Silk-Road-Inspired Opera Project
Unexpected Opera Opportunity
In Eurasia’s remote eastern regions there are ex-Soviet states whose populations are quite unfamiliar with opera, and unaware of these nineteenth-century masterpieces’ fall from public favor. For them all operas are new. This was the reasoning of the accountant and management consultant Detlef Mückert from Mühlheim/Ruhr, an opera lover himself. His bosom buddy — i.e., the interlocutor of the pub conversations that made up a considerable part of his life — was Achim Laue, an agent for young opera singers, whose view was that West Germany offered no career prospects whatsoever for THOSE ENTRUSTED TO HIS CARE. Both men were realists.
“Passion’s head (the Opera); what would be its foot?” T. W. Adorno
But in Kirgizstan and Tajikistan, the friends thought, latent audience resources would enable an opera renaissance. Why shouldn’t BOMBER SQUADRONS OF SERIOSITY (what are operas, if not that?) bring about a rebirth of opera houses in the east?
This would require a transfer of funds eastward. To this end Mückert raised money from investors. This type of fundraising follows a simple pattern. Dentists, men of private means, young managers assemble in a hotel, with attractive women here and there. Achim Laue gives a presentation. He has adopted Mückert’s speaking style, one that transforms the seriosity value of the project, incommunicable in itself, into a column of premises and conclusions that hold out the prospect of profit. And this opera project’s dividends are no more improbable than making a killing on the stock market.
Still extant bridge over a side branch of the Jaxartes. “Passion’s Foot” = Endurance. In the rear guard of the royal Macedonian army, surveyors roam from the cities of Greece to the Pamir and to the Indus. In Egypt they search for the sources of the Nile. All that they learn, all the land they survey, all that they claim for the world of the Greek spirits, they have paced off with their own feet. Counted it in double steps and in parasangs. Each man who measured these distances left behind a piece of his life.
Roadside well in late antiquity.
Laue and Mückert, now Co. (Mückert’s wife having mortgaged her inheritance), had Siegfried Graue compile an imaginary opera guide. The works it contains, written in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, are foreshortened from the present perspective. No work lasts longer than 15 minutes. Six times 15 minutes = 90 minutes. There is a 30-minute intermission for bazaar palaver and bargaining, as is customary in the new countries of the east so eager to join the EU. The intermission is followed by three works, i.e., a 45-minute block, as a sort of FINAL HURRAH. To accommodate the viewers’ homeward journey, often into the country’s mountain zones, the performance must begin at 5 p.m. and end no more than 165 minutes later. Transport is by bus.
The Aging Singer Stood upon the Stage Like a Barely Movable Piece of Furniture
In all the trappings of her coloraturi. Once her voice had been considered unique. She so loved to sing. That was how she had got into opera: she had risen from being a singer in a provincial choir in Slovakia to become a global star of coloraturi: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi.
Now she herself had canceled her engagement with the Bavarian State Opera. The intervals between her roles had become longer and longer. The critics, initially measured in their reactions, were becoming distinctly negative. A doctor told her that vocal cords, which after all are only muscles, become weaker with age. She knew that herself, that the flow of air could no longer be pressed through this gate as precisely as it could in the past. She changed her doctor. The new one was more polite, but unable to offer her any comfort.
During a guest performance in an Eastern European country, where music wasn’t treated quite so invidiously and competitively, the theater’s resident doctor sprayed her throat with a medication. Immediately she felt that she had regained the same command of the muscles of her vocal cords that she had had in the past. It was here that she dared to perform sotto voce the entire coloraturi of LINDA DI CHAMOUNIX in their original length. It turned out that the newly appointed artistic director of the Oslo opera house, on the lookout for young talent in the east, happened to be in the audience. He fell in love with the great lady’s voice, just as so many others had at the beginning of her career. He wanted to take her on. Earlier in the evening she had taken courage from the effects of the spray, but now, at the end of the grueling performance, she found that her ambition did not extend to embarking on a new adventure of this kind.
Nearly Every Night They Expected an Air Raid while the Opera Was Going On
The grandmother of a certain Swiss clan was a German who had married into the family in 1947. As a twenty-one-year-old Reichsarbeitsdienstunterführerin, she had been assigned to attend Puccini’s Tosca at the Frankfurt Opera (as the building now called the Old Opera was known before it was damaged in the war). It was customary to delegate young people to attend the opera, an effort to raise the youth quotient in the cultural sphere, which had to be reported to the Gauleitung on a monthly basis. Splendid Italian singers, commandeered as booty now that Germany’s ally, the Kingdom of Italy, had betrayed the cause. These conscripted cantatores and cantatrices, including a spectacular Tosca, wouldn’t have dreamed of singing more poorly in their exile, in their slavery, than they did at home. They deployed their voices because they wanted to use what they had. The theater directors thought the performance was a waste of effort. They expected an air raid, as they did nearly every night while the opera was going on, and the conscripted audience (twenty percent wounded, forty percent young people, twelve percent party members, the rest sold on the open market: no critics, no passionate opera lovers) held little attraction for them.
Indeed, an allied bomber squadron approached the city around 9 p.m. The civil defense headquarters for the Rhine-Main region could not determine whether they were going to drop their bombs or whether it was merely a flyover. And so the performance was interrupted just after the start of the torture scene in Act 2 of Puccini’s opera. The audience and the ensemble waited in the cellars in uncertainty. Overheated cellars, with the heating ducts running through the rooms. The bombers passed over, flying eastward, and the opera continued from the point where it had been interrupted. However, the THREAT OF RANDOM DEATH FOR EVERY SINGLE PERSON was still so immediate, and the sweltering heat of the cellar had sunk so deep, that the story’s passionate goings-on, Tosca’s murder of the Roman police chief, couldn’t top what had already come. No on-stage efforts could resuscitate the musical drama once compacted reality had ruptured it. Tosca dropped out, then the singer playing Cavaradossi. They excused themselves, citing sore throats. The curtain fell right after the aria “And the stars were shining.” Even before this finale, the sense of having been spared an awful fate severely diminished the listeners’ interest in the individual destinies of two lovers circa 1800. Had things taken a different turn that evening, the people now re-ensconced on the red velvet cushions of the auditorium might have been imprisoned in the foundations of the theater, united in the catacomb, the exits to the street blocked by rubble from bomb hits, united with the outstanding singers from the Po Valley, whose vocal prowess could have done nothing to improve the mood of these lost people. Mass death relativizes emotions; indeed, every feeling must first burrow its way out from the reality of the air raids as from a heap of rubble, and only then can it scale the pinnacles of art.
That was the evening on which (due in part to the opera’s premature end) the 21-year-old met the man who would become her fiancé, an aide at the Swiss Consulate. Both had been afraid, had been sobered by the interruption of the music. And so it was quite natural for them to strike up a conversation as they left the building. Using her ration card, which she had with her in her special-occasion purse, they ordered two pieces of cake in the blacked-out Café Kranzler, open until midnight to serve the many wounded men in the city. In this way an operatic experience (consisting of two antagonistic forms of expression, the premonit
ions of bombers circling with the anticipated crashing of the bombs, and then the stretti of the Mediterranean voices) did have a concrete result, something “true and good.” It would result in the life of — so far — sixteen grandchildren living in Switzerland’s globalized landscapes.
* * *
1 In January 1871, Beethoven’s 5th Symphony premiered in Paris while the city was under siege by the Prussians. The proceeds were used to build a cannon which was used to bombard the Prussians as the siege unfolded. In this sense Beethoven was regarded as a Frenchman.
2 For a moment Godard considered a mass production. The chorus of the Palais Garnier, organized by Trotskyites, would have been willing to perform en masse, emerging from one of the opera’s basement vaults to sing the final chorus of Beethoven’s Fidelio. That struck Godard as an excessive outlay of effort. Instead, his cameraman filmed lightbulbs, a torch, a candle, and seventeen portraits of faces from the chorus, each recorded for sixty seconds after hearing an emotionally charged word such as “freedom,” “dagger,” “fidelity,” “audacity,” or “murder” (the meaning of the word usually did not register until the thirty-seventh second).
3 La Juive: Grand opera from 1835 by Jacques Fromental Halévy.
II “In the First Act I Can’t Know the Awful Denouement in the Fifth Act”
Conversation with the Kammersänger
FRAU PICHOTA: Herr Kammersänger, you’re famous for the passion you express in the first act. Critics have written that a spark of hope lights up your face. How do you pull that off? After all, you’re a rational person, and you know the awful denouement in the fifth act.
KAMMERSÄNGER: In the first act I don’t know it yet.
FRAU PICHOTA: But from the last time — you’ve just sung the production for the 84th time, haven’t you?
KAMMERSÄNGER: Yes, it’s a very successful production.
FRAU PICHOTA: Then by now you ought to realize what the awful denouement will be!
KAMMERSÄNGER: I do. But not in the first act.
FRAU PICHOTA: But you aren’t stupid!
KAMMERSÄNGER: I’d certainly object to the word.
FRAU PICHOTA: Well then, at 8:10 p.m. in the first act you know from those previous performances what will happen at 10:30 p.m. in the fifth act.
KAMMERSÄNGER: Yes.
FRAU PICHOTA: So why do you play the role “with a spark of hope lighting up your face”?
KAMMERSÄNGER: Because in the first act I can’t know the fifth act.
FRAU PICHOTA: You mean that the opera could turn out completely differently?
KAMMERSÄNGER: Of course.
FRAU PICHOTA: But it doesn’t turn out differently. For eighty-four times now, it hasn’t.
KAMMERSÄNGER: Yes, because it’s a successful production.
FRAU PICHOTA: Which is why there’ve been eighty-four performances. But it doesn’t have a happy ending.
KAMMERSÄNGER: Do you object to success?
FRAU PICHOTA: No, but the fifth act doesn’t have a happy ending.
KAMMERSÄNGER: But it could!
The Forgetful Diva
In Italy, Austria, and France, the Kammersängerin W. was regarded as a star of the first magnitude; in Germany, though, she still had to fight bureaucratic inertia. She fought for her art. Against blundering bureaucracy. She would arrive for performances in the morning to have time to get into the mood. It isn’t humanly possible to arrive and simply sing. No great things happen suddenly. The Frankfurt correspondent of the left-wing daily die tageszeitung interviewed the artist in her dressing room.
REPORTER: Frau Kammersängerin, do you sing Tosca too?
KAMMERSÄNGERIN: That’s the part I’m famous for . . .
R: What are your current favorite roles?
K: Today I’m singing Tosca. And Aida, Gilda . . .
R: All of them this evening?
K: Sadly, no. Aida is tomorrow.
R: Why do you say: Sadly, no?
K: It would be interesting to compare their different experiences. I believe that from her temporal remove Aida — an Egyptian slave — would know of ways for Tosca to escape from her dilemma and travel safely to La Spezia with her lover; conversely, the prima donna, living around 1804, could surely offer advice of her own to Aida, who lives around 4,000 B.C. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for these women to know each other.
R: Is that a feminist perspective?
K: What do you mean?
R: Together we’re strong.
K: Yes, we are.
R: But you know all three women: Aida, Tosca, Gilda . . .
K: . . . and now I’m moving on to dramatic roles, preparing for Kundry, Brunhilde, Asuzena . . .
R: Well then, couldn’t you combine the advice of all six women?
K: There are difficulties involved.
R: Why is that? You portray all these women.
K: Only one per evening.
R: You could try very hard . . .
K: Sadly, every evening I’m still only one of them.
R: Why is that?
K: Because I try hard. I focus.
R: And if you didn’t?
K: I wouldn’t be a single one of them.
R: Well, you still aren’t Aida.
K: How do you know?
R: I can see that you’re Frau Kammersängerin Wallstabe. You’re sitting in front of me.
K: You can’t know who’s sitting in front of you. If I focus, I am Aida.
R: Or the delusion of Aida?
K: But then you’re the delusion of a reporter.
R: I am a journalist.
K: And who lives inside you? A long-dead writer?
R: What do you mean?
K: If there isn’t one living inside you, then you might as well not be here.
R: I am here.
K (rising to her feet): I don’t believe it.
(Bell signal, three shrill rings, ordered by the stage manager.)
In August 1940, the Chance of Victory Had Already Been Squandered
. . . exhausted, as though
both liberated and dazed,
he seemed to have no hope.
— You yourself saw Hitler in that state?
— From perhaps two yards away. It’s summer. He’s leaving the sweltering concert hall. He sat through two acts of Götterdämmerung.
— Why “as though liberated”?
— He’d just won the war with France.
— And why without hope?
— He has powers of premonition. He has the impression England won’t respond to his peace overtures. He doesn’t understand why.
— And this feeling intensifies under the effects of Götterdämmerung, a depressive opera.
— He knows how things turn out in Act 3. Wagner didn’t need to go on and show the battle with the Huns. It was much more horrific this way, with the gods destroyed, and Valhalla burning.
— And the summer weather, the humidity oppresses the Führer still further?
— When he has his premonitions he becomes hypersensitive.
— Everyone around him is waiting for the crowning achievement, the peace treaty. Happy days for the whole German Reich. Does he himself want peace?
— No doubt about it. The aggressive state of mind that distinguishes him has been set aside for the moment. And he has no idea where and how and to what purpose the war should be continued.
— That’s a dangerous situation for a “Führer.”
— And he feels it.
The man who’d observed him from two yards away in Bayreuth in August 1940 was a member of the planning staff at the Foreign Office. He had the vivid impression that in these moments the war was lost for the German Reich. When questioned, however, he admitted that only later developments had led him to that conclusion.
In fact, he didn’t arrive at this assessment until 1952.
— Then in 1940 this insight wasn’t yet within your grasp?
— No, it wasn’t.
Hitler couldn’t understand (nor did a single member of our planning staff) why Churchill, who had to believe that all was lost, refused to back down. He didn’t back down because he expected that the U.S.A. would ultimately enter the war on the side of Great Britain, and that any sign of weakness (after all the build-up in the media) would alienate the U.S.A. from England. He wagered that if he did nothing at all, at most provoking the German Reich, the enemy would be sure to make mistakes that would force the allies to take England’s side. It was such a haphazard plan that Germany’s leadership never even suspected it.
— But you say Hitler had a premonition that time was working against him?
— I’m convinced he knew he was supposed to be provoked into making a mistake. He was cunning. He sensed he was going to be cheated of his victory.
— And that drove him to make the mistakes he made?
— That and his colorful assortment of prejudices about the trajectory of history.
— And so you’re saying ex post facto (you were a failure as a planner in 1940, but in 1952 you’re wise, though out of a job) that the German Reich lost the war in summer 1940?
Temple of the Scapegoat Page 3
