Music and Letters Advance Access originally published online on September 21, 2007
Music and Letters 2008 89(1):56-83; doi:10.1093/ml/gcm046
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
‘An honest contrivance’: Opera and Desire in ‘Moonstruck’
*Rice University.
Correspondence: Email: citr{at}rice.edu.
 |
Abstract |
|---|
Opera can circulate through many layers of a mainstream film and set in motion desires inside and outside the fiction. Moonstruck (1987) sports a special tone that Pauline Kael has characterized as contrivance that plays against the real thing, without producing irony. Opera's exaggeration, artifice, and ritual figure prominently in the special tone, and the music and story of La Bohème play a major role. Excerpts make up a substantial portion of the soundtrack, the protagonists attend a performance of Bohème and display affinities with the opera's characters, and Bohème's connection with the Metropolitan Opera is underlined. A close reading of how Puccini's music is used, incorporating Werner Wolf's theories of intermediality, examines why certain cues are taken verbatim and others are instrumental arrangements, and the consequences for desire. Two major diegetic engagements with Bohème receive extended treatment: at an actual performance, and at the phonograph (one of the latter creating the climax of the film). The prominence of opera in the film at so many levels reveals an urge towards the genre of opera-film. Moonstruck fulfils spectators’ desires, ambivalent though they may be, for recognizing and yielding to the kitsch qualities already present in La Bohème: a prime example of how film can reveal something fundamental about an opera.