On no. 3: Is Lohengrin about a predatory horde? No, not at all. What, therefore, is the position of “collective Soviet self-confidence”? — It is precisely on this day that we shall perform Lohengrin, and in German. You ask whether it can be broadcast: it will confuse the enemy if German voices resound from the wireless sets of the Soviet Union.
To Antonov Leningrad’s boss seemed “drunk with haste.” Neglected Five-Year Plans were to be made up within days. Antonov had nothing but these words left floating in the stairwell, without a memo, without witnesses. After this ORIENTATION his doubts were, if anything, greater.
In the early evening the network of the Leningrad hierarchies gathered together in the opera foyer. Field telephone lines had been laid for the Party leaders and, indeed, as the audience took their seats they saw the Party cadres telephoning, discussing things inside and around the auditorium, a coming and going that reached into the boxes.
Seven speakers had been distributed around the stalls. They had megaphones. Each standing at a lectern, they read Wagner’s texts and stage directions in Russian in synchrony with the musical goings-on. There were three female prompters and four actors chosen from the theater company whose dark and light voices seemed to match the characterization of Ortrud, Elsa, Lohengrin, Heinrich I, and Telramund. The speakers were instructed to whisper loudly.2
The backdrop for the first and last acts was changed. Decor from the May 1st ceremonies had been brought from props and the back of the stage rigged out with flags and topical slogans. To reduce the risk that could result from an air raid, the “private” second act was omitted. First and third acts produced in a vague sense a “more political” version. The abridgment “condensed” the opera into a “demonstration of the city of Leningrad’s will to survive.” That was announced.
Antonov, who had saved the evening, was hearing the music for the first time in his life. He was already won over during the prelude and congratulated himself on the idea of having the corps de ballet lay flowers in front of the flags and posters with slogans, before the chorus and singers entered. The languidly progressing, gentle music of the strings and the pattering of the ballet shoes on the stage seemed to him expressive of a “realistic working class Party line.” An appropriate evening for the beginning of a war which no one here had wanted. He found the megaphone-enhanced speaking voices splendid, as they inserted the scraps of words between the music and the singing, so that the listeners always had something vague to think about; this vagueness, thought Antonov, became filled with the events of the day, so that the fragmentary memory of the radio broadcasts of powerful marches and songs also entered into Richard Wagner’s music. The audience, essentially factory employees, Party members, and also a few military people, appeared both happy and comforted to be together.
That same night the orchestra members were armed as a special unit and marched off to the front. The opera was closed. Within an hour everything not directly necessary for the struggle was canceled. The Socialist generosity Antonov had had in mind up to the beginning of the opera (“magnanimity as intellectual weapon”) was over and done with. To Antonov it seemed, however, a sign of the future victory that the war was not immediately able to divide everyone and everything into friend and foe, but that at least for a short time, i.e., for one day, an exceptional capacity for differentiation could be worked out, coming to life for one evening: a space between aggression and art.
Götterdämmerung in Vienna
(for Heiner Müller)
The way that the twentieth century appropriates music.
Gerard Schlesinger, Cahiers du Cinéma
Whatever is not broken, cannot be saved.
H. Müller, Cruel Beauty of an Opera Recording
In March 1945 the metropolis of Vienna was surrounded by Soviet shock troops. Only to the north and northwest was there still a land link to the Reich. At this moment the Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissar Baldur von Schirach, ruler of the city, ordered a final gala performance of Götterdämmerung. In the hopeless situation of the city and the Reich, the despair of the Nibelungs (but also the hope of return contained in the final chords), composed by Richard Wagner, was to be broadcast on all the transmitters of the southeast, insofar as these were in German hands. “Even if the Reich comes to be destroyed, music still remains to us.” The opera house, shut down and bolted and barred on all sides since October, was opened up again. Orchestra members were brought from the fronts to the Gau capital. On the evening before the dress rehearsal (with orchestra and costumes, but without Valhalla in flames, the final rehearsal was then to be recorded and broadcast by the radio station, a premiere was dispensed with), U.S. squadrons flying from Italy to Vienna bombed the city center. THE OPERA BURNED OUT.
Now the opera rehearsed in groups, split up between various air-raid shelters in the city. The left side of the orchestra worked in five groups in cellars on the Ringstrasse; the right side including timpani in four cellars in Kärntner Strasse as well as on side streets. The singers were distributed between the orchestra groups. They were supposed to try to sing “like instruments.” They could not be positioned in relation to one another, since after all they were singing in different cellars. The conductor sat in the wine cellar of a restaurant, at first without any connection, but was soon linked to all the cellars by FIELD TELEPHONE.
Artillery shells exploding in the vicinity. During rehearsals there were two daylight raids by U.S. air force units. Defending heavy artillery was dug in nearby and was finding the range of Soviet long-distance guns. Infantrymen and railway workers had been allocated to the rehearsing music sections as runners. The information delivered in this way was supplemented by field telephones, which not only linked the conductor with the orchestra sections but also linked them with one another. The sound of the rehearsing neighbors was transmitted over the lines and amplified by loudspeakers. In broad outline, therefore, the musicians could register the sounds of the musicians playing separately from them, while they themselves rehearsed the parts of the score for which they were responsible. Later the conductor hurried from cellar to cellar giving instructions on the spot. THERE ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CONSIDERATIONS TO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, HE SAID, THAN AT A DRESS REHEARSAL WHERE EVERYONE IS PRESENT.
A different sound was also produced. The noise of the final battle for Vienna could not be filtered out, the orchestra fragments produced no unified sound. Since the Vienna bridges were threatened, the commanding officer, Colonel-General Rendulic, passed on a warning to the staff of the Reich Defense Commissar. The evacuation of the singers and orchestra members to the west of Austria must be given priority, if they were to be saved. Consequently it was impossible to wait for the dress rehearsal; instead something had to be improvised. At that the Reich Defense Commissar, a young man, ordered that the wireless recordings of the sound worked out thus far were to be made immediately, i.e., the very same day. The radio engineers therefore began to record the “fragments” of Götterdämmerung at 11:30 a.m. with the first scene of the third act (Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens).
The opera was taken through to the end of the third scene of the third act. Acts one and two of the music drama were to follow. The intention was to patch it all together at the radio station, or instead, once the original tapes had been flown out of Vienna, to fit everything together and broadcast the work without interruption from the Reich Broadcasting Station Salzburg.
BY CHANCE, however, 9,800 feet of 35 mm Agfa color film were still stored in Vienna. Lieutenant-Colonel of the Staff Gerd Jänicke, who had concentrated the four propaganda companies under his command in the besieged Vienna area, had the firm intention of filming the tragedy of this city. Now his decision took solid shape. He ordered the orchestra’s achievement to be captured on film and in sound, and without consideration for camera noise, since a “blimp”3 was not available. To Jänicke the shooting of the last act of Götterdämmerung seemed the crowning conclusion of his sev
en years of devoted work as chronicler and propagandist. There was nothing to be glossed over; instead it was about documenting a perseverance that maintained what would not be destroyed with the German Reich: German music.
The third act and parts of the first act were recorded with five cameras, each with sound recording apparatus. Antiaircraft searchlights were set up as lamps: they shone on the cellar walls and gave a bright, indirect light. For the complete impression robust improvisation was necessary: thus the singers and orchestra sections in other cellars not being recorded by the film teams were included in the performance via radio telephone and stored on 17.5 mm audiotape; later they were cut into the mix. In the first scene of the third act an effort had still been made to achieve an overall sound, but after that, in scenes 2 and 3 of Act 3, there was a shift to presenting the fragments to the listeners one after the other. In the film these scenes were heard and seen nine times in succession: each time a noisy section of the orchestra played the score that it was rehearsing in its cellar.
The civilian management of Radio Salzburg displayed the institutional cowardice typical of broadcasting corporations. It considered that the sound recording of Götterdämmerung, assembled from a number of unequal parts, could not be broadcast for “reasons of quality.” Telephone calls from the staff of the Reich Defense Commissar were unable to persuade it to alter its judgement. As if in the present situation of the Reich what matters is some kind of peacetime recording quality! said Captain von Tuscheck, the officer on Schirach’s staff responsible for the operation. But the civilian management in Salzburg remained adamant. It transmitted a prerecorded version of Act 3 of Götterdämmerung and after that only marches until the surrender of Salzburg.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jänicke’s propaganda units, on the other hand, safeguarded the undeveloped negative and sound materials in a garage in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace. The intention was to transport them to Oslo or Narvik on one of the last aircraft to fly out of Vienna. There was a film laboratory in the north. The recording was to be snatched from the enemy’s grasp, presenting a last message from the fighting Reich. In this war, unlike 1918, the bodies, the tanks, the cities were smashed, but the spirit remained intact. Theoretically, said Jänicke, final victory is possible, even if all means of defense were destroyed, through will and intellectual weapons alone. This was true above all by means of music.
The transport of the Götterdämmerung film could no longer take place, because no vehicles were available to take it to the airport.
Meanwhile night had fallen. The musicians climbed out into the open air from their cellars. Infantry NCO’s led them through the city center, which was under unsighted artillery fire. They reached the buses and were driven out of Vienna (the last from the closing pocket). The morning found them in rural surroundings. They were distributed among farms in the neighborhood of Linz and a few days later were arrested by American troops.
The cans of film in the garage, still properly labelled, were secured by Soviet officers and forgotten. A Georgian colonel, who spoke French, handed the pile over to a Tartar lieutenant colonel, who could read the German writing (which admittedly he only revealed to trustworthy friends, not the Georgian colleague). The lieutenant colonel had the undeveloped film material brought to his garrison town, Sochi, where it was stored in the municipal museum’s basement for decades.
In 1991, after the collapse of the Imperium, a young composer, who described himself as Luigi Nono’s representative for Russia, discovered this stock. He was following a lead in a specialist music periodical published in the Crimea, which has its own internet page. Without ever having seen any of the material or even being familiar with the place where it was stored, the young man organized its dispatch to a film studio in Hungary, where he had the material developed. The rolls of positive film were brought to Venice. The intention was to present the soundtrack in St. Mark’s Cathedral on the tenth anniversary of Luigi Nono’s death.
A film editor and assistant of J. L. Godard, who had heard of this transfer, insisted, however, on being allowed to synch the materials in the laboratories of the Cinétype Studios in Paris and screened the 9,800 feet of film, both visual and audio material, to a group of staff members of Cahiers du Cinéma and the Cinémathèque.4
The effect of the material (after fifty years storage) was “enchanting,” writes Gerard Schlesinger in Cahiers du Cinéma.
The 35mm film material had first of all been developed through self-exposure, causing outlines and discoloration, and then the unexposed negatives had once again been developed in the lab, so that shadows and echoes were superimposed on the outlines and discoloration. Parts of the material are scratched and, contrary to one of the theses of Walter Benjamin, have acquired a unique character because of the damage. “The soundtrack,” writes Schlesinger, “displays a ‘cruel beauty’ or ‘something like strength of character.’” Richard Wagner should always be “fragmented” in this way. An authentic noise trace records the sound of the camera and the artillery and bomb detonations. This original sound, the “being-in-the-middle-of-it,” puts a rhythm to Wagner’s music and turns it from a phrase of the nineteenth century into the PROPERTY of the twentieth century.
In some images the camera and the tripod as well as the sound apparatus are visible. The “interventions of the female prompters have the high tone color of the Ufa sound films. The high pitch of the voices in the sound films of the time, therefore, appears to be not only a result of the speech training of the actors, but also of the rules of the sound recording.”
It would be a mistake, according to Schlesinger, to mix the sound fragments. Unlike the original recording, that would result in a POOR OVERALL SOUND. The mixing of the sound sections only documented the intention of those shooting the film, not, however, what they did: here it was a matter of an inspired discovery, that is, of the BEAUTY OF FRAGMENTS.
Thanks to the intervention of Cahiers du Cinéma the 9,800 feet of film and the surplus sound fragments are consequently shown as a total of one hundred and two separate pieces. Each picture section has been allocated only one soundtrack. Where pictures are missing, a concert without images is heard in the cinema. At the suggestion of Cahiers du Cinéma Nono’s representative included the work in the composer’s catalog. A successful work is not what an individual’s mind thinks up as scores, but whatever treasures of music he finds and preserves. Indeed, it is an art to get hold of such a treasure. I would not have been able to think up a telephone booth voice, says Nono’s representative, and certainly not one possessing such powers of expression. This is a unique audiovisual work of the twentieth century. “Property is the luck of finding such a treasure once in a lifetime.”
Picture description:
They were sitting at the back of the projection room in the labs of the Cinétyp Paris company. They were supposed to collaborate on logging the dailies (with picture and sound synch). It was a question of quality control.
— You can see the light bulbs shining on the cellar ceiling as well as the torches shining on the music stands.
— Apart from that the walls are bright.
— The flashlights are replaced from time to time.
— When the batteries have to be changed. You can see that some of the flashlights are already growing weaker.
— The faces are in the shadows.
— Yes, but the forceful movement of the musicians moves the shadows, so that something “spiritual” keeps the room in motion, the suggestion of “industrious figures.”
— Clouds of dust floating past the lamps. Those are shells exploding.
— Or bombs.
— Yes.
— Dust has to be wiped from the instruments. More often than at rehearsals in the opera house. Look here: the brass group, taking a break to clean their instruments. Mixed dust and spittle.
— Now this group has to jump to bar 486?
— Exactly. So now it’s sy
nchronous with the strings and the individual singer again, whom we hear, amplified by loudspeaker, from the neighboring cellar via the radiotelephone.
— Would you say it sounds “croaky”?
— Simply how a piece of Wehrmacht communications equipment sounds. Listen, the artillery sounds tinny, too, in the recording, i.e., in terms of sound quality it’s a mistake.
— Here three of the seven orchestra sections part company.
— Just as in the churches of the High Middle Ages. The notes wander around the space. There’s no “harmony.”
— But with the best will in the world it’s impossible to say that the radio telephones — and here you see only one telephone connection with loudspeakers directly linked by wire — produce a qualified space. It’s more of an anti-cathedral.
— But the imagination of a space works all the better.
— Why better?
— Think of the actual situation. At any moment one of the other musicians’ cellars (or one’s own) can be hit and collapse. Then you would hear only the sound of the catastrophe. The actual situation determines the imagination.
— It is not the sound of a space, but of a cage?
— Of course: the group sound of many spaces. A kind of Lebensraum, and music has for once arrived in real conditions. That is achieved not by a symphony orchestra setting up in a factory, and acting as if that is a place for symphony concerts. The factory is made unreal, and that is not a way of making music real. Here, however, in the emergency of besieged Vienna, there arises a new kind of sound space of real music: the resurrection of music out of the spirit of contemporary history. The spaces are the message. In the chatter of musical notes I imagine the starry sky. Something pure, clear.
— And you think Richard Wagner had that in mind?
Temple of the Scapegoat Page 8
