Ben Winters, contra Cone, proposes that the world depicted in film may well be ‘saturated with the “sound” of music’, making non-diegetic music – the equivalent, broadly speaking, of operatic orchestral music – a part of the film’s reality. This theory fails to distinguish between different types of imaginary orchestras: those that accompany sane characters in both their lofty and their quotidian expressions, and those that are conjured by mad characters who may hear and produce inaccessible sounds. (Over the years, singers have tended to break this rule: among the Lucias who react to the orchestral music are Joan Sutherland, Natalie Dessay and Anna Netrebko.) In a later version of his theory, Cone notes that characters hear the music of an ‘imaginary orchestra that they, as composers, carry around with them’. Cone asserts that Lucia ‘must synchronize perfectly with her flute, but she must not reveal that she is conscious of its presence’. In one version of Cone’s theory on musical personae, operatic characters are not consciously aware that they are singing, and they do not actively perceive their orchestral accompaniments, either.
74 The question of what an opera character hears has been asked before, perhaps most famously by Edward Cone.