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     BOOK REVIEW
   
Tereza Havelková. Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-Making, Immediacy, and the Politics of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 186 pp. ISBN 9780190091262 (hardback).

        

    Bianca De Mario
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 211–218, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Bianca De Mario. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16655.




    Conceptualizing opera today means not only to engage with a complex texture
    of arts and media, but also to look into the contributions offered by
    several approaches to the genre, from those inherited by performance and
    media theory, to the ones fostered by voice and sound studies, without
forgetting contemporary art and film studies. Tereza Havelková’s    Opera as Hypermedium moves exactly in this direction, challenging
    several theoretical frameworks emerging from the controversial debate
    around opera and media. Her discussion is driven by the underlying question
    about the politics of representation and perception, which opera performs
    within the current audiovisual culture dominated by digital technologies.



    Bolter and Grusin’s concept of hypermediacy—i.e., the logic that makes us
    aware of mediation and reminds us “of our desire for immediacy”
    
        [1]
    
    —is the starting point for an approach to opera as audiovisual event, on
    both stage and screen. Rather than a text or a work, opera is here
    considered as a theoretical object which can “‘think’ or ‘theorize’ in
    [its] own right and by [its] own means” (23). In this sense, the aim of
    this book is “to chart the theoretical terrain of opera as hypermedium”
    (23), highlighting the effects of immediacy it produces and the political
    potential of its hypermediacy.



    The case studies at the core of Havelková’s exploration are two operas by
    Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and British director and screenwriter Peter
    Greenaway, works which were both staged for the first time in Amsterdam,
    “openly hypermedial” and “directly linked to the conception of
    intermediality in theatre and performance” (18). Rosa (1994) is an
    investigation into the murder of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a fictitious composer
    of music for Western films whose love for his horse is deeper than the
    affection for his fiancée Esmeralda. Writing to Vermeer (1999) is
    built around a series of eighteen letters written by three women—the
    artist’s wife, his mother-in-law, and an imaginary model—to the painter
    (who never appears on stage) during the spring of 1672, also known in Dutch
    history as the Rampjaar (Disaster Year). While Rosa
    thematizes the use of film music on stage through the figure of the
    Argentinian composer, Writing to Vermeer projects, deconstructs,
    and reenacts Vermeer’s art. Both combine stage action and live singing with
    sound technology—audible amplification in the former case, and electronic
    inserts by Michel van der Aa in the latter.



    Before tackling the core of the discussion, the author clarifies how the
    issues at stake concern opera and contemporary staging by comparing two
    productions of Wagner’s Ring: Robert Lepage’s at the Met (2010–12)
    and La Fura dels Baus’s in Valencia (2007–09). In particular, the opening
    scene of Das Rheingold works as a mean to measure the relationship
    between technology and the human body: in Lepage’s production, technology
    functions as role characterization, beautifying the bodies which are in
    control of it, while the visual interpretation of Wagner’s music is
    “straightforward” (5) and transparent; conversely, La Fura depicts this
    relation as “precarious” (5), introducing multiple “layers of signification
    that may be immediately decipherable to the audience” (5).



    These examples outline a solid overview of the theoretical debate which
    involves, on one hand, Greg Giesekam’s notion of “multimedial/intermedial”
    performances,
    
        [2]
    
    and on the other hand the relationship between illusionism and media
    transparency as discussed by Gundula Kreuzer and Nicholas Ridout.
    
        [3]
    
    In this regard, the audio-viewers’ sensory engagement is one of the main
    characteristics of contemporary audiovisuality, as explained by John
    Richardson and Claudia Gorbman.
    
        [4]
    
    It is in this cultural frame that Havelková’s concept of opera as
    hypermedium acts as part of the performative and material turns in opera
    studies and their related debates, of which she offers a survey of the
major figures and theories. Moreover, feelings usually described aspresence, absorption, immersion, and    liveness are experienced not only through live performances, but
    also through opera on screen—the hypermedial transpositions that
    Christopher Morris defines as “‘videoistic’ productions.”
    
        [5]
    
    The author is here interested in how such effects are produced in a
    multimedia context, but—due to the importance of a “continuity between
    contemporary operatic practices and various aspects of the operatic past”
    (23)—her understanding of opera as hypermedium differs from notions such as
    “digital opera” and “postopera” (which imply a clear distinction with the
    previous tradition).
    
        [6]
    



    Another reference for Havelková is the work of cultural theorist Mieke Bal,
    from which she takes the notion of “preposterous history” to elaborate on
    opera’s afterwardness (“how opera as hypermedium is (re)though[t] in and for
    the present,” 24).
    
        [7]
    
    The use of speech-act theory for the analysis of multimedia—following Bal,
    but also Maaike Bleeker—represents a turning point in discussing “the role
    of temporality in shaping the relationship between an audiovisual event and
    its audio-viewers” (25). Moreover, “at stake in this theorization is the
    problem of how to formulate theoretical and artistic alternatives to a
    regime of representation that one is always already entangled in” (29).
    Thus, reconfiguring the relationship between perceiver and perceived
    constitutes a challenging part of the study of opera as hypermedium.



    Rosa
    ’s two subtitles—A Horse Drama for the theatrical productions
    (1994, 1998); The Death of a Composer for both the screen version
    (1999) and the audio recording (2000)—is a glimpse into the issue,
    highlighted by Greenaway and Andriessen’s work, at the core of chapter
    1—i.e., the desire for knowledge. The reflection around Rosa
    explores two features which hypermedial opera commonly deploys: “Allegory
    and Excess” (38-68). Albeit at odds with opera’s narrative and alleged
    meanings, the excess of the operatic experience (mainly produced by “the
    physical, material effects of the singing voice,” 35) is approached here as
    the result of “a dialogic situation of meaning-making” (35). Following
    Craig Owen’s work on allegory and postmodernism, Havelková argues that
    allegory “complicates the reading of the opera’s signs” (39).
    
        [8]
    
    Shoshana Felman’s analysis of J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity is
    then key to understanding the search for knowledge that, in Rosa,
    is pursued in a seductive way through the character of The Investigatrix—a
    dominatrix/seductress, whom the audio-viewers had already seen, first as
    Madame de Vries, advocating for the unveiling of the truth, then as The
    Texan Whore.
    
        [9]
    
    To shed light on the working of allegory, the study examines the striking
    scene in which an already-dead Rosa sings in falsetto. Crucified, the
    protagonist sits on his horse, whose corpse is stuffed with Esmeralda and
    the money earned by the composer throughout his life. All the visual and
    aural ambiguities triggered by the scene are an allegory of the opera’s
    “unreadability” (59), and the whole theatrical frame becomes a part of the
    dramatic illusion. By treating opera allegorically, Rosa makes the
    stage a “crime scene of opera itself” (60): a dead object whose
    mortification is the condition of possibility for its rebirth, a “rescue
    from … oblivion,” in Owens’s words.
    
        [10]
    
    Participating in the allegorical structure and in the process of
    meaning-making, voice becomes the vehicle of redemptive power. Its symbolic
    unity of sign and referent (in contrast to the “body–voice gap” identified
    by Novak)
    
        [11]
    
    operates beyond both music and libretto, as an “effect of immediacy” (63).



    Rosa
    proves also useful for an in-depth analysis of the concepts of perspective,
    focalization, theatricality, and absorption. Chapter 2 draws also on
    narratology to test how hypermedial opera “positions its audio-viewers
    toward what there is to be seen and heard on stage or screen” (71). After
    Bleeker (and Hans-Thies Lehmann), Havelková explains how postdramatic
    theater offers a multiplication of perspectives which, while seemingly
    bringing attention to the act of framing, it paradoxically produces “an
    effect equal to the absence of frames” (70).
    
        [12]
    
Perspective is still at work, though it has become obscured. In    Rosa, it represents the principle that organizes the physical and
    virtual space: Madame de Vries, who is named after a Dutch specialist in
    perspective, is the “internal focalizor” (80) bringing the audio-viewers’
    attention to the agency behind the multiplicity of media—her Brechtian
    beginning being “Let me describe the stage.” Using Gorbman’s notion of
    “point of experience” to identify the position mediating perceiver and
    perceived, this section of the book shows how in Rosa the
    positioning acts “may become obscured” (71).
    
        [13]
    



    Absorption, following Michael Fried’s definition of it as “a strategy to
    obliterate the relationship between the observer and a work of art” (75),
    
        [14]
    
    the “supreme fiction” used to “persuade the beholder of its truthfulness”
    (76), is here also considered as the result of the interaction between a
    work of art and a specific viewer, both historically and culturally
    determined. Rosa deliberately invites to step inside the drama
    (“We are to leave the opera house and go to the cinema”): a warning of
    absorption. Music is the mean that enables “the transition from the
    theatrical frame to the inner drama” (83): on the one hand, music
    (primarily derived from Andriessen’s previous work, Hout) that
    “run[s] its course” (84) from a small motif into a steady rhythm full of
    tension and alertness; on the other, the music of the inner drama, vocal
    and melodic, is mostly made of quotations from classical and film music
    (especially Hollywood Westerns). This continuous split between the two
    dimensions threatens the absorption dynamic, while “the open theatricality
    of the descriptions and enumerations constantly reminds us of our ‘desire
    for immediacy’” (86).
    
        [15]
    
    The analysis of Rosa’s and Esmeralda’s arias, the former becoming a
    soundtrack for the cinematic projections offered to the audience, the
    latter being traditionally operatic and deeply intimate, demonstrates how
    the position suggested by the music depends on the actual audio-viewer’s
    freedom to choose among a multiplicity of positions.



    In chapter 3 (“Liveness and Mediatization. (De)constructing Dichotomies”),
    Andriessen’s and Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer prompts a
    discussion on how liveness is constructed “as an effect of immediacy within
    the overall context of hypermediacy” (31). The scenes from the domestic
    life of Vermeer’s women are visual and sonic theatrical “windows” enlivened
    by Andriessen’s live music and singing; the historical events of the
    outside world are represented instead by projections and by van der Aa’s
    electronic inserts. By drawing on classic writing on film sound, Havelková
    demonstrates how oppositions such as original vs. copy, presence vs.
    representation—allegedly “dismantled in theory” (36)—are instead productive
    as analytical tools. In this analysis, James Lastra’s notion of the effect
    of sound recording as an “‘original’ independent of its representation,”
    
        [16]
    
    and Jonathan Burston’s idea of “quasi-live aesthetics” as a symptom of
    standardization of live theater,
    
        [17]
    
    contribute to identify liveness with a theatrical experience where a
    “shared acoustic space” and a “perceived unity of the singing voice and the
    performing body” (106) coexist:



    It is crucially the singing voice (and the operatic music) that foregrounds
    the performing bodies. As long as the performers sing and dance, they
    elicit a theatrical mode of audiovision. The women on stage appear as
    incarnations of the women from the paintings; they give them both bodies
    and voices (111).



    The relationship between sound and source is here reconfigured with respect
    to gender. Mary Ann Doane’s theorization of the masquerade in narrative
    cinema—according to which masking allows women to attain distance from
    their image and to reconfigure the relationship with its female
    spectator—is key to understanding the relationships among the women on
    stage and the projections of Vermeer’s paintings they represent. In this
    sense, Writing to Vermeer reveals a sense of “nostalgia for the
    live within the economy of reproduction” (125).



    The starting point of the book’s fourth and last chapter is a comparison
    between Bolter and Grusin’s critique of hypermediacy and Laura Marks’s
    concept of “haptic visuality” as a mode of perception and fruition that
    encourages a bodily, intersubjective experience of art.
    
        [18]
    
    Several scenes in Rosa’s screen version (for instance, when
    Esmeralda is stripped naked) and Writing to Vermeer (e.g., the
    killing of the De Witt brothers marked by evocative sounds) demonstrate how
    “hypermediacy elicits an embodied, multisensory mode of perception” (36).
    The author refers here to Susan Buck-Morss’s discussion of Walter
    Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay, exploring the twin systems of “(syn)aesthetics
    and anaesthetics” (133). While the former is a physiological connection
    between the external sense-perceptions and “the internal images of memory
    and anticipation” (134), the latter is its technical manipulation of
    environmental stimuli called phantasmagoria, “anaesthetizing the organism …
    through flooding the senses” and altering consciousness (135).
    
        [19]
    
    The social control produced by these dynamics in the second half of the
    nineteenth century is what prompted Benjamin’s famous call for
    “politicizing art.”
    
        [20]
    



    Not by chance, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a common reference
    both in Bolter and Grusin’s notion of hypermediacy and in Buck-Morss’s
    account of phantasmagoria, opened Havelkova’s enquiry. This convergence is
    a signal that “modes of perception … may not be as divergent as they seem”
(150); also, as foreseen by Theodor W. Adorno, the notion of    Gesamtkunstwerk highlights the immediacy of hypermediacy in a
    particularly effective way.
    
        [21]
    
    It is thus significant that the “excess of media and … stimuli” offered by
    hypermediacy, with its sensory impact, can be compared to the legacy of the
    Wagnerian model (152). In this sense, music works as a powerful tool for
    “managing attention” against a general background of distraction (153).



As Havelková argues towards the end of the chapter, “new forms of the    Gesamtkunstwerk are being devised” (161) in the digital age;
    still, the tools offered by theorists such as Benjamin or Adorno prove
    productive in identifying mechanisms of remediation. In the Conclusion, the
    author focuses on the fact that operas as cultural objects tend to resist
    theorization “while inviting, illuminating, and modifying others. …
    Understanding the operas as being in dialogue with the theorizations of
    scholarship involves concentrating on what they do rather than what they
    say” (164).



    Though Havelková’s full immersion in theory, with its constant chain of
    references, runs the occasional risk of putting the reader’s attention
    under some strain, the premises and argumentation are explicit and never
disorienting. Without labelling contemporary genres and practices,    Opera as Hypermedium is a book whose strength lies not only in its
    focus on Northern European scholarship and artistic production—often
    regrettably overlooked—but also in a constant effort to create continuity
    between present and past, both in theoretical and practical terms. By
    questioning important notions commonly accepted in current theories on
    opera and media, Tereza Havelková suggests a way to analyze contemporary
    productions through the multiple lenses offered by different research
    fields, and her meticulous testing and mapping of theory over performance
    takes stock of a problematic state of the art. How to approach a series of
    operatic practices that are hard to confine under one suitable category?
    (Digital opera? Postopera? Hypermedial opera?) How to overcome the deadlock
    of trite prejudices and tired preconceptions, while holding them as still
    essential for the interpretation of such a loaded cultural phenomenon?
    Understanding opera as a hypermedial object may prove to offer an
    all-encompassing analysis while at the same time provide a way out of such
    an impasse. It might be a tortuous path, but one that certainly will be
    useful to better understand the nature of the genre which, far from being
    dead and buried, is constantly changing and reinventing itself, challenging
    all sorts of media to reach its audiences and produce meaning.



    

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin,            Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
            Press, 1999), 34.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
See Greg Giesekam,            Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre
            (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8–9.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            See Gundula Kreuzer,
            
                Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of
                Nineteenth-Century Opera
            
            (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Nicholas
Ridout, “Opera and the Technologies of Theatrical Production,” in            The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas
            Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
            159–76.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, “Introduction,” in            The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed.
            John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (New York:
            Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–35.
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
Christopher Morris, “Digital Diva: Opera on Video,”            Opera Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2010): 111.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            The reference is to Áine Sheil and Craig Vear, “Digital Opera, New
            Means and New Meanings: An Introduction in Two Voices,”
            
                International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
            
8, no.1 (2012): 3–9; and Jelena Novak,            Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (Farnham: Ashgate,
            2015).
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
Mieke Bal,            Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History
            (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            See Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of
Postmodernism,” in            Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian
            Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 203–35.
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            The reference is to Shoshana Felman,
            
                The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin or
                Seduction in Two Languages
            
            , trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
            2003).
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
            Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 203.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
            Novak, Postopera, 7.
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
The reference is to Maaike Bleeker,            Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Hans-Thies Lehmann,            Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London:
            Routledge, 2006).
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
The reference is to Claudia Gorbman,            Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington:
            Indiana University Press, 1987).
        

    

    
        
            
                [14]
            
            See Michael Fried,
            
                Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age
                of Diderot
            
            (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 66, 71.
        

    

    
        
            
                [15]
            
            The reference is to Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 34.
        

    

    
        
            
                [16]
            
James Lastra, “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in            Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York:
            Routledge, 1992), 70.
        

    

    
        
            
                [17]
            
            Jonathan Burston, “Theatre Space as Virtual Place: Audio
Technology, the Reconfigured Singing Body, and the Megamusical,”            Popular Music 17, no. 2 (1998): 208.
        

    

    
        
            
                [18]
            
See Laura U. Marks,            Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
            (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
        

    

    
        
            
                [19]
            
            See Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter
            Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992):
            3–41.
        

    

    
        
            
                [20]
            
            Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
            Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.
            Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242.
        

    

    
        
            
                [21]
            
            See Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney
            Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), esp. ch. 6 “Phantasmagoria.”
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




                

                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
