Said on Opera

Best known for his writings on orientalism and postcolonialism, the late Said (1935–2003) was also an expert on music (Music at the Limits). In 1997, he delivered a series of lectures, reproduced here, on “authority and transgression in opera” at Cambridge, where he examined four works of music and the social and political assumptions underlying them. The works were Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The Cosi that emerges from Said’s examination is less superficial, more subversive of its day’s social norms. He ties the discussion of musical form in Fidelio to a dissecting of the values underlying it, making it difficult for the composer to weld the text into conventional operatic form. With Les Troyens, he attempted to resurrect an important but largely ignored work. The essay on Meistersinger addresses Wagner’s antisemitism but offered a more nuanced view of his tangled thoughts. Said was ill when he wrote these lectures and never lived to expand them.