Staging Opera in a Film-Drowned World: La Traviata, Cinema, and the 'Cocktail-Party Effect'

Abstract

In this paper I interpret the first act duettino »Un dì, felice«, from Verdi's La traviata, as a musical representation of the ›cocktail-party effect‹ (a psychological effect whereby people reject unwanted aural messages, whether in the form or sound or music – or both – as they focus on a specific object, person, feeling or train of thoughts). I then discuss stagings and film versions of the same moment of La traviata – by Lanfranchi and Zeffirelli, among others – as well as some cinematic counterparts from such films as Cukor's Camille, Hitchcock's Vertigo, Fellini's Eight and a Half, Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Lynch's Lost Highway. I use the cinematic examples to restore, by metaphorical association, a sense of the original impact of Verdi's treatment of the duet through its relationship to the stage music that both precedes and follows it. In so doing, I also interpret the pre-eminence of lyrical singing in the opera as an extremely anti-naturalistic, paradoxical and yet enormously persuasive means of representing the silence experienced by a self-absorbed consciousness. Indeed, it is the sonic image of a character trapped into his/her subjectivity that is one the most enduring legacies of opera. The operatic element of the above mentioned films, then, lies less in any literal reference to opera than in the representation of a subject shutting out, as it were, the outside world, completely oblivious to his or her surroundings. The discussion ends by proposing a new staging of »Un dì, felice« as informed by the very same film excerpts under discussion.