Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  “Temples of Seriousness”

  In the nineteenth century a capital city, whether of a province or an entire country, requires a palace of justice, a stock exchange and an OPERA HOUSE. Architecturally they tend to be rather similar. The entrances often “surrounded by columns.” Karl Kraus and Th. W. Adorno cite the opera houses in Lemberg and Budapest (the latter clad within entirely in wood like a violin) as examples of such “temples of seriousness.”

  There is, after all, hardly anywhere in such cities where COMMUNAL AND PUBLIC MOURNING is possible. Adorno couldn’t imagine a performance of an opera in the open air or in a public place where all kinds of other movements might take place. Something inside me, he said, needs the painted dome above the auditorium as a dividing wall to separate it from the sky and anything it might throw at us.

  Santuzza and Turiddu

  A Sicilian farming village, Easter 1880, before mass. A young woman, Santuzza, goes to see Lucia, the owner of a wine shop and mother of her lover, Turiddu, to ask if she knows where Turiddu is. Turiddu has left Santuzza because he is in love with Lola, the carter Alfio’s wife. At this very moment, Alfio is returning to the village after a long trip. He is proud of his profession, and also prides himself on his wife’s fidelity. The villagers head to church. Santuzza is waiting anxiously in the wine shop when Turiddu appears. Lola sashays by; Turiddu makes toward her. Before his military service, he had courted Lola, but ultimately lost her to the carter. Santuzza blocks his path, pleading with him to come back to her. He pushes her away. Santuzza’s soul sharpens like a knife. As Alfio walks by, Santuzza reveals to him that Lola is cheating on him with Turiddu. Horrified by what she has done, Santuzza runs off. At this point, the legendary INTERMEZZO plays before an empty stage.

  After mass, the churchgoers stop in at Turiddu’s mother’s wine shop. Turiddu, protected by his powerful mother, plays the host. As he holds out a glass of wine to the carter, the latter bats it out of his hand. “I’ll be waiting for you outside, behind the garden,” Alfio says coldly. Turiddu, who now regrets his imprudence, asks his mother to protect Santuzza. Then he draws his sword and rushes out. Ominous silence. A sudden cry: “Turiddu hath been slain. Turiddu is dead!”

  The opera is called Cavalleria Rusticana (farmer’s honor). For a few weeks in 1943, my father suspended his morning consultation hours. Irma Hofer, soprano at Halberstadt’s municipal theater, accompanied him on the piano. She sang the role of Santuzza, while he played the basic melodies on his violin. In the vestibule, I sat very still and listened. This vestibule served as the passageway from the kitchen and was also the abode of the box on the wall with attached receiver, which constituted the telephone. This part of the house was a kind of junction. It was infused with the aura of my mother, who was constantly on the telephone, noting down what needed to be fetched from the city on scraps of paper kept here. An organizational headquarters, now flooded with music. My children still laugh when I call the telephone, a device that enables one to listen and speak across distances, a “Fernsprecher,”3 or when I speak of the “exchange,” as if telephone calls were still facilitated through people. But I’m still thinking of the box with the removable receiver described here, and for me the word “Ferngespräch” (talk across distances) is tied to the sound of the Cavalleria Rusticana intermezzo that the two were performing in the study. In a movie I saw as a ten-year-old, a pair of lovers keeps in touch on the day war breaks out in 1914 through just such a box on the wall. They talk about how they are now citizens of enemy countries, and how they will probably never see each other again. In the alchemist’s laboratory of my soul, it is impossible for me to distinguish the degrees of importance of these phone calls I witnessed as a child, scanned with a key scene from a film that dissected romantic drama for me, and with passion (cool piano, heated violin, vivid voices).

  Nights in Empty Opera Houses

  In her films, my daughter Sophie does everything differently than I do in my films. But in one respect we’re alike—she refuses to employ any dramatic plot, although she knows perfectly well that it would help with pitching projects and, ultimately, with success. She has no interest in the escalation of conflict that induces so-called suspense. Instead, she holds conflict itself in suspense. She enjoys watching. People seek each other’s proximity, but then they separate. Nothing happens, and we watch.

  On the other hand, my daughter says, something does happen, something one wouldn’t normally understand as a “plot.” For her, this is the camera work. Avoiding the EMOTIONAL TANGLE is the reason why for 90-minute films I’ve always preferred the circus’s principle of “numbers” over any drama tied to plot. But then why am I so magically attracted to the opera, which almost universally practices the crochet-principle of plot escalation? This type of dramaturgy annoys me. I believe this is why I intuitively dissect every opera I hear (or, better: that I film) into its component parts. Beneath the threshold of the actions on stage, the fragments do follow the principle of “numbers,” however much Richard Wagner might have striven to overcome it. The elements operate among themselves, they respond to each other (under the skin of the events).

  I believe that at night these particles haunt empty opera houses, fighting and being affectionate by turns. A Leonore (from Fidelio) with a knack for rescue wanders into Verdi’s A Masked Ball, reveals her knowledge of the plot to the protagonists, and clears up the fatal misunderstandings—just as she once rescued her husband Florestan from the dungeon.

  “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in the nighttime backdrop for “The doomed who were rescued”: Werner Schroeter (when he visits me during such nocturnal hours in the opera house) objects to my heartfelt belief that the moment of greatest passion (which accepts death as a possible consequence) is not to be idolized in favor of day-to-day life in a conventional marriage or profession. I respond to his objection: You’re wrong. People cohabiting over a long period of time—their living bodies, their spending time with their children, their fantasies, their work, their “little successes”—do not have to be humdrum.

  In Bremen, a shipyard closes. The qualified man to whom Gerda Behnke once, with calm resolve, committed herself (for life, that was the plan)—they have two children—is forced to look for a new position in Baden-Württemberg. Husband and wife see each other rarely. In a moment of rashness, Gerda decides to go visit her husband in his provisional digs down south. The day before, her husband had met an attractive office worker in a suburban café who’d dropped hints that she might be approachable; for his part, he is not incorruptible. But thanks to Gerda’s happy fancy, this thread of fate is quickly severed. Not long afterward, Gerda discovers she is pregnant for the third time. Trube, work-time analyst, specializing in averages that nevertheless encompass extreme fluctuations from the norm, has calculated the potential for happiness in Gerda’s life. When compared with the happiness quotient in opera dramas, Gerda’s amount of happiness proves to be the greater. The precision of Trube’s reckoning is challenged by his colleague Giglatz. Both are of the opinion that true poets should also be statisticians. And both are sorry that no opera score—at least, as far as their summary examination has been able to determine—accords with the POETIC PRINCIPLE as they understand it.

  In one of the opera characters’ nightly encounters, which are beyond the control of the artistic director, the passionate Amneris, a contralto rebuffed in love, sets off for the hinterlands to incite married couples in Middle Germany to conduct more daring love lives: the idea is to export operatic energies to private households. In Verdi’s Aida, this Amneris loves the young officer commanding the Egyptian army on a campaign against the “Ethiopian barbarians.” But he loves only Aida, slave and prisoner of war, hardly Amneris’s equal in rank. Amneris cannot comprehend this affront to her legitimate feelings—that is, receiving the opposite of respect and reciprocated love. At the end of the opera she wonders why three people can’t at least live together, thereby attaining a more judicious distributio
n of the fulfillment of longings. In the consulting practice she sets up nights in the opera house’s spirit realm, she advises all life-practitioners in the city to make NOVEL CONSTELLATIONS IN THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS. Amneris calls for a court that would decide on such emotional questions. Verdi gave Amneris the more subtle music, a vocal armament against which the tenor and the victorious soprano are defenseless. At least Verdi’s music is just, even if the plot celebrates injustice.

  Madame Butterfly’s Happier Cousin

  In her second semester at an art academy in southern Germany, the daughter of a brewery owner (with properties in Bavaria, but also in the Czech Republic) met and fell in love with a Japanese man. This man was part of the academy’s technical crew and had immigrated to Germany as an electrician (he came from a poor, landless family near Osaka). After some time, the unequal pair is in possession of two hoped-for children, a boy and his younger sister. Today, they are all having breakfast in a café.

  In sharp contrast to her blue skirt, the young blonde woman is wearing a blood-red scarf around her neck, wound about three hand-widths high, a lavish decoration. Somewhat stiffly, her man in corduroys presides over the table. The children are wild—outside, they’ve misappropriated the signs listing the restaurant’s offerings and have built a hut out of them.

  The man from Japan goes to the men’s room for a time. When he returns, the family prepares to leave. The man’s movements are “practical,” somewhat inelegant, almost technical. As they leave the café, he first places his daughter on his shoulders with his strong hands and then bends her around his midriff. She moves her young body accordingly, as though it were a circus act. The four of them are not aristocrats, the parents are not citizens of the same country, their social backgrounds are different, they don’t belong to any of the known target groups, they have varying ways of dressing and moving their bodies, different skin colors and different allergies. In the children, this all got mixed together. They appear to be conflict-free.

  Recently, at the Easter Salzburg Festival, the four went to see MADAME BUTTERFLY in a conventional staging, sung in Italian. The U.S. naval officer who plays such a fateful role in the opera’s storyline was sung by a Japanese tenor. The Japanese woman seduced and then left in the lurch by this officer—traditionally called “Butterfly”—was sung by a woman from Birmingham who looked like a nineteenth-century English heiress.

  The happy day-trippers, who had good seats in the festival hall (the young woman’s bank account was regularly replenished by her brewery-owning father)—the children already tired in the evening, but patient and well-behaved in their seats—made fun of what was performed for them. They had no feeling for tragedy.

  Misunderstanding between Two Worlds

  As an experienced tenor, I would like to take a stand against the usual vilification of Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, whom I portray. One can certainly claim that Puccini so arranged this part musically that at the end of the piece, the audience doesn’t forgive Pinkerton for the soprano’s death. But that is not the situation in the first act, upon which my role is primarily built, vocally speaking. One cannot deny my performance a certain warmth, especially during the love duet. At all events, I put warmth into my voice. To position Pinkerton as a caricature of a lecherous U.S. imperialist who exploits an Asian woman seems to me an oversimplification.

  I see the U.S. naval officer that I sing as the commander of a battleship. He gets involved with a lady from a Japanese noble family that has come down in the world. She has been professionally procured, as it were, like a hetaera in the ancient Greek sense. He spends a few weeks of vacation time with her. He understands the so-called marriage of convenience to be a local custom. He does not suffer from a guilty conscience when he returns to duty and to the United States.

  He only learns between the second and third acts that he has impregnated the young Japanese woman. Meanwhile, in the U.S., he has married into a family that will aid his advancement. His wife Kate, a cool Protestant, remains childless. After Kate learns of the child, she conceives of the idea of adopting it—not least to secure her marriage of convenience—and to that end travels with her husband to Nagasaki. This, at least, can’t be held against the tenor. Due to my emotional involvement with the part of Pinkerton (I have by now sung this role, note for note, 386 times), I am certain that the knot of fate—the tragic self-directed aggression of the Japanese woman—is based on a vast misunderstanding between two cultures, a CLASH. At no point has this woman accepted the status of commercial service provider to which she saw herself forced after the death of her father and attendant loss of fortune. She barely understands what has happened to her. She possesses no “capitalist soul.” The tenor was raised very differently. I see him as a vivid, lively, mercurial primate, who believes himself to be a lucky prince, the exponent of a highly modern fleet. What drives him, and what flows melodiously through my throat, is the spirit of accepting an advantage, to which all my senses—as well as a sort of accounts register in my honor code—subordinate themselves (“You must not neglect your advancement, you must not take a back seat to any rival”). This kind of drive can distract you. I also want to note that the paper marriage in the first act and the promises he sings occur in a drunken state, intensified by the intoxication of the prospect of love. Here, two people have found each other—their minds misunderstand each other, but their senses have conjoined. Before any international court of arbitration, with Japanese and Americans equally represented, Pinkerton would be absolved of guilt. He is not disloyal, either—though he might seem to be careless in his manner—for he always remains true to himself.

  To die with honor,

  when one can no longer live with honor.

  This note, which the young Japanese woman leaves behind as a message for Pinkerton, must appear strange to me, the tenor. At this point in the drama, I show this by hesitating. I consider it to be an atavistic law that stands in opposition to my sensuous vocal delight.

  The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Renunciation

  In the fall of 1941, time grew tight for me. In sixth grade at the cathedral school where I had been a pupil since Easter, I was having a hard time keeping up. The tutoring my mother had initiated immediately after the catastrophes of my first few weeks would only show results in the long term. In the midst of this fast-paced life, an Italian film dubbed into German and entitled The Dream of Butterfly played for fourteen days in the Kino Capital, and was responsible for one of my most powerful early impressions in cinema. Eight days in a row, I attended each two o’clock screening (in the side loge, practically unable to see the screen, and only with the permission of the cashier Miss Schrader—children under 14 years of age were not supposed to be allowed in). The film is set in the period just after the original premiere of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

  The plot: before the opera singer Rosi Belloni (Maria Cebotari) can tell her fiancé, the music student Harry Peters (Fosco Giachetti), that she is expecting his child, he tells her that he has been offered a job in America. Thinking of his future, which she believes in, Rosi advises him to accept the offer. Years go by, and Rosi hears nothing from Harry Peters. She raises her child and matures into a great artist. At her request, the premiere of Puccini’s new opera Madame Butterfly is held at Milan’s Scala. Among the guests: the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. Rosi recognizes Harry Peters. She learns that he is married. In addition, she notices that his trip to Milan is about the opera, not about her. Only now does Rosi recognize the peculiar similarities of her private fate with the opera’s plot. She pours a harrowing intensity into the performance [close-up of the lovers in the opera’s first act]. No word of reproach crosses Rosi’s lips. FROM NOW ON, SHE BELONGS SOLELY TO HER ART AND TO HER CHILD.

  Why Cinema Was Unable, Due to its Conditions of Production, to Become the OPERA OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Theodor W. Adorno once had occasion to call Fritz Lang—not without a c
ertain affection in his tone—his “kitsch brother.” The epithet was not meant disparagingly, Adorno responded when I asked him about it. Otherwise, he added, he wouldn’t have used the word brother. With this remark, he was referring to a certain audacity, brutality, or insouciance with which Fritz Lang—it was simply part of the film business—pruned material and opera-ready plots for use by the public and his direction. Lang had been applying this methodology—especially to films, which he considered by-products—since his early period. It would be wrong to think that he started doing so during his time in Hollywood. Adorno’s comment referred specifically to a silent film entitled Harakiri that Lang had directed in 1919 as the “second film of the Decla world class” in Berlin. The movie made use of material from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Lang chose a version that ignored the sense of the opera.

  The Japanese father of a young, exotic woman (called O-Take-San in the film), a merchant out of a Lessing play, returns from Europe and showers his beloved daughter with gifts, including costume jewelry and a teddy bear from London. The village priest, guardian of the Yoshiwara shrine in Nagasaki, views the foreign presents as a contamination of the village and a religious infraction. These accusations induce the father to commit hara-kiri. The daughter, however, is to serve the monk as “under-priestess.” In “Buddha’s Holy Garden” she meets a Dutch naval officer, and they enter into a “999-year pact.” A kind of charade. But the Dutch man is only using O-Take-San. After he returns to Holland, he does not keep in touch. Many years later, the sailor comes back to Japan. Accompanied by a European wife. Thereupon the exotic beauty throws herself upon her father’s sword.