Premises: aesthetic foundation of opera is “Italian notion of song” – “opera that engenders a state in which one is always listening in anticipation of, or listening toward, [desiring], a place where one knows beautiful singing will take place.” Operatic singing is transcendent and potentially ridiculous “being both miraculous and continually available for parody.” (3)  “Death is immanent in the operatic voice.” “Moments of beautiful singing are always already being mourned.” (4) Poizat: death in operatic narrative allegorizes voice’s tendency to reach beyond melos and signification to “the cry, the shriek, the scream, fading out into after-echoes and silence.” Dramatic conditions created in order to produce cry (logic of vocal jouissance). Zizek: Wagnerian horror is the threat of existing between two deaths, the first biological, the second dying in peace. Abbate: Wagnerian death a Utopian moment allowing operatic immortality, for dead remain in music in sonorous form even after they can no longer authorize it. (5) Grover-Friedlander: “Orphic death” means “song revives the dead, but that revival is overturned by a gesture that is not acoustic (song) but visual (looking back)….hints that the spectral, the visual or the optical is able to bring about the total collapse of whatever has been achieved by the vocal or the acoustic.”  But “the idea of mortality or impermanence is already called for by the frailty of song, by its incapacity to sustain life, or by its passing and ephemeral nature.” (7) But “repetition of song questions the finality of eath, introducing a dimension of immortality.” “What is ephemeral and passing is also what can return.” [<- illogical] Death fails to hold sway. (8)