Opera Aperta and its influence

In Opera Aperta Eco maintains that all art works are open entities that come to life only through a process of cooperation between the spectator (reader, listener, etc.) and the art work

1 _{Umberto Eco, The Open Work. trans. Anna Cancogni. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4.} 2 _{Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee. 8th ed. trans. Simone}

Spagnolo (Milano: Bompiani, 2009), 4.

I have translated this quote myself from the original Italian text of Opera Aperta as I believe it suggests Eco’s concept more relevantly, within the context of this thesis, than the English translation of The Open Work, which translates the sentence as follows: ‘[openness] tends to encourage “acts of freedom” on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations.’ [The Open Work, 4].

itself.3 _{Therefore the meaning of an art work is unavoidably manifold, as it depends on each}

individual’s perception. Opera Aperta has been very influential for the development of post-WWII

Italian opera, particularly for the works of Berio. Opera,4 _{in fact, was the outcome of a}

rappresentazione that he had previously planned in collaboration with Eco himself and writer Furio

Colombo. Such interest in the manifold interpretations that an art work can generate was widely

spread across avant-garde composers (and also writers and theatre practitioners).5 _{The relationship}

between the stories they narrated and the audience’s intellectual activity demonstrates the composers’ curiosity for the open possibilities of narrative. Such openness of interpretations is certainly exemplified by the usage of non-linear narrative, which, together with the various systems of allusions and references, stimulates the spectators to create their own narratives.

Luciano Berio focuses particular attention on openness. In his ‘Dialogo fra te e

me’ (Dialogue between you and me)6 _{the composer simulates an interview between himself and an}

imaginary interviewer (you, the reader). In this writing Berio discusses his opera Un re in ascolto and tries to reveal what its story is about, providing different synopsises and meanings for his

work.7 _{This text reveals that Berio’s intention was not only to create a narrative that could contain}

several stories, but also, and most importantly, a work that could be open to manifold interpretations. His theatre-of-imagination and -dream indeed aim to stimulate the spectators’ interpretations. However such active (mental) participation by the audience does not have to be intended in Brechtian terms, as it is not addressing ideological or political matters. Its ultimate purpose resides in the mere openness to imagination, or perhaps in openness for its own sake.

3 _{This thesis is also discussed in Umberto Eco’s Lector in Fabula. However this work predominately focuses on literary}

text, not on art works in general as Opera Aperta does. For further reference see: Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula: La

Cooperazione Interpretativa nei Testi Narrativi. 11th ed. (Milano: Bompiani, 2010).

4 _{The first drafts of Berio’s Opera indicate that it was originally titled Opera Aperta, as Umberto Eco’s book.} 5 _{All the works discussed in the previous Chapters, including both operas and novels, are an example of this.} 6 _{‘Dialogo fra te e me’ can be found in:}

• _{Luciano Berio, booklet from Un re in ascolto, CD prod. Wulf Weinmann (CD, Col legno, LC 7989, 1984);}

• _{Luciano Berio, ‘Dialogue between you and me’, in programme note of Un re in ascolto’s première, ed. Hans Widrich} (Salzburg-Mayrwies: coproduction of Salzburger Festspiele and Wiener Staatsoper, 1984).

7 _{At the beginning of ‘Dialogo fra te e me’ (Dialogue between you and me) Berio says that his opera Un re in ascolto}

narrates ‘the events of a king listening to the building up of accidents around him and impotently witnessing the gradual fall of his kingdom and power’. Subsequently he affirms that his opera is about ‘a theatre director who is alone in his office while on the stage nearby a new musical show is being rehearsed. There are many difficulties and there is some confusion. The director dreams another theatre. He feels faint and in the delirium he is overtaken by memories. He dies, alone, on an empty stage’. Then he describes it in a further different way: ‘the theme of Un re in ascolto is the rehearsal of a show. A powerful theatre man, Prospero, is in trouble. The new show is a remake of Shakespeare’s The tempest, but there are not enough means to produce it and there is not an agreement with the very ambitious director’.

These quotes are taken from: Luciano Berio, on CD booklet from Un re in ascolto, prod. Wulf Weinmann (CD, Col legno, LC 7989, 1984).

To highlight the relationship between Italian contemporary opera and the matter of openness I took Un re in ascolto as my example, but the other aforementioned works equally exemplify this feature. Does La Passion selon Sade not open the roads of imagination toward manifold interpretations of the intellectual past? Does La vera storia not implicitly demand imagining further stories beyond the narrated ones? Such a process of openness somehow recalls the principle of insufficient reason, which states that ‘if there is no reason to believe that the possible Statuses of

Nature have different probabilities of happening, they are equiprobable’.8 _{Similarly, the multi-}

narratives of the discussed operas lead to ‘equiprobable’ perspectives. This is to say that all

interpretations are equally valid, and a narrative cannot have one ‘true story’.9

Thus, it can be argued that Italian post-WWII operas transcend the on-stage representations, and, in so doing, tell us that each narration does not end within the representational framework (the on-stage occurrences), but continues in each spectator’s mind through individual imagination and interpretation. Openness, hence, is a constant and underlying theme that implicitly acts behind the scenes.