Unity and Analytical Paradigms

Theoretical tools designed to show unity have long been used implicitly to substantiate the integrity of composers (and theorists) faced with the commodification of culture, functioning as tropes for creative authority and autonomy, and a ready criterion for value judgment. In the wake of Romantic aesthetics that critiqued conventional harmonic syntax and stereotypical melodic figures as a basis for coherence, such tools became particularly urgent. “Everyone knows,” wrote Roger Parker over thirty years ago in a study of motivic development in Aida, “[that] in good music a search for ‘motivic coherence’ will almost always be rewarded in overabundance.” These kinds of remarks have most often been tested with reference to German repertory extending from Bach to Wagner and beyond. But for quite some time now, the wall erected by critics such as Arnold Schoenberg and Carl Dahlhaus between works that putatively follow their own internal designs and those beholden to social practice and institutions (such as nineteenth-century Italian opera) has crumbled, not only because the former have been seen as grounded in ideology and society but also because the latter have been subjected to a new and wide variety of theoretical tests of what constitutes “good music.”

Varieties of Unity

Yet although the new apparatus of music theory has modernized Verdi research—just as productions of the works themselves have been modernized—it has come under fire over a range of concerns. Quite some time ago, the houselights dimmed on the type of musical logic that privileges motivic and tonal relationships. Some have objected to a tendency to “terrorize” historical Others and crush figures of the past with the heavy armor of modern analytical techniques, others to a plethora of graphs and charts and tedious prose. These complaints have been effective in encouraging greater nuance in critical and analytical discussions but often do not seem to foster methodological pluralism any more than their targets. We would do well to remember that methodologies are the product not only of ideologies, authority structures, and/or consensus-seeking communities but of personal temperaments as well.

One prominent suggestion that opera criticism should forgo analyses that seek coherence in unity came from James Webster in the late 1980s. He admonished readers “to conduct our searches for tonal coherence as skeptically as we know how, and to accept from the beginning and without bias the possibility that we may not find it.”