Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  A New Type of Opera in Vienna

  The young director had come to prominence through a rapid succession of productions in the metropolises of Central Europe. In Vienna she was considered a star. Currently she was directing an operatic version of Sophocles’ Antigone.

  At the moment, her most precious possession was the child in its eighth month residing in her womb. That was the best thing she was able to bring to the production. As image and as sound. Her heartbeat was also something she thought of as wholly her own. And so, both the child and her heart were to set the tone for the play’s immortal texts. The props department had gotten hold of an ultrasound device. Into this installation for two visual and acoustic voices, the director, who was also an actress and a singer, embedded Sophocles’ text, as well as fragments from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which she herself performed. In the ultrasound projected onto the back wall of the stage, her son could be seen moving around energetically. This, said the artist, is a contemporary opera.

  Such a production ought not to drag on. And for me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime installation. I think that for superstitious reasons alone I would never, after the successful birth of my son, be able to repeat such a CONCERT OF LIVING FORCES. As a radical and as a modern artist I won’t repeat anything, anyway.

  The young director was Polish. The performance took place in Vienna. Audiences were delighted. The accompanist hardly even got to play the piano. He did play a longer loop from the overture to the second act of Verdi’s Il Corsaro. The soft music prepared a bed for the sonic and visual text event.

  Plato’s Ban on Music

  The classicist Wülfing-von Martitz notes that in his Politeia, Plato, in contrast to the Pythagoreans, wants to do away with music entirely. Music lulls thumos.

  In nourishment (farmers)

  In armament (warriors)

  In enlightenment (philosophers)

  Therefore, music is detrimental to all three relevant sectors of concrete praxis. The senses and the intellect must not be allowed to “wallow” in dreaminess like cattle in a quagmire.

  Lost Sketch by John Cage

  During the final rehearsals for his Europeras 1 & 2 at the Frankfurt opera house in the autumn of 1987, John Cage was staying at the Hotel Frankfurter Hof. This meant that, when he received the disturbing news that the opera house was on fire, he didn’t have far to hurry to the scene. He took a tape recorder with him, and he had filled the pockets of his winter overcoat with various different kinds of special microphones. Frankfurt’s fire brigade had several of its units ready for an assault on the stage area, the center of the fire. By now a firestorm had already developed in this part of the opera house. It was simply too dangerous to send in the fire teams against it. They would have to let the fire burn.

  It was only after the roof fell in, bringing a mass of building material down with it, that parts of the fire could be put out. Cage found that the acoustic power of a firestorm of this kind produced a sound he’d never heard before: an “infernal hissing.” When he asked the fire chiefs about it, they explained that the sound was produced by the flames sucking the oxygen out of the surrounding air. A continuous noise could be heard on the tapes Cage used to record the sounds (he listened to them immediately afterwards, but the recording did not correspond to what he’d heard at the scene). He played it several times to other people present, including to members of the orchestra who were now appearing at the scene of the inferno. Cage had also recorded the high-pitched tone of the firemen’s voices, caused by excitement and nervous strain, and the same phenomenon among several of the spectators.

  In the days that followed, before the first performance of his two Europeras, which had now been postponed until December 12, Cage acquired an audiotape from a sound technician at Hessischer Rundfunk containing recordings of the discharge and impact of shells fired from British twelve-pounders, a type of heavy artillery. On the night before the premiere of his operas (the performance had been moved to Frankfurt’s main theater), Cage packed his audiotapes and notes into a cardboard box. It contained the draft for his “Suite for Cacophony and Orchestra,” known as Europera 2a. Using the material he’d recorded at the opera house fire, Cage had tried to set to sounds the image of an air attack on Beirut. Along with the noises of the shell explosions (which he’d got from Hessischer Rundfunk) and the sounds of the fire at the opera house, Cage had included a passage from the last act of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera The Soldiers (containing no vocal music), and a page of sheet music that he’d sketched out in rough and which the members of the orchestra were to play on instruments of their own choosing according to a principle of random determination. This package, unmarked and unprofessionally tied together, was mistaken for rubbish by the hotel’s chambermaid and thrown in the bin: lost sketch for sound and orchestra by John Cage.

  Shortly before his death, John Cage put together another package that has survived and whose content was recently made the subject of a performance by Heiner Goebbels in Baden-Baden. Following a long telephone conversation with his partner, who had caught the gruesome March flu that was raging along the east coast of the United States, Cage wrote his “Short Concerto for Cough (Deep in the Bronchials), Sniffling and Selected Notes by Bach, Schönberg and Myself.” The notes form an aleatory input, a kind of meal to which the soloists of the Ensemble Modern help themselves; their organized sound jostling with the breaks of something completely different, namely the sounds made by the body when seized with the coughs and irritations of a cold. Cage claimed that nowhere else was there anything richer in variations than this forcing of the air from the stomach through the vocal folds and on into the head, accompanied by the bronchial tubes. It was, according to him, superior to the voices of opera singers. It had, he added, significantly more harmonics. Following a trans-Atlantic telephone call with his close friend Heinz-Klaus Metzger, he gave the piece the German title “Rotz und Wasser” — “Snot and Water.”

  “Infiltration of a Love”

  Near the end of the war, in a manor house crowded with fugitive relatives and strangers, a powerful sense of abandon took hold. Observers and close friends recognized this abandon as love.

  “Love”: what a conventional term for an entangled system of self-abandonment and personal transformation. A desperate couple showed up at the house—and the naked passion with which they focused on each other caused Fritzi von Schaake, that very same evening, to fall in love with her cousin, a lieutenant. The following day, the heiress of a neighboring estate living in one of the house’s garrets left her husband. She had long railed against the prison of her marriage; it only took witnessing one example to trigger her decision. In the west wing of the house, a group of girls from the same graduating class in Breslau—up to that point an inconspicuous bunch who had been trained for the future in Czechoslovakian camps, and were now on the run—were seized by a kind of bacchanalian compulsion, an urge to celebrate life, an obsession with surrender. No one wanted to be alone anymore. They had plenty of options. When faced with imminent redeployment to one of the fronts—which made death foreseeable—young soldiers sought explosions of experience in the brevity of life. They had nothing more to lose. In a fit of decisiveness, the cousin who had been infected at the very beginning of the love infiltration shot her freshly acquired lover to death, and then herself. No doctors or vaccine against the epidemic anywhere in the vicinity. Let one more person try to tell me that “love” (whatever it might be), isn’t collective, isn’t contagious.

  “Oh My Heart, this Thunder-Sheet”

  After the taxi deposited me outside the emergency room at the last minute—speechless with pain in my arm, an urgent need to vomit the whole way, an ineffable feeling of failing—the diagnosis of a heart attack destroyed any illusions I might have had about the immortality of my body (up until that point, I had not seen the symptoms adding up to any whole). Afterward, well-rested, swathed in white, and connected to various m
achines, I regained trust in my circulation. Now, constantly vexed, I look at my body as at a foreign entity, a culprit. I don’t take many risks. But as an opera singer, for the sake of my career I have to wager my life on a daily basis.

  My voice’s specialty is “high French tenor,” an art form that has nearly died out on the WORLD’S GREAT STAGES. Meyerbeer, Rossini, Auber, and all the repertoire of heartfelt pap from nineteenth-century French demi-opera. I hope Mark Andre will write a new part for me.

  The warmheartedness in the vibrations of my vocal cords, something like a very high trumpet, requires not only lung power; in fact it seems to me that with each outburst of passion I give off tiny quanta of my being, so that if I sing like that—out of temperament, out of ardor—many thousands of times, I will have totally transformed my body into expressiveness. The sources of song are reserves of air in the lower lungs, but I seem to also have air sacs in my intestinal region that I use for backup. Where others digest, I lift up my high notes.

  This “marvel of emotional stimulation,” as a New York critic called it, has nothing to do with the conventional muscle we call the “heart,” and therefore it is not affected by my decreased hopes for the continuance of that muscle in the left side of my chest. And so, what gets transmitted to my listeners is not “heart’s blood” (as that generous critic claimed), but an emission from my lungs and throat shored up by my intestines, a keen puff that sweeps along my vocal cords and that comprises the entirety of my life-sap. I call it—in contrast to that fickle, holey SPONGE (my physical heart) that drives the blood through my body—my THUNDER-SHEET. It is a heart in the spiritual sense. Rossini wrote his coloraturas for it—for example, an aria that practically has my name on it, the aria of Arnold, a Swiss mercenary captain in love who has nothing urgent to do with the historical plot of William Tell, a purpose-free and thought-free flight of mind with four high Fs: an “enclave of pure music” in Rossini’s final opera (often borrowed for other works of the maestro’s). I call this “magic of the rarefied heights” an INLAY FOR STAGE, THUNDER-SHEET, AND ORCHESTRA.

  Composed more than one hundred years ago just for me. I had my performance—a “celestial volcano spewing from above—from the heavens down to earth” (and it is not lava that it is dispensing)—digitally recorded with the highest quality equipment, so that my true heart, my thunder-sheet, will keep beating long after I have ceased to be.

  The silly muscle to the left under my throat remains a quitter. I often talk to it, entice it like a dog that has grown sluggish, throw sticks for it, pet it—all to keep it willing for a little while longer.

  On my calendar are upcoming appearances in Buenos Aires, Singapore, Oslo, Cottbus, Pferdsinnig an der Elster, at the State Opera House in Berlin, in Zurich, at Angkor Wat (an open-air performance), and in Adelaide. I’d definitely like to hang on for all of them, as long as my vocal cords will bear the sounds.

  * * *

  1 “It was one romantic relationship . . .” is taken from a poem by Friederike Mayröcker.

  2 After 1940, the Third Reich requisitioned forced laborers from the countries they were occupying. Such workers were strictly forbidden from intimacy with German women.

  3 Translator’s note: an old-fashioned word for telephone, roughly translated: “distant-speaker.”

  4 In a footnote to his report, Schäfer invoked Venice’s opera house, Teatro La Fenice (fenice = phoenix, a fabled Egyptian bird that burns to death and then rises, reconstituted, out of its own ashes). It burned down completely three times. And after each fire it became, once again, the site of phenomenal premieres.

  Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Kluge

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Isabel Fargo Cole, Donna Stonecipher, Nathaniel McBride, Wieland Hoban, Martin Chalmers & Martin Brady

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Published by arrangement with Alexander Kluge.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Most of Temple of the Scapegoat is translated by Isabel Fargo Cole (sections I–III) and Donna Stonecipher (sections IV–VI) with the exception of the following pieces: “Total Commitment,” “In the Last Year of his Life,” “Snow on a Copper Roof,” “Commitment to a Colleague with a Sore Throat,” and “Lost Sketch by John Cage” by Nathaniel McBride; “The Phenomenon of the Opera,” “Lohengrin in Leningrad,” “Götterdämmerung in Vienna,” and “Napoleon and Love,” by Martin Chalmers; “Correct Slowing-Down on the Transitional Point between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “When I see you, I must weep,” “Sunday, August 4, 2013, Elmau,” “Night of Decisions,” and “The Complete Version of a Baroque Idea from Christoph Schlingensief” by Wieland Hoban; “Temples of Seriousness” and “The Original Form of Opera” by Martin Brady.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1395) in 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kluge, Alexander, 1932– author.

  Title: Temple of the scapegoat : opera stories / Alexander Kluge ; translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, Donna Stonecipher & Martin Chalmers.

  Other titles: Tempel der Sündenbock. English.

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017041785 (print) | LCCN 2017048115 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811227490 | ISBN 9780811227483 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Opera.

  Classification: LCC ML1700 (ebook) | LCC ML1700 .K5713 2018 (print) | DDC 782.1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041785

  eISBN: 9780811227490

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

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