Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  The aim of the plot, as Adorno commented, was to avoid copyright infringement of Puccini’s original material. This sacrificed much of the sense and many of the emotionally comprehensible situations. Lang focused on parallel montages—of the group of temple guards, and of the collective of seducers in the Dutch naval club. The interior of the temple in which the religious turnkeys live was tinted dark brown, the teahouse and officers’ mess glaring yellow. (Fassbinder emulated this coloring method in his final films, even though the era of black-and-white films was past.) Adorno asked: could music have saved Fritz Lang’s 1919 film?

  An Archeologist of Opera

  As a paleoanthropologist and archeologist and—my side job—an opera connoisseur, I have become something of an expert in train and plane schedules. You try to get from an archeological site in Syria (during periods in which I am not needed at the excavations) to orchestra dress rehearsal 2 in Oslo, and from there to a premiere in Naples. I cannot leave the excavation site unsupervised for long: I have to get back quickly. When one is absent from the site, one quickly loses control over it. Artifacts are swiftly purloined or traded, or they fall into the hands of the local despots. My assistants don’t have my same authority.

  So, first the leg to Aleppo, then a bus to the airfield in Jordan, change planes in Rome, and the rest of the way to Oslo in the blink of an eye. Because of the nighttime flight ban, I cannot make use of the nocturnal hours. This kind of travel demands my total concentration on the route, on being punctual, on making the connections. From Naples, another side trip: piano rehearsal of Jommelli’s Berenice, the Queen of Armenia in Stuttgart. The newest production of my indefatigable excavation colleagues Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito.

  Last week on our excavation site, we found ourselves briefly in the power of the CALIPHATE. Even before these militants realized what we were digging for, the ISLAMIC THEOCRACY (a somewhat less violent fraction of the Islamists) had freed us. Because even these warriors demanded a fee, we now pay protection money to a Druze organization, who in turn pay the militarily more powerful Islamists a lease for taking us on. An archeological site in Syria is as valuable as an oil well for the international weapons trade.

  Whatever we excavate during the day, we bring to the coast the very same night, because the protection we are paying for is not reliable. But most of what we find we leave in the ground. The trade route proceeds through Cyprus, Russia, and Uzbekistan to Marseille and from there to Tokyo or the West Coast of the U.S., depending on where the end consumer is. I have sometimes lodged with armed colleagues in the port of Tartus. It is easier to intercept the good pieces there than to dig them out yourself and guard them on site.

  My name is Dr. Sc. Fred Kaul. The name comes from Eisleben. My forefathers were geologists in Freiberg in Saxony. I took piano lessons for sixteen years. As a boy, I was thought to have talent. Now there is no proficiency left, just my love of my métier, my exploratory spirit. Although I am not yet old, my hands are gouty.

  I’m often asked what I am seeking in opera houses, since I’m not very interested in the operas’ plots or in the often unwieldy music. I tell the person asking that they ought to take a look at my notes. I judge the music based on its DEGREE OF SERIOUSNESS, its “MELTING POINT.” Nowhere, with the exception of a loved one’s funeral, is mourning more impressive than in the orchestra pit of an opera house. As for what is happening on the stage, I am interested in the details. It is not the plot revealing the signs that refer to goings-on in the opera I would like to know about. The story is only the mask for it. The secret lies in the minor points of the action, in tiny fragments. When we excavate, we also rarely find the entire object from antiquity—just splinters and remnants that we fit together.

  For example, in Verdi operas there are conflicts between men (tenors, baritones, bass). They fraternize with each other, they fall out, they exchange oaths, they take part in intrigues. They rarely kill each other in their fights; instead they kill a substitute (a woman, the soprano). I record all this in my notes, in addition to counting the shifts in the music, noting down how the music intensifies, the stresses on musical syllables. When after an oath of allegiance the fatally wounded tenor confesses his love for the soprano to his pursuer (the baritone), whom he considers his best friend, I must investigate what it really means. It’s always something other than what is actually being shown. The key is in the focal calibration of the music.

  As an archeologist, I am not surprised that what’s really at issue are traces from remembered history that date back to the early period of humanity: let’s say 60,000 to 9,000 years BC—the SCARS OF EMOTION FROM LONG AGO. Like magnets. They set the IMAGINATIONS OF COMPOSERS AND POETS IN A BRIGHT BLAZE.

  As interest in opera waned throughout the twentieth century, the archaic attractors leaped over to reality, and the cities burned. My excavations are concerned with layers, and there are many more levels underneath the plot and the basic overall impression of the opera’s music. I’ll come back to this. Don’t be fooled when a sleepwalker in Bellini’s opera sings her often cheerful melodies while the grave (obvious to the audience) lies right in front of her. In all serious operas, the subtext is sacrifice, grief, bitter fragments of memory that are similar to the finds I bring up from the earth, and that speak more often of “history as slaughtering block” than of joyful celebrations.

  —How is your method different from that of a lie detector?

  —It isn’t. Except there’s no machine, just my ear as the measuring device.

  —How do you propose to determine when music is lying?

  —I’m an archeologist.

  —Could the method you use for operas be applied to lighter entertainment—operettas?

  —Operettas lie only a little. For my excavations I require concentrated seriosity.

  I “think” best, that is to say I concentrate best, when I’m traveling. As soon as I arrive at the excavation site, people start talking at me from all sides. There’s no break. At night, when I stop directing the excavation, I am tired and crawl into my tent. But when after traveling I have reached my destination and have transported my ears to the opera house (I close my eyes), my attention is focused on something other than what I myself am thinking. While I am observing an opera, I must completely cut myself off from my own thoughts. Total listening is equivalent to the precision work of a geologist. I don’t have to pay attention to the artistic labor on the stage or in the orchestra pit; I must simply let what is happening flow through me if I want to discover what it is that I as an excavator wish to secure.

  “A Scarecrow of Religious Fury”

  Heinrich Heine would happily have written the libretto for a dance-opera for Giacomo Meyerbeer. Instead, Eugene Scribe got the job. It was the Anabaptist opera The Prophet. Heine deemed Scribe’s libretto “a crying shame.”

  The story takes place around 1536. The innkeeper Johann von Leyden must endure the fact that his bride Bertha (soprano) and his mother Fides (alto) have been imprisoned by the violent and lascivious Count Oberthal. It is unclear whether the count is abusing the women or wants to use them to blackmail the bishop of Münster. The innkeeper Johann, incited by three villainous Anabaptists (bass, baritone, tenor), lets himself be proclaimed a prophet. He storms Oberthal’s fortress and conquers the city of Münster. He has himself crowned king in the cathedral (“Coronation March”). For the sake of his alleged divine provenance, he disowns his mother, Fides. His bride Bertha stabs herself.

  In the end, Johann is betrayed by everyone. Put on trial, he has the courtroom blown up by his last two adherents. He dies, along with his friends, enemies, and mother.

  Heine needed Meyerbeer’s influence to write a letter arranging for a close relative of Heine’s in Hamburg—a banker—to transfer money to the poet. And so Heine was unable to publish the hatchet job on the opera that he had already written.

  From Heine’s notes:

  “The reli
gious motive that Jean de Leyden dies for is replaced by a garden-variety motive. Mother and wife, whom he does later disown, are ‘imprisoned.’ He gets them back. There is no need for him to accept dying like a martyr.

  “By blowing himself up, Jean obliterates his sacrificial death. What if Jesus, instead of dying on the cross, had vanished from the world in a burst of theatrical thunder? Leaving behind a note saying that he would be back soon? Would that have made him the Savior?”

  Can Hearts Set Buildings on Fire?

  The notion that the fires of passion by which singers get carried away in the heat of an opera’s climax—that is to say, fiery souls—can actually set the building on fire is easily dismissed as superstition (though it would explain the piling up of opera house fires in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which prompted Karl Kraus to call opera houses “our volcanoes in the middle of the city”). This according to Witzlaff, investigator of causes and catastrophes. He argues that if you look at the film footage of the actions of the Cairo fire department during the legendary conflagration at the Cairo Opera House (the building, when new, was supposed to attract Verdi’s Aida to the Egyptian capital when the Suez Canal opened), you can see that it is the incompetence of those extinguishing forces at fighting theater fire that is responsible for the infernos, and not a “spark of song.” The Egyptian firefighters tried to tackle the fire with a single hose after it had already taken hold of the foyer curtains and was leaping out of the high windows of the front building. The water in this sole firehose petered out. The firefighters then frittered away much time connecting a hose from the Old Town, where the opera house was located, to the Nile. When they returned to battle the fire with three hoses, the building had already burned to the ground. But the investigator’s argument does not answer the questions prompted by Karl Kraus’s remark.

  The Fire at the Ringtheater

  During one of his visits to Munich, Heiner Müller showed me a treasure he had found. He had brought it from Luigi Nono’s Venice apartment, which he had rented for himself and his young bride on their honeymoon in that city. In a drawer, he said, he had discovered a fragment of written music. The notes, in Nono’s handwriting (and with his characteristic arrows, insertions, and colors), concerned an opera project. The subject matter was the fire in Vienna’s Ringtheater in the winter of 1887 (my maternal grandmother would have been fifteen years old at the time). The notes seemed sufficient for a performance of about twenty minutes. Müller was now planning a “drama with music” based on these fragments. The theme was short and compact.

  During an evening performance of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, before the barcarole, which always got the audience swaying to the music, a fire broke out and spread quickly throughout the labyrinthine building, whose emergency exits had been closed off by renovations so that it was essentially barricaded. The doors to the concert hall could only be opened from the outside, by the ushers—some of whom, however, were taking a break during the performance. The audience fought against these doors in the dark. On the terrified faces: a few glimmers of the amusement of the previous hour. 383 people burned to death.

  Based on Nono’s remarks and his own imagination, Müller had sketched out a series of seven scenes:

  1.Scene: “The fire’s source.”

  Orchestral interlude.

  2.Scene: The doors’ fastenings. Nono’s precise information and dashed drawings, which show the locks’ technical aspects. Ushers and experienced locksmiths explain their mechanism.

  Orchestral interlude.

  3.Scene: Excerpts from operas and operettas performed in the burned-down opera house. Time-lapse film with music.

  Orchestral interlude.

  4.Scene: Fugato on the text: “How could the performance have begun before a single prudent police officer had checked to make sure nothing could go wrong?”

  Entracte buffone: Orchestra with narrator’s voice.

  5.Scene: “Hearts burn.” For this image there were no further scenic indications, although Nono had set down a number of notes for singing voices in the draft score.

  Orchestral interlude.

  6.Scene: “No one wants to die in a pleasure palace.”

  7.Scene: “In the style of a recitativo secco: recital of the list of the dead at the Ringtheater fire. Narrator’s voice.”

  Müller had written out the sequence of scenes on seven beer coasters. Obviously, he said, Nono’s sketch was a fragment that required further elaboration. This was the work he hoped to devote himself to next. Like so many others, this project was interrupted by his illness.

  When the Audience Heard the Familiar Melody, They Returned in an Orderly Fashion to Their Seats

  One year after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, when gas candelabra lamps were still in use, during a performance of Halévy’s opera La Juive a lagging feather on the hat of a girl in the chorus caught fire on a gas flame backstage. Other members of the chorus put out the fire at once, thoroughly stamping out the flames. Nevertheless, a trace of the smell produced by this incident penetrated the concert hall. A woman shrieked: Fire! The quick-thinking conductor had a fanfare played three times in a row. Shouts: It’s nothing! Quiet! Just as the audience was finally settling back down, firefighters rushed into the hall. They wanted to help, but they only stoked the disturbance. At that moment, the conductor gave the cue for the interrupted piece to continue. When the audience heard the familiar melody, they returned in an orderly fashion to their seats.

  Death of a Thousand Souls

  Until his final days, Modest Mussorgsky managed to write music and to move his heavy hands over the piano keys. He was drunk at all times of the day. The confidants who looked after him lost all respect for the genius. It was in this state that the master composed the last act of his opera Khovanshchina. There were still gaping holes in the notations to the preceding acts: only the piano arrangement had been sketched out. Then Mussorgsky sank into death, drowned in ineffable despair.

  The draft of the fifth act depicts the self-immolation of an old orthodox sect in Russia during the chaotic time of Peter the Great’s accession to power. At stake for the religious group, who were considered fanatics, were rites that they on no account wished to see altered. A religious leader initiated the collective self-sacrifice. His medium was a trusted advisor who had the confidence of all, and who was in a position to call upon them to commit the act. She had once been a sorceress, and was also the discarded mistress of the leader of a troop of rebelling guardsmen (“Khovansky”) whom she still loved, and to whom she had offered refuge in the sect’s hideout in the woods. Trees were felled, logs stockpiled. You need lots of dry brushwood and other spontaneously flammable material for an auto-da-fé. A Russian forest with its fresh sap is not very well-suited to self-immolation.

  The czar banned the Old Believers’ rites. The sect remained obstinate. If Russia is ever to gain parity with the West, reasoned the czar and his advisors, an example must be set. Beliefs and rituals must be centrally unified and simplified for the comprehension of third parties. The idea of a UNIFIED TOP, which leads to progress, must be chiseled into the people’s heart. This “heart” (made of many thousand souls and with no specific location in their bodies, and perhaps simply existing AMONG ALL PEOPLE) cannot, however, be hewn by force. The tool for it has not yet been invented (stone isn’t suitable, nor are hammers, pestles, or smelteries).

  The czar’s troops surrounded the forest. Scouts for the besieged sect announced the approach of the czar’s cavalry, at which moment the leader’s confidante (the medium) gave the sign. Sticks covered in flammable material were pulled from the campfires and used to set the forest on fire. The Old Believers suffocated before they could succumb to the flames. When the czar’s soldiers searched the forest, they were all already dead. The soldiers, trained only for parades and military drills, were baffled.

  Stravinsky translated this part of the opera fro
m Mussorgsky’s piano score with drastic chords for choir and orchestra. Although nothing even remotely similar had ever occurred in the German city where the premiere was held (not even in earlier historical periods), the audience in Stuttgart was shaken. Writes critic Wolfgang Schreiber: “There must be something in collective memory, that does not have distant Russia as its sole provenance, that lends such power to the music.” No one who was at the premiere could eat anything for more than three hours afterward, even though it grew very late.

  Phoenix from the Ashes

  After the devastating airstrike on Berlin in 1945, the Deutsche Staatsoper was utterly destroyed—except for a single clothes hanger. One of the wardrobe assistants had grabbed the thing as she fled. For decades, the hanger had held expensive evening coats. Among the debris of the smoldering ruins, the firefighters rolled up their hoses. The singers were scattered to the four winds. The day was already dawning.

  The enemy’s reconnaissance planes, which usually photographed the damage, were expected at midday. Not a single fighter jet was available to drive them off. The German planes (all night fighters) had followed the departing stream of bombers to Holland, and sat scattered across airfields there. They were expected back that evening. The photographs the British Mosquitoes took showed the site of the opera house as just a tiny detail amid the broad swath of destruction. Striking were the city’s green spaces, seemingly immune to bombs. The damage assessor Erwin Schäfer, an engineer in the finance ministry’s structural engineering department, had been assigned to the fire department’s detail. He rejected the assessment of “total loss” for the destroyed opera house, and reasoned as follows: fire walls and a two-story cellar had survived the fire and could be reused. The cellar contained an archive of orchestra scores. In addition, in the period after Giacomo Meyerbeer had taken over directorial duties, the opera had acquired an outstanding reputation. This immaterial value, impervious to destruction by the enemy, must be reckoned along with the material exterior. Also, he said, the ruins—premieres could be held in them on summer nights—were now an especially safe spot, since the strategic Brits never dropped bombs on the same target twice. Finally, he concluded, think of opera praxis itself: all of the things and people that have been destroyed over the course of an opera always reappear at the end of the performance unscathed—they even accept the audience’s applause. What’s good for the opera, said engineer Schäfer, should be good for its abode. Among his colleagues, Schäfer was considered something of a dreamer.4