melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

Absence and Presence: Interior Singing
in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Opera-Film Le nozze di Figaro 1
Marcia J. CITRON
Rice University, Houston, USA
In A Song of Love and Death Peter Conrad writes: "One of the bequests of film
to opera is its demonstration that song is soliloquy, not overt statement: that the voice
is consciousness—or the yearning consciousness—overheard.” Conrad elaborates by
discussing the love duet in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s film Madama Butterfly. Here,
singing lacks moving lips and the soundtrack becomes "the subliminal sounding of
desire" 2 .
Ponnelle deploys soliloquy imaginatively in Le nozze di Figaro (1976), a
television film widely praised. 3 Soliloquy, or what can be called interior singing,
occurs frequently in the film. By interior singing I mean vocal music presented
without moving lips, and thus it lacks an immediate and obvious source. We associate
what we hear with a particular character because of the camerawork and our
recognition of the performer’s voice. Yet even though we perceive the connection,
interior singing calls into question the status and location of the voice, and suggests
that the voice might have a different relationship with the character—one that is more
intimate than when lips move. Hence we might expect interior singing when
characters reveal personal feelings, especially in arias.
Ponnelle’s prominent use of interior singing makes this film different from
most opera films, which use it sparingly if at all. Thus Ponnelle’s treatment raises
several aesthetic and interpretive issues. For example, can the location of interior
singing be interior if it appears in the filmic space and we hear it? And what about the
fact that interior singing operates in the realm of playback? Like most opera film,
Figaro’s music was prerecorded and then synchronized with the action at the time of
shooting. Although different from lip-synched music, interior singing also belongs to
the playback system because its temporal relationship to the source is the same as that
of lip-synched music. In both, prerecorded music is played back and absorbed into the
final film at the time of shooting; only the absence or presence of the visual trace of
the voice, the movement of lips, distinguishes the two.
Today I will offer a close reading of two examples of interior singing in
Ponnelle’s film. One is the Count’s aria in Act II, "Vedrò mentr’ io sospiro," and the
other is Cherubino’s aria in Act I, "Non so più." They show us different ways the
interior voice can be used for representation and meaning. A common concern is how
vocal absence and presence affect hearing, agency, and filmic location: what is heard,
1 This essay is a revised version of my article “The Elusive Voice: Absence and
Presence in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s Film Le nozze di Figaro” in J. Jeongwon & T. Rose (eds.),
Between Opera and Cinema, New York, Routledge, 2002; my thanks to Taylor & Francis
Group LLC for permission to reuse the material.
2 Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera, New York,
Poseidon Press, 1987, p. 273.
3 Ponnelle’s Le nozze di Figaro film, produced by Unitel, features Mirella Freni
(Susanna), Hermann Prey (Figaro), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Count), Kiri Te Kanawa
(Countess), and Maria Ewing (Cherubino); Karl Böhm leads the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra. The DVD (NTSC format) is Deutsche Grammophon 00440 073 4034 (2005).
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