Using opera as expressive film music: cliches for the description of situations, from fear to love

Abstract

[En] Since the beginning of sound film the opera, mainly as diegetic appearance, has been used with the function applied as expressive music for characters and situations; this is more than just a trendy, because of its interconnection of this preexisting music with its metatext function; so the opera manages to create a special narrative role in the viewer, showing their expressive and structural functionalities. Although opera often supports its expressiveness through the contents of the texts of the arias, also gets that functionality with the colorful timbre of its instrumental parts as the overtures and interludes. This functionality makes possible that expressive operas go beyond the context for which they were created. With the popularization of commercial recordings of operas by "classical" composers (as Mozart, Verdi, Rossini ...), several filmed operas and different types of biopic film (from Amadeus to Io, Don Giovanni), any listener can recognize these “popular” arias and give them their personal cliche, which allows to open to the composer and contemporary audiences to a new sociocultural context that go further from these first opera premiere and subsequent performances in theatres to all new film audiences in their own “home” cinema. As an expressive example we see how far Apocalyse Now has been gone making a narrative cliche with "The Ride of the Valkyries" (in the famous sequence of the surf beach and the helicopter) and how many times this cliche has been reused as a recurring element of panic in different film genres either in black humor ones Casper or Manhattan Murder Mystery either in war films as Shining Through. Through the analysis of different examples of diegetic and non-diegetic cliches from "popular" operas we can establish types of expressive functions which are used not only by directors and composers but also by spectators who believes in those cliches as part of the meaning of the opera genre.