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Recognition in Mozart's Operas (review)

Recognition in Mozart's Operas. By Jessica Waldoff. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xii, 337 p. ISBN 0-19-515197-6. $45.] Illustrations, references, index. Any book about Mozart published in 2006 may immediately engender the suspicion of a celebratory tome hastily put together to mark the 250th birthday of the Austrian composer. In the case of Jessica Waldoff's Recognition in Mozart's Operas, however, the date of publication may well be a fortunate coincidence. There is nothing resembling a last-minute birthday present in this long awaited, well-written book, which is the result of many years of reflection over an essential, but previously overlooked plot element in music dramaturgy: recognition. As Waldoff defines it, "recognition-or anagnoresis, the term we have inherited from Aristotle's Poetics-marks the shift from ignorance to knowledge and involves the protagonist (and the audience) in a powerful reversal of former understanding" (p. 3). Already in this foundational definition, the reader may immediately sense the safe distance separating Aristotle's definition-constructed a posteriori on the basis of the philosopher's experience with literary genres of his time-from the idea of recognition that Waldoff uses for her critical approach to late eighteenth-century opera. For the Greek philosopher, anagnoresis represents reversal or peripeteia, the shift from ignorance to knowledge (often resulting in pity or fear; pp. 4-5)-an extremely productive concept in opera studies. What is less productive is Aristotle's undermining of the psychological element in his ideological conception of drama, in which events, not people and their state of being, propel the action towards a goal. As Aristotle puts it, "the goal is a certain activity, not a qualitative state. . . . It is not, therefore, the function of the agent's actions to allow the portrayal of their characters; it is, rather, for the sake of their actions that characterization is included. So, the events and the plot-structure are the goal of tragedy, and the goal is what matters most of all" (Aristotle, Poetics, book 6, quoted by Waldoff, p. 82). This citation appears in the context of Waldoff's third chapter entitled "Reading for Plot" and offers a mechanistic view of drama that may well serve the plot analysis of Le nozze di Figaro (pp 88-95), crafted by Da Ponte after the ingenious invention of the dramatist and clockmaker Beaumarchais. It requires, however, a substantial degree of modification to make it suitable for the analysis of Mozart's other operas. As Waldoff is well aware, psychological characterization is carefully achieved musically and dramatically, and moments of psychological transformation are pivotal in the conception of the drama. These are indeed treated by Waldoff as moments of recognition. After the first two chapters, centered on recognition as "enlightenment" in Die Zauberflote and on "Recognition Scenes in Theory and Practice" respectively, it becomes clear that "it would be pointless to try to base an understanding of recognition scenes in opera on Aristotle's categories" (p. 50). Waldoff arrives at this conclusion on the basis of two main reasons: one is the lack of a unidirectional teleological conception of the drama (subplots are as essential in opera buffa as in heroic opera), while another is the shift of attention from the objective events to the subject. Tamino's recognition, for example, involves a process of self-discovery and acquisition of knowledge, which also shifts the center of attention from "family ties" (as in Oedipus or in the Odyssey) to "recognitions of identity," or "the tendency to celebrate individual discoveries of feeling (especially love), to favor striving for knowledge over inherited wisdom, and to center plots on themes of enlightened governance in both the political [see also chapter 8 on La clemenza di Tito] and the domestic spheres" (p. 54). The political implication is inevitably that the recognitions of family ties and birth-right appear to be far less important than recognitions of self, knowledge, purpose, or feeling. …