NORMA, an Agglomeration of Magnanimity
Words, get up and follow me!
. . . onward, there’s no end ahead.
Ingeborg Bachmann
1: Theme
In a world of warriors (the Romans and Gauls have the same war gods) a priestess known for her chastity has instituted a reform introducing lost matriarchal rites ascribed to the moon goddess. Put simply: it’s all about peace.
But this revolutionary woman is not a “new type of human being,” nor is she chaste; she has an erotic secret (revealed in circumspect nineteenth-century spirit). Just before a (possible) reconciliation can take place, a tragic chain of events occurs. To prevent an annihilating massacre, Norma sacrifices herself. This wins back Pollione’s admiration, which he expresses by offering up his own life.
2: Anna Viebrock’s Set Design
The set designer Anna Viebrock has given the stage the staggered depth of a church nave, like a Huguenot temple. In front of the grille that demarcates the foreground of the stage, as though the sanctum were on the side of the audience, stands the heroine: Norma. Behind her the devout. The druidess turns her back on them. Why doesn’t she look in their direction, why doesn’t she coerce them with her eyes, like an animal tamer? Does she trust them? She has no reason to. She is shattering religious assumptions about war, military decrees, the cruelty of the gods. Prophets like her have been murdered since time immemorial.
It’s important to Norma to drag these believers onward. As though from the depths of a laterna magica’s machinery, as she sings the aria CASTA DIVA the moonlight shines through the back windows of the stage, in support of the priestess. Light of the olden days, working only in the absence of the sun.5
We are told of a battle between the matriarchy and the patriarchy, Anna Viebrock notes, long before the brothers conspired to kill the father and before the fratricidal struggle. But none of this, the set designer adds, unfolded fully so as to be brought to an end. Natural catastrophes intervened (cometary impacts, earthquakes, floods, the plague). People fled. In this exodus the homicidal group scattered, producing a new beginning that could cope with hybridity. Hybrids survived. And so it is a never-ending struggle.
Who is speaking? Who can say “I”? The I seldom can. If it holds still, it can hear echoes speaking. Only the echoes themselves know how they fit together. The GREAT DISPERSAL listens. That is how Heiner Müller described it. Whoever can read this dispersal hears something say “I,” polyglot, in chorus. And dreams, hope? They aren’t listening.
— And you express that in the set design?
— Yes, that is my means of expression.
3: A Triumph of Friendship
The two wise women who love the same man — as they have just learned — express confusion.
I loved him . . . but my heart
feels nothing now but friendship
Adalgisa means her friendship with the druidess Norma, whom the Roman has just abandoned for her sake.
The only recourse is for the friend to speak to the malefactor in public. Adalgisa sets out for the Romans’ camp.
She explains to the commander that his love for her, Adalgisa, is a mistake. How much finer, greater is Norma’s character! How could he spurn such a human treasure, destroying it in the process?
The commander, recalling many a delightful hour with Adalgisa (yes, he’s impressed by her splendid rhetorical performance, while sexually aroused by the thought of what might follow), remains uninterested in Norma. She is tiresome to him, with the seriousness of her emotions. He refuses to make any concessions. As though a man’s romantic desire could be aroused by a woman’s greater virtue!
Traitorous Roman! Adalgisa, doubtless still in love with him, carried away by fellowship with her friend, transported by the passionate élan of friendship, steals back along dark paths to the camp of the Gauls. Puts herself at the priests’ disposal. She consecrates herself to death.
4: Verdun, the Great Slave Market
Yes, she weeps / What hope has she?
Her plea has been dismissed!
Norma, Act 2, final chorus
Shortly before his death Heiner Müller was invited by the Verdun municipal theater to visit that corner of what was once Gaul; he was to stage one of his plays there the following year and begin by acquainting himself with the location.6 Having visited one of the city’s military cemeteries, and having been criticized for a public remark he made regarding his impressions, he had a falling-out with the city government, was disinvited, and departed.
In the fluvial landscape of Verdun, Müller jotted down on a beer coaster, a handful of clay remains self-identical over the course of 3,000 years. When this soil is churned up by artillery, when its surface is worked over by agriculture or the construction of towns and highways, the alteration in the molecules, as measured against the borders of Europe, is insignificant.
From the years 782 to 804 A.D. this was the largest market for slaves. A slave, taken captive in war, carted in from the lands of the Germans, can achieve happiness if the latifundium that purchases him is administered in a spirit of kindness, and if he can find a compatible woman slave. A female descendent, assuming things begin and progress felicitously, may have the chance to enchant a Frankish warrior and join the ruling class herself.
From the perspective of the seventh century’s CONFEDERATED PROMISES OF HAPPINESS, it is a fluke that the military staffs of 1916 chose these hills and plains — in a zone of the earth now defined as a fortress — to implement their project of BLOODLETTING. Museums, graves, memorial plaques commemorate it. How quickly does a landscape scar over?
Interview with Heiner Müller in Verdun:
— You described the sanctums of the dead, the monuments and chapels of Verdun’s cemeteries as “kitschy”: as battle kitsch.
— At any rate they don’t convey the way people were firing at each other here back in 1916.
— What distinguishes slaves from soldiers in the trenches, pinned down amidst the artillery barrage by their orders?
— A lot. Slaves can hope for good treatment.
— The soldiers in the trenches have no hope?
— Not really. Because even if they go home, nothing is adequate to the experience of being exposed to the mortar barrage. All they can do with the memory is extinguish it.
— How is a slave defined?
— As a person or a unit of working power who is someone else’s property.
— Whose property are the soldiers of 1916? The wounded men? The shattered men?
— On the German side, the property of the Reich. On the French side, the property of the Republic.
— In that sense they’re slaves too?
— No. They possess a will of their own, which desires to leave this battlefield at all costs. A slave had no right to this will.
— Not by law, or not in reality?
— I can’t put myself in the position of a slave from 602 A.D.
— And one of those suits of character armor from 1916, lying here outside Verdun?
— Not that either.
5: Battle on the Border of the “I”
The heart is the final dimension
of intelligence.
Marcel Proust (on Baron Charlus)
Maestro Reynaldo Hahn was an outstanding conversationalist. “The heart pulls a fast one on the intellect.” Phrases like these drift through Hahn’s mind all morning, yet he finds no opportunity to slip the epigram into one of the day’s many chats. Among Marcel Proust’s closest friends, Reynaldo Hahn was the only one suited to perform a public role. He was a critic for Le Figaro and director of the Théâtre de Casino in Cannes. He survived Proust and carried on the conversational tradition of their clique.
After the liberation of Paris in 1944, he was regarded as politically untainted, and was made director of the Paris Opera in 194
5. Sixteen premieres had to be lined up. Possibilities included Massenet (Werther), Cherubini (Medea), Saint-Saëns, Berlioz (Les Troyens), Bellini (Norma). An attractive young director thought it appropriate to costume the Gaulish heroine Norma as Jeanne d’Arc, producing an opera of revolution. Magnanimously Hahn indulged him in this fit of bad taste.
— You are politically independent, Monsieur Director.
— Politically independent.
— And you are a homosexual?
— Whatever that means. It doesn’t mean I’m a leper.
— And now, in your production of Norma, you advocate passionately for the cause of women?
— For a woman victim.
— The production inspires a deep appreciation of these Gaulish women.
— That’s why we chose this opera, which is so effective on stage. Norma appears in the costume of the Maid of Orleans.
— You aren’t appalled by the bad taste?
— It’s a bit too direct. But you can safely assume that homoerotic men always hold women in veneration.
— Now back to the opera. While Norma is dying you have people carry banners to the front of the stage (preparations are already being made during the duet between Norma and Pollione), displaying words that the French language gives a feminine gender: la bataille, la nation, la guerre. Are you making fun of the fact that the warlike virtues are supposed to be feminine?
— Am I warlike?
— What is warlike?
— Whatever makes us forget the war between the sexes.
— So you mean war is superficial?
— It’s dangerous enough.
Hahn (center) at the front, Verdun, 1916.
Baron Charlus, still part of the clan in 1916, found his heart (which ruled his keen intellect like a tyrant) drawn to the young soldiers who loitered about the Gare Montparnasse in the second year of the war. They had to be warlike ne’er-do-wells, effigies of battle’s violence. The high-ranking nobleman desired them to subjugate him in a pissoir. He wanted to be their victim; taking on the likeness of the enemies who were storming France in 1916, he approached them as a Prussian matron (something he didn’t resemble in the slightest), as “Madame Boche.” The soldiers, never once on a level with his intellect, seeking an adventure with a young female traveler or a prostitute before their furlough ended, mocked this monstrous-seeming holder of a heart. They believed (erroneously) that war was simply a menacing burden, not an aggregate state of sexuality.
At the premiere of Norma at the Palais Garnier, there was a certain danger that the corpulent singer of the title role, performing in the additional accoutrements of a freedom fighter, might seem ridiculous when she momentarily embraced the enemy general in the last act. The audience knew her as Brünnhilde. Now, as a Celtic defector, she would lead her beloved foe to the sacrifice. In the event of an utter fiasco, Reynaldo Hahn had a substitute play at the ready: GOTT MIT UNS, a drama (from 1928) by René Berton. During World War I, French soldiers seize a bunker previously defended by the Germans. Just as the French soldiers advance into the bunker, a German bomb hit buries the entrance. A single German soldier, Hermann, has been left behind. Knowing that a time bomb is hidden here, he is trying to dig his way out of the ill-fated hole. As a patriot, he refuses to tell the intruders, his foes, the location of the bomb. The French captain, in civilian life a philosophy professor, just like Hermann, persuades him to defuse the bomb. In the meantime, a French sapper unit has dug its way through the blocked entrance to the bunker. Hermann is the first to run outside. He is struck by a German bullet. His face obliterated, he goes back into the bunker, cries “Gott mit uns” and dies.
Reynaldo Hahn wanted to accompany these scenes with melodies from Bellini’s opera, which was feasible if the dialogue and singing were left out. But due to the elated mood of the audience in summer 1945, the premiere of Norma (and the rest of the repertoire) was a great success. There was no need for the substitute play.
6: Enigmatic Gaul
Love emerging from slavery and conquest. The Franks, marching into the country, were fascinated not by the Roman women, nor by the genteel wives of the Gauls who administered the rural estates, but by those estates’ slaves. The conquerors and the slave women had something in common: with their bond, a new life began.7
Only later did the new couples expropriate the old owners. Now property consorted with intimacy.8
Who was to be subjugated? The warrior? The slave? That was impossible to straighten out. But it’s said that the NEW BONDS described here are what makes the difference between France and a barbarian land.
7: Einar Schleef’s Production at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
Druids, Gaulish warriors, Romans (in identical costumes: the coats of Wehrmacht soldiers returning from war captivity). The women: Norma, Adalgisa, Clotilde (in the garb of the knights from Parsifal and Lohengrin, i.e., dazzling white and silver suits of armor). The choruses act as combat units. They fight “spectral skirmishes.” At times they gather around tables where they imbibe poison or blood.
TAGESZEITUNG: Herr Schleef, you’re accused of massacring Bellini. You’ve cut the music down to six choruses and six duets. You undermine the dramatic tension by summarizing the plot at the beginning in the past perfect tense. What is more, you expand Bellini’s great dramatic arc with a sequence of interruptions, blurring the boundary between interpolation and original by superimposing Bellini’s music.
SCHLEEF: The critics crucified me for it.
TAGESZEITUNG: You completely omitted the scene in which Norma tries to kill her two children, replacing it with a scene inserted from Cherubini’s Medea. Why?
SCHLEEF: Medea has a compelling reason to kill her children. She is indomitable. She wants to punish the traitor Jason, her husband. She wants to obliterate her previous life. All exactly as in Bellini’s Norma, except that the logical action is actually taken. “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”
TAGESZEITUNG: Norma hesitates.
SCHLEEF: With good reason. She is the more radical of the two. She discards the direct means of emotional retribution. She leaves the children out of it. That’s why I left out the scene. Medea commits the murder. Norma leaves it out.
TAGESZEITUNG: But you don’t show that.
SCHLEEF: How can you stage something that doesn’t take place?
TAGESZEITUNG: Norma approaches the children with a drawn dagger (or, in Stuttgart, a revolver), hesitates, and then retreats.
SCHLEEF: How silly.
TAGESZEITUNG: But it isn’t a game.
SCHLEEF: Certainly not. But the expression “bloody serious” is just as wrong-headed.
TAGESZEITUNG: Thus the death by fire?
SCHLEEF: Like the death of the Valkyrie in Act 3 of Götterdämmerung.
TAGESZEITUNG: But you don’t show any fire.
SCHLEEF (angrily): I don’t want to burn any witches.
TAGESZEITUNG: Why are Brünnhilde and Norma witches?
SCHLEEF: That’s just it, there aren’t any witches.
TAGESZEITUNG: But in operas there are women who die by fire. In Halévy’s La Juive the heroine dies in a cauldron of boiling oil.
SCHLEEF: Not in my production.
TAGESZEITUNG: Going by the principle of the phoenix from the ashes?
SCHLEEF (even angrier, face red): I don’t do principles. It’s practicality.
TAGESZEITUNG: Is it practical for the theater when you leave out the exciting end?
SCHLEEF: What’s exciting about a woman’s immolation?
TAGESZEITUNG: That’s the ending Bellini envisages.
SCHLEEF: So much the worse.
TAGESZEITUNG: But my dear Herr Schleef, you’re the one who claims to be guided by the original text.
SCHLEEF: Our hearts must burn.
TAGESZEITUNG: Instead of Norma?
SCHLEEF: Exactly.
A German Philosopher in Persia
1
They’re driving across the barren mountains, hour after hour. From a lecture hall in Tehran to an auditorium in the south. A practicing Shiite, a doctoral student, familiar with western works. She is the philosopher’s chauffeur.
Once, at the Tehran Opera, she’d seen a production of a western music drama. She mentions a dialogue between a priestess and another, lower-ranking priestess in a classic land of the west. He’s unfamiliar with the scene. She tries to explain it to him.
The special thing about such a journey is its duration. A journey through a rocky desert with majestic outcroppings also made of rock. You can’t describe this terrain as mountains and valleys. It’s an utterly alien world. What takes place between the philosopher and the driver can’t be called a dialogue. It’s a juxtaposition of different conceptions. The driver, evidently a religious believer, has special standards for practical earthly behavior: STANDARDS SHE DOESN’T WANT TO DISCUSS.
This philosopher, the doctoral student well knows, is famous for holding that there are no questions regarding practical earthly behavior that can’t be put up for discussion. However far-fetched a stranger’s utterance, there must be some procedure enabling exchange, barter. Otherwise one could only communicate via money and force.
After two hours in a swaying automobile, two people with a four hours’ drive still ahead of them are no longer strangers.
2
Two priestesses of the moon goddess who controls Gaul’s fate, both pledged to chastity, are seduced in succession and in great secrecy by a powerful Roman. The younger victim of seduction (but how can she be the victim of seduction, when she is the one who loves him) seeks counsel from the senior druidess, Norma. Can there be counsel in questions of intimacy? Can there be counsel among rivals?
Temple of the Scapegoat Page 10
