Hearing the Thirteenth-Century Body in Benjamin and Crimp's "Written on Skin"
I gave this paper at 'Music, Medievalism, and Modernism' at the University of Huddersfield, 27th June 2018 and OBERTO's 'Opera and Violence' at Oxford Brookes on 11th September 2018. It is a scaled-down version of my undergraduate dissertation, which you can access in full here.
Agnès’s snake-like tongue, phallic in its ‘burrowing’ into men’s mouths, complicates her parallel positioning as Eve by conflating her into an embodiment of both seducer and seduced. The Protector aims to strip her of this agency through the act of force-feeding. Aside from the rape connotations within the context of the fate of Saint Agnès, there is precedent for the heart to be analogous to a phallus. In one early thirteenth-century permutation of the eaten heart tale, Renaut’s Lai d’Ignaure, twelve women occupy Agnès’s role, and their husbands feed them the communal supper of stew that not only contains their lover’s heart, but his penis. Writing in terms of premodern gender, Webb notes that ‘the heart’s power to push heat into the rest of the body and into other bodies was considered distinctly masculine’.
TW: Sexual violence
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| Barbara Hannigan and Iestyn Davies, ROH 2017. Photograph by Stephen Cummiskey. |
There is little in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s 2012 opera Written on Skin that goes unseen: not only does the thirteenth-century Troubadour plot feature an on-stage orgasm, but throat-slitting, evisceration, cannibalism, and suicide. This lurid story is based on a vida, the apocryphal biography of thirteenth-century Provençal troubadour Guillem de Cabestan. Rather than the nomadic poet-musician that he was, Cabestan is recast as ‘the Boy’, a painter employed to illuminate a luxury manuscript for a feudal landowner, The Protector. The Boy and the Protector’s wife Agnès seduce one another with an erotic painting. Upon discovering their affair, the Protector cuts out the Boy’s heart and feeds it to Agnès and she jumps from the window, to her death. When these lurid events are painted by the Boy, however, the audience can never see them. Instead, he takes out a page and, singing, describes it. In so doing, he turns his pictures into uttered acts of ekphrasis, the rhetorical device through which visual art is described and experienced anew.
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The Boy not only describes the look of his images, however, but the feel of fleshy velum beneath his fingertips. The Chorus of Angels whispers about ink ‘wet like a woman’s mouth’, and Agnès bids the Boy paint ‘the precise music of her voice’. When she eats his heart, the audience does not just hear how it tastes (‘salt strange and sweet’); they feel her teeth grind as pebbles clack together on either side of the orchestra pit. It is moments such as these that bring to the fore what Valentine Cunningham refers to as an ekphrastic tendency towards ‘intermedial’, ‘synaesthetic overlapping and blurring’.
In focussing on the ekphrastic in Written on Skin, I refer outwards from its source texts to locate its viscera within thirteenth-century understandings of the body. I dissect this opera into four sensory organs—ear, eye, skin, and mouth—and ask what it means to watch and listen to a singer as she caresses velum, or eats a human heart. Operatic ekphrasis, it will emerge, is more deeply embodied, more erotic, and more violent than it has previously been imagined to be.
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| Georgia Jarman as Agnès, ROH 2017. |
Hearing
The function of ekphrasis in Written on Skin is deeply inflected by its thirteenth-century European setting. Kathryn Starkey situates medieval manuscripts within a ‘hybrid semiotic system’, in which courtly ‘critical listeners’ were expected to visualise texts. Martha Dana Rust describes this engagement as a ‘manuscript matrix’ between the book, body, and imagination of the reader. In an Avicennian understanding, imagination was ‘a discreet cell-like area of the brain’ which could conjure images ‘held in place by physical books’. Writing of the ‘codicological’ rather than textual ‘consciousness’ of medieval readers, then, she stresses the material realities of this culture as a precondition for engaged reading. Crucially, these are not readers of the written word, but of the spoken word, and the imagined image. Insofar as it involves the conversion of words into imagined images, ekphrasis was not just commonplace in medieval reading, but integral to it.
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In Written on Skin, the Boy ‘reads’ his illuminations to the audience, and it is their imperative as pseudo-courtly readers to render his ekphrasis legible. All of the characters partake of this reading activity in a technique which Crimp calls ‘self-narration’. For example, Agnès sings, ‘the woman takes off her shoes’ while taking off her shoes. In so dramatizing the act of writing, characters at once sing themselves into existence and foreground that existence as fictional. Given that Written on Skin’s miniatures are also fictional, and can never be literally seen, they constitute what John Hollander terms ‘notional ekphrasis’.
The ‘mind’s eye’ view we have of the book is consequently in direct tension with Vicki Mortimer’s set for Katie Mitchell’s production. Like an open doll’s house, it takes the libretto’s implication that the Angels reside in the ‘margins’ of the drama, and turns the entire stage into a manuscript page. In conjunction with the Angels’ choral observations (a commonplace function of the guiding rubrics found in medieval books), the moving bodies on the stage are an uncanny animation of the Boy’s ekphrased book, walking from room to room as if between miniature panels.
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| Vicki Mortimer's set, ROH 2012. |
The First Miniature
The First Miniature enacts the Boy's flattery of the Protector, who employs him to make the book:
Benjamin recalls studying medieval illumination while writing Written on Skin, wanting to ‘represent’ its ‘very architectural […] yet fantastic’ interplay of colour. The ‘architectural’ analogy manifests in small collections of pitch classes repeated in long but irregular rhythms, creating a three-note pedal. From the transposition of this pedal, a harmonic framework is derived (table 1). The pedals centre on set 3-2—that is, different transpositions of the pitch classes C, D♭, and E♭. The exception to the framework occurs in bars 175-80 with a simple exchange of common tones: the D is carried over, the C♯ is enharmonically exchanged for a D♭, and the E♭ is carried into the return of C-D♭-E♭.
Arnold Whittall observes that Benjamin’s ‘narrative-like forms’ are often animated by such ‘small entities’, and this pedal ‘animates’ Benjamin's architectural analogy in bars 163-68, where it works in two voices cycling between two dyads: A-G♯ and G-B♭. That this drawing of the borders of harmonic territory coincides with the beginning of the Boy's ekphrasis proper suggests that these two-dimensional dyads are analogous to the laying of a harmonic canvas, or a velum page.
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| Two-dimensional dyads. |
There is a quasi major-minor permutation in the Boy’s vocal lines’ tendency to skip up a major third and then flatten it, which derives from the pedal being turned ‘inside out’ to make set 3-3. It differs from 3-2 by shifting its internal semitone to the other side of its minor third, opening it out into a major third.
In bars 175-78, the Boy sings ‘in his face, round his eyes, see his expression’, twisting his vocal line between sets 3-3 and 3-2 by pivoting on G, culminating in a major-minor statement of 3-3 above G setting ‘expression’. The subtle effect of these semitonal shifts on the structural intervals of sets also coincides with the shift to the T5 transposition of the pedal. It is as if the Boy is shifting the page to cast new light upon it, harnessing the listener's aural gaze. Benjamin is explicit in his privileging of such a mode of listening: ‘gone is the mono-directional thrust of Classic and Romantic music’, he writes, championing in its place ‘a world of rotations and reflections, opening up myriad paths for the listener’.
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| Major-minor permutation on the word 'expression'. |
Seeing
Just as Written on Skin’s characters enact a life that imitates their art both in reading and real life, the dominant medieval model of the gaze was a reciprocal one, wherein light was both received by the eyes and ‘extromitted’ by them. Medusa-like, the gaze of a woman was anxiety-provoking, imbued, Heather Webb writes, with ‘poisonous rays’ and ‘libidinous vapours’ that could corrupt the receiving man. Visual encounters, so integral to courtly love poetry, were consequently bound up in the sexual politics of what Webb terms ‘sensual intercourse’. When performing notional ekphrasis on his illuminations, the Boy takes on the interpretive labour both of ‘reading’ the image and mediating the physical book orally, to ‘project’ it into others.
This dynamic is radically altered, however, when the Protector must read the Boy’s pornographic ‘secret page’ aloud to the illiterate Agnès in Scene Seven. This ekphrasis is even notional within the imagined world of the narrative, for when Agnès asks where the pictures are, the Boy replies, ‘I’ve painted them with words’. In the act of reading aloud, the Protector is forced to use his own body to perform the necessary mediating work, and the identity damage is apparent. Whenever he has to acknowledge his own impotence and sing ‘writes the Boy’, he shifts enharmonically between G♭ and F♯.
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The sexual politics attached to ekphrastic reading in Written on Skin render it a nexus of power relations, and its seductive content is weaponised. Agnès sets the deadly events of Part Three in motion by reclaiming her own image when she violently bids the Boy make the ‘secret page’:
push our love into that man’s eye
like a hot needle.
blind him with it.
make him cry blood.
This is her final request: to be made into pornography. Comparing the medieval saint to the modern-day porn star, William E. Burgwinkle and Howie Cary describe how both ‘simultaneously solicit and withdraw from the gaze of their devotees’. Concealment is a prerequisite for solicitation and disclosure, and constantly emphasised in Michael Camille’s discussion of illuminations depicting sex through curtains, bedsheets, and mise-en-page arrangements that conceal genitals with borders, text, and rubric.
The anxiety surrounding exposure is attributed by Mary C. Olson to the power derived from images’ ‘perceived ability not only to represent but actually become the object represented’. In a Galenic continuum of ‘grey matter’ from the brain to the production of semen, medieval scribes were imbued with phallic power; Camille reads an ‘impregnation’ and ‘jouissance in the act of pressing inky juices into the fleshly page’. The act of ekphrasis unveils the violent potential of writing, penetrating the mind’s eye, which ‘cries blood’. As the Protector sobs the word ‘pornography’ over a quasi-major-minor shift, the image of Agnès’s infidelity violates his imagination like a ‘hot needle’, pushed in by the gradual, visceral unfolding of ekphrasis.
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| Siena, Biblioteca Communale degli Intronati, 1399. |
Touching
The line between pleasure and pain is often crossed in Written on Skin, and it is a constant reminder of the peril underlying Agnès’s sexual transgressions. Significantly, however, the Boy almost never ekphrases acts of touch himself, instead demanding Agnès do it. ‘And her hair? Pay attention’, he sings, before she concedes, ‘dark—damp—heavy—the weight of mine now’. When the Boy convinces the Protector that he has not been having sex with Agnès but her sister Marie, Agnès ekphrases a nightmarish vision of betrayal:
her hair stuck—stuck like gold-leaf to your skin.
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| Victoria Simmonds as Marie, ROH 2012. |
Within the ‘manuscript matrix’ of bodies, pages, and voices in messy co-presence, the Marie of this dream sequence is as ‘real’ as any illumination by the Boy or any other self-narrated character, and gold-leaf hair sticking to bare skin is the opera’s most overt image of an interface between these competing imagined ontologies. From Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt to Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, there is a twentieth-century operatic legacy of women’s hair being morbidly erotic. This is particularly pertinent for Agnès, whose namesake saint was executed for growing impenetrable hair all over her body whenever a man attempted to rape her. Both part of the body and already dead, there was a 13th-century trend for making the deceased’s hair into jewellery, resonating with the Protector’s desire to memorialise himself on parchment.
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| Carolyn Sampson as Melisande. Scottish Opera, 2017. |
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| Santa Inés en la prisión, 1641 - José de Ribera. |
Agnès’s image of living parchment resonates with modern reactions to handling medieval manuscripts. Benjamin describes handling a manuscript with Crimp, ‘not only to look at it, but to feel it’. Marvelling at its ‘waxy’ thickness, he perceived the seat of the manuscript’s endurance to be at gold-leaf’s convergence with the cold, dead skin of an animal. A more visceral, less reverent response is Jonathan Wilcox’s to the ‘assault on the senses’ of the velum-making process, with its ‘smell of blood and sex and death’ provoking a combination of disgust and a ‘captivated’ desire to ‘fondle’. The first description of touch in the opera comes from Agnès: ‘what is it she feels between her bare feet and the wood floor?/ Grit'.
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| Making velum. |
If, as Sarah Kay suggests, reading is a skin-like process in which ‘the writer’s self is turned inside out to form a textual envelope which can then be assumed by the reader’, such a process could equally apply to the performativity of ekphrasis. Agnès’s original, miniature-bound image of hair which is ‘dark—damp—heavy—the weight of mine now’ explodes from the page into the imperative sexual expression of her later outcry: ‘grip my hair in your fist. Yes’. By her final aria, it is not the image of Agnès that is being written on skin, but she who is the embodied, three-dimensional site of inscription: she sings, ‘each mark he makes on me is good’.
Tasting
Aside from literally falling out of the window, Agnès is a fallen woman in the Christian sense. She both acts upon the temptation of her sexual curiosity and eats of a forbidden food: her lover’s heart. Milad Doueihi writes of how, in medieval courtly love, the heart was considered both the seat of passion and the seat of knowledge; like forbidden fruit, the ‘sweet taste’ of love ‘was both a matter of taste and a matter of knowledge (sabor)’. The Edenic analogy is at its most overt when the Protector sings, ‘stitch shut your lips before your pink pink flicking tongue/ snakes back into my mouth the way it burrowed into his’. Her response is a series of open-mouthed noises imbued with shades of what Abbate terms ‘the fetishisation of voice as pure sound’, but also Derrida’s visceral ‘mucous membranes of the mouth, stuck together and spat out’.
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Agnès’s snake-like tongue, phallic in its ‘burrowing’ into men’s mouths, complicates her parallel positioning as Eve by conflating her into an embodiment of both seducer and seduced. The Protector aims to strip her of this agency through the act of force-feeding. Aside from the rape connotations within the context of the fate of Saint Agnès, there is precedent for the heart to be analogous to a phallus. In one early thirteenth-century permutation of the eaten heart tale, Renaut’s Lai d’Ignaure, twelve women occupy Agnès’s role, and their husbands feed them the communal supper of stew that not only contains their lover’s heart, but his penis. Writing in terms of premodern gender, Webb notes that ‘the heart’s power to push heat into the rest of the body and into other bodies was considered distinctly masculine’.
The eaten heart collapses the forbidden apple and the body of Christ into one meal: the ‘ritualised parody of the last supper’ of Renaut’s twelve women in particular not only sees, in the words of Merrall Llewellyn Price, ‘the heart and genitals of a playboy as the body and blood of Christ’, but the perversely ecclesial foundation of a community of women who reject their husbands and, like Agnès, sanctify the meal by refusing to eat again. Agnès's defiant aria, ‘nothing I ever eat/ nothing I drink/ will ever take the taste of that boy’s heart/ out of this body’, reinstates the ‘verbal contract’ of her love for the Boy with a new orality: one not of speaking but of eating.
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| Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, Illumination from Suetonius, Life of Caesar, 1433, Princeton University Library MS Kane 44. |
Nicola McDonald collects various textual references to medieval people deriving pleasure from the Eucharist. Agnès expresses this same explicit pleasure, audibly chewing and smacking her lips when her meal’s identity is revealed, earlier singing that it tastes ‘sweet as my own milk’. As the throbbing bass of their sex scene at the end of Part One returns, now grimly recast as the revenant beating of his cut-out heart, she aligns it with the taste of her own bodily fluids in implied burial, autosarcophagy—burying the beloved inside herself—foreshadows her impending death.
Agnès’s description of her meal does necessary mediating work on the obscenely disembodied heart; she ‘digests’ it for the audience. Even in the absence of horrific spectacle, the legacy of Thomist Eucharistic theology renders the oral, liturgical description of food spiritually necessary. The audience is called into a communion with Agnès’s bodily actions: as Benjamin places clacking pebbles at either side of the orchestra pit with col legno violas in the middle, the sarcophagal pit of her stomach is audio-spatially mimed by grinding teeth. The audience is consumed.
By dissecting Written on Skin and extracting eyes, ears, skin, mouth, and heart, this paper has reached out for the sensory frontiers of sung ekphrasis to ask how they flow into one another. As Derrida writes, ‘at once virtual, potential, and dynamic’, ekphrastic traces can cross ‘all the borders separating the senses, its being-in-potential at once visual and auditory, mobile and tactile’. Through sing-sketching an impression of the senses as they unfold, what Cunningham terms the ‘excess, failure, and mimesis’ of ekphrasis is as much—if not even more—an operatic condition as it is a linguistic and a cross-historical one. A condition bound up in Written on Skin’s central, medieval concerns: sex and death; resurrection and preservation; pictures, love, and acts.
Select Bibliography
Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton Studies in Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Baert, Barbara. Interspaces between Word, Gaze and Touch: The Bible and the Visual Medium in the Middle Ages. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.
Belsey, Catherine. ‘Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2012): 175-98.
Burgwinkle, William E., and Howie Cary. Sanctity and Pornography in
Medieval Culture: On the Verge. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2010.
Cunningham, Valentine. Why Ekphrasis? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago; London, 1993.
Doueihi, Milad. A Perverse History of the Human Heart. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Duncan, Michelle. ‘The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Performativity.’ Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 283-306.
Fisher, Linda. ‘Feminist Phenomenological Voices.’ Continental Philosophy Review 43, no. 1 (2010): 83-95.
Kay, Sarah. ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works.’ Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 35-74.
Price, Merrall Llewelyn. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. New York; London: Routledge, 2003.
Rupprecht, Philip. ‘Above and beyond the Bass: Harmony and Texture in George Benjamin's 'Viola, Viola'.’ Tempo 59, no. 232 (2005): 28-38.
Rust, Martha Dana. Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Starkey, Kathryn. Reading the Medieval Book: Poetics of Orality and Literacy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
Webb, Heather. The Medieval Heart. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010.
Wilcox, Jonathan. Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy; v. 23. Turnhout, Belgium, 2013.
Baert, Barbara. Interspaces between Word, Gaze and Touch: The Bible and the Visual Medium in the Middle Ages. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.
Belsey, Catherine. ‘Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2012): 175-98.
Burgwinkle, William E., and Howie Cary. Sanctity and Pornography in
Medieval Culture: On the Verge. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2010.
Cunningham, Valentine. Why Ekphrasis? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago; London, 1993.
Doueihi, Milad. A Perverse History of the Human Heart. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Duncan, Michelle. ‘The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Performativity.’ Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 283-306.
Fisher, Linda. ‘Feminist Phenomenological Voices.’ Continental Philosophy Review 43, no. 1 (2010): 83-95.
Kay, Sarah. ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works.’ Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 35-74.
Price, Merrall Llewelyn. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. New York; London: Routledge, 2003.
Rupprecht, Philip. ‘Above and beyond the Bass: Harmony and Texture in George Benjamin's 'Viola, Viola'.’ Tempo 59, no. 232 (2005): 28-38.
Rust, Martha Dana. Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Starkey, Kathryn. Reading the Medieval Book: Poetics of Orality and Literacy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
Webb, Heather. The Medieval Heart. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010.
Wilcox, Jonathan. Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy; v. 23. Turnhout, Belgium, 2013.
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