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Britten’s musical language
Ex. 2.5: Peter’s thematic and harmonic protest at the end of the Prologue
the drama, I will be arguing, is much closer to more modern notions of the “subject” as an ideological entity, one whose actions are at least in part the result of a relationship to an authoritative societal voice. The word “subject,” Louis Althusser says, has two distinct senses: “(1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (136). Peter’s forced “submission” to the authority of Swallow’s court, in the Prologue, establishes a pattern for the plot to follow. In tracing that pattern, I turn now to consider the opera’s clearest representative of “higher authority,” the collective voice of the chorus.
2. “The Borough is afraid”: choric utterance in Act 1 It is getting more and more an opera about the community, whose life is ‘illuminated’ for this moment by the tragedy of the murders. Ellen is growing in importance, & there are fine minor characters, such as the Parson, pub-keeper, ‘quack’-apothecary, & doctor. Britten, letter to Elizabeth Mayer, 4 May 1942 (Mitchell–Reed 1991: 1037)
W. H. Auden once claimed that “the chorus can play two roles in opera and two only, that of the mob and that of the faithful, sorrowing or rejoicing community” (1989: 471), and his words are a reminder of the humanist triumph of the solo voice in opera, a post-Renaissance artform grounded in the complexity of the individual psychological state, as transmitted in vocal monody or aria. As a model for human subjectivity, the solo voice