This paper draws on Carolyn Abbate's concept of the "narrating voice" and Robert Hatten's notion of shifting "levels of discourse" in an analysis of Puccini's 1918 Il Tabarro (The Cloak). For Abbate, narrativity in music is akin to a musical "state of being," one that music can acquire, lose, and acquire again at various moments in the course of its real-time evolution. For Hatten, shifts in levels of discourse in music are analogous to shifts, in literature, from direct discourse to indirect discourse or narration. For both authors, shifts among various voices or discursive levels may result from changes of stylistic or topical registers, sudden harmonic or tonal detours, disruptions in the flow of musical time, quotations or references to other works, or references to various standard musical-formal structures.

The musical language of Il Tabarro is characterized by a single salient feature, a stasis that makes the work strikingly homogeneous. But there is one moment in the work in which the stasis abates: the love duet between two of the central characters, in which Puccini shifts to a different stylistic-topical register, reverts to a more traditional harmonic language, and makes the clearest reference in the entire work to the traditional formal structure of Italian ottocento opera (specifically the four-movement musical-textual scheme known as the "solita forma"). This shift of discursive level is so striking that it breaks the "illusion of the theater": the narrating voice's emergence forces spectators' attention away from the details of plot and toward the presence of the performers on stage. These effects not only make Tabarro an effective piece of music theater, they also mark it as solidly in the early-twentieth-century modernist music-theater tradition.