Osmin's Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text

While at work on The Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart posed for himself the great aesthetic conundrum of opera: how does drama become music? Reflecting, in a letter to his father, on the angry outburst of his operatic villain Osmin, he wrote, "Just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation and propriety and completely forgets himself, so must the music too forget itself." And yet, as Mozart went on to say, unpleasant emotions must not be expressed in unpleasant music. Even in depicting anger, music "must never offend the ear, but must please the hearer, or in other words must never cease to be music." In Peter Kivy's view, Mozart has here summarized the problem of opera: the transmutation of music into drama while remaining within the bounds of pure musical form. For to transgress these bounds would be to give up the game--to represent, perhaps, but not to represent in music.

In pursuit of an understanding of such limits, Professor Kivy focuses on three crucial stages in operatic history--the invention of opera, Handelian opera seria, and the comic operas of Mozart. From the confrontation of philosophical theory and musical practice, he extracts an operatic "essence" that is characterized as "drama-made-music," as contrasted with "music drama." In conclusion, he compares the concept of "drama-made music" with other concepts of opera, especially Joseph Kerman's, and provides a philosophical rationale for its unique character.

"Kivy is simply the best philosopher writing about music today. . . . Here he studies the special problem of opera, how it became both a dramatic and a musical art, and what its underlying aesthetic principles are. He traces opera's philosophical foundations from the imitation theories of Plato and Aristotle, to the representation theory of the Italian Camerata, the mechanistic psychology of Descartes, the doctrine of affektenlehre, and the associationist psychology of the British Enlightenment. . . . Kivy's writing is honest, insightful, careful, and witty. . . . There is meat here for philosophers, musicians, music theorists, historians, and social critics."―Choice

"Kivy provides close philosophical analysis of texts that underpin the origins of Western European opera and . . . relates seventeenth and eighteenth-century operatic practice to the philosophical and psychological theories of the times. . . . In a long and generally excellent discussion Kivy takes as his target those writers . . . who attempt to deduce a composer's psycho-biography from other librettos he chooses to set. . . . Kivy's book has a certain acumen and charm."―Times Literary Supplement