“The Specter of Drama in the Specter of Another Drama”: The Anamorphosis of the Singspiel and the Palimpsest Effect in Aspern by Salvatore Sciarrino

Abstract

The article explores the early opera by Salvatore Sciarrino, based on Henry James’s novelette The Aspern Papers. Sciarrino’s Aspern has aroused considerable interest both in the aspect of the transposition of James’s prose into the musical sphere, and in terms of the formation of the poetics of musical theater and the principles of the composer’s dramatic thinking. The experimental character of the singspiel (in the author’s definition) was stipulated by the idea of representation as an act of composition. Rejecting the traditional format, Sciarrino and his co-author of the libretto Giorgio Marini created an intertextual connection between the novelette and the opera, having turned the reading of the text into an element of dramaturgy, along with other components — the singing, the music and the stage decorations. The protagonists of the story (the Narrator, Giuliana, Titta) dissolved in the recitations of various actors. The arias based on the texts of Lorenzo da Ponte from Le Nozze de Figaro, performed by one single singing protagonist, the Female Singer, offstage, created an ironic estrangement on the scenic (between the dramatic performance in spoken dialogues and the music) and the stylistic levels (between da Ponte’s text and Sciarrino’s music). The special optics of artistic imagination established this way, making it possible to view the one through the other, helped the “ghost” of Mozart, the musical equivalent of the “divine Aspern,” appear. Mozart’s “disturbing presence” also explains the unexpected genre-related definition given by the composer to his work. The singspiel becomes an object of anamorphosis, in which elements of the genre projected from the past acquire a strange oneiric form in the present.

Reflecting on Sciarrino’s invitation to search for “music in the music and drama in the drama” in Aspern, the author of the article reveals the connections between the Italian maestro’s opera and Piotr Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, set up by the palimpsest effect hidden in James’ original text. An important connecting link between the two operas is the figure of Mozart as the ideal of “the Composer”, who had managed to absorb and transform the traditions of different eras and national schools of composition. In this light, Sciarrino’s Aspern becomes a musical metaphor of the search for and the finding of oneself in the “traces” of others.

Keywords: Salvatore Sciarrino, Henry James, Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, singspiel, palimpsest, anamorphosis