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Distant sounds – Fallen music: Der ferne Klang as ‘woman's opera’?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Peter Franklin
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Extract

Wagnerian gestures were from the outset translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the public – the murmurings of the people, applause, the trumpet of self-confirmation or waves of enthusiasm. In the process their archaic muteness, their lack of language, proves its worth in a highly contemporary instrument of domination.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 1991 , pp. 159 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Adorno, Theodor, In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1981), 35.Google Scholar

2 Puffett, Derrick, Richard Strauss: ‘Salome’, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1989), 8.Google Scholar

3 Puffett, 9.

4 I am mindful of this central point in Katherine Bergeron's review of Clément's, CatherineOpera or the Undoing of Women, this journal, 2 (1990), 93–8.Google Scholar Clément's book was translated by Betsy Wing (London, 1989).

5 Adorno (see n. l), 46; note also his reference to ‘film-like technique’ in Parsifal, 109.

6 The phrase is from Peter Kivy's review of Paul Robinson's Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss, this journal, 1 (1989), 87.Google Scholar

7 Following Michael Tanner's review of three Cambridge Opera Handbooks (including Puffett, see n. 2) in The Times Literary Supplement, 06 15–21 (1990), 642, correspondence ensued about his suggestion that analytical emphasis on the music can be at the expense of a full and humane critical perspective (Strauss's Salome was particularly in question). In a subsequent letter, Craig Ayrey dutifully protested that ‘nothing could be more humane … than the attempt to reveal the full extent of Strauss's technical mastery and structural control beneath the [tawdriness] of the Dance of the Seven Veils’ (The Times Literary Supplement, 06 24–07 5 [1990], 695). Ayrey finds subtle support in Whittall's, Arnold review article “Forceful Muting” or “Phatic Dithering”? Some Recent Writing on Opera’, Music and Letters, 71/1 (1990), 65–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Accusing Carolyn Abbate (see n. 29 below) of tending to do more justice to the text than the music of Tristan, he concludes his article with the full-scale idealist plea ‘that a great composer can be more than the mere prisoner of psychological and cultural forces outside his own innate creativity’.

8 See Seidl's, Artur article ‘Madame Butterfly and Tiefland’ (1910/1911)Google Scholar, reprinted in his Neuzeitliche Tondichter and zeitgendssische Tonkünstler, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 1926), II, 58.Google Scholar

9 A relevant page, citing a passage from Puccini's La fanciulla del West under the headings ‘Höhepunkt/Katastrophe (Schweres Verhängnis)’, is reproduced in Manvell, Roger and Huntley, John, The Technique of Film Music (London and New York, 1957), 55.Google Scholar

10 In his 1932 biography, Richard Specht addressed the Germanic problem with Puccini. He noted that ‘men of merit’ might confess to liking his music only ‘with a touch of embarrassment, just as they might be ardent readers of Eugene Sue or Conan Doyle without quite liking to admit it’. See Giacomo Puccini– The Man, his Life, his Work, trans. Phillips, Catherine (London, 1933), 3.Google Scholar

11 Works that styled themselves ‘comic opera’, ‘light opera’ or ‘operetta’ (for example) were exempt on the grounds that they aspired to entertain only within wholesome and unthreatening generic limits.

12 See Furman, Nelly, ‘The Languages of Love in Carmen’, in Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 170.Google Scholar

13 Ziegler, Hans Severus, initiator of the Nazis' ‘Entartete Musik’ exhibition in Düsseldorf (1938)Google Scholar, branded Schreker a Jewish ‘scribbler’ (Vielschreiber) in his accompanying booklet, adding: ‘There was no sexual-pathological aberration that he did not set to music’. See Dümling, Albrecht and Girth, Peter, eds., Entartete Musik: Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938, 2nd edn (Düsseldorf, 1988), 133.Google Scholar

14 In ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, Brecht compared features of Dramatic Theatre and Epic Theatre, then of Dramatic Opera and Epic Opera. See Willett, John, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964; rpt. London, 1984), 37–8.Google Scholar

15 Eisler, Hanns [with Theodor Adorno], Composing for the Films (1947; rpt. London 1951), 61Google Scholar

16 See Adorno, Theodor, Musikalische Schriften I–III, Gesammelte Schriften, XVI (Frankfurt a.M., 1978), 368–81Google Scholar and Musikalische Schriften VI, Gesammelte Schriften, XIX (Frankfurt a.M., 1984), 272–3.Google Scholar

17 In ‘Schreker and Modernism: On the Dramaturgy of Der ferne Klang’, in Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Puffett, Derrick and Clayton, Alfred (Cambridge, 1987), 199.Google Scholar

18 Dahlhaus, 200.

19 Dahlhaus, 197.

20 Gorbman, Claudia, Unheard Melodies. Narrative Film Music (London and Bloomington, 1987)Google Scholar.

21 Kramer, Lawrence: ‘Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex’, this journal, 2 (1990), 269–94.Google Scholar Kramer’s concerns fruitfully overlap with my own in a number of ways.

22 I am thinking in particular of Paul Robinson's extraordinary but clearly serious suggestion that ‘an operatic text really has no meaning worth talking about except as it is transformed into music’. See Paul Robinson, ‘A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera’, in Groos and Parker (n.12), 341–2.

23 Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I–III (see n. 16), 369–70. The translation of the stage direction is my own, as in other cases where no translator is cited.

24 Beyond any specific emotional connotation, that is. Gorbman (see n. 20), 79.

25 Doane, Mary Ann, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (1987; rpt. London, 1988), 5.Google Scholar

26 All the extracts are from Schreker's essay ‘Wie entsteht eine Oper?’ (1930), quoted in Schreker-Bures, H., Stuckenschmidt, H. H. and Oehlmann, W., Franz Schreker (Vienna, 1970), 15.Google Scholar

27 See Bennett, Tony, ‘The Politics of the “Popular” and Popular Culture’, in Bennett, Tony, Mercer, Colin and Woollacot, Janet, eds., Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1986), 19.Google Scholar

28 Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I–III (see n. 16), 379.

29 See Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Wagner, “On Modulation” and Tristan’, this journal, 1 (1989), 41Google Scholar, where she speaks of the ‘robust and manly rhapsodies to largeness, vastness, immensity’ of English-language Wagner analysis as compared with German, post-Adornian attention to Wagnerian detail. Sympathising with her ‘frustration with large-scale structuralist and reductive analysis’ (37), my suggestion here is precisely that the textual-musical disjunction of which she writes becomes ever more extreme in the early twentieth-century opera type under discussion, but to the end of music's meaningful contextualisation rather than the re-achievement of mysterious autonomy for its traditional forms and processes, as in Wozzeck.

30 A suggestion from Adorno's review of the 1929 Berlin revival of Der ferne Klang under Schreker, Adorno, Musikalische Schriften VI (see n. 16), 272.

31 H. Schreker-Bures (see n. 26), 13.

32 Translated as Opera or the Undoing of Women, Catherine Clément's book was originally published (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar as L'opéra ou la défait des femmes.