Interpreting Puccini’s Suor Angelica: An application of the semiotics of temporality

• Authors: Andrew Davis
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

This article summarizes recent discussions in the secondary literature of the semiotics of temporality, understood not as time per se but as the “time signified” by the signs in any semiotic system. Drawing especially on theories of the late Raymond Monelle and noting parallels with Monelle in work of, for example, Abbate, Daverio, Kinderman, Hatten, and Berger, the article posits that states of “temporality” in music can correlate with the syntactic signification of linear, teleological motion through time, whereas states of “atemporality” can correlate with syntactic signification of suppressed linear motion through time. As one of the distinguishing semantic characteristics of post Classical music, the signification of extended moments of atemporality is understood as a central expressive issue in the structure of Puccini’s Suor Angelica (from the II trittico of 1918), an opera that divides approximately into two halves: an atemporal half focused on portraying the Roman Catholic church, and a temporal half focused on exploring the character of Angelica, where both halves also include “tropes of temporality” cued by juxtapositions of temporal and atemporal signifiers. That the church in Suor Angelica is elevated to the position of the drama’s primary antagonist is asserted as one of the ways with which the piece engages with the aesthetics of “realism”, an aesthetic that, in turn, informs an interpretation of the opera’s ending, which includes a deus ex machina in the form of an appearance of the Virgin Mary and an apparition of Angelica’s dead son.

Keywords

PL

temporality; time; Raymond Monelle; levels of discourse; atemporality; verismo; realism; Giacomo Puccini; Suor Angelica; II Trittico; forms in melodrama; marvelous (topic); Romanticism; nineteenth-century

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 14
• Pages: 48-61

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Andrew Davis

• conducts research on late-19th and early-20th century opera and on interpretive issues in the Romantic sonata. Recent publications include “Mixed Genres and Narrativity in Chopin’s B-minor Sonata,” in Music: Function and Value (Krakow: Akademia Muzyczna); “Old Age and Late Works? The Case of Puccini,” in Le grand âge et ses oeuvres ultimes (Rennes: University of Rennes); II Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and, with coauthor Howard Pollack, “Rotational Form in the Opening Scene of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 2 (2007): 373-414. He is at work on a book, Musical Meaning in the Romantic Piano Sonata. He is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Director of Graduate Studies at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston, in Houston, Texas, USA.

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.14746/ism.2014.14.3