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Claudio Benzecry

A Night at the Opera. Musical engagement, morality and status in Contemporary Buenos Aires.  

Committee: Craig Calhoun (chair), Thomas Ertman, Richard Sennett, and Eric Klinenberg.  

Abstract  

This study analyzes how people engage with Opera in Buenos Aires. It does so by scrutinizing, through a three-year long ethnography, 44 in depth interviews and the collection and analysis of historical documents, the processes of apprenticeship and membership by which people become opera fans. These processes are triggered by a secluded space of sociability (the standing room spaces of the opera house) and result in a moral economy of opera fandom and a heroic, self-sacrificing ethic that serves as the horizon for practice. I examine issues of sensuality, attachment, proximity and bodily practices as well as discursive practices in order to show how the tension between “high” and “low” gets solved by participants in what I call moral listening; this practice underscores a rhetoric that “corrects” and presents as high the low bodily practices and makes opera a “sacred” object of appreciation. I understand and analyze the resulting modes of engagement as a combination of a “superior” spiritual understanding of the opera fans as they strive for a transcendence that helps them escape from the country’s current crisis and longtime decadence, and an attachment to opera through the dramatic qualities of the voice as enjoyed through the body. Further variation in the modes of engagement is more the result of the aforementioned processes of apprenticeship and membership than the socio-economic status or educational attainment of the audience members.  

Summary of Chapters  

Chapter 1 presents the main objectives of the dissertation, to remedy two gaps in the sociology of culture: (1) attention to the experience and practical use of the content of music (as distinct from production and circulation) and (2) attention to opera. The chapter discusses three different ways in which sociology has tried to address the relationship between music and society, focusing on three different level of analysis. The first one, centered on issues of social distinction and class identity, has usually focused on a societal/class level of analysis. At the second level, the American School of Production of culture has focused on the organizational context of production. The third body of literature, on musical consumption, has focused on the individual level. I propose a theoretical framework that integrates these three levels and shows the continuities that link them together. The chapter also introduces methodological issues, explaining why and how ethnography allows us to see the actual shape of consumption and its variation in concrete situations and concludes by giving an explanation of the chosen population.  

Chapter 2 presents opera in Buenos Aires as a case that challenges the coupling of the high/low and sacred/profane categorical divide as it has been usually discussed in cultural sociology. It focuses on the history of opera in the city as well as in the many “low” features through which people relate to the opera in their bodily and spatial behaviors. It also discusses how a combination of “sacred” conceptions and “profane” practices gets articulated as a symbolic boundary by a moralizing rhetoric and intensive and highly experiential operatic knowledge. The resulting practice is what I’ve called “Moral listening”. It highlights the rejection of critics’ mediation yet the embrace of a moral/pedagogical dimension for consumption.  

Chapter 3 scrutinizes the moral economy of being an opera fan. I discuss the moral career that takes people to be a part a community of members of mutual recognition instead of a web of friends. I show the kinds of rewards and recognitions people get for “giving their life to the opera house” and how a sacrificial heroic ethic works as the horizon of practice. Becoming a “maestro” is the ultimate reward within this moral economy. I also show how opera works as an embedded mode of sociability with reference to past seasons, performances and audiences. Because of this past-centric character fans enter in a never-ending, detail-oriented learning process about opera that is highly experiential and can’t be replaced by classes and recordings. The chapter concludes by analyzing how the changing political economy of opera production in Buenos Aires results in different strategies for accumulating operatic capital and in a divide between an old and a new audience. This makes the newer opera venues a site for new members to behave in a more detached and omnivorous way but it also extends the spaces where the older ones can perform their sacrifice. Further, it also causes for a “softening” of standards and a critical judgment more based on evaluating effort than artistic result.  

Chapter 4 focuses on the moral intensity with which fans engage with opera. They do so by opposing themselves to the “formalized” socio-economic elite of the most expensive tickets and by presenting themselves as a deserving community of appreciation. This community gets reproduced through a re-enactment of the past in the voice of the soprano, factious debates from the past that get reenacted on permanent basis and a bounded conception of what staging should look like. It also does so by policing the proper times for silence and conversation and the proper moments for expressing judgment. The chapter examines how nostalgia works as a frame for evaluation for the present and refers to a previous elusive “golden moment” in opera production in Buenos Aires. It concludes by showing how this perception expels older fans from the opera house and how their mode of engagement is through melancholy.  

Chapter 5 analyzes opera attendance as moral engagement with the nation. This is seen through the use of opera as an occasion/vehicle to utter moral statements about the country. It shows how the opera house works as an enclosed machine that stands in a double relationship of symbiosis and opposition with the “outside” so when the protective “spell” breaks, the same maladies that haunt the country (politization, corruption, economic decadence, cultural decay) enter the opera.  

Chapter 6 dissects the socialization process in operatic knowledge and emotion. It focuses on narratives of beginning and also takes a look at the categories used to understand and analyze opera. It scrutinizes what it is that people get from opera, what meanings they build and how they develop emotional attachment to those meanings. It shows how a romantic understanding of the practice results in a one on one relationship to music and to the singer and in a listening contract that privileges dramatic voices as a vehicle for transcendence and escape from the decadent outside. The contract means that the audience privileges the singing over the instrumental parts and that they react differently to soloist and choral parts and to piano and forte endings of an aria. It also means that well-known, extremely melodic and difficult arias are evaluated in a favorable manner regardless of the artistic merits of its interpretation. High-pitched notes at the end disband the contract. The chapter concludes by showing how opera works as escape and fantasy as people attach to it through a dual narrative of therapy and sickness that organizes the experience.  

I conclude by proposing how a theory of musical engagement (and cultural practices in general) can be built up from this case. Instead of focusing on just a socio-structural level, an organizational analysis or on individual variation, this study serves as a stepping stone for a more integrative understanding of cultural consumption, taking into account its emotional, cognitive and strategic dimensions.

Curriculum Vitae