Music, Culture and Society: Robert Savage
8 March 2008
On Truth and Semblance in an Operatic and Extra-Operatic Sense: Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage
Robert Savage
Is there a reality specific to opera, and if so, what are its constitutive characteristics? How does it stand in relation to extra-operatic reality, and how can that relationship be figured within operatic reality itself? In this paper, I attempt to tackle these questions with reference to Michael Tippett’s opera “The Midsummer Marriage” (1955), which I take to be a neglected masterpiece of fully realized opera.
Robert Savage is ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. He is author of Holderlin after the Catastrophe (2008), as well as numerous essays on critical theory and modern literature. His edited volumes include Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (2006) and Moderne begreifen (2007).