Prompting Voice in Opera

Prompting Voice in Opera

n michal grover-friedlandertel aviv university

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Prompting in Opera Is Unlike Prompting in Theater

In English, he prompts; in French, the word used is souffleur, from souffle,meaning breath; in Italian, a prompter is a suggeritore, from the verb to suggest;in Hebrew, the term is derived from the word whisper, lachash: a prompter is awhisperer.1 A whisperer (like a horse whisperer) has special talents for taming andcontrolling animals. This has been expanded, in pop culture, to include theso-called ghost whisperer, referring to someone who can understand nonlinguis-tic communication incomprehensible to others. A whisperer can make an animalbehave, or he can transport otherworldly messages.2 One can ask whether such adimension exists in an operatic whisperer—whether a prompter controls thesingers, has power over them, whether he mediates the performance. Does whattranspires on stage call for the exceptional talent of a whisperer? Here I willtouch on some of these evocative facets of the prompter but only as they bear onmy topic: the prompter’s vocal dimension. My article considers the nature of theoperatic prompter’s voice.

In opera, the prompter’s voice spans a range and at times he or she sings.The orchestra forms an invisible barrier between stage and audience, whichenables the prompter to sing loud enough to be heard onstage over the orchestra,yet not so loud that he remains inaudible offstage. What kind of singing does heperform? The prompter cannot deliver a “whispered song” unless his techniqueconstitutes in itself an unknown form of projection or mysterious skill. The voiceis obviously not mute, as the singers do not lip-read; nor is it a full-fledged oper-atic voice.

In the Norwegian film The Prompter (Suffløsen, directed by Hilde Heier, from1999), a prompter is asked whether she is a prompter because she whispers orvice versa. Throughout the film she is preoccupied with how loud she prompts,and is accused of whispering, shouting, and singing. Indeed, a prompter sings ina voice unlike other sung voices on stage; she does not posses a singer’s voice; infact she sings without possessing a singing voice.

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 460–480; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbs033Advance Access publication on April 24, 2012© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

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I offer to deal with the prompter in opera synchronically, not in terms of anyhistorical period, geographical location, or specific institution. There exists arange of functions and modes of operation. A prompter provides singers with theopening words of a phrase or with all the words for all their phrases, from thecueing of a word and a single pitch to the delivery of an entire soundtrack—voicing words and singing the entire opera seconds in advance of the audible per-formance. A prompter signals problems in intonation, beats time, providesrhythms, cues stage directions, and conducts. (At the beginning of the century,and in Italy to this day, the prompter served as a private singer’s conductor andalso conducted instrumentalists placed onstage. He would also monitor the audi-ence’s view of the performers and the applause received through his control overthe curtain.)3 A prompter makes clicking or other unvoiced sounds (not pickedup by broadcast microphones) to draw the singers’ attention.4 Prompting encom-passes all aspects of a performance and takes place for its entire duration (inBayreuth, several prompters may be positioned onstage, hidden behind scenerythroughout the entire space of the stage).5 What is interesting about the operaticprompter is not so much his unique constitution as a presence among the audi-ence, director, stage manager, orchestra, conductor, and the singers, and not somuch his being composed from all these functions, as though embodying apartial performance. Rather, what is exceptional in operatic prompting is that it isextreme: it is textual, musical, and directorial. The prompter is an all-encompass-ing presence, unlike and indeed in stark contrast to the prompter in spoken-drama theater, who aids actors who have forgotten their lines. Compared to its rolein the theater, prompting in opera is radical.

In this all-encompassing prompting matrix, what then can be said of the voiceof the operatic prompter? Volume and timing are its functional attributes.Timbre, quality, delivery, stylization, artificiality, projection, and color are not. Putdifferently, the prompter’s voice is ugly: it is a foreign voice, unimportant in allways that matter in opera; his is an opera singer’s other voice, a shadowed voice.To be sure, one aspect always lies beyond the prompter’s capabilities and is cate-gorically out of his control: he will never possess the qualities, the sound of anoperatic voice; he will never sing with that kind of voice when prompting. Inother words, the prompter will never prompt the singer with the type of voicethat the singer will then return back.

This notion of the prompter’s unvoiced voice is toyed with in Heier’s afore-mentioned film The Prompter, by way of an indulgence in the pleasure of prompt-ing. The prompter’s cues are provided not only in advance of singing but alsosimultaneously with it or even quite absurdly after it, as if it were superfluous ora mere simile of prompting, or indeed as if it were an imitation or mirror imageof what had already been sung—as if, that is, the cues themselves were beingprompted. The climax of the film is a collapse of the prompter’s “box” into the

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“stage”: during the performance, the prompter, singing, climbs out of her boxand takes her place onstage as the singer in the act of singing.

Indeed, a fallen singer might end up in a prompter’s box.6 Prompting mightbe a destiny befalling a singer who can no longer sing. In that case, the prompteris a singer who has lost her voice. Whereas a singer might descend into the box,an actor might climb out of it. In eighteenth-century British theater, a prompter(serving as well as stage manager and accountant) was also trained as an actorand performed as a general understudy for absent actors.7 According to the pam-phlet The Present State of the Stage in Great-Britain and Ireland by an unknownauthor (written before 1760):

Mr. Cross the Prompter should not be passed unnoticed, since he very oftenbehind the Curtain supports the Performer in conveying to us the Pleasure weenjoy, by supplying in proper Time the Defects of treacherous Memory: No Manunderstands better the Business of the Stage, and from a long Acquaintance withall the Pieces that have been play’d for some years past, he is perfect in a Numberof Characters, and can at an Hour’s Warning, fill up a Chasm caused by thesudden Sickness, or any other unexpected Accident befalling a Performer.8

Prompting thus prepared one for onstage roles. Trained as an actor, a prompterwould memorize the entire play and could indeed execute it on demand. Theprompter as super actor, an überactor: on the spur of the moment, he could standin for any actor, assume any role, as if potentially he were all the characters. Itseems that in theater the prompter’s role entails a capacity to act and a notion ofacting, while in opera it entails an inability to sing, the absence of voice, its loss.

Figures 1–4 The climax of the film The Prompter: A collapse of the prompter’s “box”into the “stage.” During the performance, the prompter, singing, climbs out of her boxand takes her place onstage as the singer in the act of singing.


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Fantasies of Promptability

The fantasy of having total control via prompting over voice can be realized in acartoon world. In the Warner Brothers cartoon Long-Haired Hare (1949) prompt-ing is given such power so as to seek to control everything in the voice—and alsoto move material objects and perform feats of “magic.” The result of such afantasy is the exhaustion and death of the voice.

In Long-Haired Hare a conductor/prompter/composer overcues an operasinger to death. Visually, using no sound whatsoever, pitch, rhythm, and breath—absurdly the wrong parameters—are prompted, determining, nay composing, whatis sung.9 During an opera singer’s concert, Bugs Bunny takes control of thevoice. The singer’s performance becomes the sole outcome of and trigger forBugs’s doings. Bugs flicks and hammers the concert hall’s roof, causing it tovibrate and disrupt the singer’s vibrato. The singer’s entire body vibrates uncon-trollably in sympathy with the building’s vibrations, like a chord that vibrateswithout producing any sound. Bugs then sprays the singer’s throat with a liquid,causing his voice to shrink, squeak, and jump in pitch. This is synched with theshrinking of the singer’s head, which diminishes until it disappears into hiscollar, resulting again in the silencing of singing. The visual mirror the voice,serving as its exhibitionistic expression.

Next, Bugs takes over as conductor. The perfect synchronization of thesinging voice with the conductor’s instructions brings about the destruction ofthe voice. The cartoon plays on the visuality of conducting—on how the motionof a stick produces and controls the acoustic outcome, the musical interpretation.Conducting, already entailing a strange relationship between the visual and theacoustic, is here piled atop the cartoon’s modes of inventing unbelievable sights.The rabbit’s conducting is outrageously absurd: a signal from him instantly stopsthe audience’s clapping; the command and result are flawlessly coordinated. Hisgestures both overpower and mirror the acoustic outcome. He determines pitchand duration, thus composing the singer’s vocalise. Before signaling the highnote, Bugs the conductor prepares himself—cracks his knuckles, winds up hisfists—as if the work of singing were mirrored in the effort to conduct it. We seethe unbelievable, impossibly long-held note figured in the conducting gestureand in the singer’s body.

The cartoon culminates in a wonderful scene in which Bugs leaves his glovehovering in the air as he exits the hall (to put on earmuffs to block outthe singer’s voice). All the while the singer holds the note in obedience to thefloating, handless glove. The unbearably long-held note eventually causes thehall to shatter and tumble down on top of the singer. One last cue from Bugs,and a stone still hovering in suspension falls and kills the singer. Singing iseradicated.


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Figures 5–7 Warner Brothers’ opera cartoon Long-Haired Hare: Bugs Bunny as aconductor/prompter/composer overcues an opera singer to death.


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Hyperperfect visual-acoustic prompting composes this ruin of the vocal. Theperfect match between the visual and the vocal, the visualization of the voice isboth funny and deadly. It is not that a prompter has successfully acquired thevoice of opera. Rather, it is mute prompting that determines each and everybreath of the singer and all of his emitted sounds, fixing their pitch, volume, andduration. The conflation of an absurd form of conducting and a no less absurdmode of composing with a revenge cartoon results in a monstrous form ofprompting. Ultimately, the operatic voice is killed and replaced with BugsBunny’s playing on the banjo.

Another way to portray a controlling power over voice would be to imagine itas lost and then reattached in a planned, prompted way. This reverse strategy,which also, as in the cartoon world, fails to preserve the voice, is the theme ofFranco Zeffirelli’s 2002 film Callas Forever.10 In this film, the singer’s late,shadow-of-its-former-glory voice is prompted by her sublime past one. Here theprompter possesses the operatic voice that the prompted had had and has sincelost. The prompter (Maria Callas with her past wondrous voice) has “more” of avoice than the prompted (Callas and her much-diminished voice).

The film reconstructs, twenty-five years after Callas’s death, what could havehappened in the diva’s last few months. Zeffirelli fictionalizes the end of her life—when she no longer possessed a singing voice—and invents a cine-operatic come-back for her. The making of the film and its plot mirror each other: recordings ofthe deceased diva emanate from an actress (Fanny Ardant) resembling Callaswhile, at the same time, Callas as a fictional character relearns the gestures andmotions that produced her former singing voice. The singer is prompted by herpast voice.

The relation between this pair of voices orients the film’s unfolding: the (real)Callas’s two voices, the shot voice from the present and the wondrous voice fromthe past. From the outset, these two voices are juxtaposed so as to help persuadeCallas to “regain” her singing voice by appearing with her past voice. Callas’svoice resides comfortably in Ardant’s body, and Callas’s former young voiceresides comfortably in her present aging body, as though the aural image canbypass the visual image. The voice, though it does not belong to the body, is per-fectly matched to what we see on screen. One could think of it as one voice beinggiven up so that its past can be summoned; what can bring this voice back isnone other than the very voice that it replaces.

Zeffirelli shows us the dubbing studio: we see a close-up of the mouth, azoom-in on the impossible fit attempted in a dubbing session. A mirror is posi-tioned close to Ardant/Callas’s mouth, and a technician supervises the fitbetween the movements and shapes made by her mouth and the singing it mustappear to produce. The dubbing session takes us “behind the scenes” to witnessthe process of transforming Ardant into Callas, or, put differently, to see what it


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takes for Ardant to become Callas for 108 minutes. We become acutely aware thatArdant does not sing a single note of what we are hearing. But the scene also hasthe opposite effect: the attempt to simulate a perfect match, emphasized by theclose-up on Ardant’s mouth-with-the-Callas-voice, is so unsettling that we canalmost forget that it is not Callas and allow Ardant to become Callas.

In this scene Ardant is trying to match her lip movements to the sounds ofCallas’s voice, and the Callas she is portraying is trying to match her movementsto those of her former voice. Within the plot, Callas mimes her own earlier play-back but, since the voice comes from so far back, it is a foreign voice, and thusher efforts approximate the conditions of dubbing. On the other hand, Callas’svoice is there prior to the body of the actress, and it is the actress who must learnto accommodate the voice, unlike in traditional dubbing. In other words, we havean inverted dubbing situation that functions as playback in the plot.

In mainstream cinema we assume that a voice seeks to anchor itself in theright body, that it would remain incomplete if it were offscreen or disembodied.But, as Christian Metz suggests and Rick Altman provocatively asserts, we shouldin fact speak of “aural objects” and the primacy of sound over image.11 Zeffirelli’s

Figures 8 and 9 Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever: To prompt a lost voice into sounding again.


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Callas Forever, I would argue, raises the theoretical question of the priority ofsound or image in the cinematic matrix and affirms the primacy of sound.

The film suggests that it is the image that struggles to satisfy the demands ofthe voice, and that its epistemological power is diminished if not annulled by thevoice. The image is prompted by the voice. Callas Forever unleashes a “voice-Callas” that overpowers its vessel and resists any anchoring in a body. This“voice-Callas” disables Ardant-as-Callas to signify Callas. It reveals impossibilityinherent in this voice. In the words of Mikhail Yampolski, “The body isabsorbed by voice and becomes voice. . . . The voice is transformed into anall-absorbing monster. . . . The body, devouring voice, is in the end absorbed byit.”12

Callas’s voice is absolutely and unconditionally marked. Callas Forever tells ahaunting tale: pairs of voices ominously search for, relive, recall, and remapthemselves one onto another. Callas’s past voice ghostly prompts them all.

In Callas Forever, the attempt to bring back Callas’s lost voice, an effort thatcenters on dubbing, cannot be understood in terms of a successful matching ofvoice and body. Rather, it is about anxious pairs of voices mapping each other,each striving in vain to become another voice. The film fails its own premise: tocreate one voice through another, to prompt the lost voice into sounding again.The film does not succeed in erecting the voice’s presence through its past one.By its end we can no longer hear Callas’s voice as we once did: we haven’tprompted a voice; rather, we have even lost the sound of Callas’s past gloriousvoice.

The Voice in Opera Is the Body in Artaud

If a prompter has no control over the voice of opera, can we think of this voice asanalogous to the idea of the Artaudian body—that which escapes the murderoussignification of the word? Body and a language of the body for Antonin Artaudmade up a site that can be freed from the identity theft that characterizes theaterand is symbolized by the prompter. Artaud mistrusted the audible word: it alwaysexists prior to its utterer, is always prompted by someone else, never originatesfrom the speaker, and in it, the speaker loses his identity. Artaud, wrote JacquesDerrida, felt that his voice was taken away from the moment of birth. “If there isan ontological theft in the background of performance,” writes Herbert Blau, itis, in Artaud’s phrasing “‘a total and original loss of existence itself,’ thoughtflying up, the body remaining below, bereaved by the duplicity of escaping words,which are not our own to begin with.”13

The prompter stands for what theater is and what is unbearable in existence:you receive your words from the other; you repeat words that were never yours to


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begin with. Nothing of what you say belongs to you or is an expression of youridentity. According to Derrida:

For the theater to be neither subjected to this structure of language, nor aban-doned to the spontaneity of furtive inspiration, it will have to be governed accord-ing to the requirements of another language and another form of writing. . . . Thistime, writing not only will no longer be the transcription of speech, not only willbe the writing of the body itself, but it will be produced, within the movements ofthe theatre, according to the rules of hieroglyphics, a system no longer controlledby the institution of the voice. . . .Words themselves will once more become physi-cal signs that do not trespass toward concepts, but [quoting Artaud] “will be con-strued in an incantational, truly magical sense—for their shape and theirsensuous emanations.”14

For Derrida’s Artaud, “to overthrow the power of the literal work is not to erasethe letter, but only to subordinate it to the incidence of illegibility or at least ofilliteracy.”15

If in Artaud there is a word/body duality and he wills an alternative significa-tion through and by way of the body, then voice in opera—and the idea of voicein opera—is a “sensuous emanation,” on par with the Artaudian “writing of thebody.” Ultimately, in opera the singer’s voice does not set words in order to bringout their meaning; rather, it destroys words and their modes of signification inorder to bring out its own senses, those of its voices. It is the specific quality of avoice as voice—not the melody sung or the words set—that is crucial in opera.And it is this quality of voice—call it the idea of voice in opera—that lies outsideprompting and is aligned with what Artaud attempts to construe as beyondprompting: a nonsignifying system, for him, of and through the body. Thus myargument: the voice of opera is unpromptable—it cannot be handed over to thesinger for her to then mime and return back as hers. This voice is always only inthe possession of the singer. We can conceive this voice as cast in the image ofwhat Artaud imagines as a theater beyond prompting.16

If the Voice of Opera Is Unpromptable, Is It Possible through the

Voice to Avoid, Cancel Out, or Release a Work from Prompting?

My central example complicates this picture and asks what occurs when theunpromptable dimension—the operatic voice—is rendered mundane, less oper-atic, less unique, and less idiosyncratic; when it is not dependent on a specializedway of training a voice, a mode of delivery and projection, and on the use offacial cavities for producing particular timbres; when the voice in opera is suchthat it can be imitated by a prompter and sung back to the singer, that is, when


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the voice is promptable. I ask whether, in opera, if a voice is rendered mundaneand not operatic, can it be imitated and returned to the singer?

This example also features a libretto about prompting. What defeats prompt-ing is ultimately located not in the voice. It is situated in the role of music in theopera and the relation music bears to the text. Music annuls the guiding referen-ces in the text. It destroys the ways the text directs a certain course of action andevents. In other words, by debating how its voices are operatic, this example rene-gotiates what is promptable. This state of affairs is coupled with a libretto aboutthe very nature of prompting: it concerns the deadly price of consenting to thelaws of a community, the meaning of being prompted to affirm, to return “yes”on demand.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill collaborated on the school opera The Yes Sayer(Der Jasager) in 1930.17 Its main purpose was didactic; that is, it was to be thefocus of a learning process for the participants.18 The cruelty of the opera, whichends with a boy consenting to be thrown to his death, sparked numerousresponses and raised questions as to its interpretation. The demand for consentis the axis around which Brecht turns the spiritual journey of the Noh play Taniko(the basis for The Yes Sayer) into a social and political problem. The work is dis-turbing and, as in Brecht’s other plays, considers how in the absence of anyradical change, impassive cruelty and hopeless victimization will remain mostcharacteristic of human social interaction. Or, how human the rejection ofhumanity is.

The text is direct, almost childlike, without character development or psycho-logical probing, without place or time. It is a somewhat transparent work whosepower lies in refusing to let the audience find a way out of the “yes.” The shortopera, half an hour long, is divided into twelve scenes, each one self-containedand characterized by a different rhythmic gestus.19 The characters themselves arenot distinguished from one another, but rather the space between and surround-ing them is defined musically. In The Yes Sayer there are no characters in thevocal-operatic sense. The music of the characters in each scene is portrayed viarhythm, and when the scenes change, so do the rhythmic world and the depic-tion of each of the characters. Atypically for opera, the voice brings no comfort:the characterization of the characters is subject to the characterization of thescenes, the words are subject to the music, the music is subject to an underlyingpulsation. Music drains the text and characters of affect and meaning, renderingthem empty and driven solely by music’s bare attributes. The music annuls anymeaning derived from the words, sneaking in its place musical meaning—and inturn prompting the text to signify musically—thus coercing a reinterpretationderived from music and gauged in musical terms.

The Yes Sayer is about a form of consent that is both voluntary and coerced.A boy is to be asked whether he consents to the “Great Custom” that demands


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his death. A teacher declares that the law requires that the boy be asked whatshould be done; yet the boy must comply, must return a “yes” to agree to hisdeath and their murder of him. Asking the boy to consent is meaningless: “Wewant to ask him if he demands / That one turn back on his account / But even ifhe demands it / We will not turn around / But throw him into the valley.” Theboy consents, and the students repeat after him that which has been derivedfrom their inducing the teacher to effect the boy’s answer. Everyone and every-thing is directed at prompting the boy to acquiesce.

For the boy’s “yes,” the goal, peak, and purpose of the work, Weill composesnothing extraordinary nor in the slightest way different from the music heardprior to or following it: one instrument, a repeated two-measure figure.20

Identical music is heard for the solicitation and the inevitable response, for thequestion and reply; the same music is employed to quote the law and to signalcompliance with it, to prompt and to be prompted. The music, in other words,does not take part in what the text brings about, thus causing what is sung to notbe the characters’ expression. The text is not set by the music but “said” by themusic. The music is neither ironic nor parodic, nor does it undermine the text(this is frequent enough); rather, it engenders its own meaning.

Such engendering can be further demonstrated if we consider another pivotalscene. The opening chorus is Brecht’s famous statement of consent, an additionto the original Noh text. The notion of consent is ambiguous and contradictory:

What we must learn above all is consent.Many say yes, and yet there is no consent.Many are not asked, and manyConsent to wrong things. Therefore:What we must learn above all is consent.21

Weill’s setting of the chorus does not exhibit his declared aesthetic of “clarity”and “simplicity.” He establishes a clear, simple rhythmic profile in the chorus’scredo that serves as the opera’s urgestus, but it stands for an ambiguous text.Moreover, while the rhythm is lucid, the impression of clarity and simplicity ismisleading due to the complex harmonic language. Finally, the blunt rhythm isnot in service of the text; that is, it is not used to clearly set the words. In fact, asIan Kemp points out, we cannot detect the word “consent.”22 The scene is set asa choral canon in which the key word, “consent,” is obscured. We do not hearwhat it is presumably most important to learn, or what we should all agree upon,because different texts overlap (ex. 1). Even in the last choral statement, thoughvoiced in unison, the word “consent” is covered up by the busy figure in theorchestra.

And there is more: Weill repeats this scene twice more as a refrain/framingdevice that states the terms of the narrative to be unfolded; reinstates them on


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the eve of the catastrophe; and reaffirms them after the execution. The chorus isrepeated exactly, both textually and musically, on all three occasions. The repeti-tion does not serve to develop any musical feature, as absolutely nothingchanges. A statement that opens and then returns to “lock” the work is typical ofmusical forms and procedures rather than narrative ones. The composer rein-states the most important textual statement at the most important narrative junc-tions and sets the work’s terms as musical: it is in music that we return to theinitial statement, as we most often do, to convey unity, closure, fulfilled expecta-tion. Weill transforms Brecht’s crucial statement into a musically signifyingscene. Repetition shifts the attention away from the text and toward the music,turning the statement on consent into a musical statement. He has suspendedBrecht’s utterance and in its place implied an unspecified, nondiscursivemeaning.

Example 1 Weill and Brecht’s The Yes Sayer, act 1, scene 1.


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In this opera, music does not set the words nor tell of actions and emotions;but neither is it solipsistic. Music does not establish characters: what they sing isnot “theirs” but is governed, indeed dictated, by the music of the scene (anabstract configuration adhering to rules of music).23 It is not simply that, forWeill and Brecht, music and text run independently of each other. Rather, eachenvisioned a different notion of music’s role in theater. For the composer, some-thing fundamental, unavailable in the text, transpires through music, somethingbasic, like a “tone” of the human relationships presented onstage, statedmusically.

In Weill’s statements about his collaboration with Brecht we get a glimpse ofthis aesthetic:

I have found in my present close collaboration with Brecht the feasibility of con-structing a libretto whose total plan and scenario has been worked out together inall details, word for word, according to musical considerations. [He is not refer-ring specifically to The Yes Sayer] . . .Music in the new operatic theater renouncespumping up the action from within, glazing over the transitions, supplying thebackground for events, and stirring up passions. It goes its own vast, peacefulway; it begins only at the static moments of the plot, and it can therefore preserveits absolute concertante character (if it hits upon the right subject matter). Sincethe narrative form never permits the spectator to be in suspense or uncertaintyover the stage events, music can reserve for itself its own independent, purelymusical effect.24

For Weill, it is the writer who adapts himself to music. Music is independent; it“goes its own vast, peaceful way,” following its own rules. Meaning is engenderedin and by the music; music does not draw on meaning derived from the text, nordoes it depict the text, it is distant from it. “For the musical elements of opera areno different from those of absolute music,”25 writes Weill, and then again, “operahas much less in common with literary stage works than the music drama of thelast decades would have us believe. It by no means proposes to limit itself to thedeclamation of a dramatic event fixed in expression, in tempo, in pitch anddynamics; but instead it represents, far beyond that, a purely musical art work.”26

In The Yes Sayer music derails words, drains out their meaning. Rather thansupport, amplify, or add depth to the text, the music eradicates it. Music does notprovide us with a meaning of the text, unspecified as that may be, but ratherreplaces it with abstract musical signification—relationships between rhythmicformulas, for instance. In other words, music unfolds its own structures. Notdetermined by the prompting text, it cancels it out; music is what prompts theprompting text to nonsignification. In this sense music prompts the prompter toannulment.


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To Put the Voice Back In

Would directing construe yet another dimension of prompting? Can the voices inThe Yes Sayer be staged so that they are attuned with the music’s canceling-outfunction rather than the text’s pointed nature? Can we expose and recover at thelevel of voice something that echoes with the nature of music in The Yes Sayer? Ifthe voices are recast in an operatic mold, are we further relieving the opera fromprompting? In 2010 I directed Brecht and Weill’s The Yes Sayer at Tel AvivUniversity with this question in mind.27 Is it possible to reinscribe operaticvoices into this opera so that they echo with the ways the music (not the text)works in this opera? Is it possible, in other words, for the voices in this opera toalso work against prompting?

The directorial concept was to stage a facet underlying acquiescence, that inopposition to it; to stage the refusal of the “yes”—which is what I find the musicdoing and how in this staging I enlisted the voices. To this end I deepened thegulf already present between signification born of the text and that born of themusic. For example, I only hinted at what occurs without filling in the gaps inthe libretto: a story was not constructed, a narrative was not created, characterswere not provided with depth and were not given motivations for their actions.Everything was to remain implied, abstract, and to echo in an incomplete, sche-matic, unparticular way: there was to be no history, sense of origin, or psychology,thus approximating the conditions of music.

Movements, motions, or gestures were created that were an in-between stratarelating the work’s textual, musical, visual, and vocal dimensions. The gestureswere neither “in” the text nor “in” the music but functioned as part of an addi-tional signifying system that brought to the surface the strangeness of the text,the music, and their interaction. Gestures stemmed from the music but inter-rupted and affixed it by freezing, slowing down, and speeding it up (gestureswere slower than the music in the static, claustrophobic first act, and faster thanthe music in the second, steady-walking-on-the-journey act). The gesture is anacoustically driven element that instructs the visual, resulting in an image thatintercepts what is heard. It is a stratum hinting at the ways we are unaware of theacoustic instruction of the textual, dramatic and visual.

The gestus is a complex and multifaceted term that Brecht and Weill eachdefine differently.28 For Brecht the term refers to a movement in a particularsocial encounter. The movement presupposes and is governed by social and polit-ical attitudes and behaviors. It is not situated in an action or in a character butsomewhere in between. For Weill gestus is the social “rendered” musically; musicin the theater neither illustrates the text nor advances the action but is expected“to capture and to realize the gestic character of a succession of situations.”29 ForWeill, mainly through the rhythmic profile, there transports something


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fundamental, unavailable in the text—something basic, like a “tone” of thehuman relationships presented onstage. Usually Weill’s sense of the term isignored when attempting to grasp the concept.

The gestures created in the production—curvature, shadow play, slouchedwalking—acted as an additional system alongside those of the opera’s text andmusic. This system develops, for example, when an innocent children’s shadowgame foreshadows, in the flawed hands of the teacher, the horrible end and turnsinto a large two-dimensional mechanical slide depicting the hurling of the childinto the valley. Similarly, the gesture of the curvature in the ailing mother isexposed as part of her body and not a gesture she makes, as it may first haveseemed. The curvature gesture is then transformed by the teacher into a farewellgreeting, in one of the few moments of compassion in the opera. Inspired by


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Weill’s use of the term gestus as a musical, particularly rhythmic essence, the ges-tures in this production are not attached to any character or to any action butinstead establish the work’s context and space. Gestures pass between charactersacross scenes, lie between the musical and the visual, and, unlike the opera’scharacters, have depth and vitality. They vary and morph—in them, meanings areestablished.30

Figures 10–13 Brecht and Weill’s The Yes Sayer: Gesture of the shadow play. Thegestures are neither in the text nor in the music but function as part of an additionalsignifying system that brings to the surface the strangeness of the text, the music, andtheir interaction. Photographs by Michal Shani.


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These directorial choices relate directly to the singing voices. The unease thatBrecht’s play induces is exaggerated in this staging by its juxtaposition withrefined and precise singing, which was beautiful on one hand and distanced,reportorial, and disturbing on the other. The singing was built not on lyricismbut primarily on repetitive rhythm. The emphasis on voice staging led to the deci-sion to work with opera singers rather than with actors, who are often cast inWeill’s works. The opera singers were requested to sing differently from what isnatural to them as classically trained singers. They were, for example, instructedto sing without vibrato (which turned out to be extremely difficult). Their soundwas thus softer and hollow—yet piercing, with vibrato sneaking in as an expres-sive element. They were requested to place accents according to the text, wherethey are often placed against the melodic line. They were also requested to singeverything with an emphasis on rhythm and structure and with guttural Hebrewconsonants as they are pronounced in speech (we chose to sing in Hebrew sothat the text would first and foremost be clear to the performers, eliminatingeven the slightest delay between the moment of singing and the moment of textcomprehension). The operatic voice—artificial, unnatural, and stylized—seemedapt for depicting non-fully-developed characters. The artificiality of countertenorvoices trained in early music lent a disembodied, asexual effect.

The voice’s ability to express the unique world of The Yes Sayer was exploredin acoustic effects such as humming, buzzing, droning, singing “too close” to theaudience (placing singers in the audience), and singing from different places inthe theater, as though the voice were indeed sourceless, a mere echo, or had beendubbed.31 We treated the voice as if it were an instrument, as if it were not com-municating a text or as if lacking an understanding of the words it sung. Weaimed at a solipsistic voice, a detached object independent of character, of thesinging body, and of the meaning of the text. We created singing that was in andof itself problematically expressionless, unaware that it was the messenger of ahorrific tale.

Vocal parts were doubled, further confusing the identification of a voice witha specific character or with an emotion as in traditional opera.32 Doubling wasachieved by adding an actor, dividing a part between two voices so that one wouldnot know whether the change were in the character or the singer, and through achorus carrying stick masks. There were even two casts; each included two per-formers for each role rather than a single child, the part divided between ordoubled by them: six students instead of three, and a teacher doubled by an actor.For each cast, different voice colors were used, one of which, comprising twocountertenors (mother and teacher), erected a further rift between what was seenand said and what was heard. Thus the meanings emerging in this staging werea result not of character formation, action, or story, but of voice.


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In this staging two strata of signification, voice, and gesture release the workfrom direct text-music dialectics. This staging erects voices and singing that are,as it were, independent from the music and the text, inventing gestures as anelement in between music and text that belong to neither. The staging aims toreconfigure the prompting context. It recasts the voices to signify operatically.Reintroducing “operaticness”—reinscribing the voice’s power in that it isunpromptable—positions the staged voices alongside the music that worksagainst prompting. The staging pitches the voice in this work in relation toopera’s unpromptable voices.

notes

Michal Grover-Friedlander is an associateprofessor of musicology at Tel Aviv University.She is also an opera director and artisticmanager of the opera group Ta Opera Zuta. Herpublications include Vocal Apparitions: TheAttraction of Cinema to Opera (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005) and Operatic Afterlives(Zone Books, 2011). Her current book-lengthproject revolves around the question of the voicein directing opera.

1. This paper is based on a talk given at the“Whispering, Prompting, Shadowing: PerformedVoices” conference, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,January–February 2011.

2. On whisper and the whisperer, see StevenConnor, “Whisper Music,” a lecture given at the“Take a Deep Breath” symposium, Tate Modern,February 15, 2007, and at “Giving Voice,” Centrefor Performance Research, Aberystwyth, Wales,March 28, 2008. A PDF version is availableonline at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/whispermusic/.

3. For details, see “Grand Opera Seen fromthe Prompter’s Box,” New York Times, January 31,1909.

4. A prompter’s position is a question of thecorrelation of the auditory and the field of vision.He was positioned either on the left or the rightside of the stage, either in the center, behind thestage, behind a screen, in a box, or, in the lastfew decades, “in” the prompter’s ear. There is anongoing debate concerning medieval theater, inwhich the prompter, according to some scholars,was in full view of the audience, providing theactors with the full text and complete actinginstructions in real time during the performance.See Philip Butterworth, “Richard Carew’s‘Ordinary’: The First English Director,” in TheNarrator, The Expositor, and the Prompter inEuropean Medieval Theatre, ed. Philip Butterworth

(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2007),327–43. In Shakespearean theater the prompterwas situated in the tiring room (green room).Some scholars claim that he was situated“behind the curtain that separated tiring-roomand stage,” from where he could both be heardand peep to see the stage, since there was goodaudibility between front and back stage. Fordetails, see Tiffany Stern, “Behind the Arras: ThePrompter’s Place in the Shakespearean Theatre,”Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History andTechnique of the British Theatre 55, no. 3 (2001):111. In eighteenth-century British theater, theprompter, it seems, was “on stage left, next tothe Prince [of Wales’s] box on auditorium right.”For details, see Bruce Koenig, “Where WasGarrick’s Prompter?” Theatre Notebook: A Journalof the History and Technique of the British Theatre37, no. 1 (1983): 12.

5. For prompting in Bayreuth, see PhilippeOlivier, “Opéra: La diva et le souffleur,”Autrement no. 71 (June 1985): 190–93.

6. One such example is Erich Siebenschuh,who became a prompter following atwenty-year-long career as a leading baritone inBerlin. See Anne Midgette, “Box Seat: OperaPrompters,” Opera News, January 1, 1999.

7. See Harry William Pedicord, “RylandsEnglish Ms. 1111: An Early Diary of Richard Cross(d. 1760), Prompter to the Theatres,” Bulletin ofthe John Rylands Library Manchester 37 (1954–55):503–27.

8. The Present State of the Stage in Great-Britainand Ireland, unknown author. Quoted inPedicord, “Rylands English Ms. 1111,” 509.

9. A famous example from theater in which aprompter authors a work is Pirandello’s Six Actorsin Search of an Author.

10. For a more comprehensive interpretationof this work, see Michal Grover-Friedlander,


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“The Afterlife of Maria Callas’s Voice,” MusicalQuarterly, Spring 2005, Vol. 88/1: 35–62.Reprinted in Operatic Afterlives (New York: ZoneBooks, 2011), 45–75.

11. Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,” and RickAltman, “Moving Lips: Cinema asVentriloquism,” both in “Cinema/Sound” specialissue, Yale French Studies 60(1980): 24–32 and67–79.

12. Mikhail Yampolski, “Voice Devoured:Artaud and Borges on Dubbing,” October no. 64(Spring 1993): 77.

13. Here is the quotation in full: “Derridawrites of the consciousness that enfeveredArtaud, that something is being dictated so thatthe signifier says something more than we meanto say, a metonymic disaster of speech in whichas Artaud says of himself, ‘the cyclonic breath[soufflé] of a prompter [souf-fleur] who draws hisbreath in . . . robs me of that which he firstallowed to approach me and which I believed Icould say in my own name.’ If there is anontological theft in the background ofperformance, it is ‘a total and original loss ofexistence itself,’ thought flying up, the bodyremaining below, bereaved by the duplicity ofescaping words, which are not our own to beginwith.” Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle:Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 123.

14. Jacques Derrida, “La parole soufflée,”Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978), 191.

15. Ibid., 188.16. We can obtain a sense of the voice’s

unpromptability from a singer’s rather than aprompter’s perspective if we observe aphenomenon bordering on prompting. One ofthe reasons stage fright occurs is when an actorlistens to his own voice and a breach in theautomatic execution of the role disrupts theability to perform. When this occurs, actors,writes Nicholas Ridout, “fall into a state ofself-observation: they hear their own voices, noteevery movement of their limbs etc., and thisdivision of attention between the objectiveinterest in the thing produced and the subjectivein their own behavior disturbs the normal,automatic, motor, phonetic or oratoricalperformance. The actors are intoxicated by theirown voices or other doings, and forget to bringabout an accomplishment with these.” SeeNicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and OtherTheatrical Problems (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006), 61–62. This mode of thephenomenon of stage fright transformed intoopera would involve an awareness of one’s own

voice beyond what would be experienced asproduced by one’s own singing. A singer wouldbe aware of the sound, timbre, and eccentricquality of her or his own voice and wouldexperience a discrepancy between her voice andthe song she sings. Would she be hearing adifference between voice and singing? If indeedstage fright in opera were analogous to Ridout’stake on it, then at the moment when promptingwas desperately called for, the singer would havebeen acutely aware of the quality of the voice:that unpromptable dimension of herperformance.

17. For the genealogy of the opera, see my“Transformations of a Killing of a Boy,” inOperalibretto: Its Place between Model and Music,ed. Sabine Lichtenstein (Amsterdam: RodopiPress, forthcoming). For intriguing discussionson Weill’s opera, see Daniel Albright, Untwistingthe Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, andOther Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2000), 170–74, 177–80; Oded Assaf, “Yes, No . . .and Possibly: Kurt Weill’s Music for The YesSayer,” program notes for performance of theopera at Tel Aviv University, 2010; Joy Calico,“Lehrstück, Opera, and the New AudienceContract of the Epic Theater,” in Brecht at theOpera (Berkeley: University of California Press,2008), 16–42; David Drew, “Weill’s SchoolOpera,” Musical Times, 106, no. 1474 (December1965): 934–37; David Drew, Kurt Weill: AHandbook (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1987), 226–29; Paul Humphreys,“Expressions of Einverständnis: Musical Structureand Affective Content in Kurt Weill’s Score forDer Jasager” (PhD diss., University of California,Los Angeles, 1988); Ian Kemp, “Der Jasager:Weill’s Composition Lesson,” in A Stranger HereMyself: Kurt Weill-Studien, ed. Kim H. Kowalkeand Horst Edler (Hildesheim, Germany: GeorgOlms, 1993), 143–57; and Anthony Sheppard,Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and RitualizedPerformance in Modernist Music Theater (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001), 83–95,249–50.

18. On the didactic in Brecht, see, for example,Fredric Jameson, “Doctrine/Lehre,” in Brecht andMethod (London: Verso, 1998), 35–88. On theLehrstück, see, for example, Jonathan Kalb,“The Horatian: Building the Better Lehrstück,”New German Critique 64 (Winter 1995), 161–73.For school opera, see, for example, Drew, “Weill’sSchool Opera”; Stephen Hinton, “Lehrstück: AnAesthetics of Performance,” in Music andPerformance During the Weimer Republic, ed.Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), 59–73; and John Rockwell, “Kurt


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Weill’s Operatic Reform and Its Context,” in ANew Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill, ed. KimH. Kowalke (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1986), 51–59.

19. For Weill on gestus, see his “Über dengestischen Charakter der Musik,” Die Musik21 (March 1929): 419–23. Translated by KimH. Kowalke as “Concerning the GesticCharacter of Music” in Kurt Weill in Europe(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979),491–96.

20. Daniel Albright writes beautifully aboutthis figure: “The more the figure is repeated,the less pathetic it becomes: all semanticsdepend on systems of differentiation, and inthe absence of a context any figure, no matterhow potently charged, will become drained, akind of fossil of meaning, or a pickled embryopresented coolly with forceps. (This is apotential danger with all musical hieroglyphs:it is impossible for any acoustic object toretain a steady significance, for the mere actof repetition tends to alter or remove thecontext that provided the meaning in the firstplace—the hope for a reliable dictionary ofmusic-figures can never be fulfilled.)” DanielAlbright, “Kurt Weill as Modernist,” Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 2 (2000): 281–82.

21. Translation from the German byWolfgang Sauerland in Bertolt Brecht, TheMeasure Taken and Other Lehrstücke, ed. JohnWillett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen,1985), 63.

22. Kemp, “Der Jasager,” 14723. Kemp’s interpretation is that the work is

a lesson in opera composition. Ibid., 143–57.24. Kurt Weill, “Zeitoper,” Melos 7 (March

1928): 106–8. Translated by Kim H. Kowalke inKurt Weill in Europe, 483–84.

25. Kurt Weill, “Die neue Oper,” Die neue Weg55 (January 16, 1926): 24–25. Translated by KimH. Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe, 464–65.

26. Kurt Weill, “Busonis Faust und dieErneuerung der Opernform,” Jahrbuch Oper(Jahrbuch 1926 der Universal-Edition Vienna),53–56. Translated by Kim H. Kowalke in Kurt Weillin Europe, 468. The notion of opera as a purelymusical form appears in several of Weill’swritings. See, for example, his “Concerning the

Gestic Character of Music.”27. For details of the production, including

program notes and visuals, see http://michalgroverfriedlander.com/weill.htm.

28. For Weill on the gestus, see his“Concerning the Gestic Character of Music.”On gestus in Brecht and/or Weill, see FredricJameson, “Gestus,” in Brecht and Method,89–130; Patrice Pavis, “Gesture and BodyLanguage,” in Languages of the Stage: Essays inthe Semiology of Theatre (New York: PerformingArts Journal Publications, 1982), 37–65; JoyCalico, “The Operatic Roots of Gestus in ‘TheMother’ and ‘Round Heads and PointedHeads,’” in Brecht at the Opera, 43–75;Michael Morley, “‘Suiting the Action to theWord’: Some Observations on Gestus andGestische Musik,” in Kowalke, New Orpheus,183–201; Eli Friedlander, “Gesture: Benjaminand Brecht,” and Joachim Fiebach, “AGerman’s Reading of Brecht in 2004: Gestus,Dialectic, Productivity,” both in Bertolt Brecht:Performance and Philosophy, ed. Gad Kaynarand Linda Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph BookSeries, 2005), 23–34; 53–68.

29. Kurt Weill, “Topical Theater,” translatedby Kim H. Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe,512. Originally published as “Aktuelles Theater,”Melos 8 (December 1929): 524–27.

30. The figures are taken from theproduction of the opera group Ta Opera Zutaat the Tmuna Theatre, Tel Aviv, 2011 (a yearlater than the production at Tel AvivUniversity). For the full production, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2bIXCoFQUg&list=UUfiEW0g7loZEEsYAapQWDiQ&index=7&feature=plcp.

31. The different experiments led us to placethe orchestra in the center of the stage, closeto the voices, without our knowing that thishad been Brecht’s placement. His reasonsmight have been motivated not directly by theacoustic prospect but rather by the wish toexpose the mechanics behind the scene.

32. The doubling of voices and the blurringof the associations between voice andcharacter function like an operatic version ofBrechtian alienation.


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Prompting Voice in Opera

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