“We leave behind ‘traces’ [. . .] and ‘looking back’ we see ‘lines’ and x-dimensional patterns formed by what we did, didn't do, but thought of doing, etc., etc. all in a wonderfully complex whirl.”Footnote 1 The Hungarian-Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt wrote these words in a 1997 letter to his close friend, the composer George Rochberg, foregrounding the backward glance that had been central to both his self-concept and his compositional output. Although Anhalt's negotiation of difference was geographical, acknowledging both a Canadian “here” and a European “there” in the construction of his identity, it was, I will argue, more significantly temporal in nature, focusing on the relationship of “now” and “then.” Anhalt's works, and his operas in particular—the focus of this article—skillfully play with temporality, linking past and present in fascinating ways and thereby reveal something unique about historical processes and forms.
Istvan Anhalt is one of Canada's most significant composers, one who embodied, according to Rochberg, “a sense of the absolute seriousness of the composer,” and whose compositions, theorist William Benjamin has written, represent “a body of work as technically refined, as rich in meaning, and as fully engaged with musicality as any other from this period.”Footnote 2 Although relatively unknown outside of circles familiar with Canadian modernist composition, Anhalt is the subject of a growing literature that explores his significance not only as a musical thinker but also a philosophical and literary one.Footnote 3
Born in Budapest in 1919, Anhalt studied with Zoltán Kodály, Nadia Boulanger, and Soulima Stravinsky, and worked alongside many of the twentieth century's most influential composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The development of Anhalt's compositional voice was entwined with a negotiation of cultural difference and displacement that would define the rest of his life's work.Footnote 4 From his own accounts, his immigration to Canada in 1949 was a life-changing event; he was forced to reconfigure his identity following harrowing experiences as a Jew in World War II Hungary and a remarkable escape from persecution in his war-torn homeland.Footnote 5 Upon emigration, Anhalt settled first in Montreal, where he taught at McGill University and established its renowned electronic music studio in the late 1950s. Following a period of political unrest in the province of Quebec in the 1960s, he moved with his family to Kingston, Ontario in 1971 where he would serve as head of the music department at Queens University for thirteen years. In his retirement years, Anhalt continued to be productive as a composer and author, passing away in 2012 just shy of his 93rd birthday.
Anhalt's compositional output is large and varied, encompassing works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, piano, voice, and multimedia. He began his career composing in instrumental genres (Trio, Symphony, and Symphony of Modules, for example), and later in life his orchestral work, The Tents of Abraham, won a Juno Award for the best classical composition. Anhalt composed for voice throughout his career as well; his extensive writings about the human voice suggest its prominence in his compositional oeuvre.Footnote 6 Of particular interest here are Anhalt's four operas: La Tourangelle (1975), Winthrop (1983), Traces (1995), and Millennial Mall (2000). The first two works are historical, but are distinctive in that they speak not only to the figures and events they represent, but also to our experience of the historical process itself, and in doing so challenge conventional approaches—both literary and operatic—to historical representation. By playing with narrative form, perspective, subjectivity, and temporality, Anhalt aligns himself with deconstructivist historians in the tradition of Hayden White, who insist on the conscious articulation or admission of one's historical perspective.Footnote 7 This tradition acknowledges that “history” is a result of the historian's subjective voice or perspective; past and present are thus linked inextricably.Footnote 8 This approach led Anhalt to explore narrative and temporality in unconventional ways, producing in Winthrop and La Tourangelle “organic tangles” and “interlocking chains of memory cells” that reflect the immigration stories of these operas’ protagonists.Footnote 9 This compositional practice intersects in fascinating ways with trends in the philosophy of history that insist on examining the historical past with a simultaneous examination of the present. As historical theorist Frank Ankersmit has argued, the past will remain unknowable if it is approached by way of an objective analysis of documents. “Language,” Ankersmit believes, “is where experience is not, and experience is where language is not.”Footnote 10 Opera, I will argue, is an ideal medium through which this postmodern relationship with history can be expressed. Specifically, I am interested in the musical and historiographical insights that arise from acknowledging the present as a time frame that envelops past and future in Istvan Anhalt's operas, La Tourangelle and Winthrop.
Contemporality
Winthrop and La Tourangelle resonate in many ways with postmodern theories of temporality, specifically cultural theorist Steven Connor's concept of “contemporality.”Footnote 11 In this model, and in these two operas, modernity's unidirectionality and irreversibility are replaced by a more flexible temporal organization that reflects a coexistence of past and present. Connor explains the interaction of divergent temporal realms by way of an intriguing, musically inspired metaphor:
In contemporality, the thread of one duration is pulled constantly through the loop formed by another, one temporality is strained through another's mesh; but the resulting knot can itself be retied, and the filtered system also simultaneously refilters the system through which it is percolating. The scoring of time constituted by one temporality is played out on temporal instruments for which it may never have been intended, but which give it its music precisely in the way they change its meter and phrasings, and remix its elements.Footnote 12
In Anhalt's first two operas contemporality is created on a fundamental level by music's own narrative properties, particularly through a foregrounding of its inescapable present mode. Music, as Carolyn Abbate memorably claimed, has the “fundamental and terrible” distinction of “[trapping] the listener in present experience and the beat of passing time, from which he or she cannot escape.”Footnote 13 Whereas traditional literary historical narratives often attempt to conceal the present position from which a historian writes, opera—through music's and theatre's presentist mode—is forced to embrace it, thus embedding any historical referents in a temporal realm that speaks, consistently, in a present tense. Music's narrative “presentness” is in fact full of potential in historical works, because it emphasizes the construction of temporalities alongside that of the present—not in conflict, but in collaboration with it.
Anhalt's tendencies towards a philosophical consideration of music—and more importantly, of temporality—frequently come out in his program notes, public lectures, and writings; they emerged as well as in my own conversations with the composer in the years before his death.Footnote 14 In a 1988 talk given at the University of Toronto about his composition Simulacrum, Anhalt remarked:
What is this three-fold something that we call the past, the present, and the future? Increasingly [. . .] I had to think of it as a pluridimensional maze. Normally when we say “past,” it is really the current act of “remembering” whatever we are referring to. And when we envision the “future” it is also an act, a projection, undertaken in this terribly narrow sliver of an existential moment to which we give the name “present.” And the present? It may be, from one angle at least, an awareness of the process of living, of existing in all the dimensions and at all the levels that are perceived as being “active,” as a result of having become energized by outside or inside stimuli or by both. [. . .] So you see, past, present, and future are intertwined, one melting into the other in organic tangles, so many interlocking chains of memory cells interacting with each other in a manner never to be unraveled.Footnote 15
The integration of past, present, and future are quintessential to Anhalt's concept of memory, a theme that figures prominently in his oeuvre, and which fascinated the composer throughout his career. La Tourangelle and Winthrop revel in the saturating powers of the present—a present that dilates in order to welcome the historical past.Footnote 16 As a result, these works emerge as examples of opera's historiographic potential.
La Tourangelle (1975)
La Tourangelle, Anhalt's first opera, was commissioned by John Peter Lee Roberts on behalf of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1970, and was premiered in 1975 at the University of Toronto.Footnote 17 Roberts approached Anhalt, asking him to compose “a work expressing the search for order and meaning in life through the focus of religion—the search for God in other words.”Footnote 18 Anhalt explored this theme through the story of the Ursuline nun, Marie de l'Incarnation (born Marie Gruyart in 1599 in Tours, France), who became the protagonist of La Tourangelle. Widowed at age nineteen, and alone with a young son, Marie later abandoned the boy, a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. A woman of deep religious faith who experienced terrifying spiritual visions from a young age, Marie entered the convent, a life she hated, leaving in 1637 to found a school for girls in New France. In 1639, after a difficult three-month journey by boat, she and a small group of Ursuline sisters and priests arrived in New France, settling at the Jesuit mission on the St. Charles River. She lived until 1672, spending the rest of her days teaching the daughters of the French colonists and the local people of the First Nations in a convent she established in Québec City. In 1980, more than 300 years after her death, she was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Anhalt's interest in this dramatic story lay primarily in exploring Marie's experience, specifically her conflicted conscience as she made the difficult decision to abandon her life and her son in France and journey to the New World. In describing the opera, Anhalt explains that the work shows, “instead of a realistically enacted plot, a succession of almost static situations, characteristic attitudes, frames of mind, emotional states, decisive moments, crises, in the lives of individuals.”Footnote 19Anhalt referred to the work as “an interior opera,”Footnote 20 based on its ability to represent and evoke through music the curious relationship of past, present and future as Marie experiences them.Footnote 21 Although the opera was performed unstaged in concert at its 1975 premiere, Anhalt described it as the most complex production he'd been involved with.Footnote 22 When asked in 2010 if he would stage the piece today in a revival, Anhalt replied: “I wouldn't need that. There was so much suggestion in the music [staging would be] un peu de trop.”Footnote 23
From the first moments of the work, it is clear that the opera does not follow a traditional historical narrative. Although the scenes are arranged chronologically to represent various points in Marie de l'Incarnation's history, the linearity of the work stops here. Indeed, as he would also do in Winthrop, Anhalt tells the story through a series of historical tableaux, often disconnected temporally and geographically. These are, essentially, snapshots of significant points in the protagonist's life. In addition to representing Marie by way of three solo voices, a technique he was to use again later in Winthrop, Anhalt made use of a chamber orchestra, as well as five tape operators in charge of cuing pre-taped recordings of texts from a variety of historical perspectives and sources.Footnote 24 He also employed electronic sound to create disorienting effects and to depict divergent temporal and geographical realms. The work is primarily post-tonal and employs unusual timbres and instrumentation to evoke the simultaneity of past and present. As Table 1 shows, the intersection of musical and temporal elements underlines the notion of contemporality: sonic, musical, and textual material reference both the seventeenth century, the period in which the story takes place, and the present day, the perspective from which the story is being told and viewed.
Table 1: Relationship of temporal and musical structures in La Tourangelle
The commingling of divergent temporalities in La Tourangelle is motivated by the protagonist's struggle to reconcile past and present throughout the work. Indeed, Marie is compelled by her spiritual visions to imagine the future, and also racked with guilt about the past when she considers her son after she has made the decision to emigrate. For example, in scene 5, “Mission,” Marie is confronted with the decision to immigrate to New France. Past and present are represented here as interdependent realities, an example of Connor's contemporality. This scene, like most in the opera, is constructed, both textually and musically, in a complex multi-layered fashion, and is therefore intensely disorienting—a reflection perhaps of Marie's own experience.Footnote 25 The various voices that are heard in the scene originate both in Marie's mind as well as from other historical figures (for example, the scene begins with taped female voices speaking entries from Marie's letters, and the King's Chancellor enters with a declamation at rehearsal number 5), and they impinge upon one another's space, as thoughts are wont to do. The scene's lack of traditional, or even predictable structures, and its stream-of-consciousness text reveal its presentness—the presentness of the past.
A closer look at the scene reveals how aspects of texture, harmony, and rhythm project this sense of presentness. In its sparsely textured opening, the harp simply repeats an ostinato of E3–D3/F3, the only regular, continuous sound, a ticking “clock time.”Footnote 26 Over the harp, the strings, contrabassoon, and spoken text enter unpredictably, providing a sense of suspension rather than progression or retrospection. The music moves forward but does so with trepidation, and like many other scenes in the work, it merely “fills” time—an example of Stockhausen's “moment time.”Footnote 27 If we experience in the present Marie's calling to the New World as it happened to her, then we are also led musically to experience a memory, or a shift from present to past, at m. 60. Indeed, as though to underline her trepidation and uncertainty about her journey and the future, Marie's mind shifts to the past, conjuring what we can assume to be the image of her son—her greatest source of guilt and anxiety. Here, we hear a pre-taped song, the sixteenth-century French song “Quand ce beau printemps je voy,”Footnote 28 which is sung softly (and I suggest distantly, temporally speaking) by a children's choir projected on tape. Harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and piano punctuate the song with bird-like quintuplets, lending it the mirage-like, hazy feel of an indistinct memory. When the memory first emerges, the dynamic drops, the tempo decreases, and the “present” sound of the harp's regular beats becomes less prominent as it plays more complex chords with a more varied rhythmic placement. The piano plays sixteenth-note quintuplets followed by sustained chords (all blurred with the sustaining pedal), and the vibraphone performs similar figures, gradually moving out of sync with the piano. The woodwinds and brass alternate with the piano and vibraphone, creating the effect of bird calls sounding at random. This section differs so markedly from the surrounding sections that the effect is one of entering a new temporal realm. One of the most striking moments in the opera is its audible dissolving, marked by the re-emergence of the three soprano voices, denoting Marie's return to consciousness.Footnote 29
Example 1. Istvan Anhalt, La Tourangelle, scene v, “Mission,” mm. 56–68. Reprinted with permission from Berandol Music Ltd.
Further consideration of the song “Quand ce beau printemps je voy” reveals how this scene might be heard as an example of musical contemporality. First, the song—as a melodic “whole” that is unusual in the opera—elicits a listening style that anticipates its entity as a complete form due to its phrasing and melodic structure, distinguishing it from the surrounding musical texture, and approximating, arguably, the musical form of a memory. Recalling Victor Zuckerkandl and Raymond Monelle's models of melodic listening strategies concerning the identification of temporal gestalts in musical units, the end of the song fulfills in a way what was already known to be (musically) from the song's beginning.Footnote 30 Thomas Clifton suggests a similar idea when he writes that we “could not experience a melody if it did not [. . .] push back the borders of the present to include itself, as a singular event,”Footnote 31 a form of retention that is “a form of memory which is articulated with the present, the two interacting with and influencing the content of both.”Footnote 32 In other words, the song expresses a simultaneous sense of pastness (articulated musically as a familiar melodic whole that “includes itself as a singular event”) and presentness (as it “pushes back the borders of the present”), seemingly suspending time. Anhalt's own ideas about the coexistence of past and present in memory resonate with this idea, and several musical details in the scene support this dramatic function. In addition to the melody emerging as a marked event due to the post-tonal musical context in which it is found—a musical texture and idiom that is not melodically based—this moment also emerges as what might be heard as a memory because of the contrastingly slow tempo at which the children sing the song, confirming the sensation of temporal manipulation and evoking the feeling that Marie is entering a different temporal realm. And finally, a sonic or timbral clue indicates its difference; that is, it lacks embodiment on stage because it is recorded on tape, therefore seeming to emerge from a different temporal space, disembodied and unbound to any one place or time.
Other scenes in La Tourangelle further demonstrate music's special ability to evoke a sense of contemporality. Scene 6, “Interlude: Voyage,” depicts Marie de l'Incarnation's difficult journey across the Atlantic through an ingenious use of the Agnus Dei from Palestrina's Missa ad fugam. Anhalt defamiliarizes the music, employing a strange compliment of accompanying instruments (piano, water gong, and harp), increasing the duration of notes (thereby offsetting harmonic resolutions), changing the text underlay, and deploying three sopranos with the tenor and bass (as opposed to Palestrina's original SATB setting). Palestrina's work only gradually becomes recognizable; the effect is the spectacular one of looking through a lens and having an object slip into focus. As the fugue emerges, the music expresses Marie's liminal experience of being between states—both physical, and temporal, echoing Marie's trans-Atlantic journey. It also suggests Connor's image of the straining of one temporality through another's mesh, as well as the unintended scoring of one temporal realm on another's instruments.
Example 2. Istvan Anhalt, La Tourangelle, scene vi, “Interlude,” mm. 1–7. Reprinted with permission from Berandol Music Ltd.
The reliance on musical quotations in scenes 5 and 6, “Quand ce beau printemps je voy” and “Agnus Dei,” respectively, underscores Anhalt's interest, like that of George Rochberg, of exploring the concepts of time and space in music that he felt serialism did not allow.Footnote 33 Both Rochberg and Anhalt saw in a varied combination of musical languages the potential to express the contrasting realities of consciousness (such as memory) and human experience. But unlike the music of Rochberg or Ives, in which a nostalgic past overwhelms and collapses the present, in Anhalt's opera, past and present manage to coexist, evoking a musical contemporality.
Winthrop (1986)
Anhalt further explored contemporality in his second opera, Winthrop (1986), based on the life of the seventeenth-century English immigrant and founder of Boston, John Winthrop (1587–1649). Anhalt designated this nearly three-hour opera “an historical pageant” (as opposed to the “musical tableau” of the much shorter La Tourangelle). More elaborate than his first opera, it employs six solo singers, a mixed choir of at least twenty-four voices, a small boys’ choir and an instrumental ensemble of at least thirty players.Footnote 34 In its treatment of the life of John Winthrop, the opera—whose libretto Anhalt assembled from historical sources—provides an English American parallel to the French Canadian story told in La Tourangelle.Footnote 35 In 1630, Winthrop sailed across the Atlantic to become the first governor of The Massachusetts Bay Company, the founder of Boston, and a spiritual and nationalist figure who expressed his vision for the moral character of the New World in his oft-quoted speech, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which outlines the nature of community life in the New World.Footnote 36
In ways that parallel La Tourangelle, and as Table 2 shows, Winthrop's unconventional form—a series of tableaux-like scenes, each of which touches on an isolated incident or episode in the protagonist's life—foregrounds a present-based perspective. Furthermore, the work's formal structure places it in dialogue with a fragmented and fluid postmodern subjectivity, resulting in a unique relationship with its content, a narrative of the past.Footnote 37 “If putatively real events are represented in non-narrative form,” Hayden White has asked, “what kind of reality is it that offers itself, or is conceived to offer itself, to perception in this form?”Footnote 38 In response, I would suggest that Anhalt created in Winthrop a non-narrative form that has more of a claim to “reality” than a more organized and structured presentation might. Although non-linear doesn't necessarily mean non-narrative, the opera clearly questions the mediating role that narrative plays with respect to historical events.
Table 2: Relationship of Temporal and Musical Structures in Winthrop
The opera opens with a scene entitled “Pilgrimage and Discovery” in which the audience is invited to embark on a pilgrimage through time to the late sixteenth-century world of John Winthrop. The work quickly reveals its complex temporal structure—it moves into the historical past from the present, a movement that is effected both textually and musically. Atop sustained sonorities in the piano, anonymous voices declaim: “Visit to England . . . the county of Suffolk,” and the music enacts a slow breakdown of typical “clock time” as musical events enter and fade in random patterns and at unpredictable intervals.Footnote 39 This first scene can be divided into five sections, each with a unique musical texture and text content. The transition from section to section occurs nearly imperceptibly, as in a dream, or, as evoking the feeling of moving further and further into the past. The first section (mm. 1–19) forms a free, dreamy introduction whose static character signals a present and “typical”—if heightened—sense of time.Footnote 40 Although it begins pianissimo and builds gradually, this section seems to negate traditional signals of development and progression. This is likely due to the absence of rhythmic activity and predictable phrase structure, both of which are key to the perception of linear time. The section is also characterized by a clear lack of harmonic directionality; its quartal chords, which do not contain the traditional pull to resolution of functional harmonies, evoke a temporal disorientation or suspension that the libretto seems to suggest. The buildup of quartal harmonies comprised of various combinations of the pitches A–D–G–C–F#–B and later, E (see mm. 1–9 in Example 3), is experienced as a linear event, formed gradually. The present-signifying slow progression of clock-time and an awareness of self prepare the listener for the temporal dislocation that is to follow.
Example 3. Istvan Anhalt, Winthrop, scene i, “Pilgrimage and Discovery,” mm. 1–10. Reprinted with permission from Berandol Music Ltd.
In the brief second section (mm. 20–21, see Example 4) all sense of metric organization is blurred, as players are instructed to repeat their particular motive until the conductor signals the move to the third section, but without a sense of hurry; the composer notes in the score that “[e]ven at its maximal density and loudness (that are to coincide) these bars should not sound overly busy, or restless.”Footnote 41 The disorienting effect of the pulseless rhythm is paralleled melodically and harmonically, as no pitch or interval classes are favored—again, contributing to a non-hierarchical musical structure, and an historical experience of un-rootedness, movement, or perhaps time travel. The lack of rhythmic and harmonic directionality contributes to a texture wherein sonorities are heard for their experiential qualities, thereby stalling any sense of progression and conjuring a sense of presentness, of being bound by the music. Timbre plays a role in this process as well; the work's use of instruments traditionally associated with dreaming and the otherworldly (such as bells, flute, and vibraphone) reflect the temporal dislocation suggested by the text. This shimmering, kaleidoscopic musical texture is not merely a representation of the past, but an evocation of the experience of time travel.
Example 4. Istvan Anhalt, Winthrop, scene i, “Pilgrimage and Discovery,” mm. 20–21. Reprinted with permission from Berandol Music Ltd.
At m. 22, the third section begins with the important text “Come to me in the silence of the night,” which invites—nearly pulls—the listener further into the historical realm. Given that this line of text is sung by the entire alto section of the choir rather than a solo voice, it might be heard as originating in the music itself, perhaps as a portal through which the historical realm might be accessed. The “me” in “Come to me” is unidentified—it may not even be an actual character in the drama—and reaffirms the music's agency in the act of temporal manipulation. The uncanny sensation of time travel is a result of music's unique temporal qualities, as well as this call from the musical realm that invites the listener into the action of the scene. This link between the scene's historical referents, its repeated mention of memory, and its temporal features is not an accident. In his notes entitled “A Brief Synopsis of the Opera,” Anhalt links the opening scene's musical idiom to the search for the past: “The past and present constantly tug and pull the hearer/viewer. [. . .] One is uncertain whether one is awake, dreams, imagines, or is actually transported back into a living past. [. . .] The latter wins out. [. . .] The present fades away [. . .].”Footnote 42
Through careful choices with regard to form, melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and voicing, Anhalt creates an opening scene that immediately grasps hold of the audience, immersing listeners into its temporal action. More specifically, this scene creates the impression of travel back in time, a journey that culminates in the audience's arrival in the past to meet the young John Winthrop in scene 2.
The protean relationship of past and present is evident on a variety of levels in the opera, perhaps most obviously in the use of a strikingly modernist idiom to connote the seventeenth century. As Figure 2 shows, the co-presence of both past- and present-referencing realms (effected musically and textually) reaffirms the opera's postmodern perspective on history. The examples highlighted above are only two of the more prominent and interesting ones, but there are many more; for example, at the beginning of scene 2, the harpsichord in the Renaissance-inspired introduction to the young Winthrop is electronically amplified, creating an uncanny distance between the historicized Renaissance material and our present time. This effect is reinforced by the atonal treatment of this originally modal idiom, as well as by the intermittent assertion of melodic and rhythmic shapes common to Renaissance dance idioms; both remind us of historiography's contemporality, the fluid in-between space that historical narratives occupy.
The Search for the Past
Jonathan Kramer has suggested that the contemporary world can be characterized by a “time-obsessed sensibility,” arguing that much modern music is, in fact, about temporality.Footnote 43 Indeed, Anhalt's explorations of the relationship between past and present in La Tourangelle and Winthrop reflect a very contemporary conception of time. Consistent with deconstructivist trends in the philosophy of history, the concept of time expressed in these works is a postmodern one. Interpreting the polytemporal soundscape in Anhalt's operas through theories such as Connor's contemporality consequently sheds light on a whole realm of meanings in the music, and reveals as much about Anhalt's historical reality as that of the historical figures of John Winthrop or Marie de l'Incarnation.
Anhalt's interest in nonlinear structures was not only compositional and theoretical, but also personal. As Robin Elliott and others have suggested, his fascination and personal struggle with the meaning of history colored most of his compositions. “The experience of living through the persecution and hardships of life as a Jew in WWII Hungary,” Elliott has written, “transformed Anhalt in ways that can scarcely be imagined, much less understood.”Footnote 44 One of the deep themes—a term Anhalt himself used—running through his work is the “search for the past.”Footnote 45 As a Jewish immigrant who spent much of his early life fleeing from persecution, Anhalt developed a unique perspective on the nature and significance of memory, and on the relationship of the past to the present. Anhalt's writings about his experiences—for example, The Bridge (1991) and Indictment (1992)—are evidence of his personal struggle to deal with the lasting effects of history and of the perpetual life of the past in the all-encompassing present. The most potent sites of his historical soul-searching, however, are his compositions, including Three Songs of Love (1951), Thisness (1985), Simulacrum (1986–87), Sonance·Resonance (Welche Töne) (1989), and of course his four operas.
In Winthrop, Anhalt's most significant contribution to the exploration of historical narrative arises out of his unconventional deployment of three vocalists—a tenor, baritone, and bass—to depict the various ages of the protagonist. In the composer's hands, Winthrop becomes a conceptually postmodern subject: humanized, varied, fractured, and indefinite in nature. Anhalt showcases the heteroglossia of the historical field, highlighting the turmoil that Winthrop felt over his requested leadership on the New World expedition, which he expressed in his journal in the form of inner debates.Footnote 46 These debates particularly interested Anhalt: as he explained to me, “Winthrop wasn't sure that [accepting the leadership of this expedition] was the right thing for him to do—it created a crisis in him. And among the Winthrop papers, you find [. . .] Winthrop writing up an argument with himself, in the form of a dialogue.”Footnote 47 Rather than view Anhalt's depiction of Winthrop by way of three singers as a historical fabrication, I would argue that what Anhalt has created is, rather, a more faithful depiction. More broadly and most significantly, as a study of a character's historical agency, Winthrop reconfigures both operatic subjectivity and convention.
The same can be seen in La Tourangelle. Whether the three voices that represent Marie depict three separate identities or one complex one, they clearly represent the multi-layered identity of a subject and in doing so speak to Anhalt's own experience. As Gordon E. Smith has observed, “we might say that Anhalt's various searches for the past are also searches for the present; stories from the past are also stories about now.”Footnote 48 Recognizing the parallels with his own experiences, Anhalt once noted: “it is the memory of being in transit that I was composing in these works.”Footnote 49
This complex temporal self-concept might be configured in a variety of ways; in an interview with Robin Elliott, the composer reflected on Lydia Goehr's notion of “doubleness,” a term she employs to describe the “transformations” and tensions in the experience of exiled musicians, and the effect of a sense of “foreignness” on these musicians’ creative expressions. “Why double?” Anhalt asks, “Why not multipleness? A person might have had a complex life, which is not homogeneous; it might have consisted of a number of elements, influences, insights, whatever.”Footnote 50 He then suggests how this notion of multipleness might reflect his own experience: “I was far from being homogeneous before I became a landed immigrant in Canada upon landing in Halifax in January 1949; I was pretty much a ‘multiple’ figure in my mind. A survivor of this and a survivor of that.”Footnote 51 Despite Anhalt's criticism, Goehr's concept of doubleness resonates quite aptly on a temporal level with his ideas about the function of memory, and with his concern with the persistent life of the past in the present. It seems that Anhalt's insistence on “multipleness” allows for Goehr's idea that artistic creativity demands elements of both “home” and “estrangement” if we consider it in temporal terms, as I have done in the present study.
Anhalt has defended his operatic project in historiographical terms. As he wrote in the epilogue to Alternative Voices:
Every generation that sees the world in a different light than earlier generations will demand a mirror to reflect, clearly and sharply, that very new perception. [. . .] To provide that mirror is a task for poets, artists and composers, along with scholars and scientists and creative thinkers in other domains.Footnote 52
Although La Tourangelle and Winthrop certainly offer a nuanced representation of two historical figures in their temporal flexibility, their contemporality draws the listener as much to the present as the historical past. As a result, the historical subject might be, at once, Marie de l'Incarnation or John Winthrop and Istvan Anhalt, sharing opera's continuous present to negotiate not the past itself, but our present journey towards it.
