Hercules, Vampires, and the Opera of Attractions

ABSTRACT

Opera’s specter has long haunted film and more recently, film haunts opera productions seeking to entice new audiences. Patrick Morganelli’s opera Hercules vs. Vampires (2010) harnesses the tension between live and recorded media. In this production, singers deliver their lines in loose synchronization with the film’s characters, dubbing over the original’s visuals with operatic voices. By encouraging an attentive rather than absorptive mode of consumption, Hercules vs. Vampires restores to both opera and film a joy and effervescence made possible through the pungent postmodern incongruencies of the high art of opera and the popular Italian sword and sandal film.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jessica Getman, Michael Lee, Eden Bradshaw Kaiser, and the anonymous reader of this article for their insights. I would also like to thank Robynn Stilwell, Jim Buhler, and David Neumeyer for their input. I am grateful to the attendees of the American Opera and Musical Theater Conference held in 2018 at Middle Tennessee State and of the 2021 Society for American Music Conference for their questions. My colleagues at Carleton College, especially Ron Rodman, Andy Flory, Justin London, and Carol Donelan have been supportive of this project for which I am very grateful. I am indebted to Adam Smart for his expert help in setting this article’s music examples. Finally, I am so grateful to Patrick Morganelli for his generosity and support in the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ I am grateful to this article’s anonymous reader for referring me to Slavoj Žižek’s more elaborate explanation of the conceptual connections between seeing and hearing. See Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 90–94.

² For more on this, see Carolyn Abbate, “Offenbach, Kracauer, and Ethical Frivolity,” The Opera Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2017): 62–86, at 79–83.

³ Robynn Stilwell spoke with me about an earlier production that echoes the type of media blending that Mondelli engages in for his work. The production was the Metropolitan Opera’s 1936 Christoph Willibald in front of Gluck: Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. For it, George Balanchine and Pavel Tchelitchew created a staging in which the singers performed from the orchestra pit while dancers portrayed the characters on stage. Robynn Stilwell, video call with author, June 29, 2023. For more on this production, see Peter Clark, “Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met,” The Metropolitan Opera, accessed June 29, 2023, https://www.metopera.org/discover/archives/notes-from-the-archives/from-the-archives-orfeo-ed-euridice-at-the-met/.

⁴ “Our Mission,” Opera Theater Oregon, accessed March 2, 2018, https://www.operatheateroregon.com/our-mission/.

⁵ Sword and sandal films, also referred to as peplum films, are a genre of Italian B-movies typically featuring ancient Greco-Roman settings. These films sought to imitate epic Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Cleopatra (1963). “In its most stereotypical form,” film scholar Robert Rushing explains, “the peplum depicts muscle-bound heroes (professional bodybuilders, athletes, wrestlers, or brawny actors) in mythological antiquity, fighting fantastic monsters and saving scantily clad beauties. Rather than lavish epics set in the classical world, they are low-budget films that focus on the hero’s extraordinary body.” Robert Rushing, “Descended from Hercules: Masculine Anxiety in the Peplum,” in Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 41–59, at 41.

⁶ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.

⁷ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

⁸ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, June 29, 2023.

⁹ Patrick Morganelli, email correspondence with author, June 29, 2023.

¹⁰ Vivaldi wrote Ercole su’l Termodonte in 1723, Handel’s oratorio Hercules premiered in 1745, and Gluck composed the opera Le nozze d’Ercole e d’Ebe in 1747. Saint-Saëns’ final opera from 1911, Déjanire, moreover, deals with the tragic death of Hercules.

¹¹ By attending to the sensual aspects of performance whether live or recorded, Abbate suggests that we can reconcile the weighty with the frivolous by accepting the ephemerality of the art. See Abbate, “Offenbach, Kracauer, and Ethical Frivolity,” 63, 82–3.

¹² Kracauer writes, “Offenbach’s music made it a promise of paradise. Halévy too, in the irony he stamped upon it, set his face towards paradise; but it was a paradise lost. Thus, the operetta oscillated between a lost and promised paradise; but the latter was a fleeting apparition, a will-o’-the-wisp that vanished as a rude hand tried to seize it.” Siegfried Kracauer, Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of His Time, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (New York: Vienna House, 1972), 208.

¹³ For more on liveness, the recorded, and mediatization, see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). Most relevant to my discussion is Auslander’s second chapter in which he touches on the increasing mediatization of live performances. See “Live Performance in a Mediatized Culture,” 10–60.

¹⁴ Jeongwon Joe, “The Cinematic Body in the Operatic Theater: Philip Glass’s La Belle et la Bête,” in Between Opera and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa (New York: Routledge, 2002), 59–73, at 63.

¹⁵ Ibid.,

¹⁶ Edward Rothstein, “Not Quite an Opera Transforms a Film,” New York Times, December 9, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/09/arts/music-review-not-quite-an-opera-transforms-a-film.html (accessed February 15, 2018).

¹⁷ Joe, “The Cinematic Body 64.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Roy E. Aycock, “Shakespeare, Boito, and Verdi,” The Musical Quarterly 58, no. 4 (1972): 588–604, at 590.

²⁰ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

²¹ Patrick Morganelli, e-mail correspondence with author, June 29, 2023.

²² Glass attempted to achieve closer synchronization in his opera. For more on Glass’s approach, see Joe, “The Cinematic Body,” 59. However, while the DVD recording of Glass’s La Belle et la Bête is closely synchronized, Aaron Ziegel points out that this is not always the case in live performances of the opera. See Ziegel, “Reshaped and Redefined,” 49–50.

²³ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Philip Gossett explores this practice of composing for specific singers. One of many examples he provides includes Verdi providing a baritone with multiple versions of a passage from Macbeth, leaving the decision up to the singer. See Philip Gossett, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69–70. Of course, the history of composers adjusting parts for singers (or singers adjusting parts for themselves) goes back to opera’s beginnings. See William Ashbrook, “Opera Singers,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 421–49, at 427, 429, and 437.

²⁶ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

²⁷ Patrick Morganelli, Hercules vs. Vampires, Production Information and Technical Rider (2010), 3.

²⁸ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ See James Buhler and David Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 528.

³¹ Charles O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 124.

³² As O’Brien points out, in the early 1930s, Hollywood devoted itself to privileging a constructed realism over actual fidelity. Technologically enabled by a multitracking system, synchronization of sound (including voice) allowed filmmakers to manipulate sound as a means of supporting the narrative world, even if the mix itself was not realistic. See O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion, 110–11. Hollywood’s voco-centrism demanded tight synchronization in order to preserve the illusion of realism, that is, of a voice that is rooted in a physical body. For more on this see James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140–41.

³³ In the case of Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) and other Italian films of the time including The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), as well as Hong Kong and Bollywood cinema, films would often be shot without synchronous sound in order to save money on shooting costs. All sound, including dialogue, music, and effects, would be recorded afterward. As a result, at times looser synchronization between voice and the cinematic body emerges in these films when compared to Hollywood cinema. Sound effects are also typically more pronounced. For more on this, see Kyle Deguzman, “What Does MOS Mean in Film—Definition, Pros, and Cons,” StudioBinder, last modified on April 2, 2023, https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-does-mos-mean-in-film/.

³⁴ Tim Lucas, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (Cincinnati: Video Watchdog, 2007), 396.

³⁵ For more on this topic, see Jeongwon Joe, Opera as Soundtrack (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013), 103–5.

³⁶ Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 288–317, at 301.

³⁷ Michel Chion, “The Audio-Logo-Visual and the Sound of Languages in Recent Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77–88, at 78–81.

³⁸ For more on cine-concerts see Brooke McCorkle Okazaki, “Liveness, Music, Media: The Case of the Cine-Concert,” Music and the Moving Image 13, no. 2 (2020): 3–24.

³⁹ Trovajoli was prolific with over three hundred credits to his name. His primary work was in Commedia all’italiana films, though he also provided scores for the other Hercules films, Mole Men against the Son of Hercules (1961) and Hercules and the Captive Women (1961), which also starred Reg Park in the title role. “Armando Trovajoli,” IMDB.com, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006325/ (accessed March 1, 2018). Trovajoli established himself as a jazz performer early in his career, having recorded with Django Reinhardt and Toots Thielemans. See Lucas, All the Colors, 399.

⁴⁰ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 9, 2018.

⁴¹ For more on Mickey Mousing see Buhler and Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies, 72–3.

⁴² Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.

⁴³ Bava, with his talent for special effects, concocted an especially creative means of achieving the lava shot. A large pan of cooking polenta was lit with neon red lights and filmed in close-up. Lucas, All the Colors, 399.

⁴⁴ As James Buhler and David Neumeyer explain, “composers are precise about the timing of their stingers so as to ‘catch’ just that right moment that opens the expression of the face to the fullest. Stingers are also used as a means of emphasizing psychological shock. As such, they are often reserved for turning points in dialogue and scenes.” Buhler and Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies, 74.

⁴⁵ In the original myth, Persephone is Hades’s wife, not daughter. The change is the result of the English-language dubbing of the film, which renames the Italian character Myosotide, “Persephone.”

⁴⁶ Many of the earliest operas drew from ancient Greco-Roman mythology for inspiration. Apollo and Orpheus were particularly favored as protagonists because of their musical abilities. For example, in the early 1600s, Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini, and Claudio Monteverdi all composed operas based on the Orpheus legend. Peri also wrote an opera based on the story of Apollo and Daphne. See Tim Carter, “The Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–46, at 8–15.

⁴⁷ Rick Altman, “Four and a Half Film Fallacies,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 225–233, at 226.

⁴⁸ Tom Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8 (1986): 63–70.

⁴⁹ Ibid.,

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., 66. Here Gunning is referencing Sergei Eisenstein’s term “attraction.” Like Gunning, I identify an element of avant-gardism nestled within this aesthetic.

⁵² Ibid. Gunning is referring to an essay on variety theaters written by Manifesto of Futurism author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

⁵³ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018. According to Morganelli, the recent phenomenon of film screenings with live musical accompaniment, particularly those for the Harry Potter series, inspired this approach to introducing the voiceover opera.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ The event websites for the L.A. Opera and Arizona Opera advertise these surrounding attractions. “Hercules vs. Vampires,” L.A. Opera Off Grand, https://www.laopera.org/season/1415-Season-at-a-Glance/Hercules-vs-Vampires/ (accessed February 18, 2018); “Hercules vs. Vampires,” Arizona Opera, https://www.azopera.org/performances/hercules-vs-vampires (accessed February 18, 2018).

⁵⁶ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 23, 2018.

⁵⁷ Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16.

⁵⁸ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.

⁵⁹ For example, one writer titled their review of the opera “‘Hercules vs. Vampires’—Campy Humor from LA Opera.” See Bondo Wyszpolski, Easy Reader and Peninsula Magazine, April 24, 2015, accessed June 28, 2023, https://easyreadernews.com/hercules-vs-vampires-campy-humor-from-la-opera/. Simon Williams critiqued the opera, writing “The event was good for campy laughs, but even they started petering out halfway through the showing.” Simon Williams, “Review of Hercules vs. Vampires, LA Opera 4/25/15,” Opera News vol. 80, no. 1 (July 2015), accessed June 28, 2023, https://www.metguild.org/Opera_News_Magazine/2015/7/Reviews/LOS_ANGELES__Hercules_vs__Vampires.html. M.V. Moorhead describes the opera as “corny,” “hokey,” and “kitsch.” See M. V. Moorhead, “For Corny Fun, Check Out Arizona Opera’s ‘Hercules vs. Vampires,’” Phoenix, October 20, 2017, accessed June 28, 2023, https://www.phoenixmag.com/2017/10/20/for-corny-fun-check-out-arizona-opera-s-hercules-vs-vampires/. Nashville Opera’s CEO and Artistic Director John Hoomes told Amy Stumpfl of The Tennesseean, “I loved the idea of pairing a live orchestra and singers with this fantastical 1960s Italian movie. But I was a little concerned that it might be something of a camp-fest—almost poking fun at the film.” See Amy Stumpfl, “Nashville Opera Takes on ‘Hercules vs. Vampires’ in Entertaining Mash-Up,” The Tennessean, January 21, 2018, accessed June 28, 2023, https://www.tennessean.com/story/life/arts/2018/01/21/nasnashville-opera-takes-hercules-vs-vampires-thrilling-mash-up/1036933001/. When I first presented this project as a paper at the American Opera and Musical Theater Conference held at Middle Tennessee State on March 24–25, 2018, Naomi Graber pointed out similarities between Hercules vs. Vampires and midnight sing-a-long performances of Rocky Horror Picture Show. The actions of singing synchronously with cinematic bodies occurs in both events, but to very different ends. Nevertheless, this shared quality with Rocky Horror might explain why so many reviewers deem Hercules vs. Vampires camp.

⁶⁰ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.

⁶¹ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 23, 2018.

⁶² Even though Morganelli conceived of Hercules vs. Vampires as a serious work, he understands that people might laugh at the juxtaposition of operatic voices with charming pre-CGI special effects and narrative non sequiturs. He commented, “If they’re laughing at things I didn’t find funny, well, I’m OK with that.” Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.

⁶³ Patrick Morganelli, telephone call with author, February 16, 2018.