Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  Temple of the Scapegoat

  Also by Alexander Kluge

  FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  •

  Cinema Stories

  The Devil’s Blind Spot

  Contents

  Preface by the author

  I The Opera Principle Total Commitment

  The Phenomenon of the Opera

  Is Opera Poison or Nourishment?

  In His Existential Crisis

  Conversation Between Siblings

  Opera Scene that Makes Me Cry

  Rules for Crying

  Godard’s Fragment

  Correct Slowing-Down on the Transitional Point …

  Weren’t They Glad to Be Liberated?

  The Scapegoat Principle

  Rachel in La Juive

  A Relationship between Two Women

  The Opera with Two Roles for High Tenors

  The Heroine of the Third Volume …

  Silk-Road-Inspired Opera Project

  The Aging Singer Stood upon the Stage

  Nearly Every Night They Expected an Air Raid

  II “In the First Act I Can’t Know the Awful Denouement in the Fifth Act” Conversation with the Kammersänger

  The Forgetful Diva

  In August 1940, the Chance of Victory Had Already Been Squandered

  Hitler’s Favorite Operetta: The Merry Widow

  “When I see you, I must weep”

  Appearance and Reality in the Operetta

  The Bandits (Jacques Offenbach)

  My Passion Burns Hotter than Goulash

  Nothing but Music between Body and Mind

  The Impotence of an Ordinary Understanding

  An Emotional Weapon of Terror

  Dark Tidings from Days of Splendor

  “How Much Blood and Horror Lies …”

  Verdi. Rigoletto or La Maledizione. Genealogy

  Rigoletto, the Gnome

  Xaver Holtzmann’s Project:“Imaginary Opera Guide”

  Disarmament of Tragic Action

  The Theatrical Demolition Expert

  A Society Does Itself Honor

  Walter Benjamin Comes to Halberstadt

  III Fatal Vocal Force vs. Generosity in the Opera A Resolute Voice Can Kill

  Remarks by Adolf Hitler

  Intermezzo for Big Singing Machines

  Lohengrin in Leningrad

  Götterdämmerung in Vienna

  In the Last Year of His Life

  Napoleon and Love

  Love, Recognizable

  The Great Welaschka

  Moment of Decision

  The Death of Wieland Wagner

  NORMA, an Agglomeration of Magnanimity

  A German Philosopher in Persia

  “Take the violinist on the sinking liner …”

  IV Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing Snow on a Copper Roof

  Commitment to a Colleague with a Sore Throat

  The Iron Ring that Conquered the Cliff

  Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing

  Sunday August 4, 2013, Elmau

  Night of Decisions

  Lament of the Goods Left on the Shelf

  Alcina’s Implacable Sadness

  Lament for the Death of the Improbable

  The Resurrection of Musical Theater

  V “When We Were Still Reptiles, We Did Not Have Feelings” Small-Statured Woman in High-Heeled Shoes

  Is Revolution Founded on Work or Ideas?

  The Complete Version of a Baroque Idea

  A Second Titanic

  Cavalleria Rusticana, an Opera about Strangers’ Lives

  VI Blast Furnaces of the Soul One Morning, Seven Days after my Fifth Birthday

  Following the Voice Where It Wishes to Go

  “It was one romantic relationship, no superfluous words”

  “Temples of Seriousness”

  Santuzza and Turiddu

  Nights in Empty Opera Houses

  Madame Butterfly’s Happier Cousin

  Misunderstanding between Two Worlds

  The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Renunciation

  Why Cinema Was Unable …

  An Archeologist of Opera

  “A Scarecrow of Religious Fury”

  Can Hearts Set Buildings on Fire?

  The Fire at the Ringtheater

  When the Audience Heard the Familiar Melody

  Death of a Thousand Souls

  Phoenix from the Ashes

  War in the Huts

  The Contrat Social of Families

  “Blast Furnaces of the Soul”

  Medea’s Decision

  The Troublesome Sister

  The Aggressive Gaze of Blood

  Love as a Hard Laborer

  Flu at the Opera

  The Original Form of Opera

  A New Type of Opera in Vienna

  Plato’s Ban on Music

  Lost Sketch by John Cage

  “Infiltration of a Love”

  “Oh My Heart, this Thunder-Sheet”

  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Drama of the Soul and the Body.

  Opera by Emilio de’ Cavalieri from 1600.

  Preface

  The oldest opera, performed not in an opera house but in a church, was written in the year 1600. In the following 417 years, around 80,000 operas have been composed. When once asked the reason for my lifelong fascination with these enigmatic musical dramas, I had no ready reply. My English grandmother would have had a word for the plot of most of these dramas — “impractical.” Why does the public, in its classic sense (the bourgeoisie; earlier, the aristocracy), erect templelike buildings for operas on the central squares of its cities, splendid as parliaments, on an equal footing with the stock exchange or the law courts?

  What moves me in the music is something I cannot express in words. But I can say with certainty that the part of me that responds to the operas’ music is not the part preoccupied with the drama performed. Different parts of my soul allow operas, in all their dreamy, unrealistic absurdity, to whip up the surface of my inner seas until a boat might easily capsize. I can’t help crying. I know that what creates within me the antirealistic spark suspending all the laws of reality is always two irreconcilable phenomena — the story and the music, neither one more important than the other.

  If I can’t explain why the SPHINX OF THE OPERA enthralls me, still less can I explain the utility of watching or listening to operas. What is the use of operas in wartime? Ernest Hemingway gives an example. After 1918, hubris drove the Greeks (with plenty of artillery, horses, and trumpets) to advance almost to the Turkish capital of Ankara. They were beaten back. Now Turkish commanders controlled the city of Smyrna, where the Greeks had lived for more than a thousand years. In the evening they’d go to the city’s opera house. According to Hemingway, it reminded them of their stays in Paris and their fluency in French. Captivated by the Bellini opera, they neglected to give the command to burn down the entire city. One southwestern district was spared. This was where the brewery belonging to my grandmother’s brother stood. He
personally regarded opera as superfluous. But Herbert Hausdorf’s property and life were saved by opera’s power to distract even barbarians.

  ALEXANDER KLUGE

  Temple of the Scapegoat

  I The Opera Principle

  Total Commitment

  He was a singer who gave more than his all. Dramatic renunciation. He would forget to spare his own voice, with the result that during many performances he would become vocally bankrupt, only capable of still displaying technique. His voice was “rough and gravelly, but possessed a solid and highly metallic core.” It would, wrote the critic of the New York Times, be difficult to surpass his cri de coeur of “Ah, la maledizione” in Rigoletto. By contrast, the critic of the Washington Post, while acknowledging that the baritone’s singing possessed a certain aplomb, declared it to be “without any stylistic delicacy.” That wounded him deeply.

  Leonard Warren, born Leonard Warenoff in New York in 1911, took over the role of the Doge in Simon Boccanegra from the legendary Lawrence Tibbett. The part put him among his generation’s leading baritones. He was UTTERLY UNSPARING of himself in defending the position he’d so strenuously sought, while maintaining a reputation for being “sensitive” and “refined.” However, it was precisely this, the QUALITY OF FEELING in his singing, that was disputed. The critic at the Washington Post was willing to grant him only a certain NATURAL POWER.

  March 4, 1960, was the opening night of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Leonard Warren sang the part of Don Carlos, brother to the unfortunate Leonora (Renata Trebaldi). Following the friendship duet between Alvaro and Don Carlos there was a pause. Warren seemed to be having difficulties beginning Don Carlos’s aria. The great man gave a sigh. He was about to come to the “O gioia” before the stretta. Suddenly he froze. Leonora’s locket slipped from his hand, and he fell, according to the Washington Post, “first with his chest, then with his head” to the ground. The fall was only too real. The audience took fright. At his side, the singer playing Alvaro cried out: “Lennie, Lennie!” Stage hands ran in from the wings and saw blood dripping from his broken nose. Taking turns, the stage manager Osie Hawkins and the tenor Richard Tucker delivered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the lifeless man. Dr. Adrian Zorgniotti, the Met’s house doctor, could do nothing more than confirm the baritone’s death. A half hour passed in confusion. No one had dropped the curtain. At this point, Rudolf Bing, the director of the Met, came on stage and addressed the audience: “This is one of the saddest moments in the history of the Metropolitan. May I ask you all to rise. In tribute to one of our greatest performers. I am sure you will agree with me that it would not be possible to continue with the performance.” Only then was the colossus carried from the stage. The critic at the Washington Post wrote that this evening at the theater, which ended around the same time that the opera would have ended, had moved him more deeply than any opera could. In this way, Warren’s total commitment — his readiness to sacrifice his own life — had had a final, decisive effect on the person who had criticized him so unjustly.

  The Phenomenon of the Opera

  The daughter of a Chinese censor in Tibet — she was born in an oasis in Sinkiang Province — is writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. Even after total scholarly immersion in the material, The Phenomenon of the Opera still seems “utterly alien” to her. One has to approach this cultural model like Voltaire’s visitor from Sirius in order to perceive its strangeness. She doesn’t see that as a problem, since she is tackling the topic with “disinterested pleasure.” She found her path to opera because, on the strength of internet information received in distant Sinkiang, that seemed the most promising way to get to a Western university.

  Via the internet (and libraries linked to it) Huang Tse-we has investigated 86,000 operas. A number of simple distinguishing features emerge, she says, when such a mass of music theater works is examined. As for the content of Huang Tse-we’s thesis, it contains nothing of relevance to an analysis of imperialism, capitalism or any other manifestation of Western domination; nor is it of any significance as far as the experience of government in China is concerned. Instead, it’s about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we. Something originally entrusted to us is lost. And we mourn it.

  She is a nomad, says Huang Tse-we. In Sinkiang the whole desert culture is nomadic. When it comes to the contrast between passion and comprehension, however, nomads do not have the same problems as sedentary Europeans, whose theatrical conventions inform opera. The fact that emotionally I do not understand this kind of theatricality at all and also do not find the music “homey” or “familiar,” still less think of it as mine, qualifies me to make an analysis, says Huang Tse-we.

  There are baritone operas, writes Huang Tse-we, tenor operas, soprano operas, contralto operas and bass operas. The distinction between comic and tragic on the other hand, does not yield any genres. Baritone operas form the majority.

  A baritone fights for his daughter and thereby causes her death (Rigoletto, Emilia Galotti). A baritone fights for the tenor and thereby kills the soprano (La Traviata). For reasons lying in the past and without any provocation in the apparent plot a baritone of particular obstinacy fights everyone and causes multiple fatalities (Trovatore, Ernani).

  A bass definitely kills his enemies. (This happens through Wotan or the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlo.) I am not aware of any exception, writes Huang Tse-we. As if the desire to kill increased with the depth of the human voice. Sopranos, on the other hand, appear threatened, even when they don’t sing (Masaniello). Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano) the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).

  Fatal outcomes appear to be related to the registers of the male voice. To me as a nomad, writes Huang Tse-we (also sensitive to the feelings of the oppressed Tibetans), such a stationary dramaturgy seems questionable. Furthermore, it is a mistake to make the human voice or the extremely arbitrary Western European orchestral voice traditions the yardstick for Chinese opera. That, rather, is a matter of a music of form, of sandy deserts, of the wind, of the central heavenly body (the sun).

  The dissertation was judged unsatisfactory. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which, on the strength of an internet draw, had co-funded the Nomad’s Polemic, regretted the failure.

  Is Opera Poison or Nourishment?

  My parents’ honeymoon in 1928 took them to bustling Paris, with their hotel chosen for its proximity to the Palais Garnier, where they attended Samson and Delilah. This opera features one of the most haunting of all French love duets.

  But how the strange plot confuses the mind! Delilah is a traitor. She has been sent to seduce Israel’s hero, to weaken and destroy him. But in their love duet, facing the force of the melodic arcs, she wavers, uncertain for a moment whether it is hate or love she feels. Love’s ardor is the main thing, coupled with love’s betrayal inciting Samson to a PUNITIVE RAGE, as he ends the opera by using his vast strength to tear down the pillars of the temple and bury the Philistines in the rubble.

  What does my mother — a cosmopolitan, a pragmatist — feel when faced with these goings-on? What moves my father, descended from Protestants? The music appeals to them both, but the story is hard to fit into the household of their marriage. Why such concentrated solemnity, when the emotional confusion the protagonists are going through could, in day-to-day living or through firmness of faith, be resolved without complications? Is opera poison or nourishment? The answer depends on the sensibility: my mother’s or my father’s.

  In His Existential Crisis

  In that dark time when my parents divorced: I see my father in the twilight, sitting in the so-called Hanseatic chair, plagued by doubts. He couldn’t find the right tone to w
rite to my mother or to win her back over the telephone. He could have said: We’ve raised two children. Against my will you chopped down trees in our garden. Whatever else you’ve done, it doesn’t matter, as long as we don’t separate. I don’t want to lose you. If a person he trusted had advised him to write something along these lines, perhaps noting down the phrases for him — he might have collected himself, taken action.

  As he brooded, he listened to Pagliacci. The record played on the console radio with integrated phonograph, a recent acquisition of my mother’s. The opera further provoked the depressive part of my father’s soul. No comfort for miles around. I loitered close by. I hemmed and hawed, thought I knew a thing or two. I asked when Mother would be back from her long trip. Shouldn’t we bake a cake for her return? Then, more urgently: Couldn’t he set his anger aside? In every way this was the wrong tone and my suggestions were inappropriate. He understood what I was trying to say. It did not leave him unmoved. But he saw no way out, hopelessness enmeshed him too deeply. When the third LP of the opera was over, he put the first one on again. What use then were my shambling advances?

  To this day I fail to understand why at least my mother — who was unswayed by operas and music, and fundamentally agnostic about finalities and blows of fate — had no words at the ready to say (or write): Ernst, let us forget what happened. We’ll start all over with a clean slate. With opera there’s no way out; without opera there’s no way out either. I suspect my parents were confused in their minds that year, and the year before as well. Wartime. The DRUG OF MILITARY CONQUEST, a pharmakon that infiltrated people’s innermost beings, about two years after its poison of the zeitgeist-suffused reality. THE GROWNUPS OF 1942! Furnished with phantasmagorias. The horizons were staked out by a more fast-paced, robust, worldly life: romantic, familiar from hearsay and popular songs, undefined and thus superior to all existing things. And so in those crucial weeks my mother’s mind wasn’t focused on saving her marriage. She didn’t even have her mind on her children.