Opera and
Rhetorical Gesture
Last year at this time I had just finished the
drawings for Chicago’s Haymarket Opera company’s production of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, and
this year I’ve designed two additional sets, a palace and a port, for their production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Last year I posted on
the integration of the arts and opera; this year, in concert with my book on
emulation, I want to offer something brief on the emulative relationship of the arts.
After the Charpentier performance last year I was
struck by the image of live actors in period costume performing in front of the
sets I’d designed, and it prompted me to compose a painting based on a moving
scene in the opera where, on the death of Eurydice, Orpheus curses the “implacable
gods.” Reverberating back from the drama, my composition recalled the approach
to rhetorical gesture that Poussin had developed, and I wanted to integrate the
“actors” and the setting in both formal and rhetorical ways.
What I had learned in the course of thinking about the
first performance was the ways in which performance gesture in the Baroque
depended on painting, even as painting itself was often “theatrical” and
dramatic. Those interdependencies were reciprocal and ongoing, despite what
some art historians might prefer to see as a more linear borrowing. Seeing for
myself what dramatic action does to static scenes made me appreciate even more
Poussin’s rhetorical gestures, for example in the Metropolitan Museum’s Rape of
the Sabines; and I wonder if anyone has looked into Poussin’s attendance at the
theaters of Rome?
