the bread 
actually becomes the body of Christ whilst simultaneously remaining merely 
as bread, the wine being both Christ's blood and at the same time just 
wine. It is a form of magic that seems to be particularly resonant with aes­
thetic experience, if not the marker by which the aesthetic is validated, as 
George Steiner (1989) has passionately argued. However, in the elegy, when 
the dancer performs, his materiality-the raw stuff of his body and its move­
ments and the makeup on his face-remains opaque, mere stuff. What 
should have happened is that the dancer becomes like a stained glass win­
dow: that which is transformed by the light passing through it, and that 
which, by its color, transforms the light itself. The window and the light 
should form a mutually redeeming interdependence. But this is not to be, 
for either the dancer is not made of glass, or there is in fact no light be­
hind him. Instead we are left with a parody of the aesthetic experience: 
"half-filled human masks." 

Bathos-it is something that many of us fear we might find ourselves 
having to experience in the face of art. Who has not gone to art in need of 
something, requiring to be healed in some way, yet nervous that magic 
might not make an appearance that evening-anxious that one might have 
to leave at the end laden down with the depressing thought that one had 
never managed to transcend the literal fact that, for example, one had 
been sitting in a theater watching a play? When we return outside, do we 
not want that slightly far-away look in our eyes, that secret smile that says 
that whilst we were in the theater we were not just in the theater? Do we 
not desire to be able to feel that we "lost ourselves" and yet, at the same 
time, were able to find the person we had lost in the first place, the person 
whose disappearance instigated our being drawn toward art: in other words, 
ourselves? 

Bertolt Brecht would not have been the first person in history to be 
disgusted by my series of assumptions and rhetorical questions. There is a 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 7 

long chain of those who have been keen to draw our attention to the idea 
that the forgetting offered by art may well be suspicious: from Plato, through 
St. Augustine, eighteenth-century French neoclassicists and nineteenth­
century Realists, Marxists, and others. Art is an addictive illusion, an opi­
ate, something that incarcerates us in a cycle of hope and despair, making 
us incapable of curing ourselves of believing in an unreliable form of magic 
that keeps us from engaging with what is truly important, with that which 
might actually redeem us. 

Tacitly, such a position is, of course, also common among the more 
politically-oriented criticism in the academy today. We are encouraged to 
rally ourselves to a particular battle cry: rouse yourselves from the slumber 
of your feelings of security, rub your dream-drenched eyes, and turn a 
cool, bright light back upon your experience of art. We are asked to disen­
chant art-that is, to perceive it purely as an artifact whose set of effects 
are the products of its own social and cultural materiality. A disenchanted 
work of art is a machine without a ghost, a cultural produCt that we should 
not perceive as having agency, autonomy, or any kind of aesthetic real 
presence. And perhaps it is this that the persona of Rilke's elegy calls for 
when, having dismissed the dancer as an aesthetic failure, it rather petu­
lantly asserts: "better the puppet. It at least is full." It is argued that we 
should admit that art is mere artifice, "nothing but appearance"; if you 
confuse the distinction between what is artifice and what is real you create 
something grotesque and unsavory, tattoo-like, "like a painting which is on 
living skin and should be on a canvas," to appropriate the words of the 
eighteenth-century French Neoclassicist Charles Batteux (Lippman 
1986:264). Our art should be solid and tangible, "full"; it should be "stuffed 
skin" and "wire," containing no secret empty chambers which we might 
fancy a magical metaphysical cloud inhabiting. Anyway, such a cloud is 
mere "emptiness," floating towards us "in a gray draft from the stage." 
There is no redeeming symbolist paradox here; this is an absence-a blank 
space, a silence-something that possess no ability to convince us that it is 
the sine qua non of a real metaphysical presence. How could it? It isn't. 

The tone of this kind of argument can sometimes seem too severe, 
verging as it does on an existentially devastating vision of a world that can­
not be anything other than what it simply is: nauseating, to describe it as 
Jean-Paul Satre does. Yet only the most pretentious of critics who wish to 
disenchant art would do so merely out of a penchant for posturing as steel­
cold and unblinking in the face of such unbearable meaninglessness. To 
disenchant may well be to deny the reality of our metaphysical horizons, to 
flatten out depth. But what we lose when we admit that magic is, in a 
pejorative sense, illusion we gain in a fuller and richer sense of our power 
as human beings, and of the power of the products that, as human beings, 



8 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

we make-or so the argument goes. When we disenchant art we energize 
ourselves in the face of a world without God; at its best the act of disen­
chantment thus has something Nietzchean about it. "Better the puppet. It 
at least is full." And if we should perceive such fullness as somehow more 
than just a puppet, more than an artifice, then celebrate that perception 
as being of our own human making, as opposed to being something that 
comes from beyond. Make a puppet, make it with your human hands, out 
of the sense that puppets are more than puppets made by human hands. 
Disenchantment is, thus, to be correlated with liberation and freedom; 
there is a distinctly Enlightenment and secularizing ring to it. This is ap­
propriate, since the term first appears prominently in the work of the soci­
ologist Max Weber where it is used to express the fact that with the emer­
gence of a scientific view of the universe and nature starting in the seven­
teenth century, nature "is no longer the visible expression of some 'world 
soul' in which humans also participate. Rather nature is sheer, impersonal 
objective 'stuff', which is governed, causally explicable, but completely cut 
adrift from human intentions" (Critchley 2001:8). Separated from nature 
in this way, Enlightenment man felt himself able to exert control, both 
intellectual and physical, over his natural environment, rather than being 
controlled by it. The ability to stand above, as it were, and see nature dis­
enchanted, as mere "stuff," gave man the ability to conceive of his own 
potential autonomy-and this gesture of disenchanting by looking from 
above, rather than trying to look out from within, is echoed throughout 
the age of Enlightenment whenever liberation, freedom, and autonomy 
are at stake. Nature, religion, political institutions-all of these things were 
to be scrutinized, their claims stripped of their aura of mythological irre­
futability and disenchanted through the process of being shown to be mere 
constructs, puppets trying to pass themselves off as living truths. Thus, 
today when we attempt to disenchant art we are acting in part as children 
of the Enlightenment, asserting, against all the odds stacked up against us 
by postmodernism and poststructuralism, that there is a perspective from 
which things will be revealed as they truly are and, therefore, by corollary, 
that we can be autonomous in some way that is not illusory. "Better the 
puppet," for then we are free. 

Likewise, this essay had started out life as an attempt to put into effect 
such a liberating act of disenchantment. Specifically, my concern had been 
to show that Mozart's late opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, tries to pass off, 
by means of the character Vitellia, an ideologically-constructed pejorative 
view of women as if it were nature, or even myth-at any rate, true. By 
contextuaIizing the work historically-a key strategy in most acts of disen­
chantment-I had, in effect, hoped to liberate us from two different roles 
that we perform, as both the perceiver and the perceived. I had wanted to 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 9 

free us as audience from our entrapment within the opera's real presence, 
that fake magic which distracts us from perceiving that we are being taken 
in by a construct. In this sense, I had wanted to free us from being uncon­
sciously complicit with a misrepresentation. But by making us aware of 
how our gaze might work to keep a character confined within an ideologi­
cal construction, there was the implication that we might be made aware 
of how other gazes may be constructing us. The political corollary here 
seems pretty clear: if we unmask the illusions of art it will help us to un­
mask the illusions we live by; if we can see the ideological constructedness 
of characters in operas we will see how ideologically constructed we are 
ourselves. And from this realization freedom is born. Here is how my ini­
tial attempt to create freedom had looked. 

II. 
La clemenza di Titowas first performed in Prague on September 6, 1791, as 
part of the celebrations for the coronation of the Austro-German Emperor 
Leopold II as King of Bohemia. The libretto, originally written in 1734 by 
the great Pietro Metastasio, was of a decidedly venerable quality, and there 
had been over sixty settings of it during the course of the eighteenth cen­
tury before Mozart and Caterino Mazzola, the court poet at Dresden, col­
laborated to create their two-act version for the festivities. The story was 
also perfectly molded symbolically to fulfill the political propaganda re­
quirements engendered by the then present state of the Hapsburg Em­
pire and also the role of Leopold as its new commander in chief. Such 
concerns were indeed very real in Europe after 1789, since with increasing 
frequency the crowned heads of Europe were being accused of incompe­
tence and immorality.3 

The action of La Clemenza can be understood as motivated by a ten­
sion between Vitellia and the Roman Emperor Titus, whose father had 
murdered and dethroned Vitellius, Vitellia's father. At the beginning of 
the opera, Titus is at the point of marrying Berenice, daughter of the king 
of Judea, and Vitellia, livid with jealousy at the thought that her claims to 
the throne have been spurned, has coerced Sextus, who is in love with her, 
to set fire to the capitol and murder Titus. During the course of the first 
act, Titus recants on his decision to marry Berenice, sends her packing 
back to Judea, and refocuses his marital plans on Sextus's sister, the mod­
est and honest Servilia, whose hand in marriage Sextus has promised to 
his friend Annius. Servilia, tormented by the decision, confesses to the 
Emperor where her true feelings lie, and the ever-clement Titus, touched 
by her honesty, releases her from the law of his plans and blesses her union 
with Annius. Servilia's joy is misinterpreted by Vitellia as a sign that Servilia 
will indeed marry Titus, and as a result Vitellia rekindles the flames of her 



10 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

treacherous idea in Sextus's mind. Sextus goes off to execute the plan, yet 
scarcely has this happened when Vitellia learns, too late to stop Sextus, 
that Titus has finally decided to marry her. The first act ends with the 
capitol in flames and the onlookers shocked at the apparent death of their 
benign emperor-who, we later learn, has fortuitously escaped harm. The 
second act is taken up with the unveiling of Sextus's crime, Titus's exon­
eration of him, and Vitellia's final decision, occurring on the cusp of the 
opera's conclusion, to confess her seminal role in the whole proceedings. 
In the final scene, the meaning of the opera's tide prevails, and with no 
surprises Vitellia is forgiven. 

Considering the event for which it was commissioned, the opera in­
vites allegorical interpretation, with Titus as a thinly-veiled representation 
of Leopold II, and Vitellia's plotted rebellion echoing the fraught political 
situation in Europe.4 In particular" [t] he burning of the Capitol at the end 
of the first act may well have been understood in 1791 as a frightening 
symbol of the violence with which the Bastille had been attacked just two 
years before" (Rice 1995a:290). This being the case, if we follow the logic 
of the allegory through further, the implication is that Leopold II is per­
sonally touched by the French Revolution, which in a very real way he was 
because of the obviously dire situation in which it placed his sister Marie 
Antoinette (Blanning 1999:354). On a general level, though, the opera 
tries to symbolically assert that Enlightened absolutism's continuation and 
feasibility are insured by the person of Leopold himself, for seemingly by 
means only of the magnetic emanations from Titus's magnanimous aura, 
the deviant and potentially politically disruptive and disastrous behavior 
of the characters are drawn back into moral and civic alignment. Thus, not 
only might the opera have appealed to those drawn to Enlightened politi­
cal behavior, but also those worried by the potential threat to the existing 
social order that such ideas posed.5 And indeed, both parties had their 
concerns when Leopold came to the throne. Leopold, like Titus, is to be 
seen as humane; yet his humanitarianism will not lead him to embrace 
extreme radicalism-which in this case would have been represented by 
Leopold's brother, Joseph II, whose Enlightened policies Leopold was keen 
to distance himself from as soon as Joseph had died in February of 1790. 

Attractive as this picture of Enlightened authority might be, it never­
theless is made possible by a decidedly unenlightened sexual politics­
which, ironically, was prevalent among Enlightened thinkers.6 Practically 
speaking, the rather far-fetched demands the opera makes in terms of its 
status as a credible reflection of a realizable political reality-particularly 
to an audience mired in the political turmoil of the late eighteenth cen­
tury-might have engendered some skeptical scrutiny. That is, if we were 
not distracted by the spectacle of an unruly and politically dangerous 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 11 

woman, dangled in front us in the form ofVitellia. 
This spectacle is a product of the slippery Enlightenment discourse 

concerning equality, human rights, and natural law, at the foundation of 
which lay the idea that reason and rationality were possessed, or at least 
could come to be possessed, by all humans.7 Unless, of course, as Mary 
Wollstonecraft was to point out in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 
one happened to be a woman. If reason were to be in the same degree of 
possession by women as men, then the autonomous workings of reason 
itself would necessitate Enlightened thought being led to the inevitable 
conclusion: that women must have equal access to political debate and 
also political action and influence as men. As Wollstonecraft wrote, "Con­
sider ... whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed 
to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsis­
tent and unjust to subjugate women ... ? Who made man the exclusive 
judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason?" (1992:87). An age 
of Enlightenment it may have been, but this did not stop many both from 
feeling threatened by this line of thinking and from trying to find a means 
by which it could be negated without seeming to negate what it meant to 
be Enlightened. The answer was to be found in science, one of the very 
foundation stones on which the Enlightenment had been built. In particu­
lar, Enlightened thinkers threatened by the potential ascendancy of women 
made recourse to the increasingly prevalent notion within medical trea­
tises that the sexes were fundamentally different from each other.8 As Tho­
mas Laqueur has written: "By around 1800, writers of all sorts were deter­
mined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between 
the male and female sexes, thus between man and woman, on discover­
able biological distinctions, and to express these in a radically different 
rhetoric" (1990:5). This was a relatively new turn of events in the discourses 
of gender science, for before the eighteenth century the sexual organs of 
men and women primarily had been understood as in an inversional rela­
tionship to each other, rather than as completely different and 
noncomparable systems.9 If it could be proven that women were, in a sense, 
a different species to men, then it could be argued that women did not 
have the same access to reason and therefore should neither have the 
same rights, nor inhabit the same spheres, nor be responsible for the same 
kinds of decisions. Women should remain in the domestic sphere, suck­
ling children, as Rousseau in Emile, ou de ['education of 1762 never tired of 
repeating. lO Otherwise, they threaten the transparency of the natural be­
havior that should exist between human beings with a cloying and destruc­
tive artifice-hence, why Rousseau railed so much against the salons, pre­
sided over, as they were, by powerful women who readily involved them­
selves in the intellectual debates taking place. Even those Enlightened think-



12 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

ers who believed that women did have genuine rights could still assert at 
the same time that women should be barred from taking part in politics 
because of a lack of independence and reason (Landes 1988). 

Few today would fail to whiff the dangerous ideological clap-trap here. 
However, it is disturbing how little stretch of the imagination is needed to 
entertain that Vitellia, as presented in Mozart and Mazzola's La Clemenza 
di Tito, would have been available to being interpreted as "proof' that such 
a view of women is in fact true. To appropriate Rousseau, Vitellia's "natu­
ral" feminine tendency toward feeling and emotion, untethered from its 
"natural" outlet in the domestic sphere, and accompanied by her equally 
"natural" feminine lack of reasoning, act to incarcerate her in a miasma of 
self-involvement. As Rousseau states in Emile, "The male is male only at 
certain moments," whereas "[t]he female is female her whole life" and 
"everything constantly recalls her sex to her" ([1762] 1964: Book V, 450). 
It was a widely held opinion in the eighteenth century, and was to appear 
again thirteen years later in the important Systeme physique et moral de la 
femme, by the French philosophical physician Pierre Roussel: "Woman is 
not woman only in one place but in every aspect under which she can be 
envisaged" ( [1775] 1993:387). Blinded by her feminine jealousy, Vitellia 
loses sight of her duty toward the political whole; constantly recalled to 
her own sex, she is driven to igniting the flames of political rebellion. 

As stated already, the patchy verisimilitude in the naively idealistic 
portrait of Titus and his powers of control and restraint probably would 
not have been lost on the informed in the politically unstable years in 
Europe following the storming of the Bastille. By comparison, though, there 
was really no convincing point of reference in recent history for the kind 
of overtly dangerous, even melodramatic, political activity by noble women 
as embodied in the representation ofVitellia. Women in the eighteenth 
century tended to suffer from a predicament which Arlette Farge has de­
scribed as "'mixity' without parity" (quoted in Godineau 1997:394). Thus, 
although the rapidly changing structure of society and the public sphere 
meant that women were increasingly visible and/or active, many of their 
newfound roles were in a sense never properly legitimated by law or by 
themselves. Even the French Revolution failed to grant women the full 
political rights of citizenship. This is not to deny women's participation in 
politics. For example, Dominique Godineau has pointed out that women 
of the lower classes continued in their traditional roles as making up the 
first ranks of all public disturbances, such as food riots, religious upheav­
als, and anti-fiscal and political uprisings: 

Protectresses of the community, they rose to defend its rights. 
Thanks to their mobility, their constant presence in the streets, 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 13 

their familiarity with public spaces, and their role in the 
neighborhood, they soon learned of any violation of the tacit rules 
governing the balance between public power and its subjecters. 
They were quick to rise to protest any situation they judged 
intolerable, dragging their men along with them. (Godineau 
1997:416)11 

Women of the upper classes, particularly those who organized salons, were 
often involved in brokering important political relationships. And let us 
not forget the fact that this was the century of three powerful female mon­
archs: Anne of England, Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, and Marie­
Theresa of Austria. However, in all these areas women came under intense 
criticism: rioting invited the age-old claim that women were shrews; we 
have already touched on Rousseau's disgust of salons, a disgust that was 
matched by none other than Mary Wollstonecraft; and Marie-Theresa's 
succession to the throne gave birth to eight years of war. Further, many 
women, while desiring to "take part" in some way, were not necessarily so 
keen to take the point much further. For example, evidence suggests that 
after rioting was over people seemed to be relatively accepting of going 
back to their business and performing their usual social roles (Farge 
1993:502-5). Many women were also prepared to justifY the kinds oflim­
ited roles offered to them. Thus, in 1793, Laetitia Hawkins wrote in her 
Letters on the Female Mind-a direct response to Wollstonecraft's Vindica­
tion-that "[i] t cannot, I think, be truly asserted, that the intellectual pow­
ers know no difference of sex. Nature certainly intended a distinction ... 
In general, and almost universally, the feminine intellect has less strength 
and more acuteness. Consequently in our exercise of it we show less perse­
verance and more vivacity" (Outram 1995:85). 

Relinquished by absence of example from the responsibility of find­
ing a reflection for Vitellia's character and actions in the so-called real 
world, audience members would have been free to use their imaginations 
in order to project traditional prejudices into the virtual allegorical world 
of the opera, where they could grow into realities and enable confidence 
to be felt in the conviction that "yes, of course that's how a women would 
act in such a situation." Moreover, the widely-held perception at this time 
that there were strong ties between radical thinking, such as proto-femi­
nist debate, and the French Revolution would have only worked to aid the 
creation of an atmosphere conducive to the public acceptance of such an 
interpretation.12 Thus, we might consider that, for many, Vitellia may well 
have functioned as the locus where the opera's claims to representational 
truth grounded in reality were legitimated. 13 Finally, if Vitellia is to be 
considered real, then by the fortuity of analogy, that which threatens the 



Example 1: "S'altro che lacrime," mm. 1-16. 

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16 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

political stability of Enlightened absolutism is gendered feminine, and there­
fore must be assumed, at least within the public discourse, to be control­
lable. The French Revolution is but a crazy woman-a comforting thought, 
perhaps. 

III. 
I might have kept fleshing out the relations here between Vitellia, La 
clemenza as allegory, and political and philosophical ideas; I might have 
kept forcing myself to see Vitellia as a cultural puppet with stuffed skin, 
wire, and a face that is "nothing but appearance," to return to Rilke's words; 
I might have kept attempting to rip away the veil of illusion that, it is as­
sumed, the "bad" work constructs; and, as I suggested in the introduction, 
I might have felt that in doing so I was involved in something important 
politically. This might have been the case, if it were not for the fact that in 
places in the opera attention is already being directed towards the possibil­
ity that Vitellia is constructed in some way. This is particularly the case with 
her famous rondo "Non pili di Fiori" (no. 23) .14 Here Vitellia's convincing 
illusion seems to crumble as a result ofthe framing of her rondo between 
two particularly expressively fused pillars: no. 21, "S'altro che lacrime," 
Servilia's entreaty that Vitellia plea to Titus for Sextus's life,15 and the open­
ing chorus in honor of Titus, no. 24, "Che del ciel," which starts the final 
scene. 16 

Servilia's aria (ex. 1) creates the sensation that the path of communi­
cations, leading from her sentiments, through the medium of her musical 
language, and eventually to Vitellia and us, is without obstacles. As result, 
when she sings one is moved beyond the situation where character is pre­
sented as representation into a realm where character as such disappears 
and a real presence starts to take over. Artifice dissolves in the context of 
an artifice. It is a magical contradiction, and in this instance I argue that 
the spell works because of a delicate and almost imperceptible blending 
that takes place between musical worlds presented as if they were nature 
and the body-appearing before our aural gaze seemingly unmediated by 
cultural discourses-and the culturally-produced artifices of musical tech­
nique and style, which are in fact what allow for this transportation to take 
place. 

Nature appears to us as a subtly etched, continuous background of 
lightly pulsating eighth notes, which delicately flows into the view of our 
aural gaze in the two measures of orchestral introduction, and then in a 
gentle sinuous fashion threads its way through the landscape of the musi­
cal fabric, every now and again calmly gurgling to the melodic surface of 
the composition, particularly at the breaks between the vocal phrases and 
in the brief orchestral coda (examples 2a and 2b show the subtle creation 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 17 

Example 2a: "S'altro che iacrime," mm. 5-7. 

/1m" 
5 woodwinds I I I J oJ. 

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+ violinl 

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oJ ""'-J , I,......J 

'~II IU F' bJ r F r F r r 'L r [ p 

Example 2b: "S'aitro che iacrime," mm. 13-16. 

+::::' : : ~: I; : e : f I~ [ ~ e ¥ : I~ J J j 

, 
= 

of passages of continuous eighth-note intertwining between the vocal part 
and the instruments at two places: mm. 5-7, and mm. 13-16). This is a 
musical landscape that rests calmly in the cool shadowy half-light between 
images of soft breezes and quietly rippling brooks. Floating within and 
seemingly organically interlaced with this environment are Servilia's sighs, 
emanating from their source in her body out into her melodic line, and 
then echoed delicately by means of gentle fortepianos and sforzandos within 
the "natural landscape" of the instrumental accompaniment, creating a 
kind of pathetic fallacy. For example, the sigh motive in Servilia's line in 
m. 4, ripples into the orchestral accompaniment as a fortepiano in m. 5, 
which is then repeated in m. 7 (ex. 1). 

These subtle pictorial intimations are both framed by and also consti­
tute the more obviously culturally-defined artifices of the composition. The 
undulating and regular rhythmic background helps to measure out the 
basic underlying rhythmic gesture of the aria, which is in the tempo of a 
minuet, a dance form that, though somewhat outdated in the ballrooms 



18 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

Example 3: "S'altro che lacrime," mm. 3-6: Motivic relations. 

m. 3 vocal' • , , 

'~Il 9 j J J I p.)j * I [j F" Ell Et r * I 
a 

@ ~# • • • • • • • • • 

b a b (inversion) a 

Example 4: "S'altro che lacrime," mm. 3-10: Motivic relations. 

rn.3 ~ ~ ~ ~~ ,L,~,2, r----'l---, 

'~H 2 J J J I D·)J11 [frEttl err I I JC'PI Urn-pi crcrJJIJ J I 

, ~1I -___ 03?- ~ j •• • 

n + 0 n + 

by the end of the eighteenth century, continued to be associated with a 
sort of noble simplicity, to invoke Johann WinckelmannY At the same 
time, though, this background is ordered into a kind of musical perspec­
tive by means of the minuet style's consistent cycle of three-beat measures. 
Likewise, Servilia's sighs are coopted into articulating the phrase structure 
and also play an active role in producing subtleties within the structure 
that help to detract from the artifice of its potential four-squareness. Thus, 
in the opening four measures of her melody descending sighing gestures 
(a) occur in the second and fourth measures. These help to articulate the 
divide between the two two-measure units, yet at the same time they qui­
etly make us aware of the motivic relations that link the two units (ex. 3). 
Finally, in mm. 7-10, we are presented with a descending sequence of 
these sighs, which grows out of the melodic pitch contour (n + 0) of mm. 
5-6, and creates a four-measure unit that is more continuous and fused in 
comparison with the more literal two-measure unit orientation character­
izing her opening four measures (ex. 4). The overall impression is of a 
sensitively flexible, seamless entity, one that appears to define a boundary 
for itself, and then accept as natural the sense and good taste of not trans­
gressing it. 

In Servilia's aria we might say that unity and variety balance each other 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 19 

out in a dance between nature and culture: a minuet that seems to em­
body everything the eighteenth century thought to be beautiful. Similar 
kinds of syntheses, which likewise accumulate into an authentically fused 
expressive presence, also occur on the other side of Vitelli a's aria, in the 
grandly sublime, Handelian-style chorus "Che del ciel."18 Here, however, 
the synthesizing tendency leads to an image of autonomous, free-thinking 
individuals, drawn magnetically together as if by natural instinct into a 
benign social contract, which, rather than compromising their separate 
identities, becomes the environment that allows the sublimity of the gen­
eral will to become manifest. The orchestral introduction to this chorus is 
in the decidedly elevated style of the French overture, which had its origin 
as processional entrance music in the court of Louis XIV. But even though 
this music exudes an aura of authority, the almost ecstatic exuberance of 
the choral music that it builds up to suggests that the Roman citizens are 
encouraged and energized by it rather than intimidated. Further, the po­
tentially restrictive formalities that might seem to be obligatory in the pres­
ence of the French overture style appear to have been transformed into 
more spontaneous behavior-spontaneity that, nevertheless, does not 
threaten to become disrespectful or contradictory. The voices give us the 
impression that without premeditation they suddenly coalesce into a rhyth­
mically unified choral pronouncement; entering on the second beat, as if 
the spectacle they are witnessing and taking part in keeps them momen­
tary stunned with an awe that then busts into life with their first exclama­
tion, they are magically inspired to sing the same unscripted music at once.19 

Amongst other things, both "S'altro che lacrime" and "Che del ciel" 
can strike one as authentically present because of their shared tendency 
toward a seemingly un oppressive synthesis, consistency, and homogeneity 
of musical expression. In sharp contrast, Vitellia's music, sandwiched in 
between as it is, is all juxtaposition and superimposition, fracture, edge, 
and seam. Through recourse to the work of Michel Foucault, Susan McClary 
has famously asserted that the vocal excess and potentially destabilizing 
presence of female characters in certain operas is often made a spectacle 
of, and also controlled by means of, a framing device which, as it were, 
hinders the spread offemale contagion (McClary 1991:80-111). This line 
of interpretation could be successfully applied here, the frame being 
achieved not only through differences in aesthetic presence, but also by 
the historical associations of the musical styles and forms employed. Both 
the minuet style of Servilia's aria and the Handelian grandeur of the cho­
rus invoke the past as a locus of stable, benign authority. By comparison, 
the rondo form employed for Vitellia was a form that was particularly in 
vogue at the time of La clemenza's first performance. One might therefore 
argue that the unstable contemporary political situation, as embodied al-



20 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

legorically in Vitellia, is aligned with the contemporaneity of the rondo 
form and also of the recently invented basset horn, which is given an obbli­
gato part here. This contemporaneity is then put in an unflattering prox­
imity to the certainties of the past. This interpretation resonates with Rice's 
view that La clemenza partakes of, or was coopted into aiding, Leopold's 
attempt to recreate the political and cultural atmosphere of the 1760s, a 
period which, apparently, many Viennese looked back on as a golden age 
before the troubles created by the events of 1789 (Rice 1995a). But of 
course, it hardly holds water to propose as a universal for the understand­
ing of operatic representation that as consistency equals presence so dis­
unity equals artifice. In fact, in this instance we could get a lot of critical 
mileage from assuming that the expressive disjuncture of Vitelli a's music 
is a direct communication of the emotional disjunction of her mind as she 
tries to convince herself of the act of self-sacrifice she is about to perform. 
Thus, perhaps Vitellia is for completely opposite musical reasons than 
Servilla or the chorus of Roman citizens are. 

Nevertheless, at four points during her rondo the expressive authen­
ticity of Vitelli a's confusion is threatened by a fracture line resulting from 
the slightly warped character of a musical idea first introduced in the ob­
bligato basset horn part and immediately repeated by Vitellia. In and of 
itself, this theme is suspicious because of the seemingly paper-thin sincer­
ity and sentimental pathos of its sinuous and rather over-seasoned expres­
sion; it is saccharine and mildly crass in its insinuating way, a kind of Mime 
music avant la lettre. Its effect, I argue, never manages to transcend the 
materials from which it is made and, thus, its effectiveness never properly 
emerges; there is a kind of grotesque literalness to its motivic, phrase, and 
harmonic structures, which stands in sharp distinction to the effortless, 
and modestly inconspicuous subtleties of Servilia's melodic material. It 
opens itself up to pejorative judgements particularly when, as happens 
twice in the piece (mm. 56-60, and mm. 109-13), this melody is slapped 
on top of a clodhopping, oom-paah-paah-paah march accompaniment, 
like a slightly curdled frosting on top of an inappropriately bland cake 
(see example 5, mm. 56-60, for the first occurrence of this theme). One 
might argue that the contrast here between chromatically saturated me­
lodic expression and simple four-square accompaniment creates the im­
pression of a sort of stunned tragic shock. And indeed, this kind of melody 
and melodic presentation was soon to become a staple means by which 
such emotions were to be indicated in the serious operas of Italian com­
posers such as Bellini and Donizetti in the first half of the nineteenth 
century. The melody, therefore, might be thought of as evidence of the 
stylistically advanced nature of La clemenza, as some commentators have 
urged us to consider.20 But such an effect is not successfully pulled off 



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here. There are a number of reasons for this, the primary one being that 
each time the melody appears it is preceded by a grand accumulative mu­
sical sweep worthy of comparison with the high tragic style Mozart employs 
for other heroines, for example in Donna Anna's magnificent aria "Or sai 
chi l'onore" in Don Giovanni. Thus, each time we are led to expect some­
thing more elevated than what we get (example 6 shows how the third 
occurrence of the idea is contextualized). 

The immediate effect is one of bathos, one which might create the 
kind of empathetic relationship between us and Vitellia that the words 
with which this theme comes to be associated would imply: "Chi vedesse il 
mio dolore/ Pur avria di me pieta" ("yet he who could see my distress 
would have pity on me"). However, there is something expressively un­
grounded about this theme that makes it just as easy to hear its effect as a 
little grotesque, or even quite comic.21 It is almost as ifVitellia suddenly 
splutters and stalls, and in order to be mended the back of this rondo has 
to be turned toward us revealing the mechanisms behind the chimera. 
Vitellia has to be kick-started back into action, she (or maybe we should say 
it) has to be reprogrammed to be, and this is done by the inserting of that 
creepy musical idea into her machinery, winding the whole thing up, and 
then letting it run until all the parts click back together again and the 
machine is able to give us the impression that Vitellia autonomously cre­
ates her own music, that she has, in a sense, become again. On a literal 
level, this impression is created by the presence of the basset horn, which 
instigates Vitellia's utterances, coaxing her to sing her own music and then 
celebrates with virtuosic figuration when it appears that the lesson has 
been learned. The transition from broken to functioning, machine to be­
ing, or even puppet to person, is also articulated by Vitellia's reclaiming of 
her elevated, declamatory musical rhetoric with the return of the opening 
words, "non pili di fiori" (ex. 5, mm. 79ff.). 

IV. 
This essay is moving toward the following kind of conclusion: the work of 
art that we are able to perceive as already in the process of unmasking its 
own illusions puts the disenchanting critic, striding confidently forward to 
unmask it, in an awkward predicament. Ifwe can already start to see what 
lies underneath, then the disenchanter starts looking a little like a hired 
magician at a tired children's party: "See! Ideology!" (One cannot but help 
noticing here a delicious irony-that self-disenchanting works turn disen­
chanting critics into their very object of criticism, into questionable magic 
makers.) The nasty little barrel-organ theme is not just the sound of a 
broken operatic music-a music, as it were, without horizon, one that has 
lost the ability to convince us that it is not just music, and that we are not 



Example 6: "Non pili di Fiori," mm. 122-130. 

Flauto 

Oboe 

Basset Horn 

Fagotto 

Corno I, 11 

Viulino/ 

Violinoll 

Viola 

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26 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

just trapped in the fact of just being people just watching an opera. It is 
also the sound of the music that one creates when one plays at disenchant­
ing. Like the mirror that never lies, this music reflects back the rather 
unpleasant sound of that which we desire: a music without illusion. Then, 
as if to add salt to raw wounds, the music immediately tries to swallow us up 
again into its magical illusion, that which we have been trying to destroy. 
Vitellia's rondo goes straight on into the chorus, "Che del ciel," that was 
discussed earlier. No time is offered for the distracting artifice of applause, 
and, thus, no room is made available to contemplate whether what we 
have just heard may, in fact, have been an artifice. Like Brunhilde to her 
immolation pyre, Vitellia runs out of our critical embrace (if in fact she 
was ever there anyway) and into the sublime forgetting of the final spec­
tacle. Suddenly reimbued with agency, she chooses the magic reality of 
operatic illusion. 

A shameless part of me craves to conclude with this image of the aes­
thetic triumphant and us humans, by comparison, belittled to the level of 
puppets who do not even know that we are such. However, the attempt to 
unmask those who unmask can only exist arbitrarily as a termination point 
of this discussion. The conclusions I have been trying to reach can them­
selves be unmasked; the music that I have been trying to make dance with­
out strings can easily be made to crash to the floor again under the sheer 
weight of disenchanting historical argument. To return to a remark from 
earlier in this essay: a puppet can be made with our human hands out of 
the sense that puppets have become more than puppets made by human 
hands. 

The shifting perspective in Vitellia's music, backwards and forwards 
from puppet to being, can be correlated with the anxious relationship 
between materialist/mechanistic and transcendental groundings of the 
subject in the late eighteenth century. Earlier in the century, materialists 
such as D'Alembert and Diderot were able to present an un anxious, even 
celebratory, view of human beings as machine-like. At that time, science 
and reason had yet to take on the negative connotations that they were to 
accrue during the industrial growth of the nineteenth century-in other 
words, as the means by which man becomes dominated, rather than that 
which he uses to dominate nature. Adorno and Horkheimer's depress­
ingly negative view of the dialectic of Enlightenment was not yet a consid­
eration. The idea that a man might be a mechanism was a sign that he was 
congruent with the universe in which he found himself, a universe which, 
since the dissemination of Newton's and Descartes's theories, was likewise 
considered to be understandable in mechanistic terms. Mechanistic man 
was, we might say, the proof that man was natural, free from alienation. 
And this way of thinking goes some way towards explaining the popularity 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 27 

of musical automata during the eighteenth century: the ability of man to 
be able to recreate mechanically the intricacies of a musical performance 
is a reflection of his ability to know himself and to be able to shine the light 
of reason even into the most mysterious corridors of the human condi­
tion. Musical automata are a celebration of the fact that man is soon to 
become Enlightened. 

One might make a case for understanding Vitellia's rondo from this 
positive perspective of Enlightened materialism and assert that Vitellia is, 
in fact, a puppet and that that is all for the best. As Carolyn Abbate points 
out, "Diderot tended to see theatre and opera in terms of what actors and 
musicians produce, not merely as abstract texts that imitate the natural 
world. He was, it would seem, always thinking of the toy theatre, the little 
marionettes and their tinkling music, when opera was discussed" (1999:476). 
For Diderot, we might argue, the potential split between art as artifice and 
life as real is not necessarily a consideration. For example, when he ironi­
cally disrupts the narrative flow with commentary from outside, as in the 
short story This Is Not a Story and the novel Jacques the Fatalist, is he acting 
like some kind of proto-postmodernist, or asserting a basic materialist prin­
ciple: that art is just as much made as everything else? If we are good mate­
rialists we do not interpret the point where Vitellia's rondo breaks down at 
the words "Chi vedesse il mio dolore" as an interruption of aesthetic illu­
sion that results in our alienation from the experience. In getting to see 
that she is made, we are drawn closer to her, for we are made, too. 

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, though, this benign sym­
biosis-man, machine, nature, and reason-found itself riven into its com­
ponent parts. And as Abbate shows, at this time puppets changed from 
being objects of entertainment which inspire us toward Enlightened opti­
mism to being terrible, even uncanny, things that disturb our sense of 
being. She writes: 

[t]he animated figure we confront, astonishingly talented at 
assuming human functions, suggests how we could look down to 
find our own chests covered by brass plates, ripped open to expose 
'an elegant clockwork' within. Thus the perfected mechanical man 
robs us of a prize, our soul, and in so doing injures human 
individuality and consciousness. (Abbate 1999:476) 

A possible backdrop for understanding this shift comes from consider­
ing Kant's notion that the subject is transcendent, no longer to be scripted 
as some kind of passive mechanism that just senses objects. In this formu­
lation, the subject's knowledge no longer conforms to the world, but rather 
the world conforms, as it were, to the structure and also the limitations of 



28 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

the subject's thinking. A result of this is that the modern Kantian subject 
has no direct access to the world as it might actually be. Rather, it repre­
sents the world to itself in the form of phenomena, and therefore remains 
on some level alienated from the problematic and somewhat mysterious 
noumenal realm of things-in-themselves. What inhibits Kant's transcen­
dental subject from the possibility of feeling itself at home with automata, 
though, is that it is a fundamental part of its own self-definition to be filled 
with a yearning to overcome its own limitations, and to strive toward the 
noumenal realm. On the one hand, this act of attempted self-transcen­
dence injects a sense of ethics into the heart of the subject's self-image, for 
the act is on some level an attempt to replace nature, how things are, with 
freedom, an impression of how things ought to be. On the other hand, the 
subject's attempt to leap beyond its own capabilities and into the unknow­
able places a mysterious glow at the center of its sense of itself. For Kant, 
this mystery is located in the schema that are active in the imagination and 
which mediate the sensory data that comes to us with the categories of 
perception that dictate the terms on which this data is to be represented. 
This mediation "is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose 
real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, 
and to have open to our gaze" (Kant 1965:183). 

By placing mystery at the center of its self-definition, Kant was able to 
empower the subject with the sense that it is always more than what it 
understands about itself. The reverse side of this, however, is the opening 
up of possibilities for appalling doubts, a crisis of faith, when the subject 
feels that its self-overcoming is not being properly accessed. The Enlight­
ened optimist in Kant worked very hard to allay such fears. But Kant's 
arguments opened up a metaphysical wound in the modern idea of the 
subject that neither Romanticism, Modernism, nor Postmodernism has 
been able to successfully heal. Within this framework, we might argue that 
the inability for the aesthetic illusion to sustain itselfwithin Vitellia's music 
speaks of an anxiety as to the transcendental grounding of the modern 
subject. When her music falls apart we are no longer able to celebrate 
wholeheartedly with her in the glory of our shared mechanistic natures. 
We are now distracted and disturbed by the huge metaphysical horizons 
whispering maybes to us from a beyond that we should, but do not, believe 
possible to curl back up into ourselves. 

The more subtle interpreter might argue that the disorienting slips 
from aesthetic illusion sustained to aesthetic illusion unmasked speak of a 
conflict between views that are symptomatic of the difficulties of the late 
eighteenth century. This being the case, we should accept Vitellia as a 
ghost from the mechanistic past, come back to haunt, superimposed onto 
Vitellia as a modern subject striving to define its autonomy in terms of the 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 29 

transcendent. And such a double exposure affects our understanding of 
the opera's sexual politics. If the fractures in Vitellia's music are normal­
ized as part of an optimistically mechanistic view of the world, then there is 
little in her music, or at least in "Non pili di fiori," that can work disso­
nantly against my earlier reading of Vitelli a as a politically reprehensible 
representation of woman that needs to be unmasked and disenchanted. 
Without the possibility of these changes in expressive mode being experi­
enced as salient and problematic, the music is unable to give us the im­
pression that it is turning its gaze back critically on the ideological context 
that is coercing it into speaking in a certain fashion. Thus, tautologically, if 
we are all puppets, in a mechanistic sense, then mechanistic thinking is 
being used to distract us from the fact that Vitellia is a puppet whose ges­
tures are attached to ideological strings. By contrast, if we equate the sus­
taining of aesthetic illusion with a concept of the subject as more than just 
what can be rationally understood about it, then Vitellia's musical slips can 
no longer be so easily accommodated. On the one hand, one could argue 
that even such a small disruption is enough to set the sexual politics of the 
opera on the road to redemption, for it briefly unmasks the fact that Vitellia 
might be a construct. And this might lead us toward celebrating La clemenza 
di Tito as a work that deliberately fails aesthetically in order to triumph 
politically, as a performative deconstruction of the representation of women 
in opera seria. But on the other hand, we can just as confidently assert that 
the aesthetic failure of "Non pili di fiori" is merely the means by which 
Vitellia's madness is represented. The inability of her music to hold itself 
together parallels her mentally unhinged state. She becomes a mecha­
nism in a pejorative sense: that which is revealed when the transcendental 
groundings of the modern subject fail to assert themselves at our com­
mand. She strikes us as unsavory and Other in the same way that the devas­
tating, spluttering, and broken inarticulateness of the bereaved sometimes 
can. Ergo women are made crazy and unnatural when they attempt to 
function within the political sphere. 

v. 
In the opening section of this essay, I proposed that disenchantment, true 
to its Enlightenment roots, nearly always implies that there is a perspective 
from which things can be revealed in a secular light as they truly are, free 
from illusory metaphysical obfuscations. In what followed, Vitellia in 
Mozart's La clemenza di Tito was repeatedly drawn back within the terrain 
covered by such a disenchanting gaze; attempts to imbue her with autonomy 
and agency were curtailed by contextualizing her historically. As a result, 
her movements were shown to have no magic to them, her existence was 
revealed as a passive reflection of culture and ideology, mutely mimetic. 



30 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

However, this strategy has led to a conclusion that actually sits rather 
uneasily with the seemingly liberating clarity that disenchantment needs 
to offer if it is to work politically to our advantage. For having gone through 
the motions of unmasking the aesthetic illusions that supposedly hide her 
machinery, we do not now have just one Vitellia before us, denuded and in 
the ideological raw, but three: a Vitellia whose mechanistic orientation 
indirectly enforces pejorative Enlightenment constructions of women; a 
Vitellia whose failure to access the transcendent similarly acts as a negative 
political indictment on La clemenza di Tito, for it works to convince us of 
the notion that women by nature are driven mad by entry into the political 
sphere; and a Vitellia whose failure to sustain the transcendental ground­
ing of her subjectivity is to be lauded as a politically liberating act of 
deconstruction. Instead of the dangerous power of an aesthetic real pres­
ence having been defused, one object with the possibility of being in pos­
session of Being has been replaced by three identically constructed ob­
jects, a trio of puppets all moving according to different cultural mecha­
nisms. Enlightened disenchanting has led us to confusions of a Gothic 
nature-E. T. A. Hoffman and Edgar Allen Poe loom. Admittedly, we have 
managed to turn artistic effects into material, into tangible and identifi­
able ideological "stuff." However, the liberating conceptual control that 
we as disenchanters were to gain from that transformation is threatened 
by the accompanying act of multiplication. Obviously there are many more 
disenchanted Vitellia puppets that can be credibly produced from further 
historical investigations, so what we have really created here is a scenario 
rather like the sorcerer's apprentice. (And as we know, that nightmare of 
multiplication is only brought to conclusion when the sorcerer returns 
and performs a terminating act of magic. Thus, perhaps disenchantment 
has led us into a crisis that can only be concluded by the use of the very 
thing that disenchantment was employed to eradicate in the first place.) 
Since at anyone time one can hold only a certain number of readings 
regarding one cultural object under the controlling power of one's con­
ceptual grasp, the object, as it continues to generate further readings, will 
eventually start to escape that grasp. As we become increasingly unable to 
fulfill the Enlightened goal of being able to stand above our material and 
completely contain it within our gaze, we begin to lose the sense of free­
dom and liberation that such a perspective offers. Our autonomy in the 
face of the object starts to wither as the object, by acquiring the ability to 
elude us, appears to become autonomous itself. Maybe, as Adorno writes, 
"we do not understand music-it understands us" (Adorno 1998:xi). If it 
can escape us for a moment, it is actually standing behind us and watching 
our growing sense of frustration and anxiety. Maybe the autonomous work 
is conceptualizing us. 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 31 

Within this scenario, there is one trump card left to those who disen­
chant, and that is to see the production of multiple readings in a work as a 
historically locatable phenomenon, and thus utterly disenchanted. Regard­
ing the eighteenth century, consideration of, for example, the implica­
tions ofJurgen Habermas's notion of the bourgeois public sphere might 
be helpful. Crudely put, in an age when art had been more an integral 
component of the ritual life of the church and the aristocracy, there could 
be no room, at least theoretically, for the notion that the meaning of a 
piece of music or a painting was open to debate. In order for the ritual to 
present itself as universally valid, the meaning of the cultural products it 
employed had to be imbued with irrefutability, and as a result the cultural 
products were surrounded with a kind of religious aura. However, as 
Habermas writes, with the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, "[ t] he 
private people for whom the cultural product became available as a com­
modity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on 
their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize 
it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long 
could assert its authority" (1991:37). Like the coffeehouse or the salon, 
the work of art during the eighteenth century became a kind of meeting 
ground, a site where the bourgeoisie could define their autonomy by de­
bating meaning through the public use of reason, rather than having to 
defer interpretation to the authority of aristocratic and religious ritual. 
The ability of a work of art from this period to be open enough to produce 
multiple readings is therefore not necessarily an invitation for us to start 
celebrating art's autonomy from the vice-like grip of disenchanting his­
torical interpretation-even though the emergence of a critical bourgeois 
environment for art during the course of the eighteenth century is, inter­
estingly, intimately bound up with the emergence of ideas of artistic au­
tonomy. To do so would be to suffer from a confusion about the origins of 
this tendency toward the production of multiple readings. The music is 
not producing them of its own volition in order to confuse us; they are, 
rather, a reflection of bourgeois values. The fact that there may be so many 
readings that we are not able to hold them all within our gaze, therefore, 
should not worry us. Although some of the readings may sometimes be 
outside of our line of vision, we are the ones who know the limits of the 
compound: the bourgeois public sphere. Thus, we are the ones with the 
ability to police them back into view. 

VI. 
That attempts to assert real presence as an important "reality" of the expe­
rience of art can be disenchanted so relentlessly suggests, perhaps, that we 
should just relinquish ourselves to the fact that history and her various 



32 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

handmaidens (cultural studies and the like) hold the irrefutable ethical 
high ground within any act of interpretation. Maybe those who still wish to 
engage with the seemingly irrational aesthetic "reality" of art are only left 
with one kind of option, that which the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus 
Logico-Philosophicus found himself with when faced with the realm of the 
metaphysical: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muB man 
schweigen" (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) 
(1961: 150). Silence does indeed generally surround the belief that there 
is a surplus within aesthetic experience that can never be fully accommo­
dated by a cultural context. It is not necessarily the silence of which 
Wittgenstein speaks, though-that which aims to preserve the integrity of 
something-but rather the silence of censorship. If this seems too extreme 
an assertion, one need only but think of the kind of morally righteous 
fireworks that immediately and without fail erupt should one mention any­
thing suggesting aesthetic autonomy-for example, the phrase "the music 
itself." Should that which is silent try to speak, it will be silenced by the 
sheer force of the speech of others. The fact that this reaction and its 
validating arguments are now automatic to the point of appearing as natu­
ralized instincts should make us deeply suspicious of any claims that the 
changes in musicology that have occurred in the past fifteen or so years 
have marked a progression towards increased intellectual freedom. Ideol­
ogy has a tendency to be most pernicious when it makes its claims felt to us 
as something glowing behind the words we speak, investing them with a 
confidence that we construe as something of our own making, instead of 
drawing our attention to the fact that something is being spoken through 
rather than by us. As Kant wrote back in 1784: "A revolution may well put 
an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppres­
sion, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, 
new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control" 
(1991:55). Are we really more enlightened now about how to study music, 
or is it the case that we have simply swapped one form of dictates about 
what we are allowed to know for another-that we still have police but now 
they are wearing brightly colored yellow uniforms that put to sartorial shame 
the drab, institutional black of last year's fashion? Is it not the case that 
whereas before music was not allowed to mean anything other than itself, 
now it can only mean that which is not itself? 

If the conclusion of this essay came down to an either/or between 
aesthetic autonomy in its various forms and the notion that art is com­
pletely historically determined, then this would indeed be a disposable 
piece of work, unproductively partisan and dogmatic. Even worse would 
be an attempt to alleviate tensions by opting for the luke-warm liberal com­
forts of asserting that both points of view can happily coexist. Faced with 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 33 

the kind of dilemma presented by this essay, such benignly smiling open­
mindedness can only be a mask for an authoritarian delimiting of critique's 
movements-a grim insistence on optimism, which denies dialectic and 
expunges the possibility of change. When Wittgenstein placed an insur­
mountable wall between the logical investigations of the first part of the 
Tractatus and the metaphysical speculations of that work's concluding pages 
he was asserting, in a sense, that the two realms could not talk to each 
other, for the terms by which one side justified its claims could not be 
employed to justifY the existence of the other. And in this essay, the flip­
ping backwards and forwards between history and aesthetics, between art 
disenchanted and art enchanted, has been an attempt to give an impres­
sion of a similar divide that cannot be transgressed. However, this would 
seem to imply that action was no longer possible, which is an unacceptable 
conclusion, for it is merely an inversion of the covert authoritarian opti­
mism that I have just dismissed. Terms within this kind of binary opposi­
tion have a tendency of being mutually reliant on the pretense of cancel­
ing each other out in order for each term to exist. 

When negotiating the rift between history and aesthetics, most of us 
attempt to establish a methodological position that is static and a priori; 
we want something that we can bring fully formed to our object of investi­
gation, something which we assume will remain invariant during the course 
of the interpretive act and appear almost indifferent afterwards, as if noth­
ing had happened. It might be argued that this is done out of a very real 
need for consistency, something by which the success or failure of an inter­
pretation is usually judged, for without methodological consistency it be­
comes difficult if not impossible to validate the route by which conclusions 
have been reached. One might say that it would be like reading directions 
for a journey which suddenly shift, without explanation, from one point 
on one road to a point on a completely different road. However, the prob­
lem with the authority vested in consistency is that it brings the act of 
interpretation into what I consider to be considerable ethical complica­
tions. This is the case whether the methodology aims at either a disen­
chanted or enchanted view of art, but since my focus of concern here is 
disenchantment, that is where I shall begin. 

The goal of disenchanting art is to act as a catalyst for the liberation of 
human beings from illusion. Disenchantment aims at freedom, yet the 
processes by which this is to happen have, as I have intimated, a tendency 
to verge towards an authoritarian policing of the object of scrutiny. Every 
time the work of art threatens to become autonomous, the disenchanter 
extends the range of surveillance further into the world of that object. 
This might be written off as intellectual thoroughness, something which, 
in turn, could be argued to be an act oflove, the scholar's commitment to 



34 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

take the object completely on board. And I certainly would not wish to 
imply that we should discontinue investigating as far as we possibly can. 
This argument is not about the positing of some kind of sacred ground in 
which the interpreter's presence is a profanity. However, I do suggest that 
extending the boundaries of investigation may be instigated less by a quest 
for knowledge and more by a desire to eradicate the possibility that the 
work of art might have a private life that we cannot access. Disenchant­
ment may, in fact, be involved in a process of dehumanization. 

For the disenchanter, this latter proposition is a ludicrous one: since 
the work of art is not human, it cannot be dehumanized. However, the 
likelihood that the foundations beneath the disenchanter's confidence 
are more unstable than such breezy common-sense retorts communicate 
is suggested to us if we try to imagine how one might listen to a piece of 
music solely from a disenchanted perspective. There is, admittedly, some­
thing slightly cheap about making recourse to an empirical gambit in or­
der to clinch an argument at this late stage in the proceedings. Neverthe­
less, I propose that it takes a huge amount of effort to even begin to sus­
tain a cultural reading consistently throughout a listening. I place myself 
solidly in front of the music so that I can keep it view. Repeatedly, though, 
I find that I have forgotten that I am the subject and the music is my 
object; I keep finding myself already surrounded by the music's effect, the 
real presence of which I no longer even consider to question. I try to fix 
my aural gaze like a spotlight, yet it keeps blinking. (From this I do not 
suggest that we will always fall back by force of gravity to music's potentially 
transcendental status, as if it were a magnet of truth situated at the heart 
of all musical experience. The attempt to remain transfigured throughout 
a piece of music can just as easily be embarrassed by the intrusion of the 
music's historicity into our consciousness.) 

The more draconian of disenchanters might argue that it is our politi­
cal duty to continue endeavoring to overcome our tendency to blink; blink­
ing is merely a bad habit from the past that we have failed to properly 
unyoke ourselves of. Ethically, I think this is exceedingly problematic, as 
hopefully the remainder of this essay will help to elucidate. Nevertheless, 
it admits of the presence of a problem, and that is to be lauded on some 
level, for most acts of disenchantment quietly fail to mention blinking­
and this is something that leads them into murky political waters. If the 
aim of disenchanting is to show us what works of music really are when 
they are denuded of their illusory aesthetic aura, then these slippages ab­
solutely must be admitted, for they remain with us even after the process 
of disenchantment has been concluded. Disenchantment can only be con­
sidered ethical if its criteria of truth are sustained rigorously at all levels of 
the investigation. If these aspects of the music are suppressed, then those 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 35 

who disenchant are using concealed censorship to pass off illusions as truths 
in order to convince us that art is illusion. This implies that there is an 
agenda behind unmasking art as illusion that is not founded on empirical 
historical research that then forms the basis of political action. It suggests 
that disenchantment is driven to suppress the possibility of art's real pres­
ence out of fear of what its presence within debate might necessitate. This 
should make us very concerned as to what kind of freedom is being of­
fered to us by disenchantment, and not just because of the problems in­
volved when those who offer us freedom have to lie in order to do so. 

What is at stake here is not whether the transcendent actually exists, 
or whether we can assert that an aesthetic real presence is or is not. Such 
questions are nonsensical since they imply that empirical methods can be 
employed to account for things which, by definition, empiricism cannot 
account. Rather, it is to ask what is made possible when we accept that 
there will always be something that eludes our conceptualization, what­
ever it is we decide to call it: the transcendent, the beyond, the metaphysi­
cal, real presence, or even, in Lacanian terms, the real. I suggest that the 
presence of this surplus within our experience that escapes full under­
standing creates a kind of productive despair. We sense a gap between our 
attempts to grasp something and the elusive thing-in-itself, and as a result 
we strive harder to understand. It is this lack that helps us to expand our 
knowledge and to increase the sophistication of our thinking-this is per­
haps one of our most important inheritances from the Enlightenment. 
However, our quest for knowledge of our object will always be interrupted 
by that which is elusive about the object. This undermines the methodolo­
gies we have been using, cancels out the possibility of interpretive closure, 
and eventually leads to feelings offutility. Such, for example, is the narra­
tive underlying Romantic irony. 

There are two routes out of this situation. The first is to seek revenge 
on that which eludes, and it strikes me that this is one means of under­
standing disenchantment and the problems and contradictions with which 
it finds itself faced. Disenchantment attempts to banish despair by banish­
ing the surplus, thereby asserting that interpretive closure is indeed pos­
sible. As I have pointed out, in order to be politically effective, disenchant­
ment confidently asserts that what something actually "is" is something 
that can be established; any illusions that are held about an object can 
then be dismissed by a simple act of comparing them with "reality." How­
ever, this means that disenchantment takes revenge on the seeming irre­
futability or transcendence of the surplus by the creation of a methodol­
ogy that then lays claims to irrefutability-something it can do only be­
cause the surplus that would invalidate such claims has been silenced. Dis­
enchantment usurps the transcendent through the act of hubris of attempt-



36 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

ing to become transcendent itself; its posited irrefutability of fact is founded 
on the very terms of its implied object of criticism. 

The problem is that disenchantment's attempt to create a transcen­
dent critical method does not result from critical engagement with the 
notion of the surplus, but from the rhetorical force of mere assertion­
i.e., that the surplus is politically detrimental, since it lures us into a con­
stant yearning for something beyond the political realities of here and 
now-and from covert censorship, by simply pushing any evidence of the 
surplus under the carpet. There is something a little scandalous about 
this, but there is a deeper sadness at stake as well. For disenchantment 
strides into the world shining with what are indeed beautiful intentions: to 
relinquish us from despair and to make us free by showing us the world as 
it truly is. What it has to settle for, though, is a kind of Spartan set of exer­
cises in which anything that threatens the possibility of interpretive clo­
sure has to be ignored out of existence. As a result, all knowledge becomes 
a means to the system's ends rather than there being the possibility of 
knowledge as an end in itself. For those who choose to disenchant, this is 
hardly a form of liberation. At its most extreme it is a demand that they 
relinquish the full gamut of their perceptions to a system that repays by 
only serving itself, unable, as it is, to fulfill its promises. This is why in the 
academy we should be exceedingly suspicious of any kind of confidently 
self-righteous behavior that is expressed on a group level and in an auto­
matic fashion, as if its claims were self-evident. With regard to disenchant­
ment, such fervor is quite possibly a covert form of mourning: a sense of 
pleasure taken in the feeling gained from being in the moral right that 
attempts to compensate for, and therefore obfuscate, the delimitations on 
thinking and freedom that have been demanded of the participants as the 
price for entry into the system in the first place. 

The presence of the surplus is always ethically problematic, siren-like. 
Since it exists in a realm beyond what can be said about it, there is a sense 
that it is not really able to communicate with us properly. As a result, it 
never tells us how we are meant to relate to it, and this can lead to the 
feeling that we are perhaps being led into dangerous waters. Perhaps one 
way of interpreting the situation is to say that disenchantment cannot in­
terpret the undermining of interpretive acts that occurs when the surplus 
interrupts as anything other than disenchantment's own failure to be in 
the place where the surplus is. Tormented by the possibility of synthesis, 
disenchantment cannot rid itself of the thought that such transcendence 
might be possible. But this leads disenchantment into attempting to de­
fine itself by a paradox, something that it cannot do since the method­
ological foundation on which disenchantment defines itself in the first 
place is empirical. Finding its desires to be in conflict with its identity, 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 37 

disenchantment experiences failure, the masking of which results in it 
having to reject the surplus. In a sense, then, disenchantment dismisses 
the surplus not because it conceives it to be an illusion that acts for the 
production of other illusions that are detrimental to the possibilities of 
political action. Rather, disenchantment dismisses the surplus because it 
actually does believe it to be real. Disenchantment is fatally wounded by its 
own inability to see an alternative to absolute synthesis, and as a result 
confuses itself by trying to use empirical methods to understand that whose 
being is not empirically founded. 

But there is another route available, which is that when the surplus 
interrupts and undermines, the possibility of a self-regulating form of cri­
tique becomes conceivable, a critique that in being involved in understand­
ing the world is simultaneously involved in trying to understand itself when 
it is forced to acknowledge its own limitations. The perception of the pres­
ence of the transcendent in the world acts as a catalyst for the develop­
ment of our abilities to think, abilities that are allowed to continue devel­
oping indefinitely, since the presence of the transcendent inhibits the pos­
sibility of closure. However, the gap that will always exist between the limits 
to where we have thought something through and the place where the 
surplus seems to begin not only creates the desire within us to bridge that 
gap; leading us forward, it works at the same time to push us backwards. 
When thinking is forced to navigate this sea between the Scylla of despair 
and the Charybdis of hope, the temptation to wish oneself elsewhere is 
strong. Like Odysseus, we long to stand on our stable home ground, rather 
than being tossed about from place to place. However, as the preceding 
has hopefully shown, if we admit to the presence of the surplus, then the 
only way to bring that wish to fulfillment is to relinquish oneself to ideol­
ogy. One must willingly submit to an intellectual terrain policed by a poli­
tics of exclusion. This cannot be condoned, for it is a willful delimitation 
of our already unacceptably limited freedoms, a kind of self-annihilation 
whose only reward is a rather fragile sense of comfort. 

If we do decide to keep navigating these waters, then the only way to 
do so is to assert the following regulative principle: that the existence of a 
place where thought is not ideology is a possibility, but that our arrival 
there will only be made known to us at the very moment at which it hap­
pens. We must not confidently map out projects to bring us home to the 
shore of redemption. As a result, thinking in the world in which we live 
becomes part of a messianic experience of exile. The beauty of the world's 
face can smile at us at the same moment that the serpent bites; its appear­
ance can be devastated and simultaneously shot through with epiphanies 
of the Good. Things are and are also full of the expectation of their poten­
tial transformation into something else, they are on the verge of flight to 



38 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

salvation, yet vertiginous with fear, thin ice over the freezing black waters 
of the unredeemable. 

VII. 
In the name of consistency, and for fear of becoming ideology, this essay 
must now collapse, since the poetic flights of the last paragraph seem to 
suggest that the coast of home is now in sight. A number of questions must 
be placed between this essay's conclusion and the safety of harbor. Who 
are these disenchanters? And would it not have been best just to take an 
article and criticize the logic of its argument, to have shown by means of 
specific proof? Is this not just speculation? 

I may well have pointed the finger more directly, but what would that 
have achieved? At best, it would have made those readers sympathetic to 
my concerns comfortable in their sense of outrage: "look, there's one of 
them, those disenchanters." And such a "best" outcome, considering what 
I have been suggesting, would then have been the absolute worst of out­
comes-for it would run the risk of replicating the problem I have been 
critiquing. If disenchantment does happen anywhere and in any of the 
ways that I have suggested, one of its most harmful actions is its pretense, 
covert or casual, at being able to stand outside of the influence of its object 
of criticism and to assert what that object actually is in contrast to what it 
might be pretending to be, or what others might be pretending it is. As I 
have urged, this is harmful to the freedom both of the object itself and of 
the person who perceives the object in such a fashion. If we productively 
acknowledge the presence of the surplus in the world we come to realize 
that disenchantment's definitions are not about knowledge, for they de­
liberately silence the possibility that the object can become something else. 
Acknowledgement of the surplus is therefore an act that makes categoriza­
tion ethically loaded. Within the academy, if we think we can just point at 
someone and say in a pejorative fashion, "there is a disenchanter," we im­
mediately tend to contradict ourselves by disenchanting that person. They 
become dehumanized for they now no longer have any surplus available 
to them, that from which they might become something else. 

But there is another contradiction involved here, for if we point pejo­
ratively at the disenchanter we are inadvertently somehow defining our­
selves as beyond infection by disenchantment. And if this is the case then 
we are in fact eradicating the possibility that we come up against a surplus 
within ourselves. Like one of Rilke's angels, the surplus is "terrifying," for 
there is no guarantee what our object of contemplation will become when 
we try to extend our understanding beyond its limits and towards the am­
biguous promise that the surplus offers. By saying "this is a disenchanter" 
we imply that we could not become one ourselves. But if we fullyacknowl-



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 39 

edge the critical role of the surplus we cannot possibly comfort ourselves 
so easily. 

Nevertheless, if the naming of disenchanters involves us in the possi­
bility of becoming disenchanters ourselves, how are those we perceive as 
misdirected to be made accountable for their actions? Surely this argu­
ment against pointing the finger is really just a means of saying that we 
shouldjust all be nice. And that is completely unacceptable. The implied 
argument of those who openly critique seems to be that the public exer­
cise of critical interrogation is more important than the niceties of 
intersubjective address. And if forced to I would agree. But that such pub­
lic critique in the academy often spectacularly fails to be self-reflexive 
enough to critique without objectifying and ignoring the emotional reality 
of its addressee is likewise completely unacceptable. Any system that bra­
zenly sacrifices moment-to-moment practical ethics to a higher critical goal 
must make us very wary ofthe critical goal that is being offered. So who are 
these disenchanters? In varying degrees it is us in our professional roles 
confronting each other in the public sphere of debate. We have a predilec­
tion for "gazing" each other too easily into puppets. 

To point to a particular instance of disenchantment would be to dis­
tract from disenchantment's prevalence throughout the discipline. Disen­
chantment is a mode or tendency that our thoughts can unwittingly fall 
into in the process of our investigations; it has reared its head a number of 
times during the course of the essay you have just been reading. I have 
opted to construct a picture of it primarily through speculation, since it is 
consistent with my belief in the productive value of the surplus. To think 
beyond an empirical investigation of disenchantment suggests the possi­
bilities of what kinds of things disenchantment might become. These pos­
sibilities might not stand for what disenchantment is now, but they can 
work politically as warnings that we can use as our criticism strives towards 
a condition where it is no longer ideology. 

And Vitellia? She encapsulates the whole debate, for the interpretive 
problems she poses do not model, but are ethical problems concerning 
whether the other we address speaks autonomously or whether language 
merely speaks through it. So better the puppet? The answer is impossible 
for the question itself is subject to various becomings. Is art ideological 
stuff-its context, the history by which it has been formed-or is it like, as 
later on in Rilke's elegy, a puppet transfigured by an angel? 

am I not right 
to feel as if I must stay seated, must 
wait before the puppet stage, or rather, 
gaze so intensely that at last, 



40 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and 
make the stuffed skins startle into life. 
Angel and puppet: a real play, finally. 
Then what we separate by our very presence 
can come together. (Rilke 1982: 170)22 

It is not our business to answer these questions; it is our duty to live them. 

Notes 
* Earlier versions of the material in this essay were read as papers at the con­

ference "Feminist Theory and Music 6: Confluence and Divide," Boise State Uni­
versity, Boise, Idaho, July 6, 2001; at the lecture series "Music and Its Spheres," 
The Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York, N.Y, 
November 2001; and in the Department of Music, University of Washington, Se­
attle, Wash., February 2002. I am grateful for helpful remarks from Naomi Andre, 
Lydia Goehr, James Mirollo, Hilary Poriss, Elaine Sisman, Timothy Taylor, and 
John Tresch. 

1. "Nicht der. Genug! Und wenn er auch so leicht tut,! er ist verkleidet und 
er wird ein Burgeri und geht durch seine Kuche in die Wohnung./ Ich will nicht 
diese halbgefiillten Masken,! lieber die Puppe. Die ist voll. Ich willi den Balg 
aushalten und den Draht und ihrl Gesicht aus Aussehn. Hier. Ich bin davor.1 
Wenn auch die Lampen ausgehn, wenn mir auchl gesagt wird: Nichts mehr-, wenn 
auch von der Buhnel das Leere herkommt mit dem grauen Luftzug." This whole 
passage is influenced by Heinrich von Kleist's short essay-dialogue "On the Mari­
onette Theatre" (1810), a complete translation of which can be found in the Times 
Literary Supplement, October 20, 1978. 

2. "Wir kennen den Kontur I des Fuhlens nicht: nur, was ihn formt von auEen." 
3. For a more extended examination of this theme, see Rice (1995a). 
4. The following discussion draws on the following studies: Landon (1988:99-

100); Angermuller (1988:261-75); Rice (1991); Till (1992:258-69). 
5. In particular here, see Till (1992:258-69). 
6. In fact, in certain respects the seemingly progressive and Enlightened eigh­

teenth century witnessed something of decrease in the power available to women. 
For example, as Miriam Brody writes in the informative introduction to her edi­
tion ofWollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, "while the eighteenth 
century would be notable in calling for reform of female manners, the seven­
teenth-century woman, in spite of vilification by seventeenth-century puritanism 
and cavalier poets, was an active, productive member of the economic life of the 
community. The range of her activities was limited, but she had far more of the 
economic independence which Mary Wollstonecraft tried to reclaim for her sex a 
century later" (Wollstonecraft 1992:27). The best general introduction to the topic 
of Enlightenment thinking about gender that I have come across is Outram 
(1995:80-95) . 

7. The clearest explanation of how these features fit together is to be found in 
Cassirer (1951:234-74). 

8. For example, see Goldberg (1984). 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 41 

9. For example, see Schiebinger (1989:191-200; 1986:42-82). 
10. For further discussion of the importance placed on woman's role as mother 

during the Enlightenment, see Fauchery (1972) and Miller (1980). 
11. See also Arlette Farge (1993), which includes a list of the studies of this 

phenomenon. 
12. To take an analogous situation, Miriam Brody writes that although "a small 

receptive circle ofliberal reformers ... would welcome the Vindication with enthu­
siasm ... once concern grew over the association of English radicalism with the 
ideas of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's assault on established authority . 
... was greeted with predictable alarm and outrage" (Wollstonecraft 1992:41-42). 

13. Underlying this paper is a huge scholarly topic, one that can only be scantily 
mentioned here, but which is centered around a cluster of questions concerning 
when and how eighteenth-century audiences started to perceive on a regular basis 
that works of art were to be understood as believably real-if, in fact, an under­
standing of "realistic" in any sense that we might normatively use that term today 
is even applicable to the period. Jiirgen Habermas, for example, talks about this 
phenomenon in relation to the novel and contemporary drama, and therefore to 
the important eighteenth-century idea of sentimentality: "The reality as illusion 
that the [novel] created received its proper name in English, 'fiction': it shed the 
character of the merely fictitious. The psychological novel fashioned for the first 
time the kind of realism that allowed anyone to enter into the literary action as a 
substitute for his own, to use the relationships between the figures, between the 
author, the characters, and the reader as substitute relationships for reality. The 
contemporary drama too became fiction no differently than the novel through 
the introduction of the 'fourth wall'" (Habermas 1991:50). Michael Fried (1980) 
has discussed the issue with regard to eighteenth-century French painting, and 
obviously these considerations are an important part of any understanding oflate 
eighteenth-century sentimental operas such as Paisiello's Nina of 1786 (for ex­
ample, see Castelvecchi 1996). The problem with regard to La clemenza di Tito, 
though, is that in the eighteenth century the forms that absorbed audiences' at­
tention and led to the perception of aesthetic illusion as real were often associated 
with art that reflected an image of bourgeois life back to emergent bourgeois 
audiences, not with the more ritualistic, authoritarian, and aristocratic subject 
matter of opera seria-a genre not necessarily reliant on such sustained suspen­
sion of disbelief (Feldman 1995:29-30). Admittedly, Mozart's remarks about 
Idomeneo show that he was as concerned with questions of verisimilitude pertain­
ing to opera seria as to opera buffa. For example, as he states about the voice of 
the Oracle in the often-cited letter of November 29, 1780: "Imagine the theatre 
before your eyes, the voice must be terrifYing, it must penetrate; people must 
believe it is real" (quoted in Heartz 1990b:29, n. 23). The relationship between La 
clemenza and more "realistic," bourgeois trends, though, warrants much further 
consideration. As a starting point, one might consider Daniel Heartz's observa­
tions on the possible influence of Paisiello's Nina on La clemenza, particularly the 
relationships between Nina's famous first aria, "11 mio ben," and Vitellia's "Non 
piu di fiori" (Heartz 1990a:311-1 7). 

14. Numbers used refer to the Mozart Neue Ausgabe siimtliche Werke 11/5/20. 
The following discussion is based around an hermeneutic interpretation of how 



42 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY 

the sounding forms of this last section of the opera create a sense of the 
constructedness of the character Vitellia. Nevertheless, there exists an interesting 
resonance between my observations and what we know of the history of the com­
position of "Non pili di fiori." Alan Tyson's examination of the paper types sug­
gests that this rondo was composed in two stages: the opening larghetto was writ­
ten shortly before the first performance, but the concluding allegro preexisted 
Mozart commencing work on La clemenza di Tito (Tyson 1987:48-60). In a certain 
sense, "Non pili di fiori" is something of a compositional mishmash and, there­
fore, already runs the risk of being unable to transcend the materials from which 
it is made, of being unable to prove that, as the venerable dictum goes, ars est celare 
artem (art is to conceal art). Of course, this point might be of minimal value, for 
there is no necessary reason why this aspect of this rondo's compositional process 
should have been perceptible to a late eighteenth-century audience. To assume 
that it would have been would be to impose an anachronistic aesthetic of the 
unified work onto a genre, opera seria, where, although such things were begin­
ning to emerge, aria substitution and the primacy of performance over work had 
been, and continued for some time to be, the norm (see, for example, Poriss 
2001; Brown 1992; Freeman 1992; Hunter 1989; Rosselli 1984; Strohm 1980). 
However, asJohn A. Rice has pointed out, the compositional history of the music 
means that Mozart composed the allegro section of this rondo with no knowledge 
of the singer who would eventually perform the role of Vitelli a at the first perfor­
mance, Maria Marchetti Fantozzi. Rice's analysis of the kinds of musics associated 
with her voice thus suggests that certain passages in La clemenza would have been 
very awkward for her to sing, and this may in turn have drawn attention to the 
sense of constructedness that I talk about (Rice 1995b). 

15. The text of Servilia's aria is as follows: S'altro che lacrime/ Per lui non 
tenti,! Tutto il tuo piangere/ Non gioveriV A questa inutile/ Pieti che senti,! Oh 
quanto e simile/ La crudelta./ S'altro che lacrime, etc. (parte) [If you do nothing 
for him but shed tears, all your weeping will be of no avail. Oh, how like to cruelty 
is this useless pity that you feel. If you do nothing for him, etc. (exit) J. 

16. The text of this chorus is as follows: Che del ciel, che degli Dei! Tu il 
pensier, l'amour tu sei,! Grand'Eroe, nel giro angusto/ Si mostro di questo di/ 
Ma, cagion di maraviglia/ Non e gia, felice Augusto,! Che gli Dei chi lor somiglia, 
Custodiscano/ COS! [That you are the care, the darling of heaven and of the gods, 
great hero, has been shown in the brief course of this day. But there is no cause for 
wonder, fortunate Augustus, that the gods thus watch over one so like themJ. 

17. The famous statement is found in Winckelmann's Gedanken iiber die 
Nachahmung der greischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the 
Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks). For information on the dance types em­
ployed in the opera, see Schwartz (1991), and for a brief discussion of the use of 
the minuet topic, pp. 757-58. For further information about the use and meaning 
of the minuet in late eighteenth-century music, see Ratner (1980:9-11) and 
Allanbrook (1984). 

18. The association of Handel with the eighteenth-century discourse regard­
ing the sublime was already in position during Handel's lifetime (Schapiro 1993; 
Johnson 1985-86), and continued on into the late eighteenth century and be­
yond (Wolff 1984; Finscher 1990; Weber 1981-82). 



JAMES ROBERT CURRIE 43 

19. My interpretation of the opening entry of the chorus as an awe-inspired 
exclamation is given some weight by the fact that the start of the chorus's second 
phrase-beginning in m. 21 with the words "rna, cagion di maraviglia" and set to 
essentially the same musical gesture as the opening of the first phrase-begins 
solidly at the beginning of the measure. More accustomed to their environment, 
the chorus is no longer so stunned; to repeat the gesture would merely be to 
unmask their initial reaction as unauthentic and unpleasantly performative. 

20. See, for example, Heartz (l990a) and Rice (1995a). 
21. At the first presentation of the theme (mm. 56ff.) there is, in fact, an 

ambiguity as to what the theme refers, since it is played on the basset horn first 
and only then expressively "grounded" by being sung to the words "Chi vedesse il 
mio dolore." Initially, the theme might be thought of as an answer to the question 
posed in the preceding line of the text: "Ah, di me che si did?" ("Ah, what will be 
said of me?"). What people will say about Vitellia will be crudely unsympathetic; 
she will be turned into a comical object of derision. This would seem to be what 
the melody "means." Thus, in this sense the melody is the sonic analogy of the 
caricature that others might make of her. 

22. "wenn mir zumut ist,/ zu warten vor der Puppenbiihne, nein,/ so vollig 
hinzuschauen, daB, urn me in Schauen/ am Ende aufzuwiegen, dort als Spieler / 
ein Engel hinmuB, der die Bilge hochreiBt./ Engel und Puppe: dann ist endlich 
Schauspiel./ Dann kommt zusammen, was wir immerfort/ entzwein, indem wir 
da sind." 

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