| Britten's last opera, Death in Venice (1973), essentially plays out a dramatic struggle for words formulated in words and as such poses a problem: how does one musically voice symptoms of writer's block in opera? The interrelation between character utterances (or lack thereof) and the ambient music that sounds and surrounds them is vital in a dramatic context driven by the main character's chronic inability to write, speak, or at times even to perceive words.;Chapter One explores the notion of writer's block, the dramatic trigger articulated both musically and textually in the opening moments of the opera. It lays down a theoretical background that fleshes out the underlying psychological mechanism that leads to inhibitions in the creative process. It presents a theory of how blockage is projected in music and text, followed in Chapter Two by a demonstration of "conceptual blending" using "conceptual integration networks." Borrowed from cognitive linguistics and adapted for musical purposes, these networks render text and music as separate inputs in a conceptual framework that emphasizes music as a structural correlate to text rather than subordinating it. Chapter Three addresses specific moments when the conflicts that underlie the protagonist's creative block culminate in his cataclysmic inability to speak. Chapter Four both narrows the focus by examining the sonic transformations of the syllables of a single word---the object of the protagonist's infatuation---and then broadens the scope by tracing these permutations throughout the opera. The analysis shows how Britten folds in other words and meanings via similar aural presentation, forming a complex web of associations that shapes the entire opera while further expressing the dynamics of repression and writer's block. |
