Legal Status of Operatic Scores and Performances at Emergence of Film

Theoretical concepts regarding the relationship between (and natures of) scores and performances emerged in a decidedly concrete way in the first decade of the twentieth century. The dual modality of encountering a musical work did not escape Italian publishing magnate Giulio Ricordi, who in 1906 called an emergency board meeting of his publishing firm, the Casa Ricordi. The recent emergence of motion pictures and its possible effects on the firm's business interests was a pressing topic of conversation. With insight predating the emergence of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927) by more than 20 years, Ricordi anticipated that film would eventually replace opera in the social sphere. 4

Ricordi's fear of losing profits from opera performance led to his objections about the reproduction of the sounds of operas for which his firm held copyrights. On one occasion, no later than early 1906, he discovered that someone associated with the copyright collection agency Società Italiana degli Autori had not consulted him before showing a moving picture of portions of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (the rights of which Ricordi held) in Rome. Because this was still in the 'silent film' era (before 1927's The Jazz Singer), a recording of Francesco Tamagno singing music from those scenes accompanied the showing. Incensed, Ricordi wrote to the Società, demanding that they fulfill one of their aims: protecting performances of written works, and by extension, reproductions of performances: "So if your company believes that it should protect the performance of pieces of works with phonographs that can be given in public, do it." (Ricordi, 1906). 5

This episode led the Ricordi company to invoke the dual Italian legal protections applicable to artistic works: diritto d'edizione to protect publishing, reproducing, and selling of printed works, and diritto di rappresentazione, to protect the right to authorize performances of a work (Thomas, 2015). The Italian legal code that Casa Ricordi invoked managed to reserve the right to grant or deny permission for any performance of an opera within the first forty years of its composition. Ricordi's application of this code included Verdi's works from Aida onward, and all of Giacomo Puccini's oeuvre (Thomas, 2015). Ricordi's legal maneuvering in response to cinema and the reproduction of operatic scores and performances appears to reflect surface-level fears about his immediate and future pecuniary realities. It also reveals his conception of the nature of an operatic work: the art form's multiple experiential modalities are in fact phenomena pertaining to a work, and, moreover, these modalities play a critical role in revealing a work.

Phenomenology and Technology

Decades later, building on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, in both Sein un Zeit (Being and Time) and "The Question Concerning Technology," examined the emergent technological world of the mid-twentieth century. 6 For him, "technology is a way of revealing" because it is "that which belongs to technē," which consists of the skills and practices of a craftsman—i.e. the work of hands—along with "the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Thus, technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis; it is something poietic" (Heidegger, 1977, p. 13). Written language is perhaps the most basic form of technology:

Writing is a 'machine' to supplement both the fallible and limited nature of our memory (it stores information over time) and our bodies over space (it carries information over distances). So it's not so much that we humans made technology: technology also made us. As we write, so writing makes us. It is technology that allows us history, as a recorded past and so a present, and so, perhaps a future. So to think about technology, and changes in technology, is to think about the very core of what we, as a species, are and about how we are changing. As we change technology, we change ourselves (Eaglestone, 2013, p. 87).

Technology is thus not an invention that exists in isolation from its creators, but in a broader context of social currents, intellectual movements and cultural products. Mark Schubin has shown such bi-directional influence in his study of the relationship between technology and opera. 7

Table 1. Historical Overview of Opera and Technology 8

Date	Development
1581	Vincenzo Galilei publishes a book containing principles and acoustics of opera as discussed by Florentine Camerata
1619	Drawing upon Galilei, Johannes Kepler posits and publishes 3rd law of orbital motion, which is evident in modern satellites
1637	Opera houses begin to use acoustic ducts
1673	Athanasius Kircher proposes ducting music outside the opera house
1726	Thomas Lediard uses moving-image projection at Hamburg opera
1730	Collapsible telescope (monocular) in use in London
1823	Voigtländer company sells binocular opera glasses
1849	Antonio Meucci experiments with electronic sound transmission at the Gran Teatro Tacón opera house in Havana
1849	Jules Dubosq projects an electric-light sunrise effect at the Paris Opéra
1880	Edward P. Fry listens to opera via telephone
1881	Clément Ader transmits stereo sound from Paris Opéra
1881	British patent filed for gas-jet-illuminated libretto display in opera house
1882	Albert Robida's Le Vingtième Siècle predicts (& illustrates) opera delivered to homes via "téléphonoscope"
1885	Based on 1884 telephone transmission, opera pay-cable service opens in Lisbon
1888	Edison's motion-picture patent caveat declares it is for opera
1893	Tivadar Puskás creates electronic newscast to increase utilization of opera-by-phone lines
1894	William Dickson plays music in first synchronized-sound movie
1895	Opera via headphones (available in Lisbon since 1888) offered by Electrophone
1896	First operetta films shown in Germany; Georges Hatot's Faust, released by Lumieres in 1897, based on Gounod's opera
1898	La fille du regiment (Donizetti) is the 1st filmed opera (two minutes) to be shown; Martha (Flotow) is shot on film
1899	Martha is shown at the Eden Musée with live performers singing behind the screen; technique popular though 1922 cinema opera Jenseits des Stromes (Hummel) (with projected score at bottom of screen; other systems for cueing musicians in opera movies used small conductor image or signal lights built into the set)
1900	Horace Short broadcasts opera from the top of the Eiffel Tower via a compressed air amplifier; Lionel Mapleson records from a non-interfering location (the wings of the Metropolitan Opera), creating some of the earliest live performance recordings
1903	Ernani (Verdi) becomes the first "full-length" (abridged) recording of a complete opera, consisting in forty discs (eighty sides)
1907	Radio transmission of opera singer leads to U.S. Navy use of radio as communication technique; "complete" Faust (22 arias) film using Chronophone; Caruso records "Vesti la giubba" (Pagliacci) a 3rd time and it becomes the first million copy record (Platinum level according to RIAA)
1913	First complete opera shot in U.S. with synchronized sound, Pagliacci (Leoncavallo)
1915	Geraldine Farrar becomes silent-movie star based on success onstage as Carmen
1919	Hugo Gernsback proposes live sound, distributed by radio, to cinemas projecting silent opera movies; Opera radio broadcasts in Chicago and New Brunswick, NJ via military transmitters, latter heard live 2000 miles out to sea
1925	Electronic recording and playback technologies emerge, standardizing techniques for both practices
1928	Washington Post reports opera singers on television
1931	Metropolitan Opera broadcasts via radio for the first time, Englebert Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel
1952	Carmen (Bizet) transmitted live to cinemas in 27 cities
1976	First commercial digital recording is opera
1977	Metropolitan Opera broadcasts via television for the first time, Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto
1986	Opera Basel first plazacast of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor
1995	Houston Grand Opera first plazacast
2006	Met HD plazacast to Times Square, international and HD cinema transmission
2009	Opera de Rennes broadcasts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni live to cinemas in 3-D
2009	International, digital, high-definition, satellite, multi-language-subtitled, surround-sound, live cinema versions of opera

Robert Eaglestone's foregoing characterization of technology applies presciently to writing, whether text, computer code, or music, reflecting the thoughts and creativity of an author. Thus, written music represents not only a composer's creativity (bringing into existence something which has not existed in the form designated by an author), but also the result of a technological practice that encodes ideas in a transmissible form. Musicologists have largely accepted that scores are not the sole representative of a musical work, recognizing that writing music conceals the actual musical entity. Cook (2013) echoes this view, characterizing the actions of performers (reading a score and acting upon it) and listeners (engaging the aural results of performers' actions) as a "slippage between two senses of 'expression'" along a communicative chain from composer to listener (p. 31). The communicative chain, which Cook identifies as a longstanding characteristic of music in scholarly discourse, is necessary because whatever the composer has conceived remains hidden from others until its inscription for preservation or sharing. Even Rudolph Kolisch's assertion that "the entire need for performance disappears if one can read music", perhaps unintentionally, admits that musical notation conceals the thoughts of the composer (Cook, 2013, p. 8). This concealment occurs because, as philosopher Jacques Derrida's stipulated, "Writing reduces the dimensions of presence in its sign" (Derrida, 1974, p. 281). A musical score, as a written entity, reduces the ways in which one can encounter the presence of the musical work by forcing the encounter into the visual realm, thereby restricting engagement by other senses. The score enables the sounds of a musical entity (what Heidegger characterizes as that which presences) to come into (aural) appearance repeatedly, but is not itself the musical entity. 9

Jacques Derrida further expounds on this point, considering "the epoch of logocentrism" as "a moment of the global effacement of the signifier [the written word]" (Derrida, 1974, pp. 285-6). This effacement creates a mode of thinking in which "one then believes one is protecting and exalting speech [by adherence to the written text], [but] one is only fascinated by a figure of the technē" (Derrida, 1974, p. 286, emphasis added). Such fascination stems from Derrida's steadfast belief in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's assertion of two hundred years earlier: "Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object" (Derrida, 1974, p. 27). In other words, written representations are not and cannot be the ideas that they represent. Similarly, speaking produces auditory phenomena representing the idea, rather than the idea itself, and is also a form of technē. Hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer reasserted a performance's status, arguing that the written component of an aesthetic entity lies in its ability to connect the past and present. 10

Gadamer's stipulation about written works also applies to musical practice. It implies that there is no inherent codependency or inherent important differentiation possible between a written score and the sounded notes: "The fact that aesthetic being depends on being presented, then, does not imply some sort of deficiency, some lack of autonomous meaning. Rather, it [aesthetic being] belongs to its very essence. The spectator is an essential element in [what] we call aesthetic" (Gadamer, 2014, p. 130). Gadamer goes so far as to claim that it is in performance, and not in the written score, that one encounters the musical work:

The performance of a play, like that of a ritual, cannot simply be detached from the play itself, as if it were something that is not part of its essential being, but is as subjective and fluid as the aesthetic experiences in which it is experienced. Rather, it is in the performance and only in it – as we see most clearly in the case of music – that we encounter the work itself…A drama only really exists when it is played, and ultimately, music must resound (Gadamer, 2014, p. 120).

This idea suggests that what is more important is the action of bringing a work into being, what I term "opsicentrism," rather than the text of a work itself, unlike "logocentrism," which preferences the written word as the primary embodiment of a musical work. 11 Sounded music, which implies the labor of producing the sound, rather than any other sensorial mode of it—written, imagined, physically felt—is thus the singular mode by which anyone can come closest to encountering the musical work itself. Nevertheless, strict adherence to Gadamer's constructs of opsicentrism and logocentrism produces an ultimately untenable binary, especially for texted music. Musical works consist then, at minimum, in their sounded phenomena, sung text (if present), and written score.

Of course, the challenge with music is its evanescent temporality—its sounded and intangible existence ceases almost as soon as it comes into being. The ephemerality of a performed music entity requires something to continue to allow its ongoing realization. Each realization (performance) of a musical work is the revealing that brings it forth: poiēsis (Heidegger, 1977, p. 29). Gadamer (2014) asserts that "[A work's] own original essence is always to be something different (even when [performed] in exactly the same way). It has its being only in becoming and return" (p. 126). Clarke (2012) reminds his readers that "Novelty and uniqueness…are central to that powerful and Romantic notion of creativity which still dominates our culture" (p. 20). This reminder follows his description of pianists playing the same work, either in comparison with each other or against themselves individually. In other words, according to Nicholas Cook (2013), "Music's communicative potential—its ability to enact openness to the other—…is built into practically all musical performance and listening" (p. 412).

Musical works, which, by their nature intersect again and again with audiences only in their coming into being or presencing (Anwesen) via the performers bringing-forth (Her-vor-bringen), are convincing testaments to humans' inability for exact mechanical reproduction (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 10-1). 12 Gadamer (2014) expands on music's Her-vor-bringen as evidenced in its occasionality: "The work of art…experiences a continued determination of its meaning from the 'occasion' of its coming-to-presentation. This is seen most clearly in the performing arts, especially theater and music, which wait for the occasion in order to exist and define themselves…" (p. 147). Acknowledging the viability of opsicentrism becomes an integral step in coming closer to encountering the musical work.

Rather than blindly accepting either logocentrism or opsicentrism and abandoning the other, however, I suggest a reinvestment in Heideggerian ideals for musical performance. Neither the score nor the performance contains the entire Wesen of the musical entity; thus, neither one constitutes that entity completely. Instead, both point to it, and the aesthetic being that is music is perhaps like a performance of music itself: intangible. Because the score endures, and is therefore (only) one embodiment of the Heideggerian Gestell of music, the score is the essencing of technology, the technē of the musical work. Gadamer's conception of every performance's uniqueness in relationship to the nature of a work reveals a prescient awareness of any performance history's inherent dynamism. For him, what is "essential to dramatic or musical works, then, is that their performance at different times and on different occasions is, and must be, different…specifically occasional art forms determine [themselves] anew from occasion to occasion" (Gadamer, 2014, pp. 147-8). Both a musical score and its realization belong to technē because they each point to the revealing of the musical work, which is poietic. Those who endeavor in either practice—i.e. in the pursuit of revealing by composition or performance—both exhibit and affirm how tangible practices link to intangible concepts. Heidegger (1977) reminds his audience that:

Here was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name technē. Once that revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearing also was called technē. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called technē. And the poiēsis of the fine arts was also called technē (p. 34).

Methodological Considerations

The present analysis further adapts the hierarchical Time Scape technique of tempo tracking, developed by CHARM, as the tool for operatic analysis. By incorporating textual underlays with Time Scapes, this method facilitates understanding of temporal-textual emphasis and aspects/elements of performers' creative processes. How singers deliver the text in the context of the musical structure provides valuable insight into the kind of character they portray. While Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (2007) has also analyzed singers' expressivity in relation to sung text of Schubert's lied "Die jenge Nonne", his approach focused on individual moments or phrases and durations of the entire song without extended consideration of connections between them. Scape plotting is useful for capturing both surface-level details and the overall hierarchical structure simultaneously while also enabling examination of the connections that Leech-Wilkinson's foundational work did not cover.

To create the scape plots, beat tapping and tempo calculation (to the following beat) using Sonic Visualiser provided the basic data for use in this study. For Giordani's performance, the process was to extract the digital audio from the commercially available DVD, then enter and adjust beat markers with onset detection. For Gruber's performance, which is not commercially available, data generation followed a process I designed to accommodate legal restrictions on archival material: 1) annotation of a score while listening, 2) tapping beats on a second listening, 3) comparing tap track and recording on a third listening while making further annotations for subsequent listening, 4) listening and tapping with new information, 5) repeating steps 3-4 until creation of a tap track reflecting beat placement, and 6) upload file into Sonic Visualiser for placement, onset detection, and tempo calculation (Neumann, 2016b, p. 50). I then used his tempo data in CHARM's web-based Scape Plot Generator tool to create the Time Scapes in this study (http://www.mazurka.org.uk/software/online/scape/).

Since Time Scapes form the basis of the following analysis, an overview of reading them with the overlay in use here is necessary. Four elements nuance the understanding of these Time Scapes. First, color coding reflects basic relationships to the overall average, or global, tempo of a performance; yellow, orange, and red are progressively faster than average (green), while blue indigo and violet are progressively slower. Second, a structural overlay indicates approximate divisions of surface (beat-to-beat tempo relationships), mid-ground (phrasal connections) and background (global tempo). Third, a tempo contour graph and linear trend line respectively indicate precise tempo values of the surface level and reflect the overall pacing tendencies within the performance, while the final and perhaps most critical element, the textual underlay, reveals a performance's unique temporal-textual emphases.

Structural analysis of the tempo hierarchy in relationship to the text is necessary for understanding the temporal-textual emphases hierarchy and its possible ramifications for dramatic interpretation. Examination of the surface level—the bottom third of each Time Scape—reveals how singers' deviations from the global tempo have the effect of accentuating or understating different elements of the text. A performance's temporal-textual emphases can align with a score's indications or result from performer decisions alone. On their own, each surface-level emphasis highlights individual words or phrases. For example, if one spends more time delivering the word "amore" than the word "colore," then the word "amore" receives a greater temporal-textual emphasis, suggesting the speaker's designation that it is the more important word. Surface level deviations from the global tempo have the same effect, whether the cause of the performed effect is based in notation or in aural phenomena. On their own, each of these surface-level emphases highlights individual words, but when their emphasis crosses another one in a higher (or deeper) structural level, a structural crossing links the two words.

The middle third of each Time Scape reflects the structural mid-ground of a performance, and in this space temporally-based connections between non-neighboring parts of the text can emerge. Such links are evident when extensions of homogenous color from surface level events intersect in a deeper structural level. Not only do these structural crossings further substantiate each performance's uniqueness, but, moreover, their respective hierarchical levels reflect a hierarchy of textual connections. For example, the emphases added in the following line changes what it communicates as most important to a reader; "The blue cow jumped over the purple moon" stresses the unorthodox coloring of the sentence's modified subject and object on the surface, but in a deeper level, it connects these two components, so perhaps the sentence is about imaginative color schemes. Alternatively, "The blue cow jumped over the purple moon" stresses the cow jumping, already a rare occurrence, but by connecting this temporal emphasis to the moon's color, perhaps the reason for the cow's odd behavior is that purple evokes such a strong reaction.

Understandably, this hierarchical structure depends largely on the imposed ordering of text and music by composers and librettists—here Puccini, Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. As previous research has established (at CHARM and elsewhere), however, performer decisions contribute greatly to variations in hierarchical tempo structures. While it may be possible to discern such connections in listening alone, they generally become more difficult to discern as one moves higher in the structure, and the longer the passage of music to which one listens. The top third of each Time Scape is predominantly green, unless there are connections between parts of the text at the beginning and end of an excerpt, or a moment-specific tempo modification strong enough to occupy an organizational space in the hierarchy. As these extensions cross at higher levels of a performance's tempo hierarchy, their importance in the overall structure for what they link increases.

Most tempo modulations in the present study are ritardandos, resulting from notated and non-notated fermatas, tenutos, and other note-specific articulation marks. Combined with Puccini's well-documented obsession with tempo and pacing, these distinct modulations in relationship to text delivery form the rationale for hierarchical analysis of textual connections based on temporal emphasis. This performance and performer centric view is not to give preference to these aspects over a score, libretto, staging, etc., but only to focus on their part of the aforementioned dialogic relationship in the continual creation of operatic works. In the following graphs—the central components of the analysis here undertaken—the temporal-textual emphases result largely from the varying applications of tempo rubato, and also from Puccini's notated metric and beat structure.

Each case study presented here followed the same analytical protocol: 1) analysis of temporal-textual emphases with the preceding method, which enabled the 2) formation of a hypothesis about its performer's interpretation, 3) interview with each singer to apprehend their unique understanding of and motivations for their characters in the musical moments this project analyzed, 4) share hypothesis/conclusion drawn from Time Scape and temporal-textual emphasis analyses, and 5) confirm veracity of empirical findings against performer characterization. In each case, my hypothesis matched how Gruber and Giordani described their respective interpretations. 16 Confirming such hypotheses via interview, as in the present study, or other secondary sources makes this approach useful for interrogating performers' creative processes both within a performance and across performances in the context of the performance history of an operatic work.

Andréa Gruber: Turandot as Charade, 29 January 2005

Turandot's entrance aria, 'In questa Reggia' and the ensuing riddle scene form the crux of both her character and the opera's dramatic arc. In this aria, Turandot explains her riddles and the ostensibly severe consequence of failing to answer them – her desire for vengeance on behalf of her ancestress Lou-o-Ling, as Table 2 illustrates. 17 Taken at her word, Turandot is bloodthirsty, vengeful, and cruel. According to Andréa Gruber (2015), both Birgit Nilsson's icy, steely timbre and dominance of the role on the stage throughout the 1960s solidified these traits as Turandot's true nature in the imagination of audiences. 18

The Time Scape in Figure 1 represents Andréa Gruber's performance as Turandot on 29 January 2005. Here, tempo modifications reflect the musical structure of the aria: twenty bars of 2/4 marked molto lento with 46 quarter notes per minute and covering beats 1-41, sixty-eight bars of 4/8 interspersed with three bars of 2/8, with indications of lento and 66 eighth notes per minute for beats 41-111, and finally twenty-two bars of 4/4 marked largamente with 56 quarter notes per minute over beats 113-199. In this analysis, the 2/8 and 4/8 measures were analyzed based on quarter note equivalency in order to accommodate limitations of accounting for meter shifts in audio files in Sonic Visualiser.

Much of the tempo hierarchy in Gruber's performance is similar to the other eighteen performances of this aria at the Metropolitan Opera between 1960 and 2009. 19 Unlike for Birgit Nilsson in 1961 (top left in Figure 1) or Maria Guleghina in 2009 (middle left in Figure 1), the higher-level structure of Gruber's large-scale slower-than-global-tempo section (b. 41-113) does not extend to the left edge of the graph in a significant manner. This feature is the result of Gruber's comparatively quicker tempi through the aria's introductory text (b. 1-41) in relationship to her performance's global tempo, as the lack of surface-level green in this section indicates. The leftward extensions touching the edge of Nilsson's and Guleghina's Time Scapes result from beats 111-113––where their onstage Turandots each emphasize Lo-u-Ling's scream and death. These emphases project a greater importance in communicating Lo-u-Ling's victimhood, perhaps suggesting a motivation substantially predicated upon vengeance. The absence of this extension for Gruber's performance insinuates that retribution is not an all-consuming impetus for her Turandot's riddles (which take place in the ensuing scene). Analysis of all recorded performances of 'In questa Reggia' at the Met reveals that the extension in question is also present at the left edge of the time scapes for Birgit Nilsson's performances in 1962, 1966, 1970, as well as for Marion Lippert (1969), Ingrid Bjoner (1974), Elinor Ross (1974), Eva Marton (March and April 1987), Ghena Dimitrova (1988, 1996), Gwyneth Jones (1990, 1992, 1995), and Adrienne Duggar (2003). This subtle difference in structural features unique to Gruber's performances results in a dramatically distinct narrative alteration from other Turandots at the Met.

Table 2. Text and Translation of 'In questa Reggia'

Turandot In questa reggia, or son mill'anni e mille, un grido disperato risonò. E quel grido, traverso stirpe e stirpe qui nell'anima mia si rifugiò! Principessa Lou-Ling, ava dolce e serena che regnavi nel tuo cupo silenzio in gioia pura, e sfidasti inflessibile e sicura l'aspro dominio, oggi rivivi in me!	Turandot In this palace, a thousand, thousand years ago, A desperate cry resounded. And that cry, through descendant and descendant, Took refuge in my soul! Princess Lou-Ling, Sweet and serene ancestress, who reigned In your dark silence, in pure joy, And who defied, inflexible and sure, Bitter domination, you relive in me today!
La Folla (sommessamente) Fu quando il Re dei Tartari le sette sue bandiere dispiegò.	The Crowd (quietly) It was when the king of the Tartars Unfurled his seven flags!
Turandot (come cosa lontana) Pure nel tempo che ciascun ricorda, fu sgomento e terrore e rombo d'armi. Il regno vinto! Il regno vinto! E Lou-Ling, la mia ava, trascinata da un uomo come te, come te straniero, là nella notte atroce dove si spense la sua fresca voce!	Turandot (like something remote) Still, in the time that everyone remembers, There was alarm, and terror in the rumble of arms! The kingdom defeated! The kingdom defeated! And Lou-o-Ling, my ancestress, dragged away By a man like you, stranger, like you, foreigner, There in the atrocious night, Where her fresh voice was extinguished!
La Folla (momora reverente:) Da secoli ella dorme nella sua tomba enorme!	The Crowd (murmurs reverently:) For centuries she has slept In her enormous tomb!
Turandot O Principi, che a lunghe carovane d'ogni parte del mondo qui venite a gettar la vostra sorte, io vendico su voi, su voi quella purezza, quel grido e quella morte! Quel grido e quella morte! Mai Nessun m'avra! Mai nessun, nessun m'avrà! L'orror di chi l'uccise vivi nel cuor mi sta. No, no! Mai nessun m'avrà! Ah, rinasce in me l'orgoglio di tanta purità! (e minacciosa, al Principe:) Straniero! Non tentar la fortuna! 'Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte una!'	Turandot O Princes who in long caravans From every part of the world Come here to try your fate, I avenge upon you, upon you that purity, That cry and that death! That cry and that death! No one will ever possess me! No one ever, No one will possess me! The horror of him who killed her Is alive in my heart! No, no! No one will ever possess me! Ah, in me is reborn the pride Of such purity! (and, threateningly to the Prince:) Never anyone, anyone shall have me! 'The riddles are three, the death is one!'
Il Principe Ignoto No, no! Gli enigmi sono tre, una è la vita!	The Unknown Prince No, no! The riddles are three, one the life!
Turandot No, no! [Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte è una!	Turandot No, no! [The riddles are three, the death is one!
Il Principe Ignoto Gli enigmi sono tre, una è la vita!]	The Unknown Prince The riddles are three, one the life!]

The most striking higher-level features in this performance's tempo hierarchy are the structural crossings resulting from the extension of Turandot naming Lo-u-Ling intersecting two others, both involving Calaf. The first crossing for the "Lo-u-Ling" extension emanates from the prince's first interjection in this aria, 'No! No! Gli enigmi sono tre, una è la vita!' (b. 173-180). The second extension originates at Calaf's and Turandot's dual ascent wherein they challenge each other (b. 181-188). These are the highest significant structural crossings in this tempo hierarchy, and the tempo-textual emphasis they highlight points to the crux of Gruber's interpretation of this role. "She thinks she is Lo-u-Ling, but this is an effect of her being only thirteen, just becoming sexually aware, and really pissed off at her father for trying to control her and marry her off. I think he is the one who makes her do the riddles. So, the anger is there, but it's not some sense of real and righteous anger over Lo-u-Ling" (Gruber, 2015).

The libretto indicates that Turandot seeks revenge on all men for the travesty inflicted on Lo-u-Ling, but the surface meaning of the text does not reflect the complexity necessary for Gruber's preferred characterization. In her view, Turandot is a coming-of-age thirteen-year-old who is a pawn in her father's game of suitors, riddles, and beheadings. Believing Lo-u-Ling is reborn in her or that she is Lo-u-Ling provides a two-fold escape for Turandot—one from her father's domination of her will and actions (which explains part of Turandot's identifying with her ancestress), and the other from her burgeoning sexuality, which she has no way to control. Also for Gruber, Turandot knows from the moment she sees Calaf that he is different from all previous suitors, who Gruber imagines as motivated by the allure of the power coming from a royal marriage and the prospect of satiating their respective sexual appetites. Gruber (2015) highlights this recognition about Calaf as the precipitating factor in Turandot's Act III tearful confession, wherein the character exclaims: "My first tears, yes stranger. When you arrived, I felt with anguish the fateful thrill of destiny, but I trembled for you! There was in your eyes the light of heroes!". 20

Under these circumstances, the links extending from Calaf's outbursts indicate his awareness of Turandot's situation and his confidence that he will free her from her present bondage. Singers who approach Calaf in this way are the most dramatically convincing for Gruber (2015), while those following a more stereotypical solely selfishly motivated archetype for Calaf present interesting challenges in onstage chemistry: "Calaf as only a sexual conqueror limits how Turandot (and I as Turandot) can interact with him from this aria onward in the opera. The riddles can be so many things: seductive, angry, cat and mouse, among others" (Gruber, 2015). Because Gruber looks to Act III's tearful admission as the fundamental dynamic between Calaf and Turandot, she cannot conceive of "In questa Reggia" as an angst-ridden cry for help to Calaf, whose very "ascent to the gong at the end of Act I and ascent to answer the riddles in Act II leaves [Turandot] shaking" (Gruber, 2015). In the aria's climactic parallel octaves with simultaneous and contradictory texts about three riddles equaling one death or one life, Calaf senses Turandot's trepidation (which she masks with her death threats) about a life different from the one she knows. Gruber (2015) summarizes this moment: "Calaf knows he can break the spell of Turandot's release-by-obsession by outsmarting her father and arousing her erotic love." Such a detail emerging in the tempo hierarchy and temporal-textual emphasis of Gruber's performance demonstrates, as it does also with Marcello Giordani's performances, both a spectrum of nuances in musical and dramatic practice that range from minute to profound, and the applicability of this methodology to better understanding the creative process. Being able to connect singers' dramatic interpretations to their onstage musical behaviors in this manner represents perhaps the most significant contribution to this vein of inquiry.

Marcello Giordani: Breaking Stereotypes of Calaf, 7 November 2009

Creative Process Analysis

Beyond affirming opera's interdisciplinary nature, each of the foregoing examples documents the identity of selected performances in terms of tempo-based phenomena – modulation, hierarchy, and temporal-textual emphasis. Such a means of capturing performance is useful in that it allows one to simultaneously glimpse both surface and hierarchical relationships of musical phenomena. By visually reflecting on-stage behaviors and their organization in time, Scape Plots can move analysis beyond the limits of language and score. These tools emphasize the importance of the point that opened the foregoing discussion: music is not merely its score; rather, its repeated instantiations through performance reveal its dynamic nature, a nature the fixity of a score cannot support. Scape Plots emerge as a sort of text in and of themselves, one crucial to understanding performance histories and their traditions.

Each of Turandot's three primary roles—Liù, Calaf, and Turandot—requires its respective singers to communicate a dramatic arc of grand opera proportions through some of Puccini's most visceral, exhilarating, and heart-rending music. Through her temporal textual emphases, and with her manipulation of timbre, Andréa Gruber created a Turandot who is not merciless by her nature, but rather as a coping mechanism because she is a victim of her father's attempts to maintain power and control over her, as his age and infirmity increasingly inhibit his ability to do so to the people of Peking. For her, Calaf's arrival is a rescue, albeit one fraught with trepidation over the dual unknowns of a life outside her father's dominion and of being able to satisfy her latent and suppressed, yet still burgeoning sexuality. Similarly, Marcello Giordani created a Calaf who breaks the stereotype of a fin de siècle tenor as sexual predator. Instead, Giordani's temporal-textual emphases and resulting connections convey a hero who exudes an idealistic love marked by concern for all characters in Turandot's Peking, rather than one who is serving himself, or an autobiographical projection of Puccini's own womanizing.

By their very existence, each performance interpretation in Turandot's history at the Metropolitan Opera has contributed to this work's ongoing tradition at the USA's preeminent opera house. Future investigations using the methods that this study has developed could establish performance traditions at other preeminent opera houses around the world. Furthermore, a comparison of these performance traditions would generate a fuller understanding of how the producing companies have each presented unique versions of Turandot. Taken together, all performances enrich Turandot's existence, regardless of how audiences or critics respond to them. Performances of this, or any, opera, while connected by their being technē—in revealing a work as poiēsis—and the traditions they create, ultimately serve as testaments to the diversity and vibrancy of the human experience.

Further Considerations

This research forms a foundation for investigation of the expressive palette for both vocal and instrumental music. Future developments will build on current means of analyzing dynamics across a performance and refine or develop techniques for examinations of: pitch modulation (including vibrato, shading, and portamento), articulation, phrasing and breathing, timbre (including dark and light vowel sounds, and vocal quality color associations), and diction. Of course, these additional analyses will generate their own data sets, which in turn will be useful as ground truth or control sets for use in machine learning. By comparing the results of musical feature extraction algorithms against human curated data, more accurate algorithms are possible, thereby speeding up the data extraction and analysis processes. 28 Connecting empirical data describing musical phenomena of the opera stage, singers' unique dramatic interpretations, and critical theories of how the operatic art world and musical works operate does more than deliver a new methodology. Such a process ultimately offers one view into understanding how, even across time and place, as Friedrich Hölderlin observed, 'poetically dwells man upon this earth' (Heidegger, 1977, p. 34).