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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2013
Employing the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.
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5 As the term is used in film studies, ‘point of audition’ is always (implicitly) ‘virtual’, being a technique for identifying spectators with a subject position within the diegesis.
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14 Buch, David J. aligns the instrumentation of the trio with that of ‘otherworldly scenes of supernatural operas’ and identifies a number of later operas employing the same instrumentation for scenes of enchantment in Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 135 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thomas emphasizes distance in Aesthetics of Opera, 260–261.
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31 Galuppi: Il mondo della luna, 32. A German translation of Il mondo della luna, published for Baldassarre Galuppi's setting of 1750, provides a slightly different stage direction for the ‘illuminated machine’ that suggests how it may have appeared on stage: ‘Man sieht eine erleuchtete Maschiene, die sich über der Spitze des Tubus hin und her bewegt, und auf welcher es Figuren hat, wie sie gewöhnlich auf den Gläsern der laterna magica sind.’ (One sees an illuminated machine that moves back and forth above the end of the [optical] tube, and on which are figures like those usually on the glass [slides] of a magic lantern.) Die Welt im Monde (Oels: Samuel Gottlieb Ludwig, no date), 8.
32 Galuppi: Il mondo della luna, 32.
33 Il mondo della luna is only known to have had one performance at Eszterháza, to celebrate the marriage of Count Nicolaus, second son of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, to Maria Anna Weissenwolf. However, Haydn's work on Il mondo della luna resulted in what have been identified as three versions. Discussed here is the ‘verbreitete Fassung’ (circulated version), as Günther Thomas calls it because of its dissemination beyond Eszterháza. In the ‘final version’, Haydn omitted the instruction ‘con sordino’ from the intermezzos. See Foreword to Günther Thomas, ed., Il mondo della luna (Joseph Haydn Werke, series 25, volume 7), three volumes (Munich: Henle, 1979), volume 1, ix, and Thomas, Günther, ‘Observations on Il mondo della luna ’, in Haydn Studies: Proceedings of the International Haydn Conference, Washington, D. C., 1975, ed. Larsen, Jens Peter, Serwer, Howard and Webster, James (New York: Norton, 1981), 144–147 Google Scholar.
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