The Composer as ‘auteur’
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I am a composer. Moreover, I am a composer who has spent years working as a ‘gun-for-hire’ in film, television, radio, theatre and other collaborative contexts. I very much understand what it means to share creative space and have my overall contribution misunderstood or overlooked in the final reckoning when it comes to giving credit where it’s due. This means I find the tradition in opera to attribute an entire work, at least on the macro level, to the composer, let’s just say, problematic. On the other hand, I find it refreshing and liberating that I am finally working in a form that allows the composer to lead and to take up the pole position. So, what to do?
Of course, I am not the first composer to wrestle with such questions. Again, I turn to Palme, whose reflection on this aligns so closely with my own thoughts:
‘With larger projects it’s impossible to do everything- it’s impractical and time doesn’t allow it, not to mention that it would be boring... Of course, there’s a division of labor and responsibilities…And then there are collaborations…The question with collaborations is always: something specific has to be printed in the programs. …That’s the point where I don’t know how I should designate authorship…Because when it comes to the music, I am in fact the composer. The assignment of rights is difficult from a legal standpoint. How do you register a collective? Often the original idea is mine and then I produce the piece. I look for people to collaborate with, I start talking to artists and musicians - but the original concept was mine. Is that important, or isn’t it?…..I ask myself, half-consciously, why shouldn’t there be women who work and appear like Richard Wagner? Is that forbidden? Do I, as a woman, automatically have to fit my work into that of a collective? What authorship can I claim as a woman, or as a queer person? Can I take on a role like Wagner did? Am I allowed to? I pose the question: does the collective dissolve individual responsibility? Where is the individual responsibility in the collective? Or: what name am I making for myself as an artist? In what way am I present? What role do I play in the music business?’ (Schimana, Palme, Kogler, Lehmann 2022).
These are such great questions: particularly for women, gender diverse people, people of colour, other minorities. We have not been allowed to take up space as ‘auteurs’ and now that we finally (maybe) can, it is tempting to step up and square our shoulders in that space. Yet, there are ethical questions at large as well. In my proposal for the grant that has propelled this very project, I made an appeal for disruption of the canon that places the traditionally male auteurs in opera on a pedestal. I still firmly believe this disruption is needed, as much to let others in, as to see the canon with its clothes off: the reality is that in this space no one makes work on their own. No one ever has. Perhaps, if we are to make truly feminist opera, in the words of soprano and essayist Juliet Fraser, we first need to:
Kill the muse
Kill the diva
Kill the auteur
(Fraser 2023)
I’m going to take a slight liberty here, and say I think Juliet means ‘Kill the (idea of) muse, diva, auteur,’ as she would likely agree there’s been way too much killing - particularly of archetypal female figures- through the course of operatic history. I myself, am still working out what to do with all this. As a woman, it is a challenging proposition for me to take up the title of ‘auteur.’ There is something about this idea that fundamentally rankles and I shrink away from it. Call it conditioning, or call it seeing through patriarchal structures that I am not comfortable adopting. So perhaps the way through this mess is for me to accede to the pole position on the condition that the auteur myth be busted. So I want to start by acknowledging the contributions others make to my project in documenting it, all the while holding this new, powerful space I inhabit as ‘the composer’ of a new opera, and acknowledging the beautiful privilege of finally having earned my entitlement to it.
Fraser, J. 2023. Deconstructing the Diva: in praise of trailblazers, killjoys and hags. Presented at the Fourth International Conference on Women's Work in Music 2023, at Bangor University.
Schimana, Palme, Kogler, Lehmann. 2022. On the fragilities of music theater. In: Sounding Fragilities, I. Lehmann & P. Palme (eds.) Wolke Verlag, Hofheim.
