On a typical night at the opera, the musico-dramatic synthesis that takes place on stage is saturated in atmosphere, but the proceedings off-stage are no less extravagant. A bejeweled crowd congregates in front of a stately façade, and inside, marble tiles and mirrors intensify the white light that emanates from the innumerable chandeliers. The auditorium itself is upholstered in velvet, and the crowd behaves in accordance with an implicit sense of ceremony. A gilded aura permeates the entire affair. My dissertation is a study of this lavish tradition as it persists in contemporary Berlin. I focus on extra-musical context, with chapters on opera house architecture, the politics of public subsidies, the experience of being in the audience, and the currency of a good scandal. I hope to show how an elaborate superstructure and an entrenched belief system help shape opera into a meaningful field of experience. This mosaic of operatic affairs in Berlin doubles as a critique of the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. The notion of aesthetic autonomy first emerges in European thought in the late 18th century, when aestheticians begin to regard works of art as inviolable objects that serve no secondary purpose. In the burgeoning market economy, these functionless vessels of beauty come to exemplify the inverted logic of commodity fetishism, in which exchange-value eclipses use-value. As members of the bourgeois public begin to pay for access to museums and concert halls, they learn to value individual works of art as objective distillations of the autonomy that they crave in their own lives. The doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is, in many ways, a naïve ideology, but it continues to regulate experience in the world of opera. By examining the context in which operatic works take place, I hope to show how the notion of aesthetic autonomy prolongs its outmoded existence by ensconcing itself in a luxuriant aura.
Chaikin, Paul Martin,
"Circling Opera in Berlin"
(2009).
Ethnomusicology Theses and Dissertations, Music Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0H41PQ5
