Introduction by Seaver Holter

Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out something special about the essence of a work of art: the work of art can only gain from performance, from exhibition, from communion with an audience. Imagine simply reading alone in one’s den a libretto or musical score rather than hearing these sung out into a cavernous concert hall alongside rapt others.Footnote ³ The first experience would seem to most people impoverished in comparison with the second. Professor David Armitage’s Niemeyer lecture series, “You Can’t Fool Rules: Opera and International Thought,” takes as its subject a recovered tradition of operatic political thought, a way of thinking about politics through and with opera. It is especially appropriate, then, that these lectures should demonstrate not just a keen understanding of how opera’s artistic essence as historically situated performance creates its unique possibilities for thinking politics, but that the lectures should themselves exemplify all of the virtues of a good operatic performance.

Enacting the claim that opera is a multivocal artform that abjures clear-cut generic distinctions between the several arts, the lecture series was in itself a complex event, in which voices spoke and sang to each other across academic disciplines and media. Armitage’s theorizing found its complement in the arias sung by three accomplished opera singers, Ian Williams, Deborah Mayer, and Anne Slovin, all accompanied by pianist Dror Baitel, who showed how the immediacy of feeling and intuition afforded by music might enter into our apprehension of legal theory and complete our understanding of this rather than diminish it. Armitage’s many insights into the genealogy of opera and its surprising kinship with the evolution of theories of sovereignty, legal pluralism, and diplomacy resounded in the helpful commentaries on his lectures by other scholars, scholars not solely of opera but also politics, history, and philosophy. These commentaries were both contrapuntal and harmonious, in agreement and disagreement with Armitage, in each case extending and magnifying the originality of their source in Armitage’s lectures.

Armitage’s contention is that opera from its very origin has been preoccupied with questions that one might think would more rightly trouble scholars of international relations, questions about states of exception, plural legal worlds, and the contested rights of the people, both citizens and the stateless, who move through uncertain territories. In its earliest origins, opera was an occasion for effecting strategic marriages between noble families, meaning that it served a political function whose scope was international. The first of his lectures, a close reading of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, taps this part of opera’s past. Both Mozart and Pierre Beaumarchais, the author of the opera’s source play, knew well and traveled extensively within the tight-knit, aristocratic world depicted in the opera. Beaumarchais was a diplomat and spy, and Mozart rubbed elbows with a long list of sovereigns and nobles. The makers’ lives are in part mirrored in the dramatic world they create, in which a scheming Count Almaviva seeks to journey from Seville to London in his capacity as ambassador. This is not simply a disinterested passage beyond one country’s border and into another, but a journey that would translate the corrupt Count from one zone of legality into another, from a space of feudal and domestic law to a space governed by the law of nations.

Almaviva’s intent would nonetheless remain ill in both places. For with his repeal of the feudal droit du seigneur, Count Almaviva no longer has the right to the body of his wife’s maidservant, Susanna. But the right of diplomatic immunity enjoyed while abroad by an ambassador would give Almaviva the impunity needed to get away with his rape of Susanna, who would become in London his “segreta ambasciatrice,” or secret ambassadress. Armitage suggests that this unusual term may mean that Almaviva imagines for Susanna a role as procuress in addition to secret lover. Contrary to Almaviva’s usage, the term seems strangely apt for Susanna and indeed all of the women characters in the opera, who, as Professor Jennifer Pitts underscored in her comments, are cunning ambassadresses, perhaps even outstripping their male counterparts in their ability to dissemble, but who dissemble towards a good end, namely foiling Almaviva’s plot and reconciling him with his wife the Countess. Armitage invites us to imagine that such a production, witnessed by people very like those in opera, would give occasion for its audience to consider itself reflected in the plot, constituting a dialogue between representation and represented.

The next branch in Armitage’s genealogy of opera’s intertwining with international political thought starts to grow in the nineteenth century with Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and stretches into the late twentieth with John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer. This branch of operatic thought, the subject of the second lecture, takes the oceanic as its guiding motif, dramatizing the uncertainty and lawlessness of the open sea, a contested site in which territorial sovereignty enjoys little or no jurisdiction. Though the ocean is a region of sovereign thinness or ambiguity, there are nonetheless “vectors of law,” to use Armitage’s phrase, that cut through it in the form of ships, the subject of a great number of operas that make up this branch of operatic thought’s genealogy. Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, for example, depicts the dark side of the ship as a vector of law in an unformed territory of competing laws or even total lawlessness, as the titular character, a simple but good man, is mercilessly prosecuted for killing a superior officer on board the Indomitable.

Perhaps Wagner, the originator of this genre, conceived The Flying Dutchman in dire straits, on the run from creditors, fleeing to Paris on a ship called the Thetis (perhaps named after Achilles’ mother, a sea goddess). This opera contributes to reflection on the plural legal worlds represented by the sea through the figure of the Dutchman, who because of a promise fulfilled by the Devil must sail the seas forever, unless he should find a woman willing to belong to the Dutchman. The opera’s Dutchman era receives an offer from Daland, another sea captain, of Gastfreundschaft, or hospitality. This Gastfreundschaft is followed by what Armitage calls a xenophilic exchange between Daland and the Dutchman, who will take Daland’s daughter Senta, already madly in love with the Dutchman’s image in a portrait, as a wife. But death overrides the rules of conduct that both enable and constrain the two’s relationship. Senta is obliged to another, the hunter Erik, and the Dutchman seems condemned to wandering because of Senta’s dual commitments. In the end, though, her suicide rids the Dutchman of his curse, whereat his ship capsizes, drowning him. Again, in death the law is suspended.

The third lecture thematizes a different kind of tragic uncertainty, that of the exile. Armitage traces this third kind of opera to one of the genre’s major figures, Giuseppe Verdi, whose Nabucco is a Biblically inflected hymn to the exile, made especially poignant by the plight of Verdi’s own Northern Italy, “under the yoke” of Austrian rule as Armitage puts it. The genre extends into the twentieth century, in which, because of developments such as the decline of empires and the rise of nation-states, the categories of “refugee” and “statelessness” find real legal purchase. The creation of new legal categories, however, is attended by the creation of new agents to execute the law. Bureaucracy becomes a theme for the first time in opera, one central example of which is Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, which for Armitage represents an almost absurd world of inscrutable legal rules like something out of Kafka. Armitage’s partner in dialogue in this third lecture, Hannah Arendt, sees bureaucracy and the surge of other impersonal rules as displacing the traditional role of more personal religions and sacred customs in making judgements about who can and cannot be permitted to stay in a foreign land.

Jonathan Dove’s Flight is a case in point about the ambiguity of such new actors and the rules that they enforce. In the opera, a man called only the Refugee, based on real-life Mehran Karimi Nasseri, is stuck in an airport terminal, an exceptional space. In bureaucratic limbo, the Refugee finds his counterpart in an immigration officer, whose words addressed to the Refugee give these lectures their title: “You can’t fool rules”. The officer goes on to say that though the rules are “inexorable,” the officer will permit the Refugee to remain in this purgatorial state of exception, in which the inexorable rules seem to be both in force and not. Human sympathy might seem to play some part in this exchange, but the ambiguity of the interaction is not forgotten as we consider that the rules are not broken but rather “arbitrarily” applied, as Armitage puts it. The Refugee is still not safe and won’t be as long as he remains there.

Almost like a leitmotif running through the three lectures, Antarctica was invoked as an example of a place without opera, though Armitage assured his audience that he would be there with the penguins when opera arrives. As Armitage’s genealogy indicates, opera has been from its beginnings a way of charting paths into unknown, uncertain territory. Opera’s cultural representations also suggest as much, with films like Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo showing the mad desperation of an opera lover, played by Klaus Kinski, who attempts to build an opera house in the Amazon. One felt at the conclusion of these lectures that even if Antarctica may still need to wait a little longer for the opera, Armitage has brought opera successfully to political theorists not as a mere adjunct to established ways of thinking about international relations but as a medium of original insight and power.