On Truth and Semblance in an Operatic and Extra-operatic Sense: Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage

This essay proceeds from the assumption that there is a reality specific to opera and that the most real operas, those that engage most intensively and productively with the possibilities of the genre, may be those that, from the viewpoint of extra-operatic reality, appear to be the least realistic. In this sense, I want to argue that Michael Tippett's first full-scale opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1955), is a fully realized opera, and this by virtue of the consequentiality with which, turning against the general tendency of the contemporary European avant-garde toward ever-increasing rationalization and disenchantment, it pits its own reality against the extra-operatic reality of opera. By “the extra-operatic reality of opera” I mean two things: first, the world outside the opera as it appears reflected or refracted within the opera; second, the ensemble of staging and framing devices—be they institutional, cultural-political, socioeconomic, logistical, musical, or dramaturgical—that make the reality of opera possible in the first place. My argument, then, will be that in The Midsummer Marriage the reality of opera is put to the test through its exposure to the other realities that limit and delimit, validate and invalidate, realize and derealize that reality.