War in the Huts
“All operas are about a suspended civil war of the soul.” In the fall of 1940, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were under time pressure. Adorno offered this sentence intuitively. Their research application for the project “Authority and Family” was due at a Columbia University foundation on Monday. It was already Friday.
Neither Horkheimer nor their legal advisor Franz Neumann liked intuitions much, including the one contained in Adorno’s formulation. “It is not,” Adorno countered, “that I know something—rather, there is something in me that knows.” One can write down a sentence, he said, and then spend one’s entire life trying to explain it. If we don’t include the sentence as is, he added, we won’t be finished by Monday. But his friends, who did not want to talk about opera, only about authority and family, rejected his introductory phrase.
It wasn’t until forty-nine years after Adorno’s death that a daughter of one of his illegitimate children took up his introductory sentence once more. The issue was still the foundations of capitalism and its more intensive fifth aggregate phase, fascism, “arising from the spirit of families and their struggles.” Adorno’s descendant was adamant about the sentence, which she had found among his papers and which she wanted to see at least included as an epigraph to a new edition of the work.
Steel mill with blast furnace around 1910. The four English converters are called “rats” or “field rabbits.” The one in front is on its back. At the moment it is empty and burning out.
The Contrat Social of Families
According to a Shanghai publication, a team of researchers at the University of Giessen has been investigating a remarkable EVOLUTIONARY LEAP that took place either just before the development of Homo sapiens, or in the beginning stages of the formation of this species. As the first of all animals with souls, as the researchers put it, “children pay back a portion of their production costs to their parents.” As a result, the breastfeeding period goes from 5.5 years for apes to just 2.5 years for humans. This developmental leap occurs in a timespan of just 112 generations! From this point on, older siblings start taking care of younger ones.
A reserve army of grandmothers forms. Division of labor by gender, but also between predatory and producing societies. The most striking event, unexplainable by Darwinian categories, say the Chinese, in their report on the Giessen scientists, is the safeguarding of the smooth transfer of experience from generation to generation—though why this is advantageous for reproduction is not at all apparent at first glance.
How is this transfer accomplished? By generations continuing the customs of preceding generations over long periods? Chains of experience and willpower are created, as if by—this is how the Chinese describe it—a COLOSSAL AND WELL-MAINTAINED ORGANIC MACHINE.
It is tempting to conclude from this, adds the economist Ho Wang-Shu, that the difficulties of actually implementing socialism lie in the fact that it in no way represents a future goal—in fact, modern (and even industrial!) societies actually evolved out of the crumbling of the PRIMITIVE COOPERATION that defined the sensational career of early humans. That means, the comrade pursued, the works of Marx must be rewritten. The EXCHANGE SOCIETY was derived not from PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION and the concept of the commodity, but from PRIMITIVE FAMILIAL CONTRACTS, as one easily learns, according to Ho Wang-Shu, from looking at EARLY CHINESE HISTORY.
“Blast Furnaces of the Soul”
The BLAST FURNACES OF THE SOUL work at very different times than the blast furnaces of industry. Their material comes from radical forces. Their machinery produces HOT-TEMPEREDNESS and ICY COLD, the two energies from which subjectivity arises.
It would be a misunderstanding, said Oskar Negt, to believe that opera houses themselves, or the arias sung with all the heart’s ardor, are “blast furnaces of the soul.” The souls of contemporary people, that is to say the performers of the musical dramas and their audiences, have long since been forged. And I don’t believe that they will soften.
He elucidated his remarks as follows:
Medea is used as material in 44 operas.
All 44 operas are based on the tragedy by Euripides.
The tragedy by Euripides is based upon a myth that recounts the story of Medea.
The terrible (presumably collective) experience that led to the myth is not known to us.
In this connection Negt quoted a remark made by the opera lover Sigmund Freud to the composer Alban Berg. The tragedies from which we infer terrible primordial events are, “without exception, screen memories.” They have shifted from the original occurrence, which is likely present in the soul-lives of both singers and listeners, to a story that can be told with the aid of music.
It was man, prince of the animals,
Who invented parricide.
But parricide, continued Freud—he had written about it, after all—was not the primordial event, either. If the earth’s interior were a time constant, then the smelter from which the “steel of the soul-life” emerges would be equivalent to the glowing magma seventy miles deep under the earth’s surface (if, as I’ve said before, the core were made of liquid time). On this point, he cited a classic:
Why do dogs whine?
They scent from a distance
The spirits’ dance.
Medea’s Decision
The adventures lay behind them. Where were the aftershocks? After all, feelings take longer to arrive home than ships. Is the fear located in their limbs? Is it hiding? Is it dammed?
The young heroes had shipped out as a united front and come back singly. Jason with the booty. His pursuers still in the wake of his ship. His freshly won mistress—traitor to her country, indispensable means by which he had procured the valuable map (drawn on the lining of a ram’s pelt, and now being brought home)—was busy carving her brother into pieces and tossing them bit by bit to their pursuers. (They had brought him along as a hostage.) In the churning darkness of the sea, how were the pursuers to notice the princely flesh, let alone be able to identify it? Left unexplained. At any rate, they veered off.
And then, daily life in Corinth. It didn’t take Medea long to realize that she was hated there—she, the foreigner.
Years later. None of Jason’s copious promises have been fulfilled. Malicious gossip: Medea, they say, the sorceress from Colchis, has tried to convince Jason’s parents to boil their son in a cauldron in the interests of eternal life. The prospect of eternal life would certainly have pleased the hero.
In fact, Medea is already doomed. Still no marriage to Jason, the heir apparent. Now she finds out about Jason’s plan to marry a princess from Athens. As if she, the woman with whom he has two children, were nothing but air! No one was even going to bother to tell her. She knows that the man who has betrayed her wants to try to win a piece of everlasting life, at least as the father of a dynasty. And so she also knows that the only means she possesses to hurt him is to kill her (and his) blooming children.
The Troublesome Sister
In the night before she died (she had helped things along with some poison entrusted to her), Margit prayed, repented, and entertained doubts as to God’s benevolence. It was all to do with an occurrence seventy years earlier (but with a prelude many years before that), concerning her first reaction to the bombing death of her dominant sister, Herta. She, the quieter flower, had always stood in the shadows of her superior older sister—the beauty, the merry favorite of both parents, and of all four grandparents. She was the one shown off to relatives and visitors. The life of this bliss-sister was so surrounded by noisy idolatry that Margit, born later, sullenly withdrew, and spurned the few crumbs of attention that did come her way. She became a difficult child, a malcontent, neither boy nor girl, appropriating what affection she could from the free-floating guilt of her parents—they were Protestants, and could find no release for their strife. Some effort was made by the parents to start over with this c
hild—though a nest was never offered that she would want to live in—but the merry sister would burst into the room too precipitously and ruin the fresh start.
So when the message broke upon them that the entire Darmstadt side of their family had been eradicated, Margit was unable to console her parents. She experienced a feeling of relief that frightened her. She was the only one in the household who was able to put what had happened into words.
But she forbade herself any feelings of triumph. So many wounds from her childhood still sought expression in her that she did not forgive her dead sister, but rather aimed the reproaches at herself instead: she would not indulge in any sensation of liberation. This helped the mortgage of guilt that ruled the entire family (except for the dead sister) to accumulate so relentlessly during the course of her lifetime that as the decades passed there was no hope of ever paying it off. The GDR ceased to be. The new freedom of movement (borderless travel!) brought about no reconciliation. She prayed earnestly, sought relief from the feelings she had avoided. But there was never any disposal site available to take them. And so, the disequilibrium from her youth accompanied her literally to her end. Her death was caused not by guilt, but by a revolt in her cells. And since she had no interest in suffering passively, she procured the powerful opiate with which, at 96 years old, she managed to compensate for the brief joy of 1944. She declined to feel any remorse.
The Aggressive Gaze of Blood
After their mother’s death by fire (which both galleries were forced to watch—usually boisterous, here they found themselves at a loss), Norma’s children were brought by an escort to Rome. Raised in the household of the praetor, their father, possibly they did not believe in the veracity of the event they themselves had witnessed. The two boys, half-Gauls (though in Rome social status is inherited through the father), passed through the senatorial ranks: quaestor, praetor, provincial governor, senator, governor once more, consul, proconsul. At the end of a Roman funeral comes the listing of deeds (res gestae). In the course of the ensuing centuries, Norma’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren recited the deeds of both her once so faithless lover and all their Roman forefathers extending back to the legendary Ennius. Actors read relevant texts. No word about Norma. The descendants of this branch of the family showed no particular distinction. Had Norma’s sacrificial death, which had enabled the rescue of the captive praetor and their children, been worth it, evolutionarily speaking?
Approximately 2,000 years later. A young Swiss federal prosecutor brings down a clan of the ’Ndrangheta that had been entrenched in Winterthur. It turns out that the boss of this mafia organization (which has a global reach) can claim as his ancestor that same praetor who had served in Gaul and been saved by Norma’s death. Almost simultaneously it becomes clear that the federal prosecutor, too, is descended from this ancient lineage, but another branch of it. So the death by fire had a late historical consequence, wrested by the firm spirit of the priestess from her martyred body—a body full of rebellion as she burned (one could see her mouth, open for a scream, while the heathens’ drumming severed any auditory connection between the spectators and the condemned).
The criminals are sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Two-thirds of the punishment is to be served. The valuable experience of this trial leads the Swiss federal prosecutors’ office to make a change in their policy regarding organized crime. In the interests of strengthening the prosecution, they decide that investigation and indictment will be based not on membership in the ’Ndrangheta alone, but on concrete acts. That way, there will be fewer acquittals. The successful federal prosecutor and the mafia boss are photographed as their eyes meet over the short distance of the courtroom (a gaze across 2,000 years).
Love as a Hard Laborer
The approximately fifty operas each that Reinhard Keiser and Georg Philipp Telemann wrote for the popular OPER AM GÄNSEMARKT in Hamburg all have a lieto fine, an interactive ending that calls upon people to engage in positive life practices. Because one must not fritter away the precious time of the elapsing decades of the Enlightenment by leaving conflicts unresolved, by sowing seeds of doubt, by spreading defeatism and tragic failure.
Sapere aude!
Dare to know—have the courage to use your own understanding. Enjoy watching the collective rational achievement of the singers and orchestra at the end of the opera. In 1740, the critique of “instrumental reason” and “the egocentricity of understanding” had not yet reached maturity. It was neither dogma nor intellectual achievement that sent the galleries of the Gänsemarkt theater into a positive frenzy—and they were who decided on the success of an evening. No, what succeeded was the wit to surprise the audience with an uplifting finale. This final chord, however, had to be preceded by a wave of sadness in the concert hall, a CONCENTRATION OF EMOTION, a TYING OF THE FATAL KNOT OF LIFE, because only then could relief, could rib-expanding joy come in, preparing the audience for the transition from dream to reality (after the end of the piece).
In Emma and Eginhard, a seven-hour opera by Telemann, Charlemagne skulks at night around his palace. (In this he is related to his contemporary, Harun Al-Rashid of Baghdad.) He is on the hunt for any signs of betrayal. He keeps a close eye on his staff. He checks up on his children.
One of his advisors, the learned but not aristocratic Eginhard (modeled on Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard), is having a relationship with the emperor’s daughter Emma. The emperor has been spying on the pair. He is an EMPEROR WHO NEVER FORGIVES. In Hamburg’s bourgeois theaters, audiences love it when medieval emperors are portrayed as tyrants.
Third act of the opera. Snow has fallen overnight. How can the besotted couple, aware that they have been discovered, flee the fortress? The tracks of a man’s shoes in the snow would prove to the emperor that Emma did not spend the night alone. The emperor’s daughter invites her beloved to climb onto her shoulders, and carries him off.
By this point, the audience has long since taken the ingenious couple into their hearts. The privy councilor decrees that Eginhard will be arrested. He and Emma will be executed by sword.
Both lovers want to sacrifice themselves—both beg for mercy, each for the other. They would rather die than be parted.
When you have won something very dear
and then must lose it,
grieving is necessary.
Mourning enriches;
denial impoverishes.
The opera house falls silent. For the scene in which everyone awaits the couple’s execution, Telemann wrote a largo. It is performed by the deep string instruments, accompanied by tympani. The audience at the Gänsemarkt opera peers into an abyss. It is only after such an experience that happiness is worth anything. Jubilation after the final chorus. Everyone loves the delicate, leptosome chronicler and scribe Eginhard, a thin slice of a man who fits well on the shoulders of his corpulent girlfriend. It’s obvious that the thunder-thighed emperor with his powerful shoulders is related to this young woman (he will eventually die of high blood pressure and obesity, when his heart-pump can no longer supply his massive body). So how could he possibly cut off her head? He should honor the feat of her feet in the snow! Love is hard labor. Music softens the rigidity in the emperor’s head: he changes his mind.
Flu at the Opera
In February 2015, it sent the most robust managers straight to bed. At 5 a.m., CEO Frank H. signaled his assistant’s computer that he was at home wrapped in blankets, and that she should cancel all appointments; she got to the office only at 8 a.m. and found the message then. The flu shot developed for the winter of 2015 had failed. The germs that appeared were not the ones they had expected, and the microbial participants of this subculture took advantage of the unusual scale of the attack surface. Particularly disastrous was the situation of the great opera stages in the southern part of the republic. In an opera house, one can regulate neither the draftiness nor the amount of people with whom one comes into contact.<
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The Original Form of Opera
In the eleventh century, Europe’s capital is in Provence (Rome is in ruins, Aachen abandoned, Byzantium far away). It is a populated countryside, not a single town. At night — we have to remember it was warmer than today — the inhabitants come together. They tell stories. Then they sing. Then they tell stories again. Under the stars.
The trained kolkhoz engineer Arkady Trifonov is writing a study about this receptacle of original, i.e., oral literature. Although he only speaks broken French, he has turned to a collection of the chantefables of the period, the early medieval stories with music. Trifonov lost his research in his home country and settled amidst the granite ruins of an old castle, the remaining stones of a castrum within sight of the Mediterranean (he grows bay leaves and sells wreaths of them in the port of Marseilles). He knows all the Romance scholars at the universities in the south of France. They are working their way toward the man with the beard. Trifonov is a reconstructionist—an artistic movement of great historical merit.
Temple of the Scapegoat Page 17
