Motive and narrative in Billy Budd
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prayer – a fleeting timbral detail, but one that marks the spiritual distance traversed during the interlude. A further sign of the orchestral interlude’s narrative autonomy from Vere himself is simple contrast of mood – this orchestral music is unlike any of Vere’s music elsewhere in the opera. Its brooding dialogue is an obvious contrast to the passionate, major-mode advocacy of his lyric outbursts (“Nay, you’re mistaken” and “Claggart”). The orchestra’s role here is comparable to the lyric interpolations of a Greek chorus, a commenting witness on the main action, one whose speech stands outside the headlong flow of dramatic time, building links by specific musico-thematic means to other areas of the opera. The bustling diatonicism of the closing “Light” quotation (Ex. 3.10c) recalls Billy’s Act 1 “King of the birds” aria; the triadchains of the Mist prefigure the more extended orchestral triad-chains still to come in the Act 2 Interview. While a protagonist’s concern is limited to events of the moment, a chorus escapes the telos of plot motion to function at a metaphoric level, pointing analogies and making connections.55 Its real dramatic force transcends local actional concerns; the orchestra’s thematic argument is an expansive discourse, impressing upon familiar materials a significance beyond the scene at hand. At such moments, the opera orchestra intervenes with the authority and distinctive voice of a narrator.
(c) Voice placement and the intimacy of focalized narrative The numerous discriminations of literary narrative – in Genette’s classic analysis, factors such as the scene/summary opposition, the temporal reordering of story events, the interplay of speech- and event-centered narration, and the degree to which distanced interventions are overt or subtle56 – offer a range of vocal modes comparable, I have claimed, to operatic modes of story telling. Hearing unambiguous signs of narrative “distance” in opera, though, is tricky; claims that the orchestra narrates are more convincingly sustained when the stage is empty (as in the Mist interlude) than when a listener’s attention is trained on the material vocality of singing actors. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the voice/orchestra relationship is a simple matter of supporting backdrop (Wagner attacked Rossini for using the orchestra only as “a huge guitar for accompanying the Aria”)57 or, conversely, to consider those on stage as mere illustrative figures supplementing a primarily orchestral action. Voice–instrumental relations are nothing if not supple (and literary narratives, Genette [191] notes, can shift mode with great speed). Listening for a range of voice/orchestra relations, one might dispense with the static textural model implicit in loose terms