W. H. Auden's Public Art: From Poetic Reticence to Operatic Performance

Abstract

W. H. Auden brought the matter of the homoerotic love lyric into a public form in his mid-century operas. This article examines Auden's æuvre through the lens of performativity as various attempts to formalize a homoerotic identity. I argue that Auden's Augustan propensities in opera—his sense of opera as a repository of civic art and the high style—are more fully understood against the backdrop of the strategies of the performative love lyric. Reading the civic thematics of Auden's operas as part of an erotic project reveal libretti that implicate sexual with civic politics, thus queering the “high style.”

Keywords:

• Performance
• Opera
• Lyric
• Homoerotic
• Collaboration

Notes

1. See Jacobs on Auden's tracing of a poetic lineage in the civic mode to Horace, Pope, and Byron (34).

2. Several video and audio recordings of The Rake's Progress by Igor Stravinsky are available: Igor Stravinsky, cond. Sadler's Wells Opera Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Sony Music [CD 46299], 1964; Robert Craft, cond. Orchestra of St. Luke's. BMG/Musicmasters [CD 67131], 1994; Kent Nagano, cond. Lyon Opera Chorus, Lyon Opera Orchestra. Erato [CD 12715], 1996; Seiji Ozawa, cond. Tokyo Opera Singers, Saito Kinen Orchestra. Philips [CD 454431], 1997; John Eliot Gardiner, cond. Monteverdi Choir, London Symphony Orchestra. Deutsche Grammophon [CD 456648], 1999; Bernard Haitink, cond. Glyndebourne Festival Chorus and London Philharmonic Orchestra. Arthaus Musik [DVD 101093], 2005; Kazushi Ono, cond. Brussels La Monnaie, De Munt Opera Symphony Orchestra. Opus Arte [DVD OA0991D], 2007; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Radio Choir. Kultur Video [DVD], 1995.

3. There are two audio recordings of The Bassarids by Hans Werner Henze (one in German with the Intermezzo and one in the original libretto's English with the Intermezzo excised): Gerd Albrecht, cond. Berlin RIAS Chamber Chorus, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Koch Schwann [CD 314006],1992 and Christoph von Dohnányi, cond. Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna State Opera Chorus. Orfeo D'Or [CD 6050321], 2003.

4. Adorno, most notably, considers the fundamentally anti-mythological impetus of opera as a corrective: “music intervenes in and transforms fate's blind, inescapable ties to nature (as they are represented in Western myths) … The operas which fulfill the genre most purely almost always correct myth through music” (33).

5. “I did not notice that I was obviously isolating myself, that my music was becoming more and more private, that its motivations were private ones, that it contained private communications, that it addressed itself to individuals, to private beings … The crisis … broke out while I was writing The Bassarids” (Henze 79).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidi Hartwig

Heidi Hartwig (PhD) is Assistant Professor of English at the Central Connecticut State University. A portion of this manuscript was originally delivered as a paper entitled “Love's Labours: Homoerotic Collaboration in Auden and Kallman's The Bassarids” at the 2005 Modernist Studies Association Conference