Customer Reviews

Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is well-written, which is why I give it 3 stars; but much of it is well-written nonsense, which is why I give it only 3 stars.

First, it is mis-titled. It is not about opera so much as about opera singers, in particular female opera singers who allegedly appeal especially to gay men, such as Maria Callas (there is a whole section (pp. 134-53) on "the gay cult of Callas") - what must my wife think when I play her records?

Second, where it leaves off the gays-as-super-aesthetes stuff, and attempts to discuss testable hypotheses, it often gets the facts backwards. For example: "Records helped kill opera by limiting the repertoire to a handful of repeated and repeatable chestnuts." (p. 47) The truth is of course the exact opposite. Before records, a handful of operas were performed in a season and every season would include at least a Bohème, a Butterfly, and/or a Carmen - one would be lucky to hear a couple of hundred operas in an entire lifetime even if one lived in one of the few world cities with an opera company. Today I can, as I do, live in the desert and choose from thousands of recorded operas whenever I feel like it, an unprecedented cornucopia of operatic riches. Similarly, Koestenbaum states that "opera virtually died with Puccini" (p. 74). That is true only if you don't count Richard Strauss's Arabella (1933) and Capriccio (1942), Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937), or all or most of the operas of Hindemith, Weill, Krenek, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Poulenc, Menotti, Barber and Benjamin Britten. Puccini may represent the end, even the Indian summer, of romantic Italian opera, but scarcely of opera.

There's no denying that Wayne Koestenbaum is a very smart man, but that still doesn't make THE QUEEN'S THROAT very worthwhile. The narratorial persona he adopts (which he's stuck to ever since the book was published ten years ago) is of a slight hysterical, over-the-top aesthete who takes to impossibly grandiose and silly declamations (such as when he pretends to dream he is Thaïs: "Wayne, Thaïs must have pearls!"). The book really belongs to that peculiar moment in academia when writers could claim whatever trivial thing they did in daily life was politically important, with regard to identity politics, simply because they claimed it to be "subversive"; if you give even two seconds worth of thought to the strictures and actual repressive measures gay men and women must face on a daily basis all over the world, you'll see how trivial Koestenbaum's claims that his trivialities are politically important really are.

There is some fun to be had in the reading of this work, but the narrator's giddy narcissism does get very wearisome after a while. This new edition comes with a new and especially pompous preface from Tony Kushner.

Koestenbaum has crafted an insightful if sometimes academic work in "The Queen's Throat." He charts the peculiar affinity between gay men and the opera, a relationship he believes begins with an "outsider" sensibility that the sexuality and the musical genre share, and along with that a love of artifice.

So far so good, but the book hits rough going about two thirds of the way through when Koestenbaum enters that stream of thought loosely housed under the heading of "deconstruction." Central to the decon. canon is the impossiblity of separating art and politics, and opera as well as gayness are for the author "subversive." I read a lot of gender studies/ feminist thought and even so, I found his line of reasoning rough going. "The Queen's Throat" is worthwhile, but a carefree night at the opera, it ain't.

Written as a series of numbered soul-scouring diary entries, this weightless volume links metropolitan gay American life in the 1970s and 80s with American grand opera's obsession with class, and as such belongs in the cultural anthropology section of anyone's library. But having expressed the link, it bathes in it and rolls around in it, and expects the reader to sympathize, without substantiation. It is its own indictment.

Exquisitely written, I loved this book, especially the chapter on the unspeakable marriage of words and music. A very personal meditation on an art, the author does the unthinkable, merging reminisces with fragments of sometimes personal history, gently turning a kaleidescope. Each tiny list, observation, is a like a breath, repeated as one might experience in meditation. The form conforms to the content--presenting an intuition rather than a didactic explanation. The author traverses the terrain between reality and dream, the pleasurable ground which is opera. Not really about homosexuality, the author explores the nether world between homosexuality and heterosexuality, revealing a realm where dreams inhabit the same universe as daily banal life. I found it profoundly touching, deeply illuminating, exposing ancient roots. If you know how words once married to music can penetrate the ear and push the body to ecstacy, you know the mystery of which the author speaks--poetry, reminding of intimate experiences past. The author succeeds where so many have failed, resurrecting a mystical experience.

This is daring, high-wire exploratory literature of the most beguiling kind. Much more than a reach into the mystery-laden world of one aspect of gay culture, though it is that as well, this is a book about desire, about the fantastical meanings within music, about enslavement and redemption. I read the book in one sitting. It's a devastating piece of prose writing, it gleams and pulls you awake with pins! It is a riveting exposition of the extravagance of sexuality, of sexual desire as metaphor for psychological neglect, an enticing and bewitching brew of fantasy and sorrow. Koestenbaum is in sublime command of his thought, the language is both startling and voluptuous, operatic, really. In Chapter 4, entitled "The Callas Cult", he begins one paragraph "Worshipping Callas, am I behaving like a vulture?" After thoroughly examining the widespread, unreasoned obsession with Maria Callas, he concludes "But it's impossible to circumscribe love. As a commentator, one can only operate like a skylight at a premiere, advertising a location." The mastery of prose throughout is never anything short of brilliant, and is often ecstatic, so that the book's 'colors' dip inevitably toward the mystical, the ineffable. I think it is a complete triumph, a masterfully accomplished piece of unforgettable literature. Highest recommendation.

The Queen's Throat is an insightful and animated blend of knowledge and intuition exploring the connections and overlappings of homosexuality and opera, arriving at a number of intriguing conclusions. The core of opera's queerness is dismantled and reassembled with a reflective and lyrical precision that defies typical essay format and approach. This is a brilliant monologue -- a very entertaining brainstorm which even includes silly graphics. It's smart, funny, personal, and spirited and even of interest for the operatically challenged. In fact, I bet big opera fans would give this a five.

The author is sometimes outrageous yet outspoken in some of his assumptions and observations about those who attend and enjoy opera and those singers and other musicians who perform these works. Some may disagree vehemently with some or all of his consclusions, but no one who reads this book will be without an opinion - either agreeing wholeheartedly with the author or having a "hissy fit" over his "over-the-top" arguments and perceptions. It is amusingly illustrated with occasionally very droll captions to go with the archival photos. On the whole, this book is a pleasant diversion for before-bed reading and may keep you from falling asleep with some of the author's "apercus" in mind

Me likey the book, me likey Gays in Opera cause no one writes about (see "Opera: The Undoing of Women; Catherine Clement) them.And Opera, Callas singing Delibes Laksme is good. It's good someone talks about how Gays like Opera, otherwise straight corporate society would think they were the only cultured ones,..Yep, Me like.