Film, Media and Music
Chapter 1 traces the transmission of pasticcio, as a practice in oral storytelling tradition, into the proto-literate culture of early modern society. While mass literacy in the nineteenth century brought an end to pasticcio in many narrative artforms, it survived in opera. This chapter explores why. Early opera’s many oral inheritances include the predominance of words over music, mimesis in learning roles and an oral rather than literate relationship with visualisation. Credible motivations are weak in early opera, as they are in storytelling. Rhetoric provided much of the framework for operatic structures and the chapter argues that this classical oral inheritance, although mediated through text, provided another means whereby oral narrative approaches shaped opera in the teeth of an increasingly literate culture. This approach restored a profound type of immersion in a story, one which had largely disappeared from spoken theatre. This kind of immersion was much written about and was a key factor in the popularity of opera. Pasticcio was much used in its creation, but intertextualities intended to be ‘read’ by the audience are argued to belong to more literate periods. References and allusions abound but a pasticcio created a new original.
The introduction explains what a pasticcio opera is and how the term is defined in the book, outlining where this differs from previous scholarship. The book argues that pasticcio is not a genre of opera, but a construction method that was already widely used before the word ‘pasticcio’ became current. Not all operas created using the pasticcio method designated themselves as pasticci, even while the term was current, but much twentieth-century scholarship only considered an opera a pasticcio if it used this designation. Evidence is given that the practice was more widespread and occurred for longer than previously argued and I challenge assumptions of its termination in the nineteenth century, arguing that pasticcio continued in direct descent from baroque practice into the twentieth century. The introduction also offers a prospectus of the varied arguments made throughout the book and a rationale for its long timeframe. Society’s changing relationship with pasticcio is argued to be closely connected to other socio-cultural and economic changes with long timeframes, such as the transition from an oral to a literate culture, generational changes in the understanding of the self and the contradictory influences of mass production on the arts.
What was later called pasticcio was widespread in Roman poetry, medieval hagiography and in the cantillated epic tales sung at courts. Seventeenth-century Italian operas continued these techniques and this chapter argues that recitative derives from earlier kinds of sung speech. The contrafactum in liturgy and madrigals is argued to prefigure the reuses of aria texts and settings in opera. Specifically Italian pasticcio practices were passed to Britain in 1656 with Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, though they may have been known earlier. Yet indigenous traditions for reusing pre-existing material had been as deeply embedded in Britain as they were in Italy. Interpolation, ‘dressing’ and collaborative process had characterised spoken theatre before the civil wars, but new encounters with operatic practice emboldened British dramatists, as demonstrated in Davenant’s The Law against Lovers (1662). Spoken theatre became increasingly literate in culture attending to resonances of Protestantism, masculine codes of behaviour, rational motivations, personation and verisimilitude. Opera, on the other hand, in restoring a much-missed emotional engagement, relished the fantastical, the digressive; it was continental and Catholic and repeatedly broke neoclassical rules. It provided an experience which spoken theatre had left behind but the need for which had not yet left society.
The expansion and popularity of pasticcio between the 1660s and the 1780s in many artforms is far from monocausal, but this chapter proposes that pasticcio practices in art were a reflection of how eighteenth-century people performed the self. In a reaction against the embedded factionalism of the previous century, a cult of civility became widespread among the elite and the self-conscious construction and performance of a public self (or selves) was also created through borrowing and assemblage. Pasticcio practices in art were thus complemented by pasticcio in personal behaviour. Another parallel explored is the relationship between opera production and the period’s mania for collecting. Collections, both public and private, are necessarily assemblages of pre-existing parts and pasticcio was a means of bringing narrativity to a collection, conscious and overt or merely implied. Sculpture restorations and operatic pasticci both tailored classical stories to neoclassical tastes and the works of an alien culture to contemporary British mores. Lastly, the chapter examines the vexed issue of pasticcio in conceptions of musical property, arguing that nineteenth-century perspectives often have been too readily projected backwards into the eighteenth century. Pasticcio is argued to be rooted in earlier, orally derived, conceptions of music as property.
A pasticcio opera is a new opera created from pre-existing parts, a creative process which has been in use for as long as the artform itself. This book argues that pasticcio is a method rather than a genre, one that was already widely used before the term was coined in the eighteenth century, and continued in use long after it dropped from favour. Nor is the method unique to opera: pasticcio poetry, plays, sculptures and film scores continue to be made. Yet all kinds of pasticcio art came under pressure in the nineteenth century as Romantic conceptions of originality and authenticity married with a rise in the importance of text over performance. A main argument in the study is that this shift from performance tradition to text was part of a wider societal transition from a proto-literate society with many oral inheritances – of which the pasticcio method was one – to a mass-literate society. A narrow canon and an ever-contracting operatic repertoire were the result in Britain, a contraction which continued for much of the twentieth century. Yet pasticcio did not disappear in the nineteenth century, as was once thought, and the book discusses its surprising continuation and proliferation. Today, it is enjoying a tentative revival.
Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with authenticity and originality, the chapter explores the pressure which pasticcio practices experienced across many artforms. Practices changed in sculpture and antiquities as well as opera, to accommodate new Romantic ideals. It was argued in the twentieth century that pasticcio opera was discontinued early in the century as a shift towards fidelity occurred. This chapter lists numerous examples of its continuity, both for operas that designated themselves as pasticci and those that called themselves something else. This continuity is found in regional opera and in London. In recontextualising the centrality of text for nineteenth-century musical practice within the shift towards mass literacy, the chapter proposes that advocates for fidelity did not have the influence claimed. In defining fidelity and pasticcio as binary opposites much is missed: pasticcio practices were often relied on to bring greater fidelity to an opera, bringing it closer to its source material, to what were considered timeless behaviours, to national stereotyping or the locale in which the story was set. These fidelities were achieved at the expense of that to the original score, but these other fidelities were often a greater priority, even for reformers.
If pasticcio operas did not terminate in the nineteenth century and advocates for textual fidelity did not have the influence claimed, how did pasticcio become so marginal to twentieth-century operatic practice? To answer this, the chapter first discusses copyright and performance licensing, arguing that their structures between the 1870s and 1920s contracted the canonical operatic repertoire and militated against pasticcio in leading opera houses. Yet these were virtually the only context where pasticcio was not practiced: from the beginning twentieth-century cinema and television took a pasticcio approach to the use of music and beyond Covent Garden pasticcio opera continued. That pasticcio skills were widespread among the public is evidenced by the thousands of musicians who invented accompaniments to silent films every week. Lines of teacher/pupil descent illustrate how skills were transmitted: Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon’s pasticcio operas were broadcast on television in 1938, and their tutors were taught by Henry Bishop, a pupil of Francesco Bianchi, to whose pasticci Mozart contributed in the 1780s. Pathways back from the margins for pasticcio operas increased after the 1970s when academic rehabilitation sped its return. The book concludes with a pulse-reading of the twenty-first century’s renewed interest in pasticcio opera.
It is widely acknowledged that one of the most significant films to emerge at the end of the 1960s, that widely captured audiences’ attentions and could certainly be labelled a political thriller, was Z, directed by Costa-Gavras and written by Jorge Semprún. Together, as well as apart, the pair would have an enormous impact on the development of the form of the European political thriller as the 1970s progressed. Key to their collaboration in this period was the work they undertook on three landmark films: Z (1969), The Confession (L'aveu, 1970) and Special Section (Section spéciale, 1975), some of the most powerful political dramas of the period.
Creating a major film season such as States of Danger and Deceit is a major undertaking. This can be broken down into three distinct components: firstly, researching possible titles for the season and engaging with the critical writing about the form of the political thriller in Europe; secondly, the selection of the films and designing of supporting events and materials; and finally, the actual delivery of the season. In this part of the dossier, these three areas are outlined, offering some thoughts and reflections on the process which represents a clear combination of research and practice. This approach is something that has been developed at HOME, and its previous incarnation Cornerhouse, through the major film seasons that took place in Manchester and on tour across the UK: Visible Secrets: Hong Kong’s Women Filmmakers (co-curated by Sarah Perks and Andy Willis in 2009) and CRIME: Hong Kong Style (curated by Andy Willis in 2016).
When asked to introduce Days of ’36 as part of the States of Danger and Deceit season at HOME, this chapter’s author thought to herself, what can she say about Theo Angelopoulos and the film in just a few minutes? She had written about his films and about the ways in which his films affect Brechtian aesthetics (Kosmidou, 2017). She had gone against the grain and argued that his films cannot be considered textbook Brechtian despite being considered by many as such (Horton, 1997; Jordan, 2000; Karalis, 2006; Rollet, 2012). It is precisely his ability to affect and alter Brechtian aesthetics that makes him one of the best and most important contemporary filmmakers, a master of cinematic style and a master of allegory, a modernist, a ‘poet of images’ (Mania, 2012), an auteur indeed.