Few today would dispute Michel Foucault's intellectually seismic assertion that discourse defines or “authorizes” knowledge: it renders visible, it “produces” what we see. As he so incisively demonstrated, discourse not only furnishes those conceptual categories through which we conceive reality within a period, but shapes or articulates all our subsequent discoveries. An outstanding feature of the humanities and social sciences in the past several decades has been the entry of those new discourses developed originally by the French Left in the sixties. Within the humanities, figures like Jacques Derrida have had an unquestionable impact, while in anthropology, sociology, and history the cynosures have been Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.

Yet musicology has neglected Bourdieu – we have slighted his insights into power and its deployment of symbols in favor of the social, symbolic analyses of Adorno and Geertz. Among my aims, then, is to raise the question of why those symbolic exchanges that Bourdieu has made “visible,” stimulating insights in so many other fields, still have not done so in ours. For the issue of why we have skirted his political and social grounding of symbols compels us to recognize premises that persist in our field and have buttressed the predominance of other paradigms. However, my focus shall be on how Bourdieu's semiotic analysis of power relations reveals contestation within French music, and particularly opera, of the 1920s, which is obscured by the now prevalent models.

When considering the great epochs of French operatic history one would scarcely even entertain the notion of including the decade of the 1920s, which pales in comparison with the febrility of Weimar. In fact, our dismissal of the French operas of this decade only appears to reinforce the common dictum of the genre's decline in much of Europe – its ineluctable marginality both in modern culture and in musical life. However, as I shall argue, this apparently insignificant decade in French opera is indeed seminal in terms of the genre's changing function, its evolving intellectual and political role. For opera in France in the twenties became an arena for a new kind of exchange: as a nexus for attempts to enunciate ideology, it led rather to an intriguing effacement of older ideological lines. This, I maintain, was the result of the inherent contradictions of the sub-genre involved, which sought to communicate abstract ideas in a semiotically unstable and emotionally compelling art.

The “opera of ideas,” as I shall call it, emerged from and yet transformed German precedents, fostered by governments of both the Right and the Left in the polarized atmosphere that followed World War I. When articulate ideologically, however, it failed to convince artistically; conversely, the most successful examples led not to reinforcement of certainties but to intellectual ferment.

As the historian (and contributor to this volume) Michael Steinberg has astutely noted with specific reference to the Catholic “Baroque” world, “the theater represents the world, but more than that it reflects the authority to represent and thus to order the world.” This observation, of course, is just as valid in other cases in which power employs the theatre, and in particular opera, to represent either the authority and social order that sustains it or that which it aspires eventually to ensconce. Theatre, however, and particularly opera, is neither transparent in its agenda nor entirely instrumental: it is a form of representation – “unique and irreducible, and in a constant, complex dialogue with the world of discourse that surrounds it.”

We must, then, be aware of what Louis Marin has described (with reference to painting) as “the gap between the visible – what is shown, figured, represented, staged – and the legible – what can be said, enunciated, declared.” Each mode of communication, including those of the arts, embodies a different “register” of representation, and although they “intersect, connect, and respond to one another” they never merge, which makes opera a uniquely complex enunciation.

Several of the chapters in this section concern attempts to use this inherently semiotically unstable genre to implement a world of symbolic domination – both social and political – and the distinctive articulation that results.