Shouting It Out
Mary Ann Smart reclaims 19th century opera for feminism

ges·ture n. Any action intended for its effect or value as nonverbal communication

If feminists have found much to criticize in opera, Berkeley professor of music Mary Ann Smart finds much to love, even if it means challenging more traditional feminist theories in favor of her own.

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"I have been accused at least once, and probably more times that I'm not aware of, of being a soft feminist who's an apologist for canonical master works by European male composers," Smart says. "I am pretty interested in those European masterworks of the 19th century, and I don't really think they need apologizing for."

The dramatic arc of many of these operas contains a sad fate for the female heroine -- many indeed rely on some grisly fate for their emotional impact -- thus giving some feminists fodder for the argument that the works are antiquated, outdated, and should no longer be staged. Some academics made comparisons with snuff films.

"I think there's a lot of truth in that," Smart concedes. "But there's not really anywhere intellectually or historically that you can go with it."

Giuseppe Verdi, another master of the opera domain

Instead, Smart went deeper into the operas themselves, exploring not only more obscure works by Meyerbeer and Bellini, but also greats like Verdi and Wagner.

In a forthcoming book, the musicologist delves into operatic gesture, which doesn't describe the bodily movements of the opera performers, but rather small parts of the music that were intended to give depth to the singer's performance. Few academics have studied gesture, but interestingly enough, it's one area where the best record of artistic intent exist -- in the music itself.

"There's very little visual material or other kinds of recording about what actually went on onstage," Smart says. "I'm interested in a dimension of the musical text that existed to give signals for gestures and to make audiences pay attention to certain things that were going on visually, in terms of movement."

In some cases, the musical gesture may be a simple parallel to an onstage action -- the equivalent of a cartoon's descending scale as Mickey Mouse walks down the stairs. In other cases, the musical gesture is more sophisticated. But either way, the musical element serves to strengthen the performer's stage presence.

Smart's analysis upends the conventional feminist theory -- most often applied to film -- of the implicit male viewer and female subject in his gaze, an analysis that rests on the notion of female objectification. Instead, Smart sees opera's female characters being empowered through multiple layers of expression.

"Because you have a visual aspect, a verbal aspect, a musical aspect, which can all be doing the same thing at the same time, you get the same message 'shouted out' at you from all these different dimensions," she says.

"When you get this duplication or triplication of the same emotion or effect coming from all these different levels, including the performer's body, you're getting exactly opposite of objectification," Smart says. "You're getting this body that says I'm in control here. Everything coheres around this female character doing this thing center stage."

Modern-day productions of 19th century operas typically leave out the musical gestures. In fact, those gestures and certain exaggerated physical movements both faded away, at a time when realism came to dominate performance styles late in that century. So why then would a scholar spend so much time dissecting such a seemingly obscure part of opera?

"This work on gesture and gender and the way music looks at gesture, one of the things that it can do is to take back these works for feminism," Smart says. If we understand the multiple modes of performance, the female characters have a completely different impact, Smart argues.

And despite opera's flagging popularity among the general public, there's still plenty of life left in the genre, Smart says. A number of well-known contemporary writers, including serial comic author Ben Katchor, poet Paul Muldoon, and South African writer J.M. Coetzee, are currently working on libretti (the text of the work) for opera projects.

"I'm intrigued by that, the huge amount of high prestige literary attention that's focused on this extremely artificial and elitist genre," Smart says.

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Smart sees opera undergoing an evolution, of sorts. This may be part of the natural process for all art forms, as they react to change. Audiences' attentions and attention spans have been greatly influenced by the dominant media of today. Companies now adapt productions from film, for example Dead Man Walking, which premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2000.

Looking forward to a sabbatical next year, Smart plans to ditch some of her gender explorations in favor of an intensive historical and political exploration of 19th century Italian operas.

While some of these operas have often been interpreted as articulating social or political expressions during a time of extreme censorship, there have been few historical studies of the real political situation in which the works were composed. Smart plans to spend her year abroad, trying to forge more concrete connections between politics and opera, where those ties until now have been fairly implicit.

"I'm looking forward to going and living somewhere else," Smart says, with a certain glee in her eyes. "I haven't done that in a while." -- Todd Dayton