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Operatic Afterlives by Michal Grover-Friedlander (review)

In her Vocal Apparitions (2005), Michal Grover-Friedlander considered the ways in which the operatic voice takes up a haunting residence in the history of film. Operatic Afterlives, its title a spectral echo of the earlier volume, continues and revises the project of Vocal Apparitions, investigating “the singing voice . . . as what is essential to opera” (16) precisely because it haunts opera, because it never is fully at home within opera. To suggest that the singing voice is what most necessarily characterizes opera is not, Grover-Friedlander argues, to conclude that there is a unified phenomenon (the singing voice) that defines a closed field (opera) in a conclusively definable way: “what accounts, in the deepest sense, for the specificity of opera is singing that is unlike any other” (14)—even, she goes on to argue, unlike itself. For Grover-Friedlander this quintessentially operatic entity, the singing voice, undoes and escapes the limits of the fields it defines, including opera and opera studies. Operatic Afterlives takes this indeterminacy seriously in its analyses and methods, and its unabashedly quixotic aim—to characterize the uncharacterizable— may alienate or frustrate the reader seeking stably defined and definite theses and results. The reader who is willing to enter into the interdisciplinary or even indisciplinary space of Grover-Friedlander’s text, however, will find it a productive, suggestive, and rewarding experience. Two epigraphs introduce the book. The second, from Stanley Cavell, defines the voice as “signature,” a trace left by the body in a field not entirely its own. That this trace can function in the absence of its signer demonstrates both the limitedness of human existence and its capacity to transcend that limitedness—what Cavell calls “your mortal immortality.” The moving, affective power of the voice (as call to others and mark of our dividedness) highlights our human finitude, yet it also offers us the chance to transcend our limits by resonating in the voices of others. Cavell argues that we are sometimes most truly ourselves in discovering something entirely new, unexpected, and different about our identity or desires. Grover-Friedlander extends this thesis: opera, for her, is most truly opera when it is becoming something other than opera. The first epigraph, from Roland Barthes,