Abstract
Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Craig Owens' theorizations of allegory, I relate the concept of allegory to the postmodernist practice of reading not only literary but also audio-visual texts. The practice of reading opera has been criticised for failing to account for opera's material effects, usually invoked by reference to the operatic voice.
An opposition has thus been constructed between meaning-making and performance, saying and doing, and reading and listening. In this chapter, I contest this opposition with the help of Peter Greenaway and Louis Andriessen's opera Rosa (1994), which, by means of its allegorical structure, invites reading and promises knowledge that it ultimately withholds from its spectator-auditors.
Following Shoshana Felman, I argue that it is this impossibility of extracting a coherent, univocal meaning from operatic signs, rather than the materiality of the singing voice, that is responsible for opera's performative effects.