Modernism

and Opera
 H O PStudies
H S M Hopkins K I NinSModernism
STUDIES IN MODERN
Douglas Mao, Series Editor

HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERN

HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERN

Modernism
and Opera

Edited by Richard Begam

and Matthew Wilson Smith

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press
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Names: Begam, Richard, 1950– editor. | Smith, Matthew Wilson,

editor.
Title: Modernism and opera / edited by Richard Begam and
Matthew Wilson Smith.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. |
Series: Hopkins studies in modernism | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047645 | ISBN 9781421420622 (hardcover :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421420639 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420627
(hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421420635 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Opera—20th century. | Modernism (Music)
Classification: LCC ML1705 .M63 2016 | DDC 782.109/04—dc23
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In memory of our friend and fellow scholar
Daniel Albright
1945–2015
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith

I World War I and Before: Crises of Gender and Theatricality

1. Laughing at the Redeemer: Kundry and the Paradox
of Parsifal 29
Matthew Wilson Smith
2. Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 63
Daniel Albright
3. Echoes of the Self: Cosmic Loneliness in Bartók’s Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle 101
Klára Móricz

II Interwar Modernism: Movement and Countermovement

4. The Great War and Its Aftermath: Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s
“Third-Way Modernism” 129
Bryan Gilliam
5. Adorno’s Shifting Wozzeck 148
Bernadette Meyler
6. Many Modernisms, Two Makropulos Cases: Čapek, Janáček, and
the Shifting Avant-Gardes of Interwar Prague 186
Derek Katz
7. Schoenberg, Modernism, and Degeneracy 206
Richard Begam
viii Contents

  8. Gertrude Stein, Minimalism, and Modern Opera 244

Cyrena N. Pondrom

III Opera after World War II: Tensions of Institutional Modernism

  9. Stravinsky, Auden, and the Midcentury Modernism of
The Rake’s Progress 271
Herbert Lindenberger
10. Gloriana and the New Elizabethan Age 290
Irene Morra
11. One Saint in Eight Tableaux: The Untimely Modernism of
Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise 315
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
12. Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin: Modernist Opera in the
Twenty-First Century 341
Joy H. Calico

Contributors 361
Index 365
 Acknowledgments

We would like to begin by thanking the contributors to this volume for their
patience and good humor through all those proposals, drafts, revisions, fur-
ther revisions, and editing deadlines. Their understanding and professional-
ism lightened our labors and reminded us of how fortunate we are to have
such generous colleagues. We are also indebted to the anonymous review-
ers of the manuscript who identified errors, made improving suggestions,
and offered encouragement. At Johns Hopkins University Press, we wish
especially to thank Douglas Mao, our series editor, whose attentive reading
helped us further refine the manuscript, as well as Matt McAdam, acquisi-
tions editor in Humanities and Literary Studies, Catherine Goldstead, senior
editorial assistant, and freelancer Carrie Watterson, our splendid copy edi-
tor. We are also grateful to Michael Opest, Phillip Bandy, and Jessi Piggott
who provided invaluable research and editorial assistance in the preparation
of this volume. Finally, our most heartfelt thanks go to our wives, Christiaan
Marie Hendrickson and Bernadette Meyler, who supported and sustained us
as Modernism and Opera went from idea to book.

Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 7 appeared in Modernist Cultures 3.1 (2010),

© Edinburgh University Press Limited, and are reproduced with permission
of Edinburgh University Press Limited via PLSClear. Both essays were sub-
stantially revised for this book.
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Modernism
and Opera
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith

But you, divine one, you resounding to the end.

When attacked by the swarm of rejected maenads,
gorgeous god, you drowned out their shrieks with order,
the architecture of your song rose from the destroyers.
Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, 135

In opera, one always dies of the thing one loves. To love less than the impos-
sible, less than that for which one cannot live, is not to love at all: the eter-
nal return of this Liebestod is opera’s Orphic mystery. Which is simply to say
what every opera lover already knows—that opera is forever dying in hopes
of being reborn, transformed.
The essayist Charles de Saint-Évremond was only one of the more elo-
quent in a long line of opera opponents when, around 1670, he dismissed
the art as mere fancy and opined that “the fatigue” among opera spectators
“is so universal, that everyone wishes himself out of the house.”1 Amid the
Querelle des Bouffons—the “battle of the comic actors” that raged in 1750s
Paris over the artistic merit of opera buffa—partisans cried murder on either
side of the aisle, stirring resentments that had barely been extinguished
before Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide kindled another and yet fiercer conflagra-
tion. Skipping ahead to the beginnings of modernism, we may take Tolstoy
as representative of a new guild of opera assassins when, after suffering
through two acts of Siegfried in 1889, he complained, “I could stand no more
of it, and escaped from the theatre with a feeling of repulsion which, even
now, I cannot forget”—an evisceration of the work that forms the center-
piece of his aesthetics in What Is Art?2 Tolstoy’s sense of physical aversion is
as integral to the operatic experience as is Nietzsche’s shudder of nervous
ecstasy, felt two decades earlier when he first heard the overtures to Die
2 Modernism and Opera

Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde: “Every fiber, every nerve in me twitches,
and I have not had such a lasting feeling of reverie in a long time.”3 Nietzsche
would later submit to opera’s repetition compulsion and regurgitate his god
“—he has made music sick—” while delivering an encomium to Bizet’s tale of
a corporal who destroys himself by murdering the gypsy he adores.4
Now if we agree that opera is, in Herbert Lindenberger’s words, the “ex-
travagant art,” then its relation to modernism is vexed.5 The flamboyance of
the prima donna, the extraterrestrial bodies both vile and wunderbar, the
blessed rage for ornament—every juicy trait captured by that adjective
“­operatic”—would appear to be the very antithesis of the cool formalism
and streamlined geometry we so often associate with modernism. The op-
eratic stage is a realm where function follows form more often than the
other way around, and where avant-garde practices—twelve-tone composi-
tion, minimalist costuming, sets constructed entirely of light and shadow or
else made shockingly au courant—tend to reify into mere gestures with
peculiar rapidity. As quintessence of the theatrical, opera is “a prototype of
precisely that which today is deeply shaken,” according to Adorno in 1955,
looking back on the previous eighty years or so of operatic innovation.6
Modernist opera’s bind, he concludes, is that “the genre cannot dispense
with its appearance without surrendering itself, and yet it must want to do
so.”7 In this sense, modernist opera shares a great deal with modernist fash-
ion, another quasi-oxymoron in which modernism’s tension between time-
less myth and commodified ephemerality vibrates with peculiar force.
Admittedly, the idea of modernism as detached and abstracted—­presided
over by a God indifferently paring his fingernails—has been justifiably chal-
lenged in recent years. But even if we substantially qualify this view of the
modern, for many it will seem incongruous to place the cerebral experimen-
talism of James Joyce or T. S. Eliot alongside the baroque theatricality of the
musical stage. Then again, it’s worth pointing out that both Ulysses and The
Waste Land make repeated and revealing references to opera. Joyce’s novel
fairly bristles with quotations from Bellini, Bizet, Donizetti, Flotow, Lehar,
Meyerbeer, Rossini, Verdi, and Wagner, and Molly Bloom—the novel’s her-
oine and central focus—is herself a celebrated soprano. Critics have some-
times ignored Joyce’s interest in opera, assuming it is nothing more than a
foil to his modernism, a kind of musty Victorianism that serves to counter-
point his avant-gardism, yet the operatic material in Ulysses is integral to its
plot and technique. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Flotow’s Martha provide
Joyce with crucial subtexts—subtexts that are inextricably linked to the
Introduction 3

novel’s audaciously modernist “Sirens”—and Joyce’s stream-of-conscious-

ness technique is itself indebted to Édouard Dujardin’s attempt (in Les
lauriers sont coupés, 1887) to find a literary analogue to Wagner’s use of
leitmotif. Similarly, references in The Waste Land to Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde may be dismissed as an overly lush Romanticism, meant to contrast
with the sterility and desolation that otherwise dominate Eliot’s modernist
classic. But again, it should be remembered that the poem, with its vision of
thwarted love, impotence, and wounds that unman, is a retelling not only
of Tristan und Isolde but also—and perhaps more evocatively—of Wagner’s
Parsifal. In other words, opera does more than haunt these modernist master-
pieces: it significantly and substantially determines their form and c­ ontent.
The enthusiasm British modernists showed for opera is also richly attested
to by the number of major writers—including E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden,
Arnold Bennett, Robert Graves, and Stephen Spender—who penned libretti.
Within an English context, this intersection of music and text is memorably
represented by the collaboration of Edith Sitwell and William Walton on the
musical recitation, Façade, which premiered in 1922, the same year Ulysses
and The Waste Land were published. If we shift our focus to the Continent,
the interest in collaborative work becomes even more remarkable. Obvi-
ously, the best-known example is the scandalous 1913 ballet, Le sacre du
printemps, which featured music by Igor Stravinsky, sets by Nicholas ­Roerich,
and choreography by Vaslav Nijinksy. This kind of cooperative artistic work
was also evident in the 1917 ballet Parade, which brought together some of
the greatest modernists of the period, including Erik Satie (music), Jean Coc-
teau (scenario), Pablo Picasso (set design), and Léonide Massine (choreogra-
phy). Among the collaborative efforts in opera that followed are Oskar Ko-
koschka and Paul Hindemith’s expressionist Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen
(1919), Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical Oedipus Rex (1927),
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s agitprop-influenced Threepenny Opera (1928)
and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1931), and Guillaume Apol-
linaire and Francis Poulenc’s surrealist Les mamelles de Tirésias (1947). This
interest in working across the arts—indeed across the media of language,
music, and visual representation—played a decisive role in the definition
and development of modernism.
One of the larger assumptions behind this volume is that the intermedi-
ality that characterized so much of modernist praxis is most memorably
realized in the synthetic genius of opera—in its ability to bring together the
literary, dramatic, visual, and musical in a single aesthetic expression.8 This
4 Modernism and Opera

impulse toward integrating—or at least coordinating—different artistic

media, especially those that focus on words and music, is evident in the
present collection in such pairings as Maurice Maeterlinck and Claude De-
bussy, Hugo Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, Georg Büchner and Alban
Berg, Karel Čapek and Leoš Janáček, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson,
and Igor Stravinsky and W. H. Auden. At the same time, many of the ­chapters
in this volume examine how artists, engaged by the problem of mimesis, chal-
lenged or redefined the limits of representation, whether by emphasizing
consonances or dissonances among various artistic media. By studying the ways
in which operatic theater of the past 120 years foregrounded collaboration
across the arts, problematized formal integrity, and sought to transcend
traditional modes of expression, we hope to understand more fully the aes-
thetic program that shaped both opera and modernism.
■ ■ ■

If opera is forever dying in the hope of being reborn, so too is modernism.

As its etymology indicates (from the Latin modo, meaning “now”), modern-
ism is committed to what is contemporary or happening in the moment, but
the word’s suffix temporally extends its root, suggesting a state of ongoing
or continuous innovation, a sort of perpetual novelty that, like Wagnerian
melody, never ends. The problem, of course, is in sustaining the newness of
the new. For once modernism achieves the kind of stability necessary to
give it definitional shape, once it acquires the weight of tradition and au-
thority of a canon, it risks becoming just one more version of the status quo.
Like Janáček’s Emilia Marty or Wilde’s Dorian Gray, modernism begins to
resemble an anxious diva or dandy, forever worrying lest the mask of youth-
ful vitality slip away, revealing that what lies beneath is that most unmodern
of all things—the passé.
In recent years, the most influential effort to renew and revitalize mod-
ernism as a scholarly field has centered on the New Modernist Studies and
its commitment to a more comprehensive canon, one that incorporates
those elements of avant-garde and popular culture that, in the 1980s and
1990s, were often viewed as post- or antimodern. The program of the New
Modernist Studies was most succinctly articulated by Douglas Mao and Re-
becca Walkowitz in their well-known 2008 article of that title.9 As Mao and
Walkowitz put it, “Were one seeking a single word to sum up transforma-
tions in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one
could do worse than light on expansion.”10 That expansion has moved along
three axes. The temporal axis enlarged the historical scope of modernism
Introduction 5

beyond the “core period of about 1890–1945,” reaching back to the middle
of the nineteenth century and forward to the beginning of the present cen-
tury.11 The spatial axis extended the geographic reach of modernism to a
genuinely international, indeed global, scale, no longer confining itself
within the boundaries of a few national literatures, especially the Anglo-
American tradition. Expansion along the vertical axis meant breaking down
divisions, largely defined by Clement Greenberg and Theodor W. Adorno,
between a “high” art associated with an austere formalism and a “low” art
characterized by a “kitschy” sensationalism. Finally, we argue that the New
Modernist Studies also developed along a fourth, horizontal axis, which we
would add to Mao and Walkowitz’s account.12 In terms of subject matter,
this axis encourages scholars to move across the arts in ways that, as we have
seen, are especially congenial to a mixed-media form like opera.13 In terms
of approach, this axis involves precisely the kind of cross-disciplinary work
that motivates this volume, work that not only brings together scholars
from literature and music but that also utilizes research methods and proto-
cols drawn from different disciplines.
With this last point in mind, we think it is also useful to contextualize the
present work in terms of what has come to be known as the New Musicol-
ogy. Interestingly, much of the New Musicology took its inspiration from
changes that were already underway in literary studies. In what is often re-
ferred to as the article that launched the movement, “How We Got into
Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Joseph Kerman polemically draws a com-
parison between the formalism dominating musicology in 1980s and the
earlier influence of New Criticism in literary studies: “One is reminded of
the state of literary studies in the 1930s. Musical analysis has also reminded
many observers of the New Criticism which arose at that time.”14 In “Adorno
and the New Musicology,” Rose Rosengard Subotnik similarly suggests that
musicology look to literary studies as a guide, especially to developments in
Marxism and poststructuralism: “At the fall 1990 Annual Meeting of the
American Musicological Society, in Oakland, California, scholars of all lean-
ings were hit by an unprecedent[ed]ly strong blast of the critical theory that
had been altering the study of literature at American universities for two
decades.”15 The New Musicologists (aside from Kerman and Subotnik, its
best-known representatives include Carolyn Abbate, Lawrence Kramer,
Susan McClary, and Gary Tomlinson) wanted not merely to reintroduce so-
ciology to musical analysis but to introduce musical analysis to Continental
theory. Figures such as Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan—none of whom
6 Modernism and Opera

had been much of a presence in musicology before, say, 1990—­became in-

creasingly unavoidable.
As Subotnik suggests, New Musicology was to a certain degree simply
catching up with movements that had already profoundly shaped literary
studies. If there is a sense of belatedness to the movement, that sense is
underscored by comparison with the New Modernist Studies, which takes
the importance of critical theory more or less for granted while at times
expressing impatience with the antiformalism of some recent sociologists
of literature. One senses, with the decline of the shock of New Musicology
and the advent of New Modernism, an abatement in the so-called theory
wars. By the turn of the new century, after all, critical theory had become
standard operating procedure in many departments across the humanities,
shaping everything from scholarship to undergraduate teaching and even
reaching into the sciences. In literary studies as in musicology, old battle
lines between formalism and critical theory (to choose just one pair of
names for the shifting and often ill-defined opposition) were coming to be
seen not just as entrenched but as increasingly irrelevant, as the crucial
fights were now being waged elsewhere, notably in deans’ offices, where
axes were falling on departmental budgets across the humanities. If there is
a certain posttheoretical tenor to many of the chapters in this collection,
the “post” should indicate not an exhaustion with theory—and some return
to the good old business of just dealing with the (musical, linguistic) texts
before us—but rather a sense that many of the insights of fin-de-XXe-siècle
theory have been incorporated into our scholarly vocabulary.
Recalling Mao and Walkowitz’s “axial” account of New Modernist Stud-
ies, we can trace a number of ways the chapters in this volume rechart the
field. The interest in traversing the arts—the horizontal axis—is immedi-
ately evident in those chapters that examine the relation between score and
libretto, which is to say between music and literature. Daniel Albright, for
instance, argues that the impressionist Debussy finds his perfect vehicle in
the symbolist Maeterlinck, revealing the kinds of transformations that occur
when modernist opera straddles different movements as well as different
arts. In using Adorno to examine Berg’s musical adaptation of Büchner’s
drama, Bernadette Meyler explores how moving across artistic media also
involves moving through time, producing a modernism that unfolds dialec-
tically in relation to an antecedent tradition. Approaching modernism as a
historical phenomenon is also crucial to Derek Katz’s analysis of The Makro-
pulos Case as both drama and opera. In 1922 Čapek’s play seemed radically
Introduction 7

new, but its novelty had substantially faded by 1926 when Janáček adapted
it to the operatic stage, resulting in two distinct conceptions of contempo-
raneity in Czech modernism. The movement of modernism from literature
to music is further complicated in Cyrena N. Pondrom’s account of Four
Saints in Three Acts. Although Thomson worked closely with Stein on the
opera, the minimalist and iterative structures that later characterized the
contemporary opera of Philip Glass and John Adams are most evident in
Stein’s libretto, suggesting intriguing confluences between literature and
music. The sense of the temporality of modernism is also evident in Herbert
Lindenberger’s account of Stravinsky’s collaboration with W. H. Auden on
The Rake’s Progress. The neoclassicism that represents a point of arrival for
Stravinsky—an evolution beyond an earlier phase of modernism—­represents
for Auden a point of departure.
What all of these cases illustrate is the extent to which modernism func-
tions as a series of uneven temporalities in which movements as diverse as
symbolism, impressionism, nationalism, minimalism, and neoclassicism
crisscross each other, converging and diverging at various points, entering
into conflict here and finding accommodation there. Such an approach—
one that assumes a dynamic and ever-evolving modernism—is especially
well suited to the broadened timeline of the New Modernist Studies (its
temporal axis), and our historical purview therefore extends from the last
third of the nineteenth century up to the twenty-first century. The volume’s
chronological organization into three sections (an emergent prewar mod-
ernism, a middle interwar modernism, and a late contemporary modernism)
is meant to provide our study with conceptual structure and developmental
coherence. Insofar as the operas we treat are in conversation with each
other—and with parallel developments in theater, literature, and ­philosophy—
we consider the historical approach we have taken both useful and justified.
If Wagner “breaks the back of tonality” and provides a pushing-off point for
much of modernist opera, it is important to situate him at the beginning of
the volume. Debussy, Strauss, and Schoenberg all respond directly to Wag-
ner; Berg’s and Janáček’s operas are inseparable from their historical situa-
tions; Thomson and Stein anticipated minimalist techniques that emerged
after World War II; and the entire last section of the volume engages with
issues related to aesthetic and institutional changes that took place in the
second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, we recognize that
there are chronological asymmetries and temporal disjunctions in our tri-
partite organization. Thus, although we have grouped together Parsifal, Pel-
8 Modernism and Opera

léas et Mélisande, and Bluebeard’s Castle as examples of opera from World

War I and before, one could argue that Strauss stylistically shares more with
Wagner than with Debussy or Bartók. Wozzeck (1925), The Makropulos Case
(1926), Moses und Aron (1932), and Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) form a
tidy interwar modernist grouping, yet the last act of Schoenberg’s opera, in
a gesture worthy of John Cage, abandons music altogether, while Stein and
Thomson’s minimalism arguably has more in common with Glass and Adams
than with the operas of the 1920s and 1930s. Even the last section, devoted
to late modernism, includes operas that are stylistically quite distinct.
Stravinsky’s pared-down neoclassicism stands in contrast to Britten’s gal-
liards and lavoltas, as does Messiaen’s abstracted modernism in relation to
Saariaho’s textured lyricism. It is precisely this interplay of formal similitude
and difference—evident within and across our three groupings—that en-
ables these operas to achieve a set of loosely defined family resemblances
within the matrix of a historically extended modernism.
Coverage is always a problem in any synoptic account of a large field, and
inevitably omissions occur—as they have here—of both worthy composers
and influential traditions. Within the limitations of Euromodernism, we
have, however, sought to show that modernism produces points of inter-
section not only in time but also in space (the Mao-Walkowitz spatial axis).
The German Wagner, who arguably stands as the father of modern opera,
makes his presence felt almost everywhere, from France (Debussy and
­Messiaen), Hungary (Bartók) and Austria (Strauss, Schoenberg, and Berg) to
Czechoslovakia (Janáček) and Finland (Saariaho). Belgian literature is trans-
lated into French music in Pelléas et Mélisande, the impact of Berg is regis-
tered in Prague in The Makropulos Case, Russia comes to England in The
Rake’s Progress, and Darmstadt modernism shapes French and Finnish music
in Saint François d’Assise and L’amour de loin.
Where an earlier view of international modernism argued for its univer-
salism by often overlooking or ignoring historical contexts, many of the
chapters in this volume demonstrate how fully modernist opera engages
with the topical and the political. The changing view of women in early
modernism is the subject of two of the first three chapters. Matthew Wilson
Smith examines Kundry, the principal female character of Wagner’s Parsifal,
in terms of an emerging psychoanalytic discourse on hysteria, while Klára
Móricz investigates the transformation of women from symbols of redemp-
tive power in the nineteenth century to demonic temptresses in the twen-
tieth century. In a more explicitly political vein, Bryan Gilliam reads Strauss’s
Introduction 9

The Egyptian Helen and Arabella in terms of the collapse of the Austro-­
Hungarian Empire, Richard Begam examines Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
as a response to the National Socialist attack on “degenerate art,” and Irene
Morra scrutinizes the difficulties that Britten encountered in Gloriana nego-
tiating nationalist commitments and modernist aesthetics. Finally, if politics
is of importance to Gilliam, Begam, and Morra, religion is the focus of Linda
and Michael Hutcheon’s engagement with Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise,
which reveals how Catholic devotion finds expression in modernist form
and technique.
We have contextualized some of the ways the New Modernist Studies
and New Musicology have influenced our approach to opera, but of equal
significance is recent scholarship, much of it revisionary, on modernism and
theatricality. It is an overriding argument of this volume that taking opera
seriously as a central aspect of modernism not only expands but also desta-
bilizes our understanding of this elusive term. To better grasp how this de-
stabilization functions and what it means, we must revisit the old question
of modernism and theatricality.
■ ■ ■

The antipathy of many modern artists toward the theatrical is far more than
just another instance of the well-worn antitheatrical prejudice famously
charted by Jonas Barish; it is a tendency within, if not quite a criterion of,
modernism itself, already visible in revolts against mid-nineteenth-century
conventions of theatrical illusion as different as naturalism and symbolism.
Indeed, as Martin Puchner has shown, modernism so often defined itself in
opposition to the theater and theatricality that the very phrase “modernist
theater” has at times come to seem nearly oxymoronic.16 Yet what makes
modernist antitheatricality especially slippery is the fact that the meaning
of “theatricality” itself changed rapidly from the late nineteenth to the late
twentieth century, yielding countergestures as diverse as Ibsen’s unmasking
of domestic masquerades and Pirandello’s reintroduction of stage masks,
Wagner’s extinguishing the house lights at Bayreuth, and Brecht and Weill’s
use of agitprop placards in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Mean-
while, alongside these changes, certain age-old themes persisted: theatricality
continued to be associated, as it has since Plato, with the inauthentic, the
unserious, the vulgar, the feminine, degenerate, and queer. More t­roubling
still is theater’s dreadful dependence on the whims and conceits of a present
audience: as anyone who has ever been involved in live performance knows,
the theater artist relies upon a public not just for a work to be successful but
10 Modernism and Opera

for a work to be a work at all. In short, many modernists—playwrights such

as Pirandello, Brecht, and Ionesco; composers such as Debussy, Berg, and
Schoenberg—found in theatricality a form at once proximate and other, a
form to be simultaneously drawn from, rejected, and reinvented. This per-
sistence of modernist antitheatricality can be found across political, artistic,
and national spectra, linking not only artists as different as Ibsen and Brecht
but also theoreticians as opposed as Adorno and Greenberg.
Given their enormous influence as exemplars and interpreters of mod-
ernism, Adorno and Greenberg may be considered the principal theoretical
architects of the modernist resistance to theater. Adorno’s antitheatricality,
fittingly inseparable from his championing of Berg and Beckett, can be
found in its starkest form in his In Search of Wagner (written 1937–38, pub-
lished 1952), with its fulsome attacks on Wagnerian gesture. The work bor-
rows heavily from Nietzsche’s fin-de-siècle assault on the theater (and
Bayreuth above all) as “always only beneath art, always only something sec-
ondary, something made cruder, something twisted tendentiously, menda-
ciously, for the sake of the masses.”17 Like Nietzsche again, Adorno associ-
ates the theater and theatricality with mob mentality and manipulation, an
association that shapes Adorno’s myriad descriptions of mass-media audi-
ences as gawkers and fetishists. It is this unyielding critique of mass culture
—whether fascist or “pop”—together with the notion of theatricality as in-
imical to the modernist temperament, that binds together Adorno’s aes-
thetic writings with those of Greenberg. In a characteristic passage of Art
and Culture (1961), Greenberg writes that “a modernist work of art must try,
in principle, to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given
in the most essentially construed nature of its medium. This means, among
other things, renouncing illusion and explicitness. The arts are to achieve
concreteness, ‘purity,’ by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreduc-
ible selves.”18
The logic of Greenberg’s aesthetics, whereby each art form strives to
emancipate itself from the others in order to realize most fully what is pe-
culiar and exclusive to it, is almost intrinsically hostile to a compound and
collaborative art form such as the theater, to say nothing of the omnivorous-
ness of opera. It is perhaps to be expected, then, that Greenberg’s most
influential student, Michael Fried, considers the theater antiartistic almost
by definition; existing between art forms, the theater simply has no inher-
ent qualities to be cultivated. When Fried concludes, in “Art and Object-
hood” (1967), that the “success, even the survival, of the arts, has become
Introduction 11

increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre,” he speaks for a sort

of cultural guardianship that came to define the institutions of Cold War
modernism.19 If Fried’s essay represents a hardening, even a reification, of
earlier modernist gestures, it also exemplifies a cultural attitude still not
entirely past.
What might it mean, in the face of such positions, to speak of a truly oper-
atic modernism, one that can neither be positioned with avant-garde perfor-
mance (manifestos, actions, happenings, etc.) and thereby distinguished (as
per Peter Bürger) from the stream of modernism nor condescended to as
haute-bourgeois kitsch and thereby handed entirely over to sociological
analysis and ideology critique? To answer this question, it might help to turn
not to opera but to that foundational work of modern drama, Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House (1879), and more specifically to the moment when Nora dances the
tarantella—dances it to nervous chaos. According to Toril Moi, in her inci-
sive analysis of the play, the dance is both an authentic expression of Nora
and a theatrical objectification of her, without showing us which of the two
possibilities we ought to choose:

If we try, we find that either option entails a loss. Do we prefer a theatre of au-
thenticity and sincerity? Do we believe that realism is such a theatre? Then we
may be forgetting that even the most intense expressions of the body provide no
certain way of telling authenticity from theatricality, truth from performance. Do
we prefer a theatrical theatre, self-consciously performing and performative? If
so, we may make ourselves deaf to the pain and distress of others by theatrical-
izing it. If I were asked whether I would call Nora’s tarantella theatrical or ab-
sorbed, I would not quite know what to say. Both? Neither one nor the other?20

Moi locates Ibsen’s modernism in precisely this undecidability, this “impossi-

bility of either choosing or not choosing between theatricality and authen-
ticity.”21 And it is in this same conflicted space that operatic modernism re-
sides.
The space is a risky one, and not only in the sense that all art is poten-
tially risky. The extravagant performance of one’s own body entails the pe-
rennial danger of that most nightmarish of experiences: being laughed at.
It’s an ancient worry, one we find already expressed by old Cadmus in The
Bacchae, as he hobbles out to dance in the Dionysian revels: “Won’t folks
say I ought to be ashamed, taking up dancing / now that I’m so old, and put-
ting ivy on my head?”22 Among those who viewed modernism as an ascetic
aesthetic cult, such shame was so unthinkable that even the risk-takers had
12 Modernism and Opera

to be exiled from the temple. It was not only Dionysus who must be dis-
missed; Cadmus too was suspect. The shamefulness of the theater, insepa-
rable (as The Bacchae reminds us) from its destabilization of performances
of gender and status—and inseparable as well from the theater artist’s hu-
miliating dependence upon that most fickle of masters, the public—this
embarrassment is one that operas have played upon from Parsifal through
Four Saints in Three Acts.
This desire to move beyond modernism’s antitheatricality toward its rich
vein of theatricality, and to do so without simply replacing one favored term
with another, is shared by a number of recent scholars.23 It is shared, too,
by several authors in this volume. Daniel Albright, for example, discusses
not only Debussy’s debt to Maeterlinck’s minimalist dramaturgy but also his
(ambivalent) enthusiasm for Wagnerian Sturm und Drang, the “great ner-
vous gasps, chromatic whirls in which the chroma varies from dark blue to
black, the sound equivalent of van Gogh’s Starry Night.” Similarly, Herbert
Lindenberger, who has previously written on the antitheatricality of much
twentieth-century opera, here turns his attention to the vexed relation of
Stravinsky and theatricality.24 While fully conscious of the ways in which
The Rake’s Progress “asks its listeners to note the extreme artifice at the heart
of the form,” Lindenberger also notes that the work “is as overtly theatrical
as any opera in the classic repertory.” And Irene Morra, to take another in-
stance, discusses the strong association of Elizabethanism with theatricality
as well as the “celebration of theater as history and history as theater.” From
such chapters we discover that modernist opera may best be read not sim-
ply as theatrical or antitheatrical but as riven, often ostentatiously so, be-
tween the desire to estrange and the equally compelling desire to absorb
and enchant. Rather than dubbing the former tendency modernist and the
latter pre-, post-, or simply non-, we ought to learn to see in modernist
opera precisely this vexation. In this way we might learn to find, too, a sort
of authenticity that is not merely theatricality’s antithesis.
If operatic modernism entails a kind of authenticity that is not theatrical-
ity’s other, then what might it mean to speak of modernist opera? For when
we choose to take both terms of “modernist opera” seriously, a different
modernism emerges and a different opera too. In his enlightening essay
“The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism,” Michael Steinberg
argues that to view modernism’s relation to history as one of mere rejection
and wholesale reinvention is to miss the repetition within modernist differ-
Introduction 13

ence. For Debussy, for Schoenberg, for Janáček, for Thomson, the injunc-
tion to “make it new” never meant to create ex nihilo but to rebuild (even if
from the ground up) largely with existing materials. “Modernism’s drive for
freedom did not entail a disavowal of history so much as distance from the
reactionary aspects of history,” Steinberg writes.25 While the claim is per-
haps too broadly stated, in that it would seem almost to rule out by defini-
tion what Jeffrey Herf has dubbed “reactionary modernism,” Steinberg dis-
covers in modernist opera in particular little alliance with fascism. Despite
Strauss’s ambiguous relation to the Nazi regime, there are no Knut Hamsuns
or Filippo Marinettis in the world of modernist opera composers. While
many German opera composers fled (Schoenberg, Hindemith, Korngold),
many Italians went into something like internal exile (Pietro Mascagni, Fran-
cesco Cilea, Riccardo Zandonai), and few if any modernist opera composers
anywhere were determined collaborationists.26
This resistance to, or at least distance from, fascism is linked, in Stein-
berg’s view, to modernist opera’s basic cosmopolitanism. Modernist opera
was essentially “European, international, and emancipatory where its lead-
ing historical and political referents are German, nationalistic, and hege-
monic.”27 The crucial turn is the one from Wagner to Strauss, with the for-
mer seen as (in the main, and by the time of his death) nationalistic while
the latter is viewed as (again, in the main) postnationalist, with Salome and
Elektra allied in a mutual disinterest in nationalist mythmaking. In this re-
spect Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, with its call for a return to national and ar-
tistic “roots,” stands as a paradigmatic antimodernist opera.
The chapters in this volume to some degree support and to some degree
complicate Steinberg’s claim of the genre’s postnationalism. Bryan Gilliam
argues that Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen and Arabella—written in part as a
response to Wagner—gave expression to the idea of a unified Europe in
which East and West would come together in an allegorical marriage of na-
tions. Derek Katz, meanwhile, distinguishes between the modernism of
Karel Čapek’s drama The Makropulos Case, which was inseparable from a
broader Czech movement of National Revival, and the modernism of Leoš
Janáček’s opera version, which arose during a more cosmopolitan moment
of Czech modernism. The chapter adds some weight as well as some nuance
to Steinberg’s internationalist thesis, as indeed does Linda and Michael
Hutcheon’s consideration of both the internationalist and the distinctively
French elements of Olivier Messiaen’s St. François d’Assise. Of all the works
14 Modernism and Opera

considered in depth in this volume, only Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana would

seem to work against the grain of postnational modernism, and it is this
peculiar quality of the opera that Irene Morra attends to here.
■ ■ ■

Part 1 of this volume, “World War I and Before: Crises of Gender and The-
atricality,” takes as its point of departure Richard Wagner, whose revolu-
tions in composition and staging—famously described by him as Zukunfts-
musik, or the “music of the future”—laid the foundation for what would
become modernist opera, while inspiring composers like Debussy and
Bartók.28 Reflecting social and aesthetic transformations occurring at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, this sec-
tion highlights changing ideas of gender and theatricality. Age-old associa-
tions among theatricality, hysteria, and “woman” have been central to the
(mistaken) conception of modernism as detached, cerebral, and masculine.
The chapters in this section problematize this conception by showing that
ideas of the feminine and the theatrical were sharply contested sites in
which an emerging modernism struggled with its own self-definition.
Matthew Wilson Smith’s “Laughing at the Redeemer: Kundry and the
Paradox of Parsifal” deals with the figure of the woman as a harbinger of
modernism while relating her to Wagnerian innovations in staging. Smith
notes that the period between the writing of the libretto (1877) and the
premiere of the opera coincides with the medicalization of hysteria brought
about by Jean-Martin Charcot’s research at the Salpêtrière, which Sigmund
Freud attended in the mid-1880s. Related to the opera’s interest in hysteria
and selfhood is a developing crisis of representation in the late nineteenth-
century theater that pointed in two directions: toward a symbolism that
subordinated matter to spirit and toward a naturalism that subordinated
spirit to matter. Wagner’s interest in creating an “invisible theater” (burying
the orchestra beneath the stage, extinguishing house lighting, etc.) is con-
nected to his desire to transcend materiality. But as Smith observes, the
character of Kundry haunts the opera not only as woman but also as the
specter of corporeal theatricality. She represents both a disruptive eroti-
cism, which must be suppressed, and an incipient modernism that keeps
breaking out of Wagner’s nineteenth-century costume drama, expressing
itself in that most transgressive of all forms—laughter.
Daniel Albright also deals with issues of theatricality and Wagnerianism
in his chapter on Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), often regarded as the
first fully modernist opera. Debussy’s source was the drama of the same
Introduction 15

title by the Belgian playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, usually associated

with the symbolist movement. Albright shows, however, that Maeterlinck
brought a high degree of irony and self-consciousness to his stage produc-
tions. Indeed, many of his plays bear a striking resemblance to the work of
that most antidramatic of twentieth-century dramatists, Samuel Beckett.
What results is a theater that tends to cancel out its own theatricality—plays
with plot designs and symbolic structures that deliberately undermine
themselves. Debussy was also uncannily sympathetic to Maeterlinck’s aes-
thetic, so that the “first” modernist opera in a certain sense looks like what
we might imagine as the last: a Beckettian work of shadowy vignettes with
half-formed characters uttering half-formed thoughts in timeless, placeless
settings. Debussy finds the musical equivalent to this dramatic aesthetic in
what Albright calls the Verleitmotiv, a leitmotif that effectively undoes itself.
Albright concludes by showing—in ways that look back to Smith’s c­ hapter—
the debt Pelléas et Mélisande owes to Wagner’s Parsifal.
Klára Móricz rounds out this section with “Echoes of the Self: Cosmic
Loneliness in Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” which analyzes the figure of
the woman alongside a modernist sense of isolation and anomie in Béla
Bartók’s opera, composed in 1911 and staged in 1918. Comparing Bartók’s
work with Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” Móricz shows how love—a re-
deeming force in nineteenth-century art—becomes in the twentieth cen-
tury the means of the protagonist’s mental destruction. In Bartók’s opera,
the failure of redemption through love is depicted as a wedding night that
ends with the cosmic loneliness of the male protagonist. Bluebeard is only
one in a long list of artworks that exemplify turn-of-the-century paranoia
concerning women. What distinguishes the opera from other misogynistic
works is that Bartók casts the male protagonist, and not the woman Judith,
as living in harmony with nature. In Bluebeard, man’s spirituality finds its
nourishing environment within the secure enclosure of his castle, a world
into which light cannot penetrate without shattering identity into painful
and fragmentary memories. Self-knowledge in Schubert’s “Doppelgänger”
brings temporary relief, but in Bluebeard the revelation of the protagonist’s
soul, facilitated by Judith, renders the darkness of the castle more impene-
trable and man’s solitude more inescapable.
Part 2, “Interwar Modernism: Movement and Countermovement,” traces
modernist opera from the lush harmonics of Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen
and Arabella to the one of its sparest articulations in Stein and Thomson’s
Four Saints in Three Acts in the 1930s. If Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik marks the
16 Modernism and Opera

first shudderings of musical modernism, this section examines how in the

wake of World War I composers attempted to move beyond Wagner as
modernist opera sought to consolidate itself. Among the issues discussed
here are modernism’s relation to history and tradition, the politics of nation-
alism and postnationalism, the philosophy and aesthetics of “degenerate
art,” and an emergent musical minimalism that looks forward to post–World
War II opera. As this tally of issues shows, the interwar modernism of the
1920s and 1930s was far from unitary in either its preoccupations or its
techniques. Indeed, the composers under discussion in this section ex-
plored varied and conflicting modes of musical expression and dramatiza-
tion, aligning themselves with movements as divergent as expressionism,
symbolism, naturalism, serialism, abstractionism, and minimalism. While
World War I was a catalyzing event and while Wagner was increasingly a point
of negative reference—especially for composers in the Austro-­German world
—the modernism of this period was dynamic and ever shifting, as it strug-
gled toward a sense of what it meant to be “new.”
As Bryan Gilliam shows in “The Great War and Its Aftermath: Strauss and
Hofmannsthal’s ‘Third-Way Modernism,’ ” World War I marked a turning
point for Straussian opera. Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918)—arguably Strauss
and Hofmannsthal’s grandest creation—was conceived in peacetime, com-
posed during war, and premiered just months after the Treaty of Versailles.
Vowing that future works would be stripped of their “Wagnerian musical
armor,” Strauss developed a “third way” in modernism, a musical idiom that
rejected the metaphysics and idealism of Wagner but that retained its tonal
language—now leavened with irony and pastiche. But if the turn away from
Wagner was crucial to the development of a more modern opera, so too
was Austro-Germany’s defeat in the Great War and the end of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. The latter especially traumatized Hofmannsthal, who
wrote numerous essays envisioning a “United States of Europe” where East
and West would be reunited in Vienna. The vision of a postnational Europe
was the covert message of two operas Strauss and Hofmannsthal wrote in
the late 1920s: The Egyptian Helen (1928) and Arabella (1929/33). While both
operas focus on issues of love and marriage, the central characters repre-
sent countries (Greece and Troy, Austria and Croatia), and their possible
unions symbolize the resolution of conflict and the promise of peaceful
coexistence. Especially important is the positive focus on marriage in these
works, which represents a rejection of the romanticism of Wagnerian love.
In both The Egyptian Helen and Arabella, redemption comes not from a
Introduction 17

L­ iebestod that overwhelms and annihilates but from the dedication and pa-
tience of two marriage partners working together.
Like Albright, Bernadette Meyler takes up the musical adaptation of a
dramatic work, in this case Alban Berg’s response to Georg Büchner’s
Woyzeck, in “Adorno’s Shifting Wozzeck.” Meyler’s chapter discusses Berg’s
opera—and its effort to “rescue” or “salvage” (retten) Büchner’s fragmentary
work—in relation to the philosophies of history articulated by both Adorno
and his fellow Frankfurt school critic, Walter Benjamin, another admirer of
Wozzeck. In doing so, Meyler scrutinizes how Berg specifically conceived of
his modernism in historical terms—that is, in relation to a past that is both
retrieved and effaced. Much more than the works of his contemporaries
Schoenberg and Webern, Berg’s music seems to recall the language of the
nineteenth century, but its modernity consists precisely in the quality of its
relation to that earlier material, a relation neither of imitation nor of nostal-
gia. In the “posthumous court of appeals” of Berg’s opera, doing justice to
Büchner’s tragedy entails ripping the work from its historical context while
simultaneously introducing a moment of temporal disjunction into the
twentieth-century modernist movement itself.
In chapter 6, Derek Katz contextualizes yet another operatic rewriting of
a famous dramatic work, this time within the horizon of Czech modernism.
“Many Modernisms, Two Makropulos Cases: Čapek, Janáček, and the Shift-
ing Avant-Gardes of Interwar Prague” takes as its subject Leoš Janáček’s
1926 opera Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case) and Karel Čapek’s 1922
play of the same title. These two works represent telling instances of the
ways in which an emergent nationalism and an emergent modernism were
intertwined in Czech culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. Čapek briefly benefitted from a cultural moment in which to be
Czech—that is, to assert one’s national identity—was a substantial compo-
nent of being modern. In less than a decade, however, this moment would
pass, as a younger generation matured, which took the completion of the
National Revival for granted and aligned itself more with Soviet culture and
international modernism than with a parochial nationalism. By examining
Čapek and Janáček’s versions of The Makropulos Case alongside each other,
we see how Czech modernism—like so many other national modernisms—
functioned as a series of currents and countercurrents, in which different
schools and movements (nationalism, avant-gardism, Marxism) staked com-
peting claims and contested disputed ground.
Like Katz’s chapter, Richard Begam’s “Schoenberg, Modernism, and De-
18 Modernism and Opera

generacy” historically contextualizes modernism, interpreting Arnold Schoen-

berg’s Moses und Aron (1932) as a response to the National Socialist polemic
against entartete Musik, or “degenerate music.” As a matter of polemical
provocation, Schoenberg accepts the Nazi identification of modernism with
Judaism, treating the Decalogue’s prohibition against graven images as the
beginning of an abstract aesthetic. But Schoenberg reverses the Nazi argu-
ment, contending that degeneracy in art—especially a degeneracy that pro-
motes the “primitivism” and “atavism” the Nazis deplored—results not from
the rejection of mimesis but from its idolatrous worship, as the episode of
the golden calf so vividly illustrates. The principal conflict of the opera
­centers on a debate between Moses and Aaron on the status of representa-
tion, but Schoenberg aligns himself with neither of his title characters.
Moses’ commitment to abstraction is so uncompromising that it ultimately
leads to the end of music, as exemplified by Moses’ use of Sprechstimme and
an unscored third act. However, while Aaron better understands the contin-
gency of representation than does his brother, Schoenberg is equally critical
of Aaron’s penchant for conjuring up images that that are dangerously incar-
national. What Schoenberg seeks and his opera delivers is a compromise
between Moses’ rigorous abstractionism and Aaron’s seductive pictorialism.
In “Gertrude Stein, Minimalism, and Modern Opera,” Cyrena N. Pondrom
takes an intermedial approach to Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four
Saints in Three Acts (1934). Looking ahead to the next section of this book,
she considers Stein’s impact not only on Thomson but also on post-1950s
musical minimalism, especially operas like Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s
Einstein on the Beach (1976) and John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987). Focus-
ing on formal features like repetition, hammering rhythms, phased lan-
guage, and use of the vernacular, Pondrom documents the direct influence
Stein had on Thomson and later on John Cage, both of whom first encoun-
tered her work when they were students. Cage would in turn later influence
La Monte Young and Terry Riley, who, along with Steve Reich and Philip
Glass, helped pioneer American minimalism. In addition to her influence on
music, Stein also helped to shape the narrative construction of minimalist
opera, which often organizes itself more around a series of tableaux or im-
ages than around a sequence of events. Glass and Wilson have explicitly
acknowledged Stein’s importance for their work, with Wilson expressing
his special appreciation of Stein’s notion of plays as “landscapes” rather than
traditional, plot-driven stories.
Part 3, “Opera after World War II: Tensions of Institutional Modernism,”
Introduction 19

examines how, in the second half of the twentieth century, modernist prac-
tices of musical composition and opera production became increasingly
standardized, subsidized, and institutionalized. Postwar modernism gener-
ated its own internal tensions, several of which are discussed in the four
concluding chapters. Herbert Lindenberger explores how Auden and Stravin-
sky responded to their situation as belated modernists in The Rake’s Progress;
Irene Morra analyzes the conflict between British nationalism and British
modernism in Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana; Linda and Michael ­Hutcheon dis-
cuss Olivier Messiaen’s attempt to reinvent modernist aesthetics as a call to
recover religious orthodoxy in Saint François d’Assise; and Joy H. Calico ex-
amines Kaija Saariaho’s recovery and transformation of tonality in L’amour
de loin. Belatedness, nationalism, orthodoxy, tonality: these are elements
not often associated with modernism, though hardly ever quite absent from
it. In the latter half of the twentieth century, as this section shows, they
return with a vengeance.
Like Pondrom, Herbert Lindenberger takes up the issue of a poet and
composer working across the arts in “Stravinsky, Auden, and the Midcen-
tury Modernism of The Rake’s Progress.” Auden, a generation younger than
Stravinsky, first emerged as a poet in the wake of the radical innovations of
Pound and Eliot. Stravinsky, by contrast, was often regarded as one of the
founders of musical modernism, at least outside the German-speaking
world, and to maintain his avant-garde credentials he recreated himself sev-
eral times during his long career. His neoclassical period, which culminates
in The Rake’s Progress (1951), represents not only a single but also a central
stage in his own progress. By the time that Auden, together with his partner,
Chester Kallman, worked with Stravinsky on the opera, his style had as-
sumed a new direction: although still employing traditional forms, it had
become more self-consciously literary and less politically committed. The
opera on which these two men collaborated so successfully occupies a
unique moment in the history of modernism, one in which two figures rep-
resenting distinct phases in the development of their particular art forms
allow their aesthetic programs to coincide. Lindenberger’s chapter shows
how Stravinsky and Auden both express themselves in the opera and helped
to define midcentury modernism and its commitments with their formal-
ism, irony, and engagement with earlier styles.
In “Gloriana and the New Elizabethan Age,” Irene Morra investigates an-
other midcentury response to high modernism, Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana
(1953), commissioned by the British Arts Council in honor of the corona-
20 Modernism and Opera

tion of Elizabeth II. Conceived as a nationalist celebration, the opera’s li-

bretto was written by William Plomer, who adapted the story of Elizabeth
and Essex from Lytton Strachey’s novelistic history of that title. By the early
1950s Britten had earned a reputation not only as a modernist composer but
also as a distinctly English composer, one who had helped rejuvenate the
opera of his country and brought it to prominence in the twentieth century.
This produced a set of mixed expectations, with some assuming that Glori-
ana would pay tribute to a nationalist narrative rooted in imperial models,
while others anticipated a more modern treatment of the subject in keeping
with the contemporary realities of postwar England. Such a clash of ideas is
present in the opera itself, with its conflicting idealizations of nationalist
sentiment and modern musical and literary culture. The opera is further
complicated by the relationship between a libretto and a score that attempt
at once to be self-consciously up to date and to conform to models of
­Englishness for which there was very little operatic precedent—and no ­future.
While Morra looks back to debates on nationalism and modernism in
late nineteenth-century opera, Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s “One Saint in
Eight Tableaux: The Untimely Modernism of Olivier Messiaen’s Saint Fran-
çois d’Assise” reconsiders many of the modernist themes and forms already
encountered in this volume, including Debussy’s impressionism, Schoen-
berg’s atonality, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, and the ecclesiastical subject
matter of Stein and Thomson. The first major musical influence on Messiaen
was Claude Debussy, the father of French musical modernism, and although
Messiaen was for a time part of the Darmstadt summer music school (1949–
50), he would soon break from it and go his own way. A devout Catholic,
Messiaen regarded birds as the greatest musicians, and out of this belief
comes much of his most innovative work, including St. François d’Assise
(1983). The opera represents, in religious terms, the modernist search for
the means to suspend time within a temporal medium. As an opera com-
poser, Messiaen had to deal with a narrative staged in time, but he worked
to transcend it in ways that recall symbolist attempts to do the same. The
eight tableaux that constitute the opera are relatively static as scenic and
sonic “pictures,” with a libretto that is repetitive both in actions and words.
Such techniques of stasis recall Albright’s comparison of the temporality of
Pelléas et Mélisande with that of Beckett, as well as Pondrom’s analysis of the
protominimalism of Four Saints in Three Acts.
The last chapter of the volume brings us to the contemporary moment
with Joy H. Calico’s “Saariaho’s L’amour de loin: Modernist Opera in the
Introduction 21

Twenty-First Century.” Directly inspired by Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise

and bearing strong affinities to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, L’amour de loin
(2000) joins the beginning of the century to its end. Calico draws upon
David Metzer’s idea of late modernism in examining Saariaho, whose train-
ing in modernist composition included study with Paavo Heininen at the
Sibelius Academy, Darmstadt summer courses, and time at Pierre Boulez’s
IRCAM in Paris in 1982, where she became interested in spectralism as an
alternative to serialism.29 For Metzer, spectralism is connected to the mod-
ernist interest in flux of sound, with its emphasis on timbre, and it is in these
terms that Calico analyzes the opera. But if Saariaho’s music is late modern-
ist in its acoustic texturing and tonal coloring, it is also deliberately operatic
in its commitment to emotional evocation and communication. Each of the
three principal characters is associated with recurring musical features, and
dramatic expressivity is achieved through harmonic and melodic devices
that function in concert with a soundscape of ever-shifting timbres. Calico
concludes with a brief discussion of Peter Sellars’s production of L’amour de
loin, which employed the same static staging that attracted Saariaho to Saint
François d’Assise and persuaded her to bring her own brand of modernism to
the operatic stage.
■ ■ ■

Clov (turning towards Hamm): One hasn’t the right to sing anymore?
Hamm: No.
Clov: Then how can it end?
Hamm: You want it to end?
Clov: I want to sing.
Hamm: I can’t prevent you.
Beckett, Endgame, 72–73

The chapters in this volume survey approximately 120 years of opera,

from Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) to Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000), viewing it in
relation to various modes and manifestations of modernism. Yet as robust,
as varied, and as innovative as the opera of this period has been, anxieties
persist that the end is nigh. From the nineteenth century through the inter-
war period, opera played a far more central role in the social life of major
European cities than it does today—and its fall from prominence was such
that Richard Taruskin has gone so far as to declare that operatic culture was
“effectively killed” by the 1930s.30 Economic depression, dictatorship, and
war all played their parts, of course, but why did opera (unlike, say, theater)
22 Modernism and Opera

not rebound? For Taruskin, the chief culprit was the talkies—“which were
really singies, with or without songs.” With the masses now discovering
their divas at movie palaces, opera aficionados became an increasingly rare
and preening breed. Opera continued to shuffle consumptively along, ac-
cording to Taruskin, but it had lost its high notes. Dying once more, it fell
into the arms of its last, lonely lovers.
To be again reborn? As the last section of this volume demonstrates,
some of the richest works of the operatic repertoire emerged after the Sec-
ond World War. By the 1970s, the United States, generally an importer
rather than an exporter of new opera, was yielding a bumper crop. The re-
naissance began, fittingly, in the bicentennial year of 1976, with Philip
Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, to be followed by the other two-thirds of his
Portrait Trilogy (Satyagraha [1979] and Akhnaten [1983]), as well as John
Adams’s duet of collaborations with the librettist Alice Goodman (Nixon in
China [1987] and The Death of Klinghoffer [1991])—to say nothing of the
rock-opera performances of Lori Anderson, Lou Reed, John Zorn, and Dia-
manda Galás, or the operatic musicals of Stephen Sondheim. As the twenty-
first century advances, other formerly provincial zones continue to make
themselves central. While Saariaho, for example, may live and work primar-
ily in Paris, her native Finland has experienced an opera boom since the
rejuvenation of the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 1967. The nation now
boasts at least five prominent opera composers (Aulis Sallinen, Atso Almila,
Ilkka Kuusisto, Kalevi Aho, and of course Saariaho herself ) as well as numer-
ous emerging talents (such as Kimmo Hakola, Olli Kortekangas, and Tuomas
Kantelinen). Turning toward the East, we find new opera blossoming in
China. The Chinese premiere of Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake and the
world premiere of Ye Xiaogang’s Song of Farewell both occurred during the
same week at the Beijing Music Festival in 2010, as did an avant-garde pro-
duction of Handel’s Semele directed by performance artist Zhang Huan.
That year also saw the establishment of the Academy of Opera at Peking
University, with the first Chinese Opera Festival following in 2011. Most
recently, British opera has resurfaced in the shape of George Benjamin and
Martin Crimp’s extraordinary Written on Skin (2012). And alongside such
national resurgences must be placed a more emphatically international one:
the explosion of the digital simulcast as a potent medium of opera’s global
dispersion. The Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series, which began in
December 2006, had sold more than ten million tickets by April 2012, at
which point it was beaming opera simulcasts to roughly 1,500 movie screens
Introduction 23

worldwide. These simulcasts—along with the yet larger market of CDs,

DVDs, and streaming media productions—have produced an audience for
opera that is more global than it has ever been. What opera has lost in cul-
tural centrality, at least for parts of Europe, it seems to be gaining in breadth
and hybridity.
As the following chapters show, the love duet between modernism and
opera has been a dissonant as well as a harmonious affair. Will opera con-
tinue dying? Of course it will.

Notes
1. See Saint-Évremond.
2. Tolstoy 119.
3. Nietzsche, Briefwechsel 77. Letter dated October 28, 1868.
4. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy 164.
5. See Lindenberger, Opera.
6. Adorno 25.
7. Ibid. 27.
8. For a discussion of intermediality, see Wolf.
9. See Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies.” Mao and Walkowitz
offer an earlier account of the New Modernist Studies in their introduction to Bad
Modernisms.
10. Ibid. 737.
11. Ibid. 738.
12. One sees evidence of this horizontal axis both in the journal Modernism/­
modernity, which has published numerous articles that are intermedial and interdis-
ciplinary, and in the annual Modernist Studies Association conference. Indeed, this
volume had its beginnings as a session at MSA entitled “Modernism and Opera.”
13. For excellent examples of this kind of scholarship, see Albright’s Untwisting
the Serpent, Panaesthetics, and Putting Modernism Together.
14. Kerman himself acknowledges that the “analogy” with New Criticism “is not
one that will survive much scrutiny,” but he defends it on the grounds that it does
“point to one of the constants in intellectual life as this applies to the arts: as intel-
lectual stimulus, positivistic history is always at a disadvantage beside criticism”
(319).
15. Subotnik 234–35. Stanley Rosen also evoked literary studies in describing,
from a decidedly more detached perspective, the practitioners of the New Musicology
who “deplore the pretended autonomy of traditional musicological studies and present
an explicit program of bringing the subject into contact with social science, political
history, gay studies, and feminism . . . to transform musicology into a field as up-to-date
as recent literary criticism”; see “The New Musicology” in Rosen 255–56.
24 Modernism and Opera

16. See Puchner, Stage Fright.

17. Nietzsche, Case of Wagner 182–83.
18. Greenberg 139.
19. Fried 139.
20. Moi 271–72.
21. Ibid. 272.
22. Euripides 9.
23. Recent scholarship in this direction is various and rich. See, for instance,
Anderson; Miller; Preston; and Marcus.
24. See Lindenberger, “Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera.”
25. See Steinberg.
26. Ibid. 636.
27. Ibid. 631–32.
28. See Wagner.
29. IRCAM stands for Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/­Musique.
30. Taruskin 548.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. “Bourgeois Opera.” Opera through Other Eyes. Ed. David J. Levin
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 25–43.
Albright, Daniel. Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014.
———. Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music and Painting, 1872–1927. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
———. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and the Other Arts. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Anderson, Mark. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Hapsburg Fin-de-
Siècle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame and Acts without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. Paul Woodruff. Cambridge: Hackett, 1999.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum ( June 1967): 116–48.
Gibson, Nigel, and Andrew Rubin, eds. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell,
2002.
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961
Kerman, Joseph. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry
7.2 (1980): 311–31.
Lindenberger, Herbert. “Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera.” Modern
Drama 44.3 (2011): 300–17.
———. Opera: The Extravagant Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2006.
Introduction 25

———. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–48.

Marcus, Sharon. “Salomé!! Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and the Drama of Celeb-
rity.” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 999–1021.
Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic
Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Moi, Toril. “ ‘First and Foremost a Human Being’: Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A
Doll’s House.” Modern Drama 49.3 (Fall 2006): 256–84.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. and ed.
Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
———. Briefwechsel mit Erwin Rohde. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1903.
Preston, Carrie. Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
———. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2002.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. A. Poulin Jr.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Rosen, Stanley. Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000.
Saint-Évremond, Charles de. “Saint-Évremond’s Views on Opera.” Opera: A History in
Documents. Ed. Piero Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 51–59.
Steinberg, Michael. “The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism.” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 36.4 (Spring 2006): 629–48.
Subotnik, Rose. “Adorno and the New Musicology.” Adorno: A Critical Reader. Ed.
Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 234–54.
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Music. Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Trans. Aylmer Maude. New York: Crowell, 1899.
Wagner, Richard. “Zukunftsmusik.” Judaism in Music and Other Essays. Trans. William
Ashton Ellis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. 293–345.
Wolf, Werner. “Towards a Functional Analysis of Intermediality: The Case of
­Twentieth-Century Musicalized Fiction.” Cultural Functions of Intermedial Explora-
tion. Ed. Erik Hedling and Ulla-Britta Lagerroth. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2002.
15–34.
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I World War I and Before
Crises of Gender and Theatricality
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 1 Laughing at the Redeemer
Kundry and the Paradox of Parsifal

Matthew Wilson Smith

“People will say,” [Wagner] remarks jokingly, “that if

Amfortas had seen the vision of the Grail and heard the
lament, he could have carried out the task of salvation as
well as Parsifal!” “But just as a professional task,” say I, “and
if Parsifal had listened to Kundry, then she would have
laughed, and then everything would have been all right,
too!”—Lengthy discussion about this new miracle.
Cosima Wagner (2:215/2:186)

Opera’s Human Comedy

“I have big hips, and Covent Garden has a problem with them.”1 Thus
Deborah Voigt, after receiving word of Covent Garden’s decision to break
her contract to perform the title role in Ariadne auf Naxos in March 2004.
Director Christof Loy intended to update the Strauss opera in a manner that
emphasized sleek forms and placed the protagonist in a little black dress,
and Voigt’s remarkable size destroyed the concept. There was a predictable
outcry, with fury over the insult to the diva on one hand and defense of the
director’s prerogatives on the other. The debate, in fact, soon broke down
along lines familiar to any historian of opera, with voice battling text, music
battling mise-en-scène for supremacy. Yet if the conflict was an old one,
then the solution was decidedly contemporary: a year later Voigt went in
for gastric bypass surgery, lost a hundred pounds, and was rehired.
Voigt, of course, is not alone, as so many of our greatest singers are oddly
proportioned for the roles they play. Jane Eaglen’s Isolde has a large body
and a crystalline voice; Placido Domingo’s Parsifal is a husky senior voicing
a lost child; Bryn Terfel’s Wolfram is monumentally lyrical. There are beauti-
30 World War I and Before

ful dissonances in opera between ungainly frames and the agile sounds that
emerge from them, between aging bodies and the young ones they play.
And if a comedy occasionally emerges from such juxtapositions, then it is a
very human one; most of us have soaring souls in awkward flesh. It is a
wonderful subject for art, this valiant, humbling struggle of bodies and
voices, but it was never a subject for Wagner’s art. At least, not by intention.
In practice, however, the new wine in the old cask and the canary in the
big-boned cage are some of the central features of the Wagnerian stage.
And this serious, delightful, profoundly moving human comedy is particu-
larly germane to that music drama that resists it most strongly.
The profundity and the preposterousness of Parsifal are inseparable from
each other. Indeed, they are the identical form, seen in different ways, and
for at least some of us the experience of watching Parsifal can be an uneasy
balance of rapture and bemusement, absorption and abstention. Thus can
almost any Wagner opera become Wittgenstein’s optical illusion: looked at
one way a duck, another way a rabbit. This duck-rabbit doubleness, rising
and falling abruptly between heaven and earth, is especially common to the
work that is arguably Wagner’s most Schopenhauerian, and therefore most
precariously balanced between idealism and biology. Alongside much else
that Wagner gained from that bleakest of philosophers, he gained an unin-
tentional comedy of bodies and wills.

The Weight of Genius

There are two kinds of Wagner critics: those who care about Schopen-
hauer and those who don’t. The former group tends toward a cultural con-
servativism of the high modernist sort.2 Take for example Bryan Magee:
“What has bred such confusion in much of the Wagner literature of recent
generations, especially in the literature about Parsifal, is that Schopenhauer
has remained a closed book to so many people who have chosen to write
on the subject.” For Magee, the problem is not simply one of ignorance but
of a general decline of cultural values. Scholars’ obsession with “politico-
social programmes” has made them lose touch with “serious and deep con-
cerns.” Thus the short-shrifting of Schopenhauer becomes but one particu-
larly egregious “example of attempts to explain the greater in terms of the
less, art in terms of journalism, the subtle and sophisticated in terms of the
crude, the insightful and revealing in terms of the imperceptive, and alto-
gether the profound in terms of the superficial.”3
And Magee is right to worry, if only because the latter group, the ones
Laughing at the Redeemer 31

who don’t spend much time writing about Schopenhauer, has become the
larger of the two. Catherine Clément, Slavoj Žižek, Carolyn Abbate, Marc
Weiner, David Levin—to name just a few recent critics—all mention Scho-
penhauer sparingly, if at all, in their work on Wagner.4 And one takes their
implied point: What more is there to say? After a century and a half of influ-
ence studies, beginning with Wagner’s own writings about himself, Wag-
ner’s relationship to his philosophic mentor has perhaps become a tiresome
topic of conversation, maybe even a false lead: what’s really going on must
surely be elsewhere.5
The lines, then, are clearly drawn. Or are they? Schopenhauer, after all,
was not simply the philosophical inspiration of Wagner and of symbolism; he
also developed a number of ideas (the existence of the unconscious, the rela-
tion of the unconscious to repression, the importance of the body generally
and sexuality in particular) that would prove central to psychoanalysis.6 To a
degree never before seen in a philosopher, and rarely seen since, Schopen-
hauer was the thinker of the gross material body, of genitals and guts. More
than many of the critics Magee excoriates, and certainly long before them, it
was Schopenhauer who attempted to explain “the greater in terms of the
less,” “the sophisticated in terms of the crude,” “the profound in terms of the
superficial.” Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy of the will, indeed, might be
understood as precisely this inversion carried out on a universal scale.
There is something almost paradoxical about Schopenhauer’s thought,
at once vertiginously abstract and as meaty as a bloody wound. On one
hand, it would be hard to find a more thoroughly elusive, utterly intangible
category than Schopenhauer’s omnipresent “will,” the single reality behind
the veil of illusion that passes for the world. On the other hand, Schopen-
hauer’s most important development of Kant is this: that he brought the
body to bear on the mind, and thus on the world. While, for Kant, we have
access to the world only through the lens of the transcendental categories,
for Schopenhauer we are able to perceive the world immediately and di-
rectly only through our own bodies. It is through the body that we discover
the will; as Schopenhauer writes, “My body and my will are one . . . or, My
body is the objectivity of my will.”7 Without a body, the “purely knowing
subject” might imagine the operations of the world to be merely causal and
would have no access to the inner force beneath all phenomena. For it is
only by analogy with the perception of our own bodies that we are able to
discover the truth of the will in all things (2:125/1:103).8
Schopenhauer struggles throughout The World as Will and Representation
32 World War I and Before

with a dissonant cultural condition by attempting to reconcile German ide-

alism with the discoveries of nineteenth-century biology (most of all, with
the emergent biology of mind).9 The philosophy that results from this effort
can read like unintentional comedy. In his chapter “On Genius,” for instance,
Schopenhauer begins in a high-idealist vein that reflects his years of immer-
sion in Plato and Kant.10 He defines genius as the “predominant capacity” for
the perception of “(Platonic) Ideas,” the ability to “perceive a world different
from [that of the rest of humanity], since [the world] presents itself in his
mind more objectively, consequently more purely and distinctly” (3:430/
2:376). Just a few pages later, however, Schopenhauer’s idealist account of
the abstract consciousness of genius turns suddenly, grotesquely corporeal.
For genius to be possible, we are told, “the cerebral system must be clearly
separated from the ganglionic by total isolation,” “even a good stomach is a
condition on account of the special and close agreement with this part of
the brain,” “the texture of the mass of the brain must be of extreme fineness
and perfection, and must consist in the purest, most clarified, delicate and
sensitive nerve-substance.” Drawing on postmortem evidence of Byron’s
brain, he tells us that “the qualitative proportion of white to grey matter . . .
has a decided influence” on genius, while, ruminating on Goethe’s height,
he concludes that “a short stature and especially a short neck” are favorable
for genius, as “the blood reaches the brain with more energy” (3:449–
50/2:392–93). Thus is the German Romantic cult of the Künstler forced into
marriage with physiological determinism.
Cultural change is such a complex process that it is difficult to assign a
single set of reasons for Schopenhauer’s sudden emergence into popularity
in the 1850s, after decades of languishing in obscurity. Certainly, the col-
lapse of the revolutionary movements of 1848–49, the consolidation of con-
servative power under Bismarck, and the upheavals of the Second Industrial
Revolution created a more fertile ground for Schopenhauer’s relentless his-
torical pessimism than existed in the far more hopeful days of the previous
three decades. In light of such sweeping transformations, Schopenhauer’s
murder of the Romantic myth of Promethean man suddenly seemed sensi-
ble, even attractive, to a number of intellectuals and artists. His writings
have a Gothic sensibility not only in their singular gloominess but also in
their reversal, through extension, of Romantic idealism. If Kant’s crowning
of subjective perception was treated as an elevation of the artist to semi­
divinity by so many Romantics, then Schopenhauer’s relentless pursuit of
Laughing at the Redeemer 33

Kantian logic ended up in a frigid landscape littered with body parts and
haunted by a single, insatiable ghost. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Scho-
penhauer swept aside that centerpiece of bourgeois virtue and that back-
bone of modern masculinity: willpower. In the face of the Schopenhauerian
will, such concepts as willpower and free will come to be seen as so much
flotsam atop a great sea, and consciousness itself is shown to be “the mere
surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the inte-
rior, but only the crust” (3:149/2:136).
It is a commonplace that Wagner was never the same after reading Scho-
penhauer in October 1854.11 Critics who discuss Wagner’s transformation
generally focus on three or four themes: his turn away from the relative
optimism of, say, The Artwork of the Future or Siegfried’s Death; his embrace
of an ideal of renunciation and the annihilation of the will to live; the central
ethical importance he would give to compassion (Mitleid ) for all living
things; and, finally, the increasing centrality of music in the construction of
the music dramas. All of these changes in his ethics and aesthetics were
inspired, or at least reinforced, by Schopenhauer’s writings, a debt Wagner
was the first to acknowledge. Largely unexplored, however—and unac-
knowledged by Wagner because almost certainly unconscious—is a less
thematic and more formal transformation. This transformation may be de-
scribed as a paradox in Wagner’s work: increasing attention to the material
body uncomfortably coupled with an increasing disembodiment of the
stage. What Wagner’s most Schopenhauerian music dramas (Tristan and
Isolde, The Twilight of the Gods, Parsifal ) recall is the philosopher’s juxtaposi-
tion of vile bodies to the most intangible abstractions of consciousness.
This transformation marks not merely the introduction of a new idea or
technique in Wagner’s work but a whole new discourse of selfhood. More
than this, the discourse it inaugurates will become central to the develop-
ment of theatrical modernism, taken up and transformed by Strindberg and
thereafter by Wedekind and the artists of the expressionist stage. But to
return to the moment of transition, we find this new discourse entering
Wagner’s writings soon after his discovery of Schopenhauer. Having written
to Liszt six months earlier announcing his discovery of the philosopher who
has “entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven,” Wagner writes again in
June 1855 (6:298/323). The letter opens with a paean to Liszt’s artistry and
to the miraculous powers of creativity in general. The terms are textbook
Künstlerkult.
34 World War I and Before

Allow me, best of men, to begin by expressing my amazement at your immense

creativity! So you are planning a Dante Symphony? And you hope to show it to
me, already completed, this autumn? Do not take it amiss if I sound amazed at
this marvel. When I look back on your activities during recent years, you strike
me as being quite superhuman [ ganz übermenschlich]! There must indeed be
something quite unique about it. But it is entirely natural that we should find
pleasure only in creative work, indeed only in that way can we make life at all
tolerable: only when we create do we become what we really are. (7:203/343)

The letter continues as a celebration of Liszt’s genius—indeed, a hymn to

the power of creativity itself—until the beginning of the second paragraph,
where Wagner suddenly begins to voice his qualms.

And so—a “Divina Comedia”? It is certainly a most splendid idea, and I am already
looking forward to enjoying your music. But I must discuss certain details of it
with you. That the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” will be a success I do not doubt for
a moment: but I have some misgivings about the “Paradiso,” and you yourself
confirm these misgivings when you tell me that you are planning to include cho-
ruses in the work. In the Ninth Symphony (as a work of art), it is the last move-
ment with its chorus which is without any doubt the weakest section, it is impor-
tant only from the point of view of the history of art since it reveals to us, in its
very naïve way, the embarrassment felt by the real tone-poet who (after Hell and
Purgatory) does not know how finally to represent Paradise. (7:203/343)

Wagner’s reservations here are a long way from his essays of the previ-
ous decade, essays such as “Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at Dresden
1846,” in which he rhapsodizes about the last movement above all else (“we
clasp the whole world to our breast; shouts and laughter fill the air, like
thunder from the clouds, the roaring of the sea; whose everlasting tides and
healing shocks lend life to the earth, and keep life sweet for the joy of man
to whom God gave the earth as home of happiness,” and so on [2:64/7:255]).
In the intervening decade—and here we must particularly recall the failed
Dresden revolution of 1849—much of Wagner’s joy had been shattered. For
Wagner in 1856, the trouble with the fourth movement of the Ninth lies not
in the limitations of Beethoven’s imagination but rather in the impossibility
of convincingly representing paradise at all. Over the course of the second
paragraph of his letter, therefore, Wagner attempts to transplant Dante’s
paradise in the soil of Schopenhauer. He imagines “sinking into rapt contem-
plation of Beatrice, [in order that] I might cast aside my entire personality,
Laughing at the Redeemer 35

devoid of will” (7:204/343). Arguing that Dante’s vision can only be appreci-
ated now as a historical artifact, he nevertheless expresses the “wish that I
could have lost my private consciousness, and hence consciousness in general
[das Bewusstsein], in that refining fire” (7:205/344).
The revision is radical: it is not, as for Dante or for Liszt, sin that must be
burned away but simply consciousness itself. The juxtaposition of Wagner’s
two highlighted phrases—“amazement at your immense creativity” and “wish
that I could have lost . . . consciousness in general”—neatly epitomizes Wag-
ner’s crisis. In the former phrase, he is gazing up at the peaks of the artist-
gods, while in the latter he plummets into the abyss of Thanatos. What they
have in common is vertigo.
At this point in the letter, Wagner is still expressing his death drive in
idealist terms, as a crisis of abstract consciousness. While the influence of
Schopenhauer can already be seen in the desire to annihilate the will, the
more thoroughgoing influence of the philosopher comes in the third para-
graph of the letter, when Wagner suddenly abandons his idealist vocabulary
in favor of an instrumentally materialist one. Human organs, writes Wagner,

are created to meet various needs, and one of these organs is his intellect, i.e. the
organ for comprehending whatever is external to it, with the aim of using such
objects to satisfy life’s needs, according to its strength and ability. A normal man
is therefore one in whom this organ—which is directed outwards and whose
function is to perceive things, just as the stomach’s function is to digest food—is
equipped with sufficient ability to satisfy a need that is external to it, and—for the
normal person—this need is exactly the same as the most common beast, namely
the instinct to eat and to reproduce; for this will to live, which is the actual meta-
physical basis of all existence, demands solely to live, i.e. to eat and reproduce
itself perpetually. (7:206/344–45)

At a stroke, Wagner reduces the whole panoply of mental functions to mere

appetite and places the mind on the level of the gut. And while this bleak
materialism holds true for “normal” people, with geniuses the light shines
no brighter. “So we also find (albeit rarely, of course) abnormal individuals in
whom the cognitive organ, i.e. the brain, has evolved beyond the ordinary
and adequate level of development found in the rest of humanity, just as
nature, after all, often creates monsters in which one organ is much more
developed than any other. Such a monstrosity [Eine solche Monstruosität]—if
it reaches its highest level of development—is genius, which essentially rests
on no more than an abnormally fertile and capacious brain” (7:206–07/345).
36 World War I and Before

The artist-genius, “übermenschlich,” at the beginning of Wagner’s letter,

degenerates into a “Monstruosität” by the end. And not grandly monstrous
in a manner that might recall Milton’s Satan but merely a freak of nature, a
big-brained baby. An object that speaks more of pity than of awe.

The Paradox of Parsifal

For all its attention to the pains of the physical body, Parsifal, like the
Festival Theatre it was intended to consecrate, strains toward the incorpo-
real. The Festspielhaus, after all, was designed in large part to eliminate the
sight of unwanted bodies, and its three most significant innovations are all
connected to this project of dematerialization. According to Wagner’s
“Bayreuth” essay (1873), the decision to bury the orchestra beneath the
stage stemmed from the need that his new theater make “invisible the tech-
nical source of its music”—more specifically, that it conceal the bodies of
the musicians (9:336/5:333). Further, the decisions to eliminate box seating
and to extinguish the house lights arose from Wagner’s desire to neutralize
the audience’s eyesight “by the rapt subversion of the whole sensorium,”
which “can be done only by leading [the eye] away from any sight of bodies
lying in between” it and the stage (9:336/5:333).
In no other modern drama is Mitleid so central and so corporeal as in
Parsifal. For this reason, the usual translation of the oft-repeated durch
Mitleid wissend as “knowing through pity” is insufficient; more accurate
would be the more literal “knowing through shared suffering” or “knowing
through compassion” (with “compassion” taken to its etymological roots).
In Parsifal, suffering is passed like a virus across the stage, and its mark is the
wound. Two wounds prefigure the action of the drama: the evil sorcerer
Klingsor’s self-castration and Klingsor’s wounding of the Grail King Amfor-
tas. These wounds, passed from Klingsor to Amfortas, pass again to Parsifal,
first as a flesh wound, later as a deep penetration. The flesh wound comes
at the end of act 1, when Parsifal witnesses Amfortas lying in his litter, his
wound “bursting out afresh”: “Parsifal, on hearing Amfortas’ last cry of
agony, clutches his heart and remains in that position for some time”
(10:345). Parsifal’s compassion for Amfortas means that he catches Amfor-
tas’s wound—not by means of a spear but by means of the eye, not in the
thigh but in the heart. The wound returns again as a much deeper cut in act
2, when Parsifal is in the moment of consummating his oedipal union with
the maternal seductress Kundry:
Laughing at the Redeemer 37

Amfortas!—
Die Wunde!—die Wunde!—
Sie brennt in meinem Herzen.— (10:358)

Here, the experience of the burning wound of Amfortas—or, one might

more accurately say, the wound of Klingsor-Amfortas-Parsifal—becomes the
catalyst of Parsifal’s sexual renunciation and ascension to sanctity. The wound,
vaginal in form and grammatically feminine (Parsifal’s cry literally reads:
“Amfortas!— / The wound!—the wound!— / She burns in my heart.—”),
travels from one male host to another. As it travels it mutates, turning from
literal castration (removal of the genitals) to quasi-castration (a wound to
the side that renders impotent) to symbolic castration (an invisible wound
“straight to the heart” that recalls these previous wounds and likewise cuts
off sexual passion). This motion from the somatic to the symbolic underlies
the work as a whole.
More broadly, both the Festspielhaus and Parsifal reflect many aspects
of Wagner’s post-Schopenhauerian aesthetics. Whereas Wagner had, in his
Zurich writings (1849–57), argued that music should serve drama, he sharply
revised that view in the decades following his turn to Schopenhauer. The
Beethoven essay of 1870 may serve as a mark of this transformation in its
maturity. He insists there on the subordination of all three-dimensional arts
to the supreme art of music, which is uniquely capable of expressing the
universal. Music’s superiority to plastic arts is particularly seen in its avoid-
ance of mere gesture. Whereas a three-dimensional art form “fixes gesture
[Gebärde] with respect to space, but leaves its motion to be supplied by our
reflective thought, music speaks out gesture’s inmost essence in a language
so direct that, once we are saturated with the music, our eyesight is posi-
tively incapacitated for intensive observation of the gesture, so that finally
we understand it without our really seeing it” (9:76–77/5:76). Music, then,
does more than obviate physical gesture. It does what gesture cannot: it
takes us directly to the heart of that which gesture more clumsily attempts
to capture. Blinding our vision of the body, music shows us the body in its
innermost form.
A distinction needs to be drawn here between Wagner’s turn away from
physical gesture in his late works, especially Parsifal, and his broader com-
mitment to theatricality. The distinction is necessitated by the fact that the
terms “gesture” and “theatricality” have become deeply intertwined within
the critical lineage running from Nietzsche through Adorno. As Martin Pu-
38 World War I and Before

chner writes in Stage Fright, “Nietzsche and Adorno agree that Wagner’s art
suffers from being too gestural and that his fixation on gestures, even and
especially in music, is an effect of both his theatricality and his excessive
reliance on vulgar mimesis. . . . Gesture becomes a shorthand for the mi-
metic actor lingering at the heart of the theatre and, due to the general
slippage between anti-mimesis and anti-theatricality, for the theatrical ef-
fects the theatre imposes on the other arts.”12 Particularly in Adorno’s use
of the term, “gesture” generally refers to a reified mimetic expression, with
the leitmotif seen as the heart of Wagner’s regressively allegorical tech-
nique. This is so even for motifs that are meant to represent abstract themes
(such as Fate or Grace), the names of which become allegorical emblems
and so operate gesturally: “Allegorical rigidity has infected the motiv like a
disease. The gesture becomes frozen as a picture of what it expresses.”13
Adorno is thus able to preserve the term “gesture” even for—in the case of
thematic leitmotifs, especially for—aspects of music drama quite removed
from the embodied action of the stage.
For our purposes, the trouble with this approach is that it elides impor-
tant distinctions between stage gestures and the broader category of mime-
sis. While this elision serves Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s larger attacks on the-
atricality (understood as mimesis in extremis), it obscures a significant
transformation in Wagner’s aesthetics. Simply put, Wagner’s theatrical
prac­tice in his early music dramas places music largely in the service of stage
action, often making physical gesture the driving force of the total effect.14
In Carolyn Abbate’s account, the transformation begins with Tristan and
Isolde, which “introduced mirror effects that led to a radical separation of
voice from body.”15 The voice, Abbate argues, enters the orchestra, which
becomes a sort of gramophone avant la lettre; the onstage bodies, by exten-
sion, are overshadowed by the orchestral creature that sings beneath them.
While the Ring marks a half step back from the extremity of the disembodi-
ment of voice in Tristan, one might argue that the end of The Twilight of the
Gods and the entirety of Parsifal push the experiment forward once more.
Abbate’s argument is complemented by that of Carl Dahlhaus in a 1969
lecture on Wagner’s use of gesture, in which he identifies a transition in
Wagner’s work from “outer drama” (centering on physical gesture) to “inner
drama” (centering on states of consciousness). Though he sees intimations
of the turn in Tristan, he ultimately places the moment of transition with the
Beethoven essay of 1870.16 Regardless of the precise date, what is clear from
both Abbate and Dahlhaus is that Wagner’s theory and practice turn against
Laughing at the Redeemer 39

corporeal gesture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and do so es-
pecially in his most Schopenhauerian works.
Of all Wagner’s works, only Tristan and The Twilight of the Gods are com-
parable to Parsifal in their emphasis on music over theatrical action, yet
these two works ultimately rely more on physical gesture than does Wag-
ner’s final opera. (Take, for example, the finales of each opera: Isolde’s love-
death, Brünnhilde’s leap into the flames.) Moreover, Parsifal’s music tends
even more strongly toward the symphonic than does the music of either of
these earlier works, and it offers a degree of harmonic complexity without
equal in Wagner’s oeuvre. The harmonic complexity of Parsifal’s score is
significantly detached not only from the action of the drama but from action
itself. Reflecting the concern of the work as a whole with meditative, ritual-
istic consciousness, the score of Parsifal is substantially unrelated to the
physical business of the stage. Consider for example the prelude to act 1,
which begins with a somewhat arrhythmic phrase played on reeds and
strings, an amorphous theme made more mysterious when joined by A  ♭
chords. The theme bursts forth for a moment like some hothouse orchid,
then just as suddenly dies, before returning again transposed into C minor,
altered now by chromaticism, and dying away twice more. While identified
by Wagner as a theme of “Liebe,” the love it suggests is no physical gesture
of intimacy—is not kissing, hugging, nor (like the Liebestod ) explosive or-
gasm followed by collapse—but rather, like Parsifal’s wound, a disembodied
symbol into which the body has been transmuted.17
Wagner was concerned, in fact, that his Parsifal preludes not be con-
fused with gestic music of any sort. On October 31, 1878, Cosima seems to
have made just such an error and was corrected. “He plays the prelude to
me . . . ,” she writes. “It begins like the lament of an extinguished star, after
which one discerns, like gestures [wie Gebärden], Parsifal’s arduous wander-
ings and Kundry’s pleas for salvation.” Wagner seems to have corrected her
on this point, as Cosima adds the following in the margin: “That is to say,
not the lament, but the sounds of extinction, out of which lamenting
emerges.—‘My preludes must be elemental [elementarisch], not dramatic
like the Leonore Overtures, for that makes the drama superfluous.’ ” Reading
Cosima’s entry, Wagner seems to have been at pains to stress that it is not
any dramatic gesture (whether of lament, wandering, or pleading) that the
prelude expresses but rather something “elemental.” Wagner’s new attitude
toward gesture is not a rejection of mimesis so much as a shift from the im-
itation of the body by means of musical motifs to an imitation of that which
40 World War I and Before

underlies the body, that immaterial reality of which the body is (like drama
itself ) a superfluity. Significantly, Cosima notes of the prelude that “none of
this could be sung—only the ‘elemental’ quality can be felt here, as R. does
indeed emphasize.”18 Unlike, say, the role of Isolde, which stretches the
vocal capabilities of the human body beyond what seemed the limits of pos-
sibility, much of Parsifal is meant not to expand the vocal range but to ex-
ceed it and thus further humble the body before dematerialized music.19
Parsifal’s obsession with the body, a body rendered at once grossly mate-
rial and profoundly mysterious, reminds us that the work’s premiere was
roughly contemporaneous with the development of psychiatry. More pre-
cisely, the period between Wagner’s libretto (1877) and the premiere of
Parsifal (1882) coincided with the modern medicalization of hysteria. As
Elaine Showalter recalls, the modern diagnosis of hysteria largely developed
out of Jean-Martin Charcot’s quasi-theatrical stagings of hysterical subjects
at the Salpêtrière in the 1870s and 1880s, stagings that made a particularly
profound impression on Freud, who studied at the Salpêtrière in 1885 and
1886.20 This connection of hysteria with theatricality was one that ­Nietzsche
had in mind when he accused Wagner of hysterical stagecraft in The Case of
Wagner (1888). “Wagner’s art is sick. The problems he presents on the
stage—all of them problems of hysterics—the convulsive nature of his af-
fects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices,
his insatiability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choice
of his heroes and heroines—consider them as physiological types (a patho-
logical gallery)!—all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness
that permits no further doubt. Wagner est une névrose.”21 Nietzsche, of
course, knew the potent implications of this charge. Hysteria, after all, was
not seen simply as a histrionic disease; it was more specifically a disease
of women and Jews.22 The repressed, Nietzsche suggests, returns in the
very form of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. With Nietzsche as a guide,
we might say that the Gesamtkunstwerk is a hysterical discourse that dis-
places its own troubles of bodies and wills onto hysterical characters such
as ­Kundry.
The Gesamtkunstwerk, like any totalizing project, relies on a necessary
Other, a figure or figures who must be present in order to be excluded.
“Given Wagner’s commitment to the Gesamtkunstwerk, to a program of
seamless aesthetic totalization,” argues David Levin in his essay on The
Master­singers of Nuremberg, “the Jew functions as the structural guarantor
of that totality by representing, within the work, that which does not be-
Laughing at the Redeemer 41

long, which must be exorcised. We might think of Jews, then, as the ‘I don’t’
that guarantees a series of polygamous unions: the reconciliation of lan-
guage and nature in a non-Jewish artwork of the future; the union of the arts
in the Gesamtkunstwerk; or, more concretely, the union of Walther and Eva,
which is, of course, repeatedly (if only temporarily) marred by what must
nonetheless be seen as its guarantor.”23 While there has been some critical
debate about how strongly to read the Jewishness of Wagner’s Beckmesser,
Kundry is a more straightforward case, explicitly identified with the Wan-
dering Jew in the text of Parsifal as well as in other writings of Wagner.24 In
her Jewishness—though not only in her Jewishness—Kundry represents the
Other upon which the Gesamtkunstwerk relies, the Other whose purpose it
is to not belong. Moreover, since the form of the Gesamtkunstwerk is late
Wagnerian—that is, is particularly shaped by the late Wagnerian project of
the extinction of corporeal gesture—Kundry’s otherness is particularly cen-
tered upon her embodied theatricality.
Kundry is a great caldron into which all the necessary exclusions of the
late Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk are thrown. Having taken many forms
throughout time, Kundry functions as a Wagnerian totality in negative, as-
suming and incorporating all the marginalized and rejected elements of
Bayreuth into a pseudo-organic whole. Her “special form of neurosis,” like
that of “woman” generally according to Luce Irigaray’s reading of Freud, is
therefore “to ‘mimic’ a work of art, to be a bad (copy of a) work of art,” “a
counterfeit or parody of an artist process.”25 When we first encounter Kun-
dry, she is a wild woman, the very antithesis of the liturgical Gesamtkunst-
werk. “Kundry bursts in, almost staggering; wild clothes tied high; a snakeskin
belt hanging low; loose locks of black, fluttering hair; dark brownish-red com-
plexion; piercing black eyes, sometimes wildly blazing, but more often glassy and
as rigid as death” (10:326). From the outset, Wagner clearly marks Kundry—
with her fixed and glassy eyes, her loose hair, her wild laughter, her sudden
exhaustions, her screaming, and her manic contortions—as a hysteric,
which further emphasizes her singular position as woman and Jew on an
otherwise male, gentile stage. As act 1 continues, the Grail Knights refer to
Kundry as a “heathen” and a “sorceress,” “burdened with a curse” (10:329).
In act 2, Klingsor calls her a “nameless creature,” “first sorceress,” “Rose of
Hades,” “Herodias,” and “Gundryggia” (a wild huntress of Nordic myth;
10:345–46). Her identities proliferate still further, as she plays the roles of
lover and mother while attempting to seduce Parsifal and reveals herself, in
the opera’s climax, as the Wandering Jew, eternally cursed for laughing at
42 World War I and Before

Christ. Wagner’s decision to make the Wandering Jew a woman of course

goes against tradition, and it may seem odd until placed in the context of
Kundry’s overall dramatic function, which is to serve as the receptacle of all
that which the opera must ultimately exclude. Through Kundry, Wagner is
able to unify the eternal femme fatale (itself combining deadly seductress
and deadly mother) and the eternal Jew in a single hysterical figure; he
is able, too, to stage the rejection, the shattering, and the redemption of this
creature, whose last words are “dienen, dienen” (to serve, to serve) before
she falls silent and dies. The apotheosis of Parsifal, with its unification of
Spear and Grail, celebrates an androgynous totality that is a mise en abyme
of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself.26 But redemptive androgyny is here a dis-
course that occurs exclusively between men and between gentiles; “woman”
and “Jew” must be broken and redeemed, and finally die, in order to be
preserved in the higher synthesis of Monsalvat.
Kundry’s bodiliness—and therefore her threat to the obsessively subli-
mated Grail community—is in large part manifested through her hysteria.
Certainly her manic gestures throughout the first act (“Kundry rushes in, al-
most reeling”; “She throws herself on the ground”; “She trembles violently; her
arms drop powerlessly”; etc.) keep our attention on Kundry as fleshly crea-
ture, half human and half “wild animal” (10:329). Noting that “hysterics
force us to pay attention to their bodies,” Mary Ann Smart shows that Wag-
ner’s music tightly shadows Kundry’s movements in act 1.27 When she
fetches water in act 1, for instance, the music captures her physicality (fig.
1.1). The sequentially ascending four-note motif (fig. 1.2) captures Kundry’s
agitated movements. After four repetitions, Wagner increases the intensity
by shortening the phrase to its final gesture and repeats that twice before
the climactic chord (fig. 1.3).
Of the fourth measure of the six-measure section, Smart writes that “we
might imagine Kundry turning and rushing back toward Parsifal; the pivot
of this gestural arch is marked by an iteration of Kundry’s motif, hurtling
downward and coming to rest as she reaches her goal.”28 By musically echo-
ing her bodily gestures in this way, Wagner goes against the grain of his late
style, making the music, in at least these instances, subservient to physical
action. By act 3, however, Kundry’s metamorphosis from shrieking hysteric
to silent supplicant is mirrored in the almost complete silencing, too, of her
bodily presence in the music. Recalling act 1, Kundry goes to fetch water
again in act 3, but now the action produces a very different orchestral re-
sponse.
Laughing at the Redeemer 43

Figures 1.1–1.3. The orchestra initially mirrors Kundry’s gestures

The only remaining traces of bodily mimesis are the repeated cello tattoos that
punctuate the early part of this scene, suggesting fluttering breath or a weak
heartbeat. Once Kundry exits for the water, a gentle rising line is initiated by
clarinet and continued by the oboe, and as Gurnemanz comments on Kundry’s
transformation, wondering if this is the effect of Good Friday, we hear hints of
both the motive of Amfortas’s suffering and the Grail motive, the first time in the
opera that Kundry has been associated with any of these crucial musical symbols
of meaning and redemption.29

Kundry’s journey, from a performance that emphasizes her body to a per-

formance that transmutes her body into an abstraction, repeats the wound’s
journey from corporeal to symbolic form. It is a process that is iterated time
and again over the course of the opera; ultimately, it is the journey of the
Grail quest itself—a prize that, as Gurnemanz tells us, cannot be attained by
any earthly route. 30
The curious thing about Kundry’s hysteria—about, more precisely, the
hysteria that afflicts the whole Grail community and is displaced onto
­Kundry—is that it at once focuses attention on the body and renders the
44 World War I and Before

body radically mysterious. As Elisabeth Bronfen argues in her study of Kun-

dry, hysteria is a diagnosis that “eludes any precise nosology” and has thus
“proven itself a useful screen for the diagnostic fantasies of the doctors
faced with their own impotence and helplessness while confronting this
medical enigma.”31 Hysteria serves, then, as an emblem of the problem of
the body and the will first wrestled with by Schopenhauer. Performing
­hysteria—whether on- or offstage—at once foregrounds the performer’s
body and radically destabilizes it, raising the question of who the true actor
is: the visible person or the invisible mystery lurking beneath. On one hand,
it is this question that Parsifal aims to answer by means of the wholesale
substitution of symbols for bodies. On the other hand, Wagner, reflecting
Charcot’s own practice at Salpêtrière, attempts to address the hysteria of his
stage by means of hypnosis and electricity.32
Hypnosis and electricity are unified in the curtain-closing culmination of
Parsifal, the moment when Parsifal holds up the electrically illuminated
Grail. George Davidson, a member of the Bayreuth Patrons’ Association and
another observer of the original production of Parsifal, describes the effect:

I don’t think it will take anything away from the experience of future audience
members if I tell how the wonderful illumination of the Grail is accomplished.
When the boy, who carries the shrine of the Grail ahead of King Amfortas, has
placed it on the tabernacle in the middle of the rotunda, an invisible wire connec-
tion is established that runs between a small Siemens electrical bulb inside the
red chalice and a motor [i.e., a battery] inside the tabernacle. This connection is
established by a man who has been placed next to the motor and who is also
hidden behind the tabernacle. In this way, the previously dark chalice suddenly
glows in a red light, while Amfortas in the first and Parsifal in the last act kneel to
pray in front of the uncovered Grail. This incandescence continues when both
take the goblet into their hands, raise it slowly, and gently sway it in all directions.
The effect remains a wondrous one, even if the means by which it is accom-
plished are known.33

Wagner was making use of novel stage technology for this illusion; it was
only a year previous that London’s Savoy had been the first theater to be lit
by electricity. If there is any truth to Nietzsche’s charge that Wagner was a
master hypnotist, then this surely is one of the Master’s grandest effects,
intended to enthrall both the Grail community and the Bayreuth audience—
intended, indeed, to make the former an idealization of the latter. The mo-
ment is Wagnerian theatricality at its grandest, and it is, significantly, an
Laughing at the Redeemer 45

electrified, hypnotizing symbol rather than an actor’s body that is the focus
of the last stage image of Wagner’s career. The moment completes the
transfiguration from corporeal theatricality, still present in acts 1 and 2
in the gestures of Kundry, to more fully dematerialized theatricality. The
music that plays above it, dominated by the quiet strains of the Faith and
Grail motifs, is as far as possible from the explicitly hysterical, musically ac-
companied shriek of Kundry’s laugh.
What would Kundry be without her laugh? It is not quite the only laugh-
ter we hear in Parsifal (Gurnemanz laughs at Parsifal’s misunderstandings;
Parsifal marches on Klingsor with rosy-cheeked laughter; the Flowermaid-
ens laugh as they seduce), but Kundry’s dominates the drama as does no
other. It is integral to her character and is so from the outset. Cosima re-
cords that Wagner told her the following on February 16, 1877: “I have
made a note: Kundry can only laugh and scream, she does not know true
laughter.” And seven months later, on September 27, as again recorded by
Cosima: “I also have some accents for Mademoiselle Condrie, I already have
her laughter, for instance.” Curious, here, that Cosima, in transcribing Wag-
ner’s words, should (mis)spell the witch’s name this time with the first two
letters of her own name: is it only a French jest, or is it a sign of a more
significant desire? If Kundry’s false, screaming laughter is one of her first
“accents” to emerge, then it seems to arise together with its antithesis, the
sighing smile of servility. Wagner’s comment on the laugh of “Condrie” is
immediately followed, in Cosima’s account, by another exchange. “ ‘You and
I will go on living in human memory,’ he exclaims. ‘You for sure,’ I exclaim
with a laugh.”34 Thus does Cosima’s laugh replace Condrie’s, and one wom-
an’s blasphemous cackle gives way to another’s worshipful trill.
Kundry’s laughter marks her as a hysteric and a femme fatale, and it is
central to her character for another reason as well: because Wagnerian the-
atricality calls it forth. In an opera distinguished by its lack of such connec-
tions, Kundry’s laughter binds music closely with gesture. In act 1, her slan-
der of Parsifal’s mother—“die Törin! [Sie lacht]”—is caught in the musical
phrase that captures her first laughter of the opera (fig. 1.4). Already we find
the sudden drop (here from E  ♭ to F) that will come to characterize Kundry’s
laugh throughout the work. In this first instance of her laugh, however, the
descending seventh actually represents not the laugh itself but her spoken
mockery (“die Törin!”). Her laughter, by contrast, is represented in the vocal
line by five beats of rest and is presumably meant to be either pantomimed
or improvised (though often, in performance, the stage direction is simply
46 World War I and Before

Figure 1.4. The orchestra laughs for Kundry

ignored). The transition from speech (“die Törin!”) to laughter (Sie lacht),
meanwhile, is marked by a transition from vocal to orchestral scoring. Thus,
in this first instance of her laughter, it is not Kundry who laughs but the
orchestra that laughs for her. As might be expected in the light of the
Beethoven essay, music gives us Kundry’s bodily gestures in their innermost
form.
It is not until act 2, when she recalls her original blasphemy, that her
laughter begins to return from its orchestral sublimation. Now it enters the
vocal line with tremendous force and does so in a fashion that unifies vocal
and orchestral lines. “Ich sah Ihn—Ihn—und—lachte . . .” (I saw Him—Him
—and—laughed . . .), she sings, making the last word howl. Kundry’s huge
drop of an octave and a seventh (“lach-te”) recalls the drop of a seventh in
the example from act 1, but the line is now, for the first time in the opera,
unambiguously one of vocalized laughter. While, in the earlier instance, her
laughter was expressed through the orchestra alone, here her laughter is
rooted in her body through her voice. Moreover, in what may be the most
precipitous vocal descent in all Wagner, he very nearly delineates the sing-
er’s range in the space of two beats. Finally, he brings Kundry’s voice to-
gether with the orchestral line, unifying voice and orchestra on high B, be-
fore having the voice plummet unaccompanied into the depths. Kundry’s
laughter now returns us, forcefully, to the corporeality that defines her and
brings that corporeality into union with the orchestra (fig. 1.5).
Laughing at the Redeemer 47

Figure 1.5. Kundry’s laughter returns from its orchestral sublimation

This is the outrageously gestural Kundry who erupts, taking the orches-
tra with her, at the end of act 2. Examples could be multiplied, but consi-
der the return of her laughter some minutes later in the scene. The sudden
drop that characterizes Kundry’s laughter has now become a descending,
partly arpeggiated line (“Ich verlachte, lachte, lachte, ha-ha!”), but one that
once more unifies voice and orchestra, in their unison descents from E to G,
from F to A#, and from G# to C#, and in their parallel ascent from G to B
(“ha-ha!”). Here the orchestra no longer embodies the “real” drama of which
48 World War I and Before

Figure 1.6. Kundry’s laughter once more reunifies music and drama

the staged bodies are but shadows; instead, we find voice and orchestra,
text and music, drama and will brought into something close to a single
expression without subordination. It is this final passage of Kundry’s laugh-
ter that reintroduces the vocal body most strongly into Parsifal, that brings
Wagner furthest away from the Schopenhauerian aesthetics of the Beethoven
essay, and that returns Wagner most forcefully to the sister arts theories of
his Zurich period. These passages embody Kundry’s aesthetic (and more
than aesthetic) threat to Wagner’s newly Schopenhauerian conception of
the Gesamtkunstwerk. It is no accident that these most threatening vocal
gestures immediately precede Parsifal’s rejection of Kundry in favor of the
Grail and the shattering of her power over the Grail Knights and the opera
as a whole (fig. 1.6).
While the main thrust of Parsifal is toward the translation of bodies into
symbols, a demand partly expressed through the dominance of thematic
over gestural motifs throughout the work, the emphatically corporeal motif
of Kundry’s laugh poses an increasing threat to the first two acts.35 Ulti-
mately, Kundry’s laugh not only threatens Wagner’s larger aesthetic project
Laughing at the Redeemer 49

but is also produced by it. It is produced by it precisely because that proj-

ect’s obsession with the body and the body’s extinction tends toward the
ludicrous. Ironically, no one has understood the comedy that arises from a
disjunction between consciousness and the body better than Schopen-
hauer. It is Schopenhauer, in the end, who provides some of the sharpest
insights into the threatening necessity of Kundry’s laugh.

The Ludicrous Remainder

We return to Schopenhauer not because he grasps some eternal truth of
humor but because his theory best captures the ludicrousness of the same
totalizing discourse that gave it birth and that helped to form Wagner’s late
Gesamtkunstwerke: “The ludicrous [das Lächerilich] is always the paradoxi-
cal, and thus unexpected, subsumption of an object under a concept that is
in other respects heterogeneous to it. Accordingly,” Schopenhauer writes,
“the phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden apprehension of
an incongruity between such a concept and the real object thought through
it, and hence what is abstract and what is perceptive. The greater and more
unexpected this incongruity in the apprehension of the person laughing,
the more violent will be his laughter” (3:99/2:91). In the light of Schopen-
hauer’s theory of laughter, his entire corpus may be seen as a particularly
long-winded example of the ludicrous. The World as Will and Representation
offers the reader all-encompassing abstractions (chiefly the “will” itself ) ap-
prehensible only through sensuous particularities. Time and again, Scho-
penhauer’s central claim that we must judge the world according to the
analogy of our own bodies leads him, as it does Wagner, to incongruous
juxtapositions of abstract concepts and sensuous objects of perception.
Schopenhauer’s theory of laughter has particular resonance for the
study of the late-nineteenth-century theater because it was during this pe-
riod that the relationship between the abstract and the perceptual became
particularly fraught. The developing crisis of representation that would
come to define modernism was felt with peculiar vigor on the late-­
nineteenth-century stage, a medium far more beholden to sensuous mate-
rial representation (bodies, props, costumes, sets, lighting, stage architec-
ture, etc.) than is the written word. The two most influential avant-garde
movements of the fin-de-siècle stage, symbolism and naturalism, exemplify
two very different responses to this crisis. Symbolist theater would attempt
to avoid the increasingly ridiculous juxtaposition of the perceptive and the
abstract by entirely subordinating the former to the latter—a movement for
50 World War I and Before

which Parsifal and La revue wagnerienne would prove especially influential.

Naturalist theater, by contrast, would attempt to solve the same crisis by
going in precisely the opposite direction, subordinating the abstract to the
perceptive such that concrete particulars of environment and heredity,
rather than immaterial symbols, would determine stage action. While sym-
bolism and naturalism were locked in mortal combat at the threshold of the
twentieth century, each captured an element of that increasingly ludicrous
concatenation of idealist and materialist discourses called the modern bour-
geois subject. The two movements were, as Adorno would later remark of
mass culture and the avant-garde, “the torn halves of an integral freedom,
to which, however, they do not add up.”36
It is likely that in none of the fin-de-siècle arts was the distance between
the abstract and the perceptive so great as in the theater, a condition to
which Schopenhauer’s discussion of the ludicrous at least partly testifies.
Over the course of his argument, Schopenhauer provides eighteen comic
examples, drawn from sources ranging from poetry to oral tales to news­
paper reports, to prove his case. Tellingly, almost half the examples—eight
in total—are drawn from the theater. The theatrical anecdotes, by and large,
draw attention to the unintentionally comic slippages created by live perfor-
mance. Consider, for example, the following three examples Schopenhauer
uses to illustrate his theory of laughter:

[1] The audience at a theatre in Paris once asked for the Marseillaise to be played,
and as this was not done, they began shrieking and howling, so that in the end a
police commissioner in uniform came on to the stage, and explained that for
anything to be done in the theatre other than what appeared on the play-bill
was not allowed. A voice then shouted: “Et vous, Monsieur, êtes-vous aussi sur
l’affiche?” [And you, sir, are you on the playbill?], a hit that raised universal laugh-
ter. (3:101/2:93)

[2] After [the actor Unzelmann] had been strictly forbidden to improvise at all in
the Berlin theatre, he had to appear on the stage on horseback. Just as he came
on the stage, the horse dunged, and at this the audience was moved to laughter,
but they laughed much more when Unzelmann said to the horse: “What are you
doing? don’t you know that we are forbidden to improvise?” (3:102/2:93)

[3] There is the case of the laughter into which Garrick burst in the middle of
playing a tragedy, because a butcher, standing in front of the pit, had put his wig
for a while on his large dog, so as to wipe the sweat from his own head. The dog
Laughing at the Redeemer 51

was supported by his fore-feet on the pit railings, and was looking towards the
stage. (3:107/2:97)

While Schopenhauer uses such anecdotes to argue for his general theory of
humor, he also suggests, without quite meaning to, that the theater is a
space that particularly lends itself to the ludicrous. It does so because of the
many opportunities it offers for accident and thus for the sudden, uninten-
tional interruption of the particular into a general concept alien to it (a po-
lice announcement seen as a part of the playbill, a defecating horse seen as
an improvisational actor, a bewigged dog seen as a spectator). In European
theater, the unique capacity for live performance to produce such disorient-
ing juxtapositions has stood metonymically for a broader crisis of represen-
tation at least since Hamlet, and perhaps even as far back as The Bacchae, but
never before was this capacity explored so relentlessly as it was on the
modernist stage. Schopenhauer’s theory succeeds, in other words, less as a
general theory of humor than as a presentiment of the theater of the
absurd.
At the root of such absurdity is the problem of the body, and indeed all
laughter for Schopenhauer is a kind of revolt of flesh against reason: “It is
the concepts of thinking that are so often opposed to the satisfaction of our
immediate desires, since, as the medium of the past, of the future, and of
what is serious, they act as the vehicle of our fears, our regrets, and all our
cares. It must therefore be delightful for us to see this strict, untiring, and
most troublesome governess, our facility of reason, for once convicted of
inadequacy. Therefore on this account the mien or appearance of laughter
is very closely related to that of joy” (3:108/2:98). Predating Freud’s Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious by more than half a century, Schopen-
hauer describes laughter here as a cruel delight taken by the bodily percep-
tions in the humiliation of their “troublesome governess,” reason. Though
he does not use the word in this passage, the essence of laughter becomes,
in his account, a sort of schadenfreude. The irony is that schadenfreude is
precisely the emotion that Schopenhauer elsewhere most forcefully rejects.
Calling it “the worst trait in human nature,” Schopenhauer writes in Parerga
and Paralipomena that “Schadenfreude is diabolical and its mockery is the
laughter of hell” (6:229–30).37 Schopenhauer’s disgust with schadenfreude
is no idiosyncrasy but follows of necessity from his ethics as a whole, since
schadenfreude marks the very antithesis of Mitleid. As with Schopenhauer,
so with late Wagner. Indeed, it is Parsifal’s message of Mitleid (in the person
52 World War I and Before

of Parsifal) and rejection of schadenfreude (in the person of Kundry) that is

perhaps that work’s most obviously Schopenhauerian aspect.
If Schopenhauer’s grand metaphysical project often produces precisely
the laughter it attempts to exclude, and does so for reasons accounted for
by the theory of laughter his work itself offers, then much the same can be
said of Wagner’s own totalizing creation. Parsifal may be sublime and ri-
diculous by turns, but it can admit laughter only in order ultimately to ban-
ish it. The ridiculousness of Parsifal is created by precisely the extreme jux-
taposition that we find in The World as Will and Representation: the collision
of the most idealist conception of consciousness with the most materialist
conception of the body. It is a juxtaposition exacerbated by Parsifal in per-
formance, since theatrical performance, with its often ungainly bodies, im-
perfect voices, and awkward mechanics, always threatens to widen the di-
vide between conceptual and perceived reality. The stronger the aspiration
toward idealist totality, the sharper the threat of that totality’s becoming
suddenly, unexpectedly undone by the intrusion of alien corporeality.
While a defecating horse might amuse audiences at a Berlin theater (“don’t
you know that we are forbidden to improvise?”), at Bayreuth it would be an
outrage. One can easily imagine the audience response: either fury or a
desperate attempt to ignore the intrusion or—what else?—laughter. It is
this profound sense of dissatisfaction with theatricality that provoked Wag-
ner’s famous remark to Cosima about wanting to create an “invisible the-
atre.”38 Though the joke is frequently cited, often unmentioned is the fact
that it was occasioned by Wagner’s frustration with the performance of
Parsifal in particular—and especially with the performance of Kundry.
“[Wagner] comes to his Parsifal and says: ‘Oh, I hate the thought of all those
costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will
have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists’ balls immediately spring to
mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the
invisible theatre!’ ” (2:181/2:154).
Parsifal, in its attempt to move dramatic representation away from bod-
ies and actions and toward a direct expression of eternal symbols, pursues
a thoroughgoing subsumption of concrete perception to abstracted repre-
sentations. Such a strategy of high seriousness, ironically, replicates pre-
cisely the dynamic at the root of laughter, and so, like Schopenhauer, Wag-
ner risks becoming risible through sheer profundity. Kundry stands for the
necessary exclusions of Parsifal by virtue not only of her gender and her race
but also of her laughter, which is (unlike that of, say, Siegfried, Brünnhilde,
Laughing at the Redeemer 53

or Gurnemanz) essentially anti-Wagnerian. Not quite speech, not exactly an

act, Kundry’s laughter is nevertheless a speech act, one that condemned
her at the moment of its utterance to tortured exile. The moment she
laughed at her redeemer is the moment that transformed her to the alle-
gorical form of eternal femme fatale and Wandering Jew. Her moments of
laughter in Parsifal are but further iterations in her age-long recycling of that
primary speech act, iterations that will end only with her conversion from
cruel laughter to high seriousness, and from allegory to symbol, a conver-
sion marked by her silent servitude and followed shortly by her death.
Kundry, in short, haunts Parsifal not only as woman and Jew but also as
the specter of corporeal theatricality. Indeed, the combined threats of her
femininity, her Jewishness, her corporeality, and her theatricality are insepa-
rable from one another, are in fact mutually reinforced through ­nineteenth-
century discourses that constructed “woman” and “Jew” as distinctly bodily
and mimetic types. Through the hysterical gestures that draw attention to
her body, through the mimetic relationship between her gestures and the
music, through her laughter that brings together music, voice, and gesture,
Kundry operates as the antitype to Parsifal’s drive toward dematerializa-
tion. She is the unintentional but inevitable ridiculous at the heart of the
­Schopenhauerian-Wagnerian sublime. Though antitype, however, she is
never allowed to become antidote. Instead, the cure that is offered in Parsi-
fal for the crisis of corporeality is always and everywhere sublimation forced
to neurotic extremes. The Grail-Spear becomes, in other words, a paradox-
ical object, simultaneously a product of sublimation and of repression: an
obsessive and symptomatic sublimity.39
With remarkable if not fully self-recognized insight, what Wagner shows
us toward the end of Parsifal is nothing less than an addiction to symbols,
an addiction that threatens, if left unsated, to turn blood brothers into frat-
ricides. Before Parsifal returns to the Grail Temple at the end of the opera,
Amfortas refuses to perform his office as Grail King, provoking his own
order of Knights to turn on him. “The Knights press nearer to Amfortas,” de-
manding that he “Uncover the Grail! / Serve now your office! / Your father
commands you: / You must! you must!” and Amfortas reacts by rushing
about in “mad despair,” screaming, laughing, tearing open his clothes. It is a
scene usually directed with foreboding, as the compassionate order, de-
prived of its symbol, becomes suddenly brutal. Thus does the hysteria, for-
merly displaced onto Kundry, come home to the Grail Knights, in their
mob-like desperation for symbolic relief, and it centers even more strongly
54 World War I and Before

upon their king, whose insane death drive seems the only alternative to
supernatural succor. Kundry’s laugh, too, returns, in Amfortas’s hysterical
“Ha!” marked by a single quarter-note ejaculation. Further, Amfortas’s laugh
is linked, like Kundry’s, to the exposure of his body, suddenly revealed as he
tears open his clothes. We hear the return of the unredeemed Kundry, too,
in the “lebhaft” (animated) orchestral line beneath Amfortas’s “No! / No
more! / Ha!” This orchestral line recalls Kundry’s motif from the example
given above from act 1, most obviously in the rhythmically identical de-
scending lines shaped as a duplet plus a triplet (notated in sixteenth notes
in act 1 and in eighth notes here) ending chromatically in both passages (fig.
1.7). For a moment—but only for a moment—the virus of the wound re-
verts back to its corporeal origin, and the old, bad Kundry risks returning in
the shape of the Grail King himself.

Laughing at the Redeemer

The modernist debate over the theatricality of opera has occasionally
been framed as one between two camps, with Wagner and Stravinsky
standing as advocates of theatricality on one hand and Nietzsche and
Adorno opposing it on the other.40 Yet the dichotomy, eliding the highly
ambiguous and fluid positions of each of these figures, obscures as much as
it reveals. While our understanding of all of these figures is compromised by
the opposition, our understanding of Wagner suffers the most. Nietzsche’s
caricature of Wagner as actor-showman-hypnotist is so evocatively ex-
pressed, and captures so much of the truth, that it has become difficult ever
since to recall the sheer complexity of Wagner’s position on theatricality.
Ironically, the late Wagner, with his sharp rejection of spectacle and gesture
and his insistence on the internalization of music, actually comes uncom-
fortably close to Adorno. One possible response to this discomforting prox-
imity would be to argue, as Puchner does, that Wagner’s late rejection of
theatricality is essentially a feint.41 While Puchner’s response is largely cor-
rect when applied to many of Wagner’s only superficially antitheatrical ele-
ments (such as the character of Mime, with its displacement of “bad” mime-
sis onto anti-Semitic stereotype), there are still genuine transformations in
Wagner’s views on theatricality when it comes to his more distinctly Scho-
penhauerian works. These transformations are particularly linked to the role
of the performing body, which is subjugated to the increasingly symphonic
voice arising from the “mystic gulf” beneath the stage. Kundry is the mark of
the performing body, a body that haunts the opera that is its ­exorcism.
Laughing at the Redeemer 55

Figure 1.7. Symbol addiction and the hysterical order

Parsifal marks the extreme of Wagner’s effort to close the gap between
idealized and real performance, and to do so by excluding the body, so far
as possible, from theatrical performance. The opera as a whole is a liturgy
in celebration not so much of Christ as of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and more
particularly of the Gesamtkunstwerk now understood in a particularly Scho-
penhauerian fashion.42 The totality that Parsifal at once celebrates and
56 World War I and Before

a­ ttempts to achieve, in other words, is based upon the thoroughgoing trans-

lation of drama to music, of the visual to the aural, of the body to the sym-
bol. Unsurprisingly, Wagner intended to have done with music drama after
Parsifal and looked forward to devoting himself instead to the composition
of symphonies. The remnant of corporeal theatricality still occupies the
stage, however, in the character of Kundry, whose redemption, silence, and
death are Wagner’s ritual sacrifice. Kundry’s laughter not only draws atten-
tion to her body and reminds us of her hysteria; it also points to the un-
avoidable ludicrousness of Wagner’s project of idealist totality. In a period
when fissures between idealism and corporeality were destabilizing modern-
ist subjectivity even at the moment of its formation, Kundry’s laughter threat-
ens to turn against the redemptive project of the Festival Theatre ­itself.
It was Wagner’s wish that Parsifal never be performed anywhere except
at Bayreuth and to be performed in precisely the same manner, fixed forever
like a ritual or a movie reel. Despite Wagner’s wishes, however, his “stage-
consecration festival play” has now been performed in places far from its
birth, in stagings of which he never would have dreamed, and it has been
revivified by both transgressions. Theatricality, with its inevitable slippages
between text and performance, is often most strongly felt in those works
that struggle most fervently against it. While Wagner’s redemptive vision
now seems impossible at best and apocalyptic at worst, Kundry’s fleshly
laughter at the redeemer continues to be reborn.

Notes
1. Dyer. For more on the controversy, see also Tommasini, “Should the Fat Lady
Diet Before She Sings?”; and Tommasini, “With Surgery, Soprano Sheds a Brünnhilde
Body.”
2. Not all critics who take an interest in the relations between Wagner and Scho-
penhauer tend toward the culturally conservative, however. Exceptions include
Lydia Goehr, Paul Lawrence Rose, and James Treadwell.
3. Magee, Tristan Chord 278, 279.
4. Clément’s Opera: The Undoing of Women, Abbate’s Unsung Voices, Levin’s Rich-
ard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen, and Žižek’s “The Wound Is Healed” offer
some of the most provocative insights of the past quarter century into Wagner par-
ticularly and opera generally, and none contains a reference to Schopenhauer. Simi-
larly, Weiner’s important Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination contains
just three references to Schopenhauer (despite his influential anti-Semitism) over the
course of roughly four hundred pages. While the diminution of Schopenhauer’s im-
portance among Wagner scholars may be at least partly attributable to simple Scho-
Laughing at the Redeemer 57

penhauer fatigue, the same cannot be said for his neglect among theater scholars.
Despite Schopenhauer’s enormous influence on the development of the modernist
stage, his omission from theater history is almost total. Oscar Brockett’s History of the
Theatre (8th ed.), John Russell Brown’s Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre, and
Christopher Innes’s Avant Garde Theatre, all works of impressive scope and depth,
omit the philosopher. J. L. Styan’s three-volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice
mentions Schopenhauer just once, in a subclause on Wagner’s indebtedness to
“Schopenhauer and German metaphysics” (2:5). Nor is Schopenhauer to be found in
more focused studies (such as Frantisek Deak’s otherwise excellent Symbolist The-
atre) of theatrical movements where his influence was particularly central. Even set-
ting Wagner aside, Schopenhauer’s importance for such central figures of the mod-
ern stage as Turgenev, Nietzsche, Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, O’Neill, and Beckett
has been largely forgotten.
5. There is another implied reason behind much of the scholarly silence, which is
that Schopenhauer’s complete dismissal of Hegel in particular and historicism in gen-
eral puts him beyond the pale of much contemporary literary theory. Added to this
was his excoriation by the late Nietzsche and Adorno, and his almost complete ne-
glect by Heidegger and Levinas.
6. Schopenhauer’s anticipation of Freudian theory was occasionally acknowl-
edged by Freud himself, for example, “What [Schopenhauer] says [in The World as
Will and Representation] about the struggle against acceptance of a painful part of
reality fits my conception of repression so completely that I am again indebted for
having made a discovery to not being a wide reader” (“On the History of the Psycho-
Analytic Movement,” Collected Papers 4:355).
7. Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke 2:122. English modified from Schopenhauer,
World as Will and Representation 1:102–03.
8. When citing German-language primary sources, I have included the volume
and page number of the German text, followed by a slash, followed by the volume
and page number of the translation. In cases where I provide my own translation, I
have referenced the German source alone. Unless otherwise noted, all excerpts from
Wagner’s prose writings are taken from the Gesammelte Schriften. For the sake of
accuracy and readability, I have occasionally modified W. Ashton Ellis’s translations
of Wagner’s prose writings.
9. The fascination with the brains of “geniuses” was relatively common among
European intellectuals in the nineteenth century, with the skulls and brains of Kant,
Schiller, Byron, and Schopenhauer, among many others, studied, debated, and held
up as evidence for the physiological roots of intellectual superiority. Indeed, the first
biography of Schopenhauer, published in 1862, featured a portrait of his skull along-
side those of illustrious figures such as Kant, Schiller, Talleyrand, and Napoleon. The
brains of Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin were also examined, the latter
for evidence of insanity (Hagner 206). By the late nineteenth century, “brain-clubs,”
58 World War I and Before

in which distinguished men bequeathed their brains to science, were founded in

Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Philadelphia, Moscow, and Berlin (215). Two excellent
studies of nineteenth-century developments in the biology of mind are Hagner and
also Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. The relationship
between such developments and Romantic idealist conceptions of consciousness,
however, is a subject that merits further study.
10. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation vol. 2, ch. 31.
11. In his letters and autobiography, Wagner emphasized the “vast importance”
of Schopenhauer for his development as a thinker and artist (see, e.g., Selected Letters
323, 338; My Life 508). The overwhelming majority of critics have agreed with this
self-assessment. Magee of course emphasizes the centrality of Schopenhauer to
Wagner’s later work (see esp. Philosophy of Schopenhauer ch. 17; Tristan Chord chs.
8–11), as do Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer (Wagner, Selected Letters 163) and
Michael Tanner (Tanner, Wagner 100). Ernest Newman is somewhat more nuanced
in his verdict, arguing that “Schopenhauer merely reinforced [Wagner’s] emotions
and intuitions with reasons and arguments. That, and that alone, was Schopenhau-
er’s ‘influence’ upon him: but it was the most powerful thing of the kind that his
mind had ever known and was ever afterwards to know” (2:431).
12. Puchner 34–35.
13. Adorno, In Search of Wagner 46.
14. Several of these musical imitations of physical gestures are traced in Reeser.
15. Abbate, “Immortal Voices, Mortal Forms” 296.
16. Dahlhaus.
17. Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften 12:347.
18. C. Wagner 2:214–215/2:186.
19. As Ryan Minor has demonstrated, the journey that the Grail Knights undergo
over the course of the music drama parallels this process of dematerialization in
disturbing fashion. The chorus of Knights, he argues, devolves “from autonomous
participant to powerless observer” as it joins the invisible treble choir at the work’s
conclusion (36).
20. Showalter, Female Malady 147–48.
21. Nietzsche [Link]. In his essay “The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wag-
ner” (1933), Thomas Mann renders a similar verdict on Parsifal, which he describes
as “one advanced and offensive degenerate after another,” though a work largely re-
deemed by the “sanctifying, mythologizing power” of its music (336–37).
22. For the construction of hysteria as a specifically female and Jewish disease,
see, e.g., Showalter, Female Malady; and Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gen-
der”; as well as Gilman.
23. Levin, “Reading Beckmesser Reading” 131.
24. On the Jewishness of Beckmesser, see Millington; Rose 112; Weiner 66–72;
Borchmeyer; Dennis.
Laughing at the Redeemer 59

25. Irigaray 125.

26. The “grand united artwork,” Wagner writes in Religion and Art, is a unity of
“the masculine principle” of “the poet’s work” (i.e., the text) and “the feminine” prin-
ciple of “music” (10:167/6:165). The most important study of Wagner’s interest in
androgyny is Nattiez.
27. Smart 196.
28. Ibid. 197.
29. Ibid. 198.
30. It is worth noting, too, that religious mysticism (especially that of Jansenists
and Eastern Jews) was often associated, in late-nineteenth century studies, with hys-
teria (Gilman 367–79). In this regard, Parsifal’s lavish veneer of Roman Catholic mys-
ticism may again raise the threat of hysteria (and indeed Nietzsche’s attacks on Parsi-
fal for its hysteria are linked to his attacks on it for its pseudo-Catholicism). If so, then
the Jew may serve in the opera as a way of displacing the hysteria called forth by the
opera’s embrace of mystical rapture.
31. Bronfen 149.
32. The reflection is clearly unintended, since Wagner seems to have been un-
aware of Charcot’s experiments. But this is not to say that the coincidence of Wagner
and Charcot’s parallel stagings of hysteria, hypnotism, and electricity are accidental.
Both drew on broader nineteenth-century discourses of electricity and hypnotism.
For more on the development of these discourses, see Asdendorf; Lenoir; McCarren
748–74.
33. Davidson, n.p.
34. C. Wagner 1:1031/1:978, 1:1073/1:984.
35. In this way, Parsifal essentially duplicates Freud’s own gendering of sublima-
tion as work from which women are largely excluded, repression and hysteria being
more congenial to women. See especially Irigaray’s critique of Freud on this point
(123–27).
36. Adorno, “Correspondence with Benjamin” 66.
37. It should be noted that Wagner read the Parerga and Paralipomena as well as
The World as Will and Representation (Newman 2:431).
38. As William Kinderman notes, the vexed antitheatricality of Parsifal can also be
found in the character of Klingsor, who, with the dazzling illusions of his Zauber-
schloss, “most resembles an opera director” (227).
39. I am particularly influenced here by Doane’s critique of the Freudian opposi-
tion between sublimation and repression (249–67).
40. This dichotomy is well expressed in Puchner (39).
41. “We should not understand [the depiction of Mime’s deceptive theatricality],
or any of Wagner’s other doubts [about theatricality], as a revocation of his total
theatricalization of the work of art. Mime does not prove that Wagner envisions an
essentially nonmimetic and nontheatrical art. What he shows instead is Wagner’s
60 World War I and Before

anxiety about false mimesis and false theatricality, an anxiety that is deeply rooted
precisely because Wagner’s entire conception of the work of art is based on such
theatrical and mimetic gestures. Wagner and the audience can safely laugh about the
dilemma in which Mime is caught without having to acknowledge that perhaps a
similar kind of theatrical mimesis, theatrical gestures, and gestural music lies at the
heart of Wagner’s entire oeuvre” (Puchner 51).
42. For more on Parsifal as a liturgy in celebration of the Gesamtkunstwerk, see my
Total Work of Art ch. 2.

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62 World War I and Before

Rose, Paul Lawrence. Wagner: Race and Revolution. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämtliche Werke. 7 vols. Ed. Arthur Hübscher. Wiesbaden:
Eberhard Brockhaus, 1946–50.
———. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York:
Dover, 1966.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture. London:
Virago, 1985.
———. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander Gilman
et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 286–344.
Smart, Mary Ann, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Berke-
ley: California University Press, 2004.
Smith, Matthew Wilson. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Styan, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1981.
Tanner, Michael. Wagner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Tommasini, Anthony. “Should the Fat Lady Diet before She Sings?” New York Times
14 Nov. 2004
———. “With Surgery, Soprano Sheds a Brünnhilde Body.” New York Times 27 Mar.
2005.
Wagner, Cosima. Die Tagebücher. 4 vols. Munich: R. Piper, 1982.
———. Diaries. 2 vols. Trans. Geoffrey Skelton. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1977, 1980.
Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. 10 vols. Leipzig: C. S. W.
Siegel, 1907.
———. My Life. Authorized translation. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1911.
———. Prose Works. 8 vols. Trans. W. Ashton Ellis. London: Keagan Paul, Trench,
Trübner, 1895–96.
———. Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen. Ed. Hans von Wolzogen and Richard
Sternfeld. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911.
———. Selected Letters. Trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
Weiner, Marc. Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995.
Young, Robert M. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral
Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon,
1970.
Žižek, Slavoj. “The Wound Is Healed.” Opera through Other Eyes. Ed. David J. Levin.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
 2 Maeterlinck, Debussy,
and Modernism

Daniel Albright

Maeterlinck’s Subtractions
Pelléas and Mélisande talk intently about the fountain that no longer
restores the sight of the blind. He notes that Mélisande’s hair is so long that it
has fallen into the water; he warns her not to keep tossing her wedding ring
high in the air, because it might fall into the water. But Mélisande cries “Oh!”

Pelléas: It fell!
Mélisande: It fell in the water!
Pelléas: Where is it? Where is it?
Mélisande: I didn’t see it go down.
Pelléas: I see it shining!
Mélisande: My ring?
Pelléas: Yes, yes; down there . . .
Mélisande: Oh! Oh!
It’s so far from us!
No, no, that’s not it . . . That’s not it.
It’s lost . . . lost . . .
Nothing left but a big circle of water.1

But during this scene the singers aren’t sitting on the edge of a fountain:
they’re talking to each other quietly in a luxurious high-ceilinged room,
wearing expensive, more-or-less modern clothes. They seem to be impro-
vising an operatic scene to amuse themselves—they are too well bred, too
reticent to talk directly about their affection for one another, so they make
up a pseudo-medieval play world in which they can obliquely describe their
emotional landscape. Pelléas and Mélisande are simply names of characters
in a role-playing game—a sort of Dungeons and Dragons for the listlessly
64 World War I and Before

rich, but almost completely improvised. When two people engage in this
sort of feigning-together, one party proposes an event, then the second
party either agrees (“It fell”; “It fell in the water!”), thereby affirming the
event’s existence, or corrects (“I see it shining!”; “That’s not it”), thereby
retracting the proposed event and substituting a new one.
I’m describing here the 1987 Lyons production, in which the director,
Pierre Strosser, found a brilliant solution to a problem that had long vexed
Maurice Maeterlinck himself: the inadequacy of human actors.2 Maeter-
linck liked to write marionette plays, and noted, in a preface to a volume of
plays including Pelléas et Mélisande, that he did not intend to write for ordi-
nary actors:

Isn’t it evident that the Macbeth or the Hamlet we see on the stage bears no re-
semblance to the Macbeth or the Hamlet we read in the book? . . .
In my dreams I remember Hamlet’s death. One evening I opened the door to
the poem’s usurper. The actor was illustrious. He entered. It took only one glance
to show me that he wasn’t Hamlet. Not for one instant, as far as I was concerned.
For three hours I saw him stomp around in a lie. . . . [H]e was trying in vain to
interest me in a life that wasn’t his own and that his very presence had made a
sham.3

But if Hamlet were sitting with Laertes on a sofa, talking through a pretend
fencing match, then Maeterlinck would not have to worry about the actor’s
inadequacy to the role: the actor would be, in effect, reading a book out
loud from memory and inviting the audience to read along with him. If he
shouted, if he sobbed, the audience would see it not as enacting a role but
as illustrating it, giving voice-color, voice-shape, to some fleeting personage
nowhere in the playhouse, nowhere in the world. The communal experi-
ence of the theater and the intimacy of reading are almost perfectly inte-
grated in Strosser’s production.
Maeterlinck is a modernist in that his plays concern characters on the
threshold of nonentity, losing the power of speech, dwelling in a self-dis-
crediting theatrical space. Despite his love for extravagant special effects,
Maeterlinck is a minimalist:

Arkël: How are you?

Mélisande: Fine, fine. Why are you asking me that? I’ve never been better. It
seems to me, however, that I know something.
Arkël: What are you saying? I don’t understand you.
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 65

Mélisande: I no longer understand all that I’m saying, you see. I don’t know
what I say. I don’t know what I know. I’m no longer saying what I want to say.
Arkël: But you are, you are.4

Clov: I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more,
teach me others. . . . Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don’t un-
derstand, it dies, or it’s me, I don’t understand that either. I ask the words that
remain—sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say.5

These echoey, nearly contentless exchanges—speech that keeps calling it-

self into question—tatters of language fluttering or flagging on the stage—
show how Maeterlinck opens some of the paths on which Beckett was to go
further. Sometimes Maeterlinck’s anticipations of Beckett are striking. In his
gripping play Intérieur (published 1894; first performed 1895), written soon
after Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; 1893), the Old Man and the Stranger are
standing outside a house, staring through a window at a happy domestic
scene in which a family is putting the baby to sleep—the spectators know
that the family in a moment will receive news of the death of a young daugh-
ter of the house. The two men at the window note that the family members
have ceased all movement so as not to make any noise—a skein of silk drops
amid the hush—everyone is looking at the baby:

The Stranger: They don’t know that others are looking at them.
The Old Man: Someone is looking at us, too.6

This moment has something of the shiver of the famous speech in Waiting for
Godot (1953) when Vladimir says, as Estragon dozes, “He’ll know nothing.
. . . At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleep-
ing, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”7 There is a sudden sense of dila-
tion of the reference frame, in which looking and being looked at, knowing
and not knowing, are absorbed into some rhythm beyond all horizons.
The oxymoron-riddle, the leaving off at the far verges of language, the
sense of a rickety theater inset within the larger, still more rickety theater
of the earth itself—these are modernist themes but also themes that
Maeterlinck learned from Shakespeare. I am not what I am. The rest is si-
lence, O O O O. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Nothing, nothing,
nothing, nothing, nothing. Maeterlinck’s best-known works are dramas
with such severe restrictions of language and incident that it is easy to
forget that he was a both a versatile playwright and a man of learning and
intellectual curiosity—he read Schopenhauer, Emerson, and Darwin with
66 World War I and Before

care, translated Novalis’s Fragments and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore into
French, and took Marcus Aurelius as his hero. We remember his fairy-tale
plays—abstractions and evacuations of the normal theater of his age—but
Maeterlinck also wrote a worthy satirical drama (Le miracle de Saint Antoine
[1904], in which St. Anthony of Padua visits a bourgeois household holding
a wake and resurrects the matriarch from her coffin, to the consternation of
most of the family, who would prefer her dead) and a topical play about the
Great War (Le bourgmestre de Stilmonde [1918], in which the mayor of an
newly invaded Belgian town has to decide whether to offer his own life in
place of the life of his old servant, wrongly accused of shooting a German
officer).
Maeterlinck learned from the symbolist theater of his time, especially
from the works of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, but he learned more from Shake-
speare. Maeterlinck’s first play, La princesse Maleine (1889) is a bizarre com-
bination of motifs from King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and other plays. It is, for
a Maeterlinck play, unusually eventful: The princess escapes from a locked
tower and disguises herself as a servant in order to be near her beloved, the
son of a weak and dithery king; but she learns that her beloved is now en-
gaged to be married to the daughter of an evil queen, who has seduced the
prince’s father, the weak king. The play ends in general havoc, as the evil
queen and the weak king strangle Princess Maleine and the prince stabs the
evil queen to death, then kills himself with the same dagger. It is as if Lady
Macbeth whispers hateful counsel to King Lear, and then, transforming her-
self into a female Iago, manages to destroy the life of a green and guileless
Othello.
Maeterlinck returned to Shakespeare in a still more overt, but more
spare and intent manner, in Joyzelle (1903). This is, in effect, The Tempest,
stripped of all characters except Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, and Ariel,
with the difference that Prospero’s child is now a son and the test of fitness
to marry is now given to a woman, Joyzelle, newly arrived on the island.
Prospero (named Merlin in this play) plots with his familiar, Arielle (a female
spirit), devising various schemes to ensure that Joyzelle’s love for his son is
unconditional, absolute; in the most interesting twist, Merlin makes Joy-
zelle think that he himself is trying to seduce her, so that father and son
seem rivals. This is as close as fin-de-siècle theater can approach to the
modality of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).
Maeterlinck lived a long life and spent a great deal of time pondering
Shakespeare. He was profoundly suspicious of Shakespeare’s taste for the
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 67

grandiose—for all the bloody blameful blades that bravely broach those
boiling bloody breasts. Othello in particular struck Maeterlinck as over-
wrought, excessive. As he says in his essay “Le tragique quotidien” (from Le
trésor des humbles, 1896):

I admire Othello, but it doesn’t seem to me that he lives the distinguished daily
life of a Hamlet, who has time to live just because he doesn’t act. Othello is ad-
mirably jealous. But isn’t it maybe an old error to think that it’s in moments when
we’re possessed by such a passion, and of other equally violent passions, that we
truly live? I’ve come to believe that an old man sitting in his armchair, standing by
under a lamp, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws that reign
around his home, interpreting without understanding what is in the silence of the
doors and windows . . . I’ve come to believe that this motionless old man lived,
in reality, a life more profound, more human, more universal, that the lover who
strangles his mistress.8

Maeterlinck never wrote a play in which a man sits in a chair and does noth-
ing at all—no playwright did until (perhaps) Samuel Beckett’s Nacht und
Träume (1982; 1983). But Maeterlinck was nevertheless engaged in a theater
of kenosis, emptying: behind his plays there is often a conventional melo­
dramatic plot, such as a love triangle, but Maeterlinck systematically dis-
mantles most of the intrigue, either by moving it offstage or by omitting
large pieces of it. This taste for eventlessness would spread widely through
the modernist age: Gertrude Stein’s theater, such as the opera Four Saints in
Three Acts (1927–28; 1934), displays actors who stand still or noodle around
the stage speaking almost contentless dialogue—indeed Stein thought that
all successful plays were plays in which “nothing was happening. . . . [A]fter
all Hamlet Shakespeare’s most interesting play has really nothing happening
except that they live and die. . . . [A]n interesting thing is when there is noth-
ing happening. I said that the moon excited dogs because it did nothing,
lights coming and going do not excite them.”9 Maeterlinck too was more
interested in what he could subtract than what he could add, more inter-
ested in what he could paralyze than what he could set in motion.
Possibly Maeterlinck reached his limit in the domain of subtraction and
paralysis quite early in his career when, in 1890–91, he wrote Les aveugles
and Les sept princesses. Les aveugles concerns a group of blind men and
women lost in a forest—their guide, a priest, seems to have abandoned
them, and they debate what to do; at last they find the priest, dead, and it
begins to snow. Les sept princesses is an eerier play: arriving on a warship
68 World War I and Before

sailing through a narrow canal, a prince enters a castle to see his grandpar-
ents (the king and queen) and his cousins, the seven princesses; but he can
see the girls only vaguely, from a distance, on the other side of a locked
door, as if through a misted window or a mirror. At one point the queen
remarks that the hall appears as though it is full of shadows. The prince calls
them white shadows; he peers intently, but he can’t make out whether he’s
seeing their hair or another shadow. The queen knocks on the window to
try to awaken the sleepers, softly, because they are ill and mustn’t be dis-
turbed; but they remain imperturbable, blank. The king tells the prince
about a corridor that goes under the princesses’ cell: he makes his difficult
way, pushes up the flagstone, enters—six of the princesses begin to stir, but
the seventh, Ursula, the one he loves, cannot be awakened, is not asleep,
though the hysterical queen keeps crying that the servants must wake her. The
play seems to concern the inaccessibility of the imagination’s ­ treasures
—“Nothing that we love over-much / Is ponderable to our touch,” as Yeats
puts it.10 But it also seems to concern the playwright’s difficulty in putting
on stage a nothing-thing, an emotionally charged stasis. Like Intérieur, Les
sept princesses is a dumb show framed by an interpretive dialogue; but unlike
Intérieur, Les sept princesses gives the audience something between a tableau
vivant and a tableau mort, a tantalizing glimpse at a gesture so restrained that
it scarcely constitutes itself as a gesture at all. In Beckett’s prose piece “Imag-
ination Dead Imagine” (1965), a man and a woman are folded together, two
white images in a white rotunda, almost completely still except for an “in-
finitesimal shudder instantaneously suppressed.” Something of this liveli-
ness of dead imagination is anticipated in Les sept princesses.

Le Hasard et la Nécessité
Maeterlinck’s predilection for an abstract theater affected the design of
his fables. Because he had little interest in subplots, his plays can be quite
linear: when he took some elements of a play by Paul Heyse to create his
Marie-Magdeleine (1910), he simplified the plot to the point where he called
Heyse’s original incomparably richer than his own; and we’ve already seen
how he seized one minor theme in The Tempest to make Joyzelle. However,
the linear design of a Maeterlinck play usually has yawning gaps: the catas-
trophe is often at once inexorable and improbable, unmotivated. In Pelléas
et Mélisande, Golaud is a gigantic, powerful, desperately jealous man, but
he’s a floundering Othello, without glory, without even a handkerchief. In
the course of the play this noble prince gets lost in a forest and is injured
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 69

after being thrown from his startled horse—he seems as inept as Lewis Car-
roll’s White Knight. He tries to gather evidence of Mélisande’s infidelity by
bribing his little son to spy, but the son reports nothing more sinister than
that Pelléas and Mélisande keep staring steadily at the light. Golaud will fi-
nally kill Pelléas, but Mélisande dies too, even though she has suffered only
the smallest of wounds. In Maeterlinck’s plays, you die not so much because
a train of events culminates in your dying but because you have an air of
death about you. At one point the Doctor tells Pelléas that he has the grave
and friendly look of someone who won’t live long; elsewhere, Mélisande
tells Golaud that she feels that she won’t live for a long time; and early in
the play Pelléas reads a letter urging him to visit quickly his friend Marcellus,
who knows the exact day when he’s going to die. Things you ought to know
you don’t know, such as (in Mélisande’s case) who you are and where you
come from; things you ought not to know you do know, such as the day of
your death. Causality works sideways—synchronically, not diachronically:
at the exact moment when Mélisande’s wedding ring plops into the foun-
tain, Golaud’s horse starts and topples onto Golaud. The design of the plot
is linear, but the line is zigzag and full of holes.
Maeterlinck understood this quite well. In his important essay “L’év-
olution du mystère” (from Le temple enseveli, 1902), Maeterlinck speaks of
rereading two or three of his plays and noticing how fate worked in them:

The wellspring of these little dramas was terror of the unknown that surrounds
us. People trusted in powers enormous, invisible, and fatal, whose intentions no
one could guess, but that the soul of the drama imagined as spiteful, attentive to
all our actions, hostile to smiles, to life, to peace, to love. Maybe these powers
were at bottom just, but just only in rage, and they exercised their justice in a
manner so subterranean, so tortuous, so slow, so remote, that their punishments
—for they never gave rewards—took on the appearance of arbitrary and inexpli-
cable acts of destiny. In a word, it was the idea of the Christian God combined
with the idea of the fatality of the ancients, thrust back into nature’s impenetra-
ble night, and, from there, taking pleasure in studying, thwarting, disconcerting,
darkening the plans and the happiness of men.11

Maeterlinck seems almost amused by the blackness of his own dramatic

imagination, but he took the notion of fatality seriously, and indeed most of
his writing on drama can be seen as a long meditation on the theme of fate.
He thought that all great drama depends on a sense of fatedness—a sense
of some implacable process that generates the plot and ennobles the strug-
70 World War I and Before

gles of those who succumb to it. Dramatists, he believed, made use of sev-
eral kinds of fatalities—one is the fatality of passion itself:

But in order for a passion to be truly fatal in a conscious soul . . . it requires the in-
tervention of a God, or of some other infinite and irresistible force. Therefore Wag-
ner had recourse to the philter in Tristan und Isolde, Shakespeare to the witches in
Macbeth. . . . We find that we’ve gone in a circle, back to the very heart of what
the ancients called necessity. This circling-back is more or less admissible in a
drama set in archaic or legendary times, when every sort of poetical fantasy is
permitted; but in a drama that would like to press closer to the truth of the pres-
ent day, it would be necessary to find another sort of intervention, that would
appear to us truly irresistible, in order to dress up the crimes of a Macbeth . . .
with the excuse of fatal compulsion, and so to impart to them the dark grandeur,
the dark nobility that they don’t have in themselves.12

You see Maeterlinck’s problem. He hungers to present in the theater con-

temporary problems, contemporary science, the whole intellectual/social
milieu of his age. But he also thinks that a good play requires some iron slab
looming in the background, secretly moving to the foreground, dropping
when ripeness is all. Macbeth is just a commonplace murderer unless his act
has some black aureole playing around it. So Maeterlinck is almost always
willing to sacrifice contemporaneity in order to regain the fatedness avail-
able only in legend.
Maeterlinck never succeeded in his quest to find some contemporary
equivalent of predestination. He looked with great interest at Ibsen’s ex-
periment in finding a modern fate surrogate:

Thus Ibsen, in quest of a new and so to speak scientific form of fatality, placed in
the middle of his best dramas the veiled, grandiose, tyrannical figure of Heredity.
But at bottom, in his works, it is not the scientific mystery of heredity that stirs
in us certain human fears, deeper than our animal fears. . . . No; what excites a
terror of a different kind from the terror of imminent but natural danger, is the
obscure idea of a justice that heredity manifests—the bold affirmation that the
sins of the father fall on the children.13

Maeterlinck is thinking of Ibsen plays such as Ghosts (1881–82), in which the

legacy of the vile Captain Alving is the hereditary syphilis that destroys the
mind of his son. But, as Susan Sontag points out, it’s dangerous to take ill-
ness as a metaphor for anything at all, let alone for the patient working of
justice; the spirochete is a contrived and artificial nemesis, compared to
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 71

(say) the Furies of the Oresteia. Maeterlinck, therefore, thought that Ibsen,
like all other contemporary dramatists, had failed to find new and credible
Parcae: “We can affirm that the poet who would find today, in the material
sciences, in the unknown that surrounds us, or in our own heart, the equiv-
alent of the fatality of the ancients, that is to say a predestining force as ir-
resistible, as universally acknowledged, would for certain write a master-
piece.”14 Maeterlinck believes that he needs Fate in his dramas to provide a
teleology, an importance, even in some sense a sanctity to the deeds of his
characters; but he has little confidence in any Fate that makes larger claims
than the simple statement, You are often unhappy and you are certainly
going to die. One reason for the celebrated wispiness of Maeterlinck’s plays
is that destiny, design, is asserted but asserted in bad faith, amid a regres-
sion into fairy tale. When Arkël says, in Pelléas et Mélisande, that we see only
the back side of fate, it sounds as if someone or something sees the front
side; but in fact Maeterlinck has the gravest doubts about the existence of
an obverse.
There is probably no better description for the role of fate in Maeter-
linck’s plays than the random inevitable. He returns to this theme in one of
his last books, a collection of aphorisms: “inexplicable errors of nature or of
a universe where all is predetermined.”15 He was obsessed with the notion
that the history of the universe was preengraved in unalterable bronze
but that this general inexorability was the result of errors, blotches, random
thrusts. He tended to look at human life under the aspect of eternity, as
if time were an unrolled filmstrip in which everything was visible at the
same time:

In the eternal present that is the sole reality of time, you would be perfectly able
to see yourself die before you were born. . . .
What does it matter what happens to me, since everything that happens to
me was already there before I was born?16

All time has, in a sense, already happened; as Eliot says, the future is a faded
song. But there is no true continuity in the great story, for events come to
pass through blind spasms. Beneath the utter determinedness of events
there lies sheer indeterminacy. Maeterlinck wasn’t entirely comfortable
with Darwin’s theory of natural selection by means of random variation, but
he was willing to accept it as a sort of provisional truth.17 And Maeterlinck’s
plays are gardens full of odd sports.
The architecture of Maeterlinck’s castles reifies fate’s own architecture.
72 World War I and Before

His plays are full of underground tunnels, occult connections between dis-
tant things, like the corridor in Les sept princesses that bypasses the locked
door. Opening doors and gates requires a great deal of effort, if it is possible
at all: Pelléas et Mélisande begins with a scene, omitted in Debussy’s opera,
in which the servants struggle with all their strength to push open the cas-
tle’s great portal. Doors threaten in other ways too: Mélisande tears her
dress when it snags on a door. Maeterlinck tends to understand fate as an
endless series of closings-off, intermitted by painful accessions to your fu-
ture life.
Not only is your path hemmed in and full of obstacles, but the ground
beneath your feet is at any moment likely to give way. Often the castle is
constructed precariously over some dank grotto: in Pelléas et Mélisande, Go-
laud and Pelléas grope their way down a slippery subterranean path, full of
the smell of death, and try not to fall into the stagnant water below. The first
play that Maeterlinck wrote after Pelléas et Mélisande was Alladine et Palo-
mides (1894), in which he develops at length the theme of the grotto be-
neath the castle—indeed the castle of this play is Maeterlinck’s most elabo-
rate architectural fantasy. Alladine’s pet lamb falls in the castle moat and is
swept away; later the desperate Alladine and Palomides find themselves in
the castle’s dark foundation space and embrace in desperate wonder. The
lovers imagine that they are in a heaven of roses and smiling jewels, sur-
rounded by water so blue that it seems a distillate of sky. But when the
sunlight at last streams in, they see that the grotto is actually all fungus and
rock and rot; the decomposed body of the lamb is there, too. This refocus-
ing of the theater’s eye from love’s delirium to death’s squalor is one of
Maeterlinck’s simplest but most effective presentations of fate’s undergird-
ing, fate’s stamina.
The castle is perched over an abyss, but it also incorporates the abyss, so
to speak, into the design of the superstructure:

Alladine: I can’t help being uneasy when I come back to the palace. . . . It is so
big and I’m so little, and I still get lost in it. . . . And then all those windows on
the sea. . . . You can’t count them. . . . And corridors that keep turning for no
reason; and others that don’t turn and lose themselves between the walls. . . .
And halls where I dare not go in. . . .
Palomides: We’ll go everywhere. . . .
Alladine: You could say that I wasn’t made to live in it, or that it wasn’t built for
me. . . . Once, I wandered off. . . . I pushed open thirty doors before finding
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 73

daylight. . . . And I couldn’t get out; the last door opened on a pool. . . . And
vaults that are cold all summer long; and galleries that fold back endlessly on
themselves. . . . There are staircases that lead nowhere and terraces from
which you can’t see anything.18

Where did Maeterlinck find the inspiration for this extraordinary castle?
The Carceri d’invenzione (1750) engraved by Piranesi—phantasmagorical
prisons seemingly designed for lunatics by lunatics—are one possibility. An-
other possibility lies in apiculture, for Maeterlinck was a remarkably keen
student of bees and wrote an erudite account of the dynamics of the hive
(La vie des abeilles [1901]), based on his own curious experiments in bee
navigational systems and on the best science of his time. Note, for example,
his account of how bees begin hive construction: “At last, when she has
worked the substance until it appears to have the desired dimensions and
consistency, she applies it to the high point of the dome, thus putting in
position the first stone or rather the keystone of the vault of the new city,
for we have here an upside-down city that descends from the sky and
doesn’t arise from the earth’s breast in the way that a human city does.”19
As far as Maeterlinck is concerned, a beehive is a miracle of complex architec-
tural thrift, just as bee society is a miracle of unanimous intent cooperative to
the good of the whole. But Maeterlinck makes no claim to understand all its
internal workings and is deeply puzzled by the telepathic coordination of all
the individual drones, workers, and queens; here fate works perfectly but
incomprehensibly. In human society fate is not only incomprehensible but
scattered, distracted, haphazard, just a name for the usual misery of things;
a drama, any drama, is a poor thing next to the annual mystery play of the
hive. Still, the palace of Alladine et Palomides looks more like a hive than like
a normal palace: if not completely upside down, it contains many inverted
elements, and the galleries folded back on themselves, confusingly sym-
metrical, are like the hexagonal cells of the honeycomb.
Maeterlinck’s absurd palace spatializes the way that fate works in time:
full of dead ends, sudden useless illuminations, vain repetitions—the repli-
cated galleries are like the sideslips in the plot, such as the horse that rears
at the instant that Mélisande’s ring drops in the fountain. The elaboration of
the delicate pathos of the lost has a fin-de-siècle tint, but the sheer miscon-
structedness of the stage set (virtual or actual) and of the fable feels mod-
ernist. The atmosphere is refined, sober, eerily empty—Maeterlinck’s king-
doms are nearly depopulated, except for the royal family and the occasional
74 World War I and Before

blind or sleeping beggar; but there is an odd Looney Tunes aspect to the
plays, in that the scenario consists of one damned thing after another, until
the Acme safe, long suspended in air, squashes the characters flat.
Maybe Maeterlinck’s most telling dramatization of fate can be found in
one of his oddest projects, Les fiançailles (1922). This is a sequel to his most
successful play (in terms of box office), L’oiseau bleu (1908), a probable factor
in his winning the Nobel Prize in 1911. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a play
that I dislike more than L’oiseau bleu—but its very repulsiveness fascinates
me. It’s a childish, sentimental, heavy-handed féerie à la Perrault in which
two impoverished children discover that their skimpy little cottage isn’t so
bad after all, after the Fairy takes them on a tour of a panpsychic world full
of talking dogs, talking trees, talking bread, talking sugar, talking light, and
other special tickles so cartoonish that they may have influenced some of
the early creators of animated cartoons. I suspect that when, in Lolita (1955),
Vladimir Nabokov damns the evil playwright Clare Quilty by calling him a
new Maeterlinck, he had this play in mind—Nabokov also said in a 1970
interview that “Beckett is the author of lovely novellas and wretched plays
in the Maeterlinck tradition.”20 And I also suspect that when Auden, in The
Sea and the Mirror (1944) describes a fiasco of a play in which everything
conceivable goes wrong, “even the huge stuffed bird of happiness,” he is
thinking of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird of Happiness.21
In Les fiançailles, Tyltyl, the boy protagonist of L’oiseau bleu, has passed
puberty with flying colors, and the Fairy asks him to ponder possible brides
from among the girls of his acquaintance. We need not trouble with further
summary of the plot, except to note that there is a character named Destiny,
the enemy of Light: “Here a trapdoor opens, in the middle of the stage; and
there slowly rises, like a tower, a gigantic form twice as high as a man. It is
square, enormous, imposing, crushing, and gives the impression of a granite
mass and of a blind and inflexible power. You can’t see its face. It is dressed in
grayish rigid draperies like a mountain ridge.”22 But Destiny shrinks: by the
middle of the play Destiny is stumbling, limping; by the end (when Tyltyl’s
unborn children are trying to pick their proper mother), Destiny is no bigger
than a small child and lisps like a baby when he talks. At the end of the play,
Light comments that necessity in human affairs comes not from fate but
from a kind of general racial will: “It’s not destiny, as human beings say, but
the will of those who know all and never die.”23 Just as the motions of bees
are guided not by fate’s decree but by an instinct arising from the pressure
of all bee-kind being brought to bear on the performance of individual bees,
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 75

so human Destiny recasts itself: it is no longer some exterior godhead, mon-

umental and implacable, but a sort of collective plastic force that issues
from the abiding presences of the dead, the living, the unborn. Les fiançailles
is a cutesy-pie, uningratiating piece of work, but it suggests that, as Maeter-
linck grew older and more determined to be cheerful, he made his peace, to
some degree, with his old enemy, fate: fate’s self-discrediting is now ex-
plicit, and if the alternative to Destiny is still unconvincing, at least Maeter-
linck propounds it only in the course of an obviously contrived and prepos-
terous fable.
Maeterlinck is usually regarded as a symbolist, but those who would
identify him as such should ponder L’oiseau bleu and its sodden array of truly
clunky symbols, from the Blue Bird of Happiness on down. He was often re-
markably maladept at handling overt symbols and was disinclined to regard
symbols as particularly important or useful literary devices. In “L’évolution
du mystère,” Maeterlinck declares that the poet should be honest—should
not attribute the wretchedness of human life to causes (God, hereditary,
and so forth) in which he doesn’t personally believe: “Otherwise, he will see
in hell, in God’s wrath, in decrees written in bronze, only an ostentatious
show of symbols that won’t satisfy him any more. It’s time for poets to rec-
ognize this: the symbol is sufficient to represent provisionally an accepted
truth or a truth that we as yet can’t or won’t confront; but when the mo-
ment comes when we want to see truth itself, it’s good for the symbol to
disappear.”24 Not only do Maeterlinck’s plot designs work to undesign them-
selves, but his symbols work to unsymbol themselves. Few writers offer
such a spectacle of continual discomfort with the tools of their craft.

Blank Souls
In the great plays of the 1890s, Maeterlinck’s plots are both overdeter-
mined and underdetermined—overdetermined in that murder or enerva-
tion or some other doom is felt at every moment; underdetermined in that
the doom isn’t the culmination of some causal chain but an arbitrary inflic-
tion. (This is another way of stating the principle of the random-inexorable.)
The characters are also overdetermined and underdetermined: overdeter-
mined in that they are marionettes with carved faces and traditional roles
(the jealous husband, the ingénue, the wise grandfather); underdetermined
in that the characters are far more incoherent, unpredictable, and chance
driven than their masks would suggest. The masks are deceptive, for Maeter-
linck is far more concerned with some substrate of human being far beneath
76 World War I and Before

character traits or personality types. You think that Maeterlinck cares about
the puppet’s face; but his real interest is wood.
In Pelléas et Mélisande, the heroine often seems a figure of helpless pa-
thos, a child forlorn in a world of adult sexual complexities, a fairy whose
thin wings tremble in vain. However, it is perfectly possible for an actress to
play the role in much cannier, more self-consciously histrionic way. After
she confesses her love to Pelléas, her enraptured lover exclaims that her
voice is like a breath over the springtime sea, that she speaks with an angel’s
candor; but a slightly darker thought strikes him:

Pelléas: You aren’t deceiving me?—You aren’t lying just a little, to make me
smile?
Mélisande: No; I never lie; I only lie to your brother.25

This line can be read in a hushed voice, as another proof of angelic candor;
or it can be read slightly rushed, overeager in the fashion of a seductress,
smiling at her lover but smiling more to herself. Mélisande is always a kind
of doll: when her hair falls Rapunzel-like from the tower, Pelléas ties it to a
branch of a willow; later, Golaud seizes her by her hair and madly swings
her from right to left, from left to right—in both cases she seems more a
plaything than a person. But in her perfectly submissive state she is never-
theless exercising power: both Golaud and Pelléas are in some sense lost
in the toils of her hair. It’s complicated, the question of who is the snarer,
who the ensnared.
The play’s main theme is love, but for Maeterlinck love is everything and
nothing. His canon is a long and intense investigation of love from every
possible angle, but love is a passion bizarrely detachable from those who
suffer it. In Aglavaine et Sélysette (1896)—a play that like Pelléas et Mélisande
concerns a love triangle, though in this case involving two women and a
man—the title characters discuss the differing qualities of their love for
Méléandre. Sélysette is a reticent lover, hiding the depth of her affection:

Sélysette: It seems to me that I’d like for him to love me though I didn’t exist. . . .
And then I hid, I hid. . . . I’d like to hide everything. . . . It isn’t his fault. . . .
And that’s why I was happy when he kissed me while shrugging his shoulders
and shaking his head. . . . Much happier than when he kissed me while admir-
ing me. . . . But that’s not how you’re supposed to love, I guess? . . .
Aglavaine: No one knows how you’re supposed to love . . . some love this way
and others that way; and love does this, or love does that; and it’s always just
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 77

right because it’s love. . . . You look at love in the bottom of your being, like a
vulture or a strange eagle in a cage. . . . The cage belongs to you, but the bird
doesn’t belong to anybody . . . you look at him anxiously, you warm him, you
feed him, but you don’t know what he’s going to do, if he’s going to fly away,
or hurt himself against the bars, or sing. . . . There’s nothing in the world that’s
so far away from us as our love, my poor Sélysette. . . . You just have to wait,
and learn to understand. . . .26

We are almost in a pagan world where the passion to kiss, or to kill, is utterly
extrinsic to the person who feels it—where love is credited to Aphrodite,
belligerence to Ares, not to the motions of our own soul. In a Maeterlinck
play, love may be all-consuming, but it’s always a visitor, not a native. There
is a part of you that love leaves untouched, an absolute calm far below the
tumult of the upper regions.
At around the time of Aglavaine et Sélysette, Maeterlinck wrote the essay
“La morale mystique” (1896), which elaborates considerably on this theme:

What would happen, for example, if our soul suddenly became visible and she
had to move forward into the midst of a gathering of her sisters, stripped of her
veils, but laden with her most secret thoughts and dragging behind her the most
mysterious acts of her life—acts that nothing could explain? What would make
her blush? What would she want to hide? Would she start to throw, like a modest
women, the long mantle of her hair over the numberless sins of the flesh? She did
not know them, and these sins have never reached her. They were committed a
thousand leagues from her throne; and even the Sodomite’s soul would pass in
the midst of the throng without suspecting anything, and bearing in her eyes a
child’s transparent smile. She hasn’t intervened, she spent her life close to the
light, and this is the only life she will remember. . . .
Is there a mysterious morality that reigns in regions more distant than those
of our thoughts? Is there a central star that we don’t see—a star around which
our most secret desires are merely powerless planets? Does there exist, at the
center of our being, a transparent tree whose ephemeral flowers and leaves are
all our actions and all our virtues?27

Maeterlinck thought that many great plays of the past were lacking in soul—
he even considered Racine’s Phèdre, though a work of the greatest psycho-
logical acuity, talky and soulless.28 Maeterlinck intended his plays to be, above
all, intimate—stage presentations of that precious wraith the human soul. But
if the actions and virtues and feelings of the personages are all pretty much
78 World War I and Before

irrelevant to their souls, then Maeterlinck has in effect predismissed the

entire apparatus of the theater even before the curtain rises for act 1.
This is perhaps the most modernist aspect of Maeterlinck: the abiding
sense that, despite agony and bloodshed and birth and death, nothing at all
is really happening. It’s all a sort of melodramatic claptrap that dimly bodies
forth that luminous blank, the soul, a remote tenderness that remains im-
mune to love, hate, talk, deed. The characters are in some sense serious, but
they can’t take seriously any event, even any predicate attributed to them-
selves. You are not what you do, no matter how violent the deed. Rage,
sorrow, loving, kindness, naïveté, whorishness, intelligence, lethargy, ge-
nius, obtuseness—these traits stamp us as determinate beings, but finally
they all belong to the outer husk. Beneath the husk we’re all exactly alike.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of
us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in
Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of mel-
ancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we
differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of
voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the
like.”29 In a late essay, published in 1936, Maeterlinck repeats, with more
circumstantial detail, the idea that the heroes of Shakespeare are more or
less idle variants of the same person:

Coriolanus is the Hamlet of the South, a Hamlet pulled up two or three notches,
no longer walking with muffled step in the dangerous silence, in the suspect dark-
ness, in the muted decorum of Elsinore, but gesticulating in the sun, under the
blinding light of the Forum; exuberant, hot-blooded, scornful, vociferous, always
indignant, always full of rage, let loose against the crowd’s stupidity and bad
smell, and against the base intrigues of its leaders. At bottom the same man, the
same soul, the same character, in a different milieu, in different circumstances,
under different skies, and wearing different clothes. Coriolanus already bursts
out in Hamlet, for example in the scenes with Polonius, with Ophelia, with the
actors, just as all of Hamlet’s sadness shows through in the Coriolanus of the final
scenes with Volumnia and the silent Virgilia.
But Coriolanus is also Macbeth, just as Macbeth is a Hamlet who dares to act
because he is split in two: his will is exteriorized in the figure of his wife. At bot-
tom, Macbeth is an irresolute man, a man of feeling beneath his iron armor, who
dared to commit only after long meditation, and too late, the very act that Corio-
lanus ventured immediately, and too soon.
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 79

But above all, Coriolanus is King Lear. A Lear as yet swollen with the furious
blood of youth. Transport Coriolanus, grown old, to the black castles and somber
heath of Scotland, let his parricidal daughters Regan and Goneril make him flail,
and he will speak or rather howl like Lear; just as Lear, at the age of thirty among
the Romans and Volscians, would have uttered Coriolanus’s cries of horror and
rage. They are interchangeable because they are, though differing in their adven-
tures and their locales, three brothers from the same stock, three clusters of
grapes on the same vine, three aspects, three trial versions of the same individual,
because they are always and everywhere, at their core, at their soul, at their es-
sential I, at their axis of vitality, Shakespeare in person, that is to say the same
man of genius, the same universal poet dipped in a gray, or red, or black bath, the
creator in his multiform and inexhaustible appearance, who draws out of himself
everything, the superman a thousand times man, proud, capricious, eloquent,
contradictory, hermaphrodite, who carried in himself, as we all do, numberless
beings.30

It is part of old romantic bardolatry, this notion of Maeterlinck’s that Shake-

speare was an androgynous chameleon in whom the whole human race was
latent. But there is another notion a little less familiar, that Shakespeare’s
protagonists are also chameleons who will effortlessly metamorphose into
one another if placed in different circumstances, dipped into a different vat
of dye stuff. Northrop Frye argues, in Fools of Time (1967), that Shakespeare’s
plays are to some extent fragments of a single overplay that literary criticism
could hope to reconstruct; and Maeterlinck is working along similar lines.
Lady Macbeth turns out to be not an independent character but a psycho-
logical contingency, a projection of her husband’s will; the boundaries
­between one character and another, one play and another, are fluid, trans-
shifting. There is a single impredicable soul at the heart of Shakespeare’s
tragedies: Shakespeare’s own.
There is a single soul at the heart of Maeterlinck’s plays, too. Golaud’s
soul is interchangeable with Mélisande’s, since Golaud finally has nothing to
do with his jealousy, just as Mélisande has nothing to do with her pathos.
All souls are equally fragile, equally ethereal. When the dying Mélisande
asks to hold her baby, we usually see the baby in the form of an immobile
something that might be a doll or a bundle of rags; and this uninflected
thing might be her soul or the soul of any of the characters in the play.
Maybe the moment when Maeterlinck comes closest to confessing the eerie
interchangeability of his personages occurs in Joyzelle, when Merlin’s son,
80 World War I and Before

speaking to Joyzelle, remembers a time when “all my thoughts surrounded

your thoughts, as a transparent water surrounds a clearer water.”31 The dif-
ference between any two of Maeterlinck’s characters, then, is the difference
between transparent water and clear water.

Pelléas et Mélisande
I would now like to turn to Claude-Achille Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,
written mostly from 1892 to 1896, though not performed until 1902. De-
bussy was uncannily sympathetic to Maeterlinck’s aesthetic—in fact, in the
entire history of Western opera I know of no case where a composer was
better equipped to handle the special difficulties of a challenging text, with
the possible exception of Alban Berg’s response to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.
Even before Maeterlinck wrote Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy was (so to speak)
in search of that very text, as we know from a transcription of a conversation
of 1890 between Debussy and his old teacher, Ernest Guiraud:

Debussy: I don’t imitate. Other dramatic form to my way of thinking: music

where the word leaves off. Music for inexpressible. It must come out of
shadow. Be discreet.
Guiraud: But then, where’s your poet?
Debussy: The poet of things half said. Two linked dreams: there’s the ideal. No
country, no date. No scenery to make. No pressure on the musician who per-
fects. Music insolently predominates in the lyric theatre. They sing too much.
Musical dressing-up too heavy. Sing when it’s worth the trouble. Monochrome.
Grisaille. No musical developments for the sake of “developing.” Mistakes! A
prolonged development doesn’t stick with the words, can’t stick. I dream of
short poems: mobile scenes. Fuck the 3 unities [of time, of place, and of
action]!32

Pelléas et Mélisande fits this recipe so exactly that it’s as if Debussy had com-
missioned it: a play of disjointed umbral vignettes, in which half-formed
characters half-speak half thoughts in nowhere, nowhen.
After Debussy got permission from Maeterlinck to write the opera—he
was surprised by the playwright’s deference to him—he confronted the ex-
traordinary difficulties of writing something like a speech opera, in which
the speakers are indistinct or unreal presences and the plot is attenuated to
near nonexistence.
Debussy’s solution to the problem of the plot is to return to the aesthetic
of the early opera: that is, to stick to the most local phenomena and to ig-
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 81

nore most matters of continuity and large-scale form. Claudio Monteverdi

wrote in 1627 to Alessandro Striggio that musical expression should be con-
centrated “on the word and not on the meaning of the sentence” (sopra alla
parola et non sopra al senso de la clausula), and Debussy is equally deter-
mined to register minute responses to the text.33 As he wrote in 1909 to
Edwin Evans:

Maybe it’s better for music to try to render by simple means—a chord? a curve?—
the successive states of the atmosphere, of the soul, better for music to adjust
itself to everything that happens, without painfully forcing itself to follow a pre-
existing and always arbitrary symphonic plot-line, which will necessarily tempt
you to sacrifice the plot-line of the emotions; but you’ll have succeeded in mak-
ing a beautiful symphonic development . . . ! Once again, that has no place in lyric
drama; moreover, it’s too cheap a way of evading a difficulty. That’s why there’s
no “guiding thread” in Pelléas, and why the characters in the opera don’t submit
to the slavery of the Leitmotiv, as a blind man is slave to his poodle or his
clarinet!34

A leitmotif, as the name suggests, leads and moves: its recurrent forms, al-
tered, recolored, reworked in light of the changing dramatic situation, pro-
vide an Ariadne’s thread through the opera’s labyrinth. But Debussy craves
a musical rhetoric discontinuous and uninstructive, in which the labyrinth
is left labyrinthine, unsolved. He wants to impose no arbitrary form on the
near formlessness—the random-inexorable—of Maeterlinck’s play. Debussy
tries to provide the single perfect chord, or a curve a few bars long, to make
a musical dream double for a single instant of Maeterlinck’s word-dream; as
for large form, he is content to let the music sag into whatever sort of odd
form that the play can provide.
The comment to Evans is part of a general attack on the Wagnerian leit-
motif:

What saws, these leitmotive! What eternal catapults! The Ring of the Nibelung, in
which there are pages of staggering force, is a set of mechanical tricks. They even
disfigure my beloved Tristan, and I grieve to feel myself severed from it.35

The drama by M. Zola and M. Bruneau [The Hurricane] is noted for its numerous
symbols, and I admit I don’t understand this excessive need for symbols. They
seem to have forgotten that the most beautiful thing is still the music. Naturally,
the symbol summons forth the leitmotiv; and there it is, the music is still obliged
to encumber itself with little obstinate phrases that insist on being heard in spite
82 World War I and Before

of everything. In sum, to claim that such a succession of chords will represent

such a feeling, or such a phrase some sort of personage—this is a rather unex-
pected anthropometrical game.36

Ah! my lord! How insupportable these folks wearing helmets and animal skins
become by the fourth evening [Götterdämmerung] . . . Think of it, they never ap-
pear without being accompanied by their damned leitmotiv; there are even some
of them who sing it! It’s like the cute madness of someone who, as he hands you
his visiting card, lyrically declaims what’s printed on it!37

Debussy’s dislike of the leitmotif is twofold: first, the set of all its evolutions
provides a form of musical continuity clumsily superimposed on the text,
and probably irrelevant to it; second, as soon as you fasten a name to the
musical theme, it becomes a gross and glaring form of musical commentary
on the personages—as if Hunding, when he stalks around his hut in Die
Walküre, bears on his chest a neon sign that keeps flashing the name Hund-
ing. The first objection pertains to the plot, the second to characterization.
Debussy is following Maeterlinck’s way of deconstructing, dissolving the
personages, and a name plate works against what he is trying to accomplish.
Pierre Boulez has it almost right when he comments on Debussy’s nonleit-
motif, “It’s instead a matter of arabesques tied to the characters themselves,
without variation other than decorative, effortlessly integrated into the
general context.”38 But the liaison between the arabesque-like themes and
the characters may be a little weaker than Boulez suggests. In some sense
Debussy’s themes are Verleitmotive, misleading motives. Just as Maeterlinck
is uncomfortable with a vocabulary of symbols, Debussy is somewhat anti-
symbolic, too: he may well have thought that he is desymbolizing Pelléas et
Mélisande by liberating his musical themes from names, from any intelligible
semantics beyond glints and hints derived from Maeterlinck’s evanescent
rhetoric of feeling. Anthropometry was a sort of whole-body phrenology, in
which measurements of body parts were used to define ratios that presum-
ably gave insight into character and temperament; Debussy seems to be
mocking the leitmotif system as a game that constructs icons of men and
women, symbolic character shapes, through musico-mathematical proce-
dures.
The personages in Pelléas et Mélisande are vanishing creatures on the
brink of dissolution, half-formed beings that toy with the notion of being
characters in an opera. And their musical symbols are pseudo-motives that
fail to constitute themselves properly, fall into signlessness.
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 83

We’ve already looked in some detail at Maeterlinck’s strategies for at-

tenuating and disindividuating—even in a sense abrogating—the characters
in his plays. Debussy, who could have known almost nothing of Maeter-
linck’s theories of the drama beyond what he could infer from the plays
themselves, was quite aware of the strange nullity of Pelléas, Mélisande, and
the rest of the crew and tried to supply his own nullities to match. As he
wrote to Chausson (probably at the beginning of 1894): “I’ve spent some
days in pursuit of this ‘nothing’ from which she (Mélisande) is made. . . .
Now it’s Arkël who torments me. That one, he’s from beyond the grave, and
he has the impartial and prophetic tenderness of those who are going to
vanish soon, and I have to say all that with do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do!! [sic]
What a job?”39 Mélisande is nothing, and Arkël is a sort of ectoplasm thin-
ning into the void. Yet, as Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith have
pointed out, Debussy himself labels a four-measure passage at the begin-
ning of act 1, scene 3, the thème initial de Mélisande, a theme that undergoes
many vicissitudes in the course of the opera. So we have here a curious
musical entity that both is and is not a leitmotif (fig. 2.1).40 The little six-note
phrase in the middle stave of the first measure is indeed one of the opera’s
most salient features. It’s worth noting that Debussy isn’t alone in labeling
it the Mélisande theme (or one of them): Paul Dukas, one of Debussy’s keen-
est and most admiring critics, hears it the same way. In the play Ariane et
Barbe-bleue (1899), Maeterlinck amuses himself by assigning to Bluebeard’s
first five wives—a spectral coven—the names of characters in his previous
plays: one of them is Mélisande. In Dukas’s lucid, luminous opera Ariane et
Barbe-bleue (1907), as Sélysette announces to Ariane the name Mélisande,
Debussy’s thème initial provides a charming carte de visite.
There are two themes heard with astonishing frequency in Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande: one is the thème initial de Mélisande, but I think that the
key to the opera’s motivic structure lies in the other theme (fig. 2.2). This is
the opera’s very beginning, prefacing the scene where Golaud, lost in the
forest, discovers Mélisande, lost in the forest; the theme I mean is the one
in measures 5 and 6. It has been sometimes labeled as the Golaud theme,
because it offers a striking contrast with the Mélisande theme (also con-
spicuous in this prelude) and because it sometimes sounds a bit stern and,
when played by horns, hunter-like; but—for reasons that will become
­evident—I’ll refer to it as the “Golaud” theme, in quotation marks. Here, in
its first appearance, it is harmonically tricky: the first chord might be con-
strued as a half-diminished chord, but I think it would be better to describe
84 World War I and Before

Figure 2.1. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: thème initial de Mélisande

the theme as an alternation of two chords each derived from the whole-
tone scale. Later in the opera, Golaud and Pelléas will grope their blind way
down a subterranean path, accompanied by an up-and-down movement of
a whole-tone scale, perhaps the purest expression in Western music of the
directionlessness, the disorientation, the sheer absence of any possible
tonic that the whole-tone scale (like any symmetrical division of the octave)
entails. And right here at the beginning we have an alternation of a whole-
tone chords, at once resolute sounding and completely aimless, introducing
us to a tone domain that lacks a guiding thread, a sense of forward motion,
a sense of fate—or, to say it better, that provides only a fake fatality in
music, comparable to the fake fatality of Maeterlinck’s text.
In the following measures we hear Golaud again, and then, sweetly, ex-
pressively, Mélisande, in a slightly different shape from what Debussy would
label (at the beginning of scene 3) the thème initial de Mélisande (fig. 2.3).
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 85

Figure 2.2. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: “Golaud” theme, first appearance

Now the “Golaud” theme is more normally formed, harmonically speaking:

a dominant chord in G minor (maybe a little unusual, in that G minor is the
tonic), alternating with an A-major chord (if a thirteenth chord can ever be
considered normal). The music seems to be refocusing, moving to a better-
adjusted space, a space you’re less likely to get lost in. Then, for the first
time, the Mélisande theme appears, in a manner that is equivocal—neither
particularly disorienting nor particularly well oriented. The harmony isn’t
overly challenging: you can hear the often-repeated accompaniment figure
as a slightly warped B ♭ major7 arpeggio, undergirding a melody that counter­
asserts itself in B ♭ minor. But I don’t hear it in quite that way, and Debussy
(by writing the melody with a C ♯ instead of a D ♭ ) doesn’t spell the notes in
a way that invites that interpretation. It might be better to think of the Mé-
lisande theme, in this guise, as a pentatonic melody—if played on a piano,
the melody would be all black notes—with a whole-tone accompaniment:
as if both of the main themes need to be stated first in harmonic forms at
an angle to tonality.41 But I think it’s also important to note that the melody
and the accompaniment alike are entirely part of the whole-tone scale, ex-
cept for the single melodic note C ♯. According to either analysis, it’s the C ♯
that sticks out, since it is the one note that isn’t in the whole-tone scale of
the accompaniment (if you’re listening on this axis) or that deviates most
86 World War I and Before

Figure 2.3. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: “Golaud” and Mélisande

strongly from B  ♭ major (if you’re listening on that axis). The theme is per-
fectly susceptible to far more orthodox harmonic forms, forms that leave
the topmost note in a less glaring position: for example, the still-sweeter
version from the beginning of scene 3 (qtd. in figure 2.1) works as a compact
melody supported by a B9 chord.
The persistence of these two themes (Mélisande and “Golaud”) through
the opera, especially in the opening acts, is astonishing, unprecedented,
and without a successor. Debussy weaves many other threads through his
tapestry, some dark, some golden, such as the lovely, down-skipping theme
at the beginning of act 2—he lavishes a wealth of thematic material on the
opera—but the acoustic environment is created largely by the two main
themes.
There is another major work by Debussy that is similarly built up from
two themes—and from two themes bearing a striking similarity to these
two themes: Sirènes, the third of the Nocturnes. Debussy composed this
piece while working on Pelléas et Mélisande, and it was first performed in
1901, a year before the opera. Figure 2.4 shows the main theme. This is
Maurice Ravel’s reduction for two pianos: in the original version, the sirens’
song (the theme that begins in the third measure here, très expressif ) is sung
by a wordless female chorus. Like the “Golaud” theme, the sirens’ theme
consists of two notes separated by a major second: indeed the whole of
Sirènes might be considered the apotheosis of the major second, since so
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 87

Figure 2.4. Debussy, Sirènes: sirens’ song

much of the music is constructed around that interval. The E ♯ makes for an
intense sonority, since it’s a tritone away from B, and B major is both the
tonic and the chord that accompanies the theme, here in its first appear-
ance; if you could reduce the opening flute solo in the Prélude à L’après-midi
d’un faune to two adjacent notes, it might sound a bit like this. And like the
“Golaud” theme, the rhythm of the sirens’ song is complicated, with its liga-
tures connecting an eighth note to the first beat of an eighth-note triplet:
the rhythm isn’t urgent in the “Golaud” manner, but it is equally arresting,
in a more languid way.
I think of Sirènes as even more oceanically alive than La mer. At the begin-
ning the horns seem to make great bird cries of desire—the sirens of antiq-
uity were not mermaids but women on top and birds on the bottom—but a
particular kind of desire, endless and insatiable, for Odysseus’s ship is never
going to come to their rock. The music seems to have no particular sense of
beginning or end: it doesn’t drive toward a cadence but elaborates the big
waves with little waves, underpulses, in the way that the surge of surf on a
beach falls into long rhythms of tide and medium rhythms of regular wave
fall and short rhythms of little splashes at the end of the regular wave fall.
In the libretto that Debussy wrote for a projected opera on Poe’s “The Fall
of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher hears or imagines a lost bird—“Ses
ailes battent comme si c’était la respiration du temps” (The bird’s wings beat as
if it were the respiration of time)42—and Debussy’s rhythm in pieces like
Sirènes, pulse without ictus, is the sound of time’s breathing.
There is one other important theme besides the song itself (fig. 2.5). The
chromatic figure marked expressif feels Asiatic, seductive, odalisque: it sounds
88 World War I and Before

Figure 2.5. Debussy, Sirènes: snake-charming

like the music of sexual display, as if the sirens are wriggling their bodies as
they sing.
Sirènes, we see, is constructed from two themes, one that is simply a
complex dance across a major second and another that is melodically in-
tense. This is a simplified version of the recipe of Pelléas et Mélisande itself,
for the opera is constructed from the theme that is a complex dance across
a major second and another theme that is melodically intense, though in a
chaster manner than that of Sirènes.
Insofar as the “Golaud” theme is another casting of the theme of the si-
rens’ song, it seems more appropriate to Mélisande than to Golaud. The
demure, white, angelic Mélisande is properly represented by the thème ini-
tial de Mélisande; but, as we’ve seen, there is another way of regarding Mé-
lisande, as a far more sexually alert being—and that version of Mélisande can
be conceived along the lines of the sirens of the Nocturnes: the liquid Mé-
lisande, the Mélisande of the fountain in the forest and the fountain of the
blind and the grotto by the sea, the elusive Mélisande. Mélisande is Mélusine.
Maeterlinck’s women are often, in one form or another, undines or na-
iads, images drawn on water that somehow rise into some semblance of
human life. In one of Debussy’s most beautiful songs, La grotte (1904), he
sets a line by Tristan L’Hermite concerning reflections of flowers that seem
like “les songes de l’eau qui sommeille.”43 Mélisande herself is a sort of
dream of the sleeping water, in the pool where, as L’Hermite puts it, Narcis-
sus died long ago.
In L’oiseau bleu, a play that works as a sort of bowdlerized child’s anthol-
ogy of all of his favorite themes, Maeterlinck invents, as a companion to
little Tyltyl, a character named Water, dressed in a costume of dripping blu-
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 89

ish gauze, with seaweed in her hair: she enters through the water tap and,
as she becomes more fully personified, becomes disturbed that she cannot
leave through the same aperture. Soon afterward the Fairy tells Water that
it would be nice if she didn’t keep flowing all over the place; later, Tyltyl tells
his crybaby sister Mytyl that she shouldn’t weep all the time, in the way that
Water does. And Water is indeed a complaining sort: at one point she
groans that she has never known the least happiness. However, Water is, in
her quiet, tender way, a vocal sort: saying farewell, she gives some advice to
the children, though her enemy Fire makes snide comments:

Water: Love the Fountains well, listen to the Streams. . . . I will always be
there . . .
Fire: She’s flooded everything!
Water: When you sit down, in the evening, by the edge of the Springs . . . you
can find more than one here, in the forest—try to understand what they’re
trying to tell you—I can’t, any more—I’m choked with tears and I can’t speak.
. . . Remember me when you see the jug . . . you’ll also find me in the pitcher,
the watering-can, in the tank and in the tap.44

It is striking how much Mélisande there is in all this: Mélisande enters the
play through a forest fountain, almost without history, as if she had just
recently turned into a human being; and she resists Golaud’s attempts to
carry her off into the human world, as if she would prefer to deliquesce back
into nonentity. “Ne me touchez pas, ou je me jette à l’eau” (Don’t touch me,
or I’ll throw myself in the water), she warns her future husband.45 But, like
Water, she seems already a little too big and dense to return through the
tap. In this opening scene, and elsewhere, she melts into tears without
much provocation. Her voice is fluent and attractive, watery: “Ta voix! Elle
est plus fraîche et plus franche que l’eau” (Your voice! It’s fresher and more
open than water), Pelléas tells her.46 But like the voice of a brook, her voice is
not always very intelligible: “Je ne comprends non plus tout ce que je dis” (I
no longer understand all I’m saying), she says as she dies, and it’s not likely
that others understand her riddling words very well, either.47
The “Golaud” motive—I’d prefer to call it the motive of water, along the
lines of its cousin in Sirènes—is watery, informe, not just because of its un-
steady sloshing between two chords but for other reasons as well. The
heaving of the sailors in act 1, scene 3 is closely related to it (fig. 2.6). Here
the contraltos go back and forth across a major second, in dotted rhythm,
just as in the “Golaud” motive, in many of its forms. Sea spray often tends,
90 World War I and Before

Figure 2.6. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: sailors

in Debussy’s imagination, to gather around such melodic phrases. In De-

bussy’s best-known essay, “L’entretien avec M. Croche,” from Monsieur Croche
antidilettante, he writes, “You must seek discipline in liberty and not in the
formulas of a worn-out philosophy, good only for the weak. Don’t listen to
the counsels of anybody, except that of the wind that in passing tells us the
history of the world.”48 I’m not sure that Debussy has a particular musical
trope that represents the counsel of the wind, though there are a few places
where I could look; but I think that water has a distinct tendency to speak
in a language of irregular motions across a major second.
But the “Golaud” motive occasionally contracts, fascinatingly, from a
major second to a minor second, as in the interlude just before the begin-
ning of act 1, scene 2 (fig. 2.7). Here the chords oscillate between B major7
and A minor. Such alternation between chords themselves a major second
apart is common in the harmonization of this theme, but the minor-second
melodic form is not so usual. In the later acts we sometimes hear other os-
cillations across a minor second (fig. 2.8). Golaud, distraught, tries to hide
his emotion from his son as he encourages the boy to spy on Pelléas and
Mélisande, so he invents a wolf to explain why he seems shaken. The imag-
inary wolf makes this faint ululation in the depths of the orchestra. In retro-
spect from today, it sounds like an almost erased allusion to the wolf theme
in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936).
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 91

Figure 2.7. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: “Golaud” motive in its minor-second form

Figure 2.8. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: wolf

This sort of slow black trill is part of the normal operatic rhetoric of
uneasiness. There is a similar moment in a later opera, Igor Stravinsky’s The
Flood (1962): a horn indulges in a nearly rhythmless vagrancy between ad-
jacent semitones, B and C, as the Serpent comes to tempt Eve (fig. 2.9).
Stravinsky describes his music as follows: “The Tarnhelm music for two
muted horns is likely to be my first and last attempt to compose a belly
dance.”49 It is the merest sketch of a belly dance, a dance for the skeleton of
a belly dancer. That Stravinsky associates this little bit of music—scarcely
more than an ornament—with Wagner’s Tarnhelm is of interest. Now
the Tarnhelm motive—the motive of Alberich’s shape-shifting or invisible-­
making helmet in Der Ring des Nibelungen—appears initially as a G ♯-minor
chord that transforms itself into an E-minor chord, recedes back to G minor,
tries out E minor once again, and then rises to a B chord, not marked as
either minor or major (fig. 2.10). It is a harmonic riddle that poses the ques-
tion, How many triads contain the note B?—B is the one stable element as
the motive creeps up and contracts and creeps up again. (Similarly Alberich
is always Alberich, whether in the form of dragon or toad—he is going no-
92 World War I and Before

Figure 2.9. Stravinsky, The Flood: temptation of Eve

Figure 2.10. Wagner, Das Rheingold: Tarnhelm

where, just as the motive is going nowhere.) Stravinsky has oversimplified

the Tarnhelm into the emptiest possible oscillation of two notes separated
by a minor second, with a slight reinforcement (from the second horn) of
the upward creep at the end of Wagner’s motive.
The “Golaud” motive also operates as a kind of Tarnhelm and indeed may
have been partly inspired by Wagner’s invisibility music. It is a pure isolate
of instability. Golaud is of course a weak, deeply unstable man, full of bad
imaginings about his wife, full of murderous frustration, and driven mad,
like Othello, by the general uninterpretability of human conduct. Mélisande
trickles through Golaud’s hands, through Pelléas’s hands, like water. Arkël,
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 93

according to Debussy, is a voice from beyond the grave. One important

character, Pelléas’s sick father, never appears and doesn’t even have a name.
These wraiths are almost too translucent to cast a shadow; they are given a
good deal of beautiful and touching music, but their nobodiness is given
expression by the “Golaud” theme.
Instability is also a property of the castle itself, built over a chasm of
whole tones, indefinite musical spaces. The scene where the castle makes
itself most psychically present is the scene in the underground grotto, but
there are other moments where the castle looms forth, forbidding, tene-
brous:

Golaud: Can’t you get used to the life we lead here?

Is it too sad here?
It’s true that this castle is very old and very dark . . .
It’s very cold and very deep.
And all who dwell here are already old.50

The brief passage in figure 2.11 is one of the glories of the score: in the low-
est stave, the English horn quietly, insistently traces a four-note figure that
becomes a kind of soft clock, a drift of sand through an hourglass, as if the
castle’s stones were making a faint sound of crumbling. Neither Maeterlinck
nor Debussy push any further in the direction of the castle’s falling into ruin,
but at the climax of Debussy’s fragmentary opera La chute de la maison Usher
(on which Debussy worked from about 1908) there is a moment that seems
an extrapolation of the castle of Allemonde into a state of full collapse. De-
bussy himself considered that his Usher project had nothing to do with
Pelléas et Mélisande; as he told an interviewer in 1910, “I’m happy . . . not
only because the atmosphere of secrecy, the sentiments, the tensions, the
emotions found in Poe’s stories have never been translated into music, but
also because you can’t find any contrast more absolute than that between
Poe and Maeterlinck.”51 But I think that Debussy is wrong in distinguishing
so strongly between Poe and Maeterlinck. A set designer for the scene
where Pelléas and Golaud grope along the walls of the grotto beneath the
castle might profit from studying Poe’s account of Roderick Usher’s p ­ ainting:

If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least—
in the circumstances then surrounding me—there arose out of the pure abstrac-
tions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity
of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the
certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.
94 World War I and Before

Figure 2.11. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: castle

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly

of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A
small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault
or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device.
Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet
was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial
source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and
bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.52
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 95

Figure 2.12. Debussy, La chute de la maison Usher: crack

Maeterlinck’s claustrophobias and agoraphobias are quieter than Poe’s, less

overwrought but no less intense.
In La chute de la maison Usher, the Friend reads aloud to Roderick Usher
the story of how the knight Ulrich encounters an evil hermit who turns into
a fire-tongued dragon: Ulrich rushes to seize a shining bronze shield hang-
ing on the wall. In the reconstruction of the opera by Juan Allende-Blin,
printed in figure 2.12, there is a maniacally repeated four-note figure that
falls through major sevenths and minor seconds, from B to C to B to C.53 It
is as if the gentle structural instabilities in Arkël’s very old, dark, cold, deep
castle in Pelléas et Mélisande had zigzagged wide open—Usher’s house is
falling apart before our ears. The last act of Pelléas et Mélisande is simply a
96 World War I and Before

long tapering-off, as the Doctor gives up and Golaud weeps and Mélisande
unsubstantiates herself. But among the unrealized potentialities of Maeter-
linck’s vagrant impossible plot is a louder ending, an implosion in which the
vacuum at the play’s heart would take aggressive shape. In La chute de la
maison Usher, Debussy toys with the bang that is on the far side of all of
Maeterlinck’s whimpers.
The collapse of a building is a theme more resonant in opera than it is in
prose fiction. Debussy was a keen student of early French opera and even
composed an Hommage à Rameau (the second of the Images pour piano, 1904–
05). A remarkable number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French
operas (by Lully, Charpentier, Gluck) end with a scene in which a huffy witch
(Armide, Médée) exits on a flying chariot while her magic palace falls into
ruin. Debussy has no use for dragon-drawn witches, but he is deeply attracted
to the idea of a building falling asunder. His older colleagues were similarly
attracted: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877) ends with Samson’s
pulling down onto his head the Temple of Dagon, and the second act of
Parsifal (1882) ends with nightmare ferocity as Klingsor’s magic castle un-
does itself—you can hear in Wagner’s music how the earthquake first top-
ples the small stones at the top and then upheaves big slabs of wall.
As it happened, the composition of Pelléas et Mélisande was intimately
bound up with Parsifal. On October 2, 1893, the exasperated Debussy
wrote to Chausson that he was tearing up certain passages of his new opera:

I was in too much a hurry to cry victory for Pelléas et Mélisande, for, after a sleep-
less night, the sort of night that brings good counsel, I’ve had to admit that I
wasn’t yet there at all! This part looked like a duet by Mr. So-and-so—it doesn’t
matter who—and above all the phantom of old Klingsor, alias R. Wagner, ap-
peared at the curve of a measure. And so I’ve torn it all up, and started afresh in
search of a little chemistry of more personal phrases, and have tried to be as
much Pelléas as Mélisande.54

There is a sense in which Debussy’s opera is about magic; but there is an-
other sense in which it is about exorcism, the dispelling of Wagner’s magic
to make room for his own. Klingsor’s castle has to fall down once and for all
before Arkël’s castle—another rickety structure—can be built.
Debussy is haunted not only by the remarkable music that Wagner wrote
for Klingsor—great nervous gasps, chromatic whirls in which the chroma
varies from dark blue to black, the sound equivalent of van Gogh’s Starry
Night—but also by the dramatic figure of Klingsor himself:
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 97

The most beautiful character in Parsifal belongs to Klingsor (former knight of the
Grail, shoved out of the door of the Holy Place for his too singular opinions con-
cerning chastity). He is a marvel of rancorous hatred; he knows what men are
worth and weighs the solidity of their vows of chastity in the scales of his con-
tempt. You could easily argue that this twisted magician, this old recidivist, is not
only the only “human” personage, but the unique “moral” personage in this
drama where the falsest moral and religious ideas are proclaimed; the young
Parsifal is the heroic and nitwit knight of those ideas.55

Klingsor’s too singular opinion on chastity is that it is a good idea to castrate

himself to be immune from sexual temptation—Wagner even toyed with
the idea of scoring the role for a male soprano, if Domenico Mustafa, a cas-
trato in the Vatican choir, could be made available to sing it. Wagner’s two
greatest villains, Alberich and Klingsor, both renounce love to gain power:
Klingsor manages to ruin Amfortas, the king of the knights of the Grail, by
compelling the witch Kundry to seduce him. For Debussy, Klingsor is a hero
of impotent despair. Debussy was far from sexually impotent, but he drove
two of the women in his life to threats of suicide (his first wife actually shot
herself ), and I think that he may have seen himself as a sort of Klingsor,
snide, spiteful, tormented and tormenting, a seducer who practiced his
music-magic in a calculating, somewhat hollow manner.
Debussy, at least in certain moods, thought that his music was about
emptiness: as he wrote to Pierre Louÿs on March 27, 1898, “The three Noc-
turnes are continuations of my felt life, and have been full of hope, then full
of despair, and finally full of the void!”56 Each of the three Nocturnes trails
off into nothingness: the sirens first seduce and then turn their backs. As
J. Alfred Prufrock says, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” If Debussy
had completed his opera on the fall of the house of Usher, it would have
been his finest presentation of the vacuum at the heart of things. Maybe in
its unfinishedness it is a still more impressive rien. Maeterlinck thought that
the ultimate truth of human life is that it is full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing. But neither Maeterlinck nor Debussy was particularly expert in
fury; an old man sitting vacantly in a vacant room or a faint song heard from
somewhere in a tower can adequately signify nothing, too.

Notes
1. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 2.1.11–12 mm. 1–2. References to the score will
be to act, scene, and rehearsal number, followed by measure when necessary. This
and all subsequent translations are my own.
98 World War I and Before

2. A DVD version of the production, originally recorded for television, is avail-

able. See Strosser.
3. Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande 7, 10. This and all subsequent translation of
Maeterlinck are my own.
4. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 5.1.5 m. 6–6 m. 7.
5. Beckett, Endgame 44, 81.
6. Maeterlinck, Intérieur 108.
7. Beckett, Waiting for Godot 104–05.
8. Maeterlinck, Le trésor des humbles 182–84, 187.
9. Stein 292.
10. In “Towards Break of Day” lines 17–18. See Yeats 208.
11. Maeterlinck, Le temple enseveli 112–13.
12. Ibid. 128–29.
13. Ibid. 158–59.
14. Ibid. 126.
15. Maeterlinck, L’autre monde 43.
16. Ibid. 96.
17. See his La vie des abeilles 273.
18. Maeterlinck, Alladine et Palomides 18–19.
19. Maeterlinck, La vie des abeilles 130.
20. Nabokov 172.
21. Auden 340.
22. Maeterlinck, Les fiançailles 36.
23. Ibid. 177.
24. Maeterlinck, Le temple enseveli 131.
25. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 4.3.45 mm. 4–7.
26. Maeterlinck, Aglavaine et Sélysette 72.
27. Maeterlinck, Le trésor des humbles 68–69, 74.
28. Ibid. 33.
29. Wilde 1075–76.
30. Maeterlinck, Avant le grand silence 29–34.
31. Maeterlinck, Joyzelle 91.
32. Hoéré 28–29.
33. See my Modernism and Music 38, 33n.
34. Nichols and Smith 184–85.
35. To Guiraud in September 1890. See Hoéré 33; also cited Nichols and Smith,
193.
36. Comments from La revue blanche 15 May 1901. Debussy, Monsieur Croche et
autres écrits 41–42.
37. In Giles Blas, 1 June 1903. See Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, 180.
38. Boulez 134.
Maeterlinck, Debussy, and Modernism 99

39. See Debussy’s “Deux lettres de Debussy à Ernest Chausson,” in La Revue mu-
sicale 7:7 (1 May 1926), 183–84. Cited in Nichols and Smith 34–35.
40. Nichols and Smith 144.
41. This is also how Nichols and Smith hear it (91).
42. Debussy, La chute de la Maison Usher 29.
43. Debussy, “La Grotte” 133.
44. Maeterlinck, L’oiseau bleu 246.
45. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 9.
46. Ibid. 337.
47. Ibid. 372.
48. Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits 52.
49. Stravinsky 75.
50. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande 2.3.24.
51. Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits 310.
52. Poe 98.
53. Debussy, La chute de la Maison Usher 40. In the reconstruction by Robert
Orledge, the effect is much less striking. See Debussy, Le Roi Lear 73–74.
54. Debussy, Lettres 1884–1918 55.
55. Debussy, Gil Blas 6 April 1903. In Monsieur Croche et autres écrits 143–44.
56. Debussy, Lettres 1884–1918 90.

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3. Ed. Robert Orledge. Paris: Durand, 2006.
100 World War I and Before

Hoéré, A. “Entretiens inédits d’Ernest Guiraud et de Claude Debussy notés par Mau-
rice Emmanuel (1889–1890).” Inédits sur Claude Debussy. Paris: Les Publications
techniques, galerie Charpentier, 1942.
Maeterlinck, Maurice. Aglavaine et Sélysette. Paris: Société du Mercure de France,
1899.
———. Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, et La mort de Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour
marionnettes. Brussels: Collection du Reveil, 1894.
———. L’autre monde, ou Le cadran stellaire. New York: Éditions de la Maison Fran-
çaise, 1942.
———. Avant le grand silence. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1934.
———. Les fiançailles: Féerie en cinq actes et onze tableaux. Paris: Fasquelles, 1922.
———. Intérieur. 1895. Pelléas et Mélisande et Intérieur. New York: Holt, 1945.
———. Joyzelle. Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1903.
———. L’oiseau bleu. Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1912.
———. Pelléas et Mélisande: Alladine et Palomides. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896.
———. Le temple enseveli. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1908.
———. Le trésor des humbles. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1904.
———. La vie des abeilles. Paris, Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1905.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
Nichols, Roger, and Richard Langham Smith. Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. New York: Pen-
guin, 1986.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993.
Stravinsky, Igor. Dialogues. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Strosser, Pierre, dir. Pelléas et Mélisande. By Claude Debussy. DVD. Region 1. French
with English subtitles. Image Entertainment, 2002.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying” (1889). Complete Works. Glasgow: Harper Col-
lins, 2003. 1071–92.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1933.
 3 Echoes of the Self
Cosmic Loneliness in Bartók’s
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Klára Móricz

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Béla Bartók’s only opera, ends on an irreversibly

dark note. Bluebeard’s bride Judith slowly disappears behind the seventh
door of his castle to join Bluebeard’s previous wives, whom he married, in
the libretto’s symbolist wording, in the “morning, noon, and evening” of his
life in an effort to break free of loneliness. Like them, Judith also failed to
redeem him. Having reached the “night” of his life, Bluebeard resigns him-
self to spending his remaining time alone, closed in the darkness of the
castle, the symbol of his soul. Bluebeard’s last words, which Bartók added
to the original libretto by Béla Balázs (1884–1949), indicate that he compre-
hends that with Judith his last hope disappears: “And it will be night ever-
more, night . . . night. . . .”1 His tale told, Bluebeard vanishes from view
without the mediation of a falling curtain, his figure dissolving in the slowly
spreading darkness. Given the story’s mythological resonances, the opera’s
ending is inevitable—the Prince of Darkness finally unites with his natural
element. Yet the human side of the story, the tragic, final separation of the
potential lovers who retreat into their separate worlds unredeemed, fatally
wounded, and disillusioned, leaves the listener in a state of despair. Seen
from this perspective, Bartók’s Bluebeard is a paradigmatic portrayal of the
modernist condition of loneliness, isolation, and alienation caused by the
loss of faith in the redeeming power of human relations.
Like Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Richard Strauss’s Salome
(1905), and later Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1928–35), Bartók’s
Bluebeard (1911) is a Literaturoper, an opera that uses an existing literary text
as its libretto. Balázs, a Hungarian symbolist writer, published his “mystery
play” in 1910 and dedicated it to Bartók and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). In-
tended for his erudite friend Kodály, the play instead caught the interest of
Bartók, who generally paid little attention to literature.2 He had no high
102 World War I and Before

opinion of Balázs’s literary talent and was attracted to the play not for its
literary value but for its subject matter.3 He was also intrigued by Balázs’s
attempt to recreate on the stage “the language and rhymes of old Hungarian
Székely folk ballads,” the music of which had fascinated Bartók since he had
first encountered them in 1904.4 Balázs’s subject resonated strongly with
the young composer, who was still recuperating from having been rejected
by violinist Stefi Geyer. His 1908 Violin Concerto was conceived as a fare-
well to Geyer; he sent her the score with Balázs’s sentimental lines:

My heart is bleeding, my soul is ill

I walked among humans
I loved with torment, with flame-love
in vain, in vain

No two stars are as far apart

As two human souls.5

Bartók’s sudden marriage to his piano student Márta Ziegler in 1909 does
not seem to have soothed his wound: the young wife received the dedica-
tion of Bluebeard, an opera about the impossibility of real love between man
and woman, as a reward for her staunch support during this difficult period
of Bartók’s life.6 The opera, into which Bartók poured his personal disap-
pointment, created professional frustrations. The first disappointment
came when the juries of the two competitions to which Bartók submitted
the piece rejected it as “unperformable.”7 Later, Bartók himself admitted
that the plot was rather slim for a conventional stage production, for, as he
put it ironically, it “offers only the spiritual conflict between two individuals
and the music does nothing more than depict this conflict in abstract sim-
plicity. Nothing else happens on stage.”8 Irony aside, Bartók’s focus on deep
psychology and his complete lack of interest in theatrical illusion kept his
opera—a genre commonly associated, as Richard Begam and Matthew Wil-
son Smith write in the introduction to this volume, with the inauthentic,
the insincere, and the vulgar—in the realm of authenticity and modernism.
The only surviving thematic sketch for Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is in a black
notebook that Bartók purchased for taking down folk music but used instead
for compositional sketches between 1907 and 1922.9 The first sketch in
the notebook is the theme of the Violin Concerto dedicated to Geyer. A theme
from Bluebeard (which in the final version of the opera Bartók assigns to the
English horn and clarinet as they provide a lyrical extension of Bluebeard’s stark
Echoes of the Self 103

statement, “My castle does not glitter”10) follows the continuity draft of the
third of Bartók’s Four Dirges, a series of short piano pieces composed around
the same time as the opera and considered to be its stylistic forerunner.11
In the present chapter, I argue that the physical proximity of these two
sketches suggests interpretative possibilities for Bluebeard that point far be-
yond the chronological and stylistic proximity between opera and piano
piece. With its insistent hollow fifths in the low register, ringing pedal tones,
and characteristic diminished fourths in the left hand, Bartók’s Third Dirge
bears a striking resemblance to Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” (1828), a
setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine. Heine’s “Doppelgänger” is an early
poetic expression of dissociation or out-of-body experience that would
haunt artists to the end of the century and beyond as a metaphor for exis-
tential loneliness. Although dressed in lush orchestral garb, Bluebeard pre-
serves some of the dark colors, hollow sounds, and, most crucially, the existen-
tial despair expressed in Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” the Romantic
prototype for Bartók’s Third Dirge. Comparing Bluebeard to “Doppelgänger” via
the Third Dirge thus highlights the existential question posed in Bartók’s opera.
Another, more frequently noted nineteenth-century precursor of Blue-
beard is Wagner’s Lohengrin, an opera about the forbidden question, or about
man’s desire to be loved unconditionally and woman’s failure to trust love
without asking for assurances. Reading the polarized representation of gender
relations in Bluebeard as inspired by Wagner and at the same time resisting
Wagner’s redemptive resolution helps specify the source of Bartók’s existen-
tial anxiety. These comparisons not only show Bartók’s debt to nineteenth-
century Romantic paradigms but also reveal the modernist transformation of
woman from Wagner’s redeeming female into Bartók’s paradigmatic fin-de-
siècle femme fatale. Instead of saving man through self-sacrifice, this new
woman reinforces man’s existential loneliness, compelling him to look for
redemption not in love but in a utopian folk community. Bartók thus trans-
lates Romantic feelings of loneliness, isolation, and longing for redemption
through love into modernist notions of the self and its longing for commu-
nity. The use of folk music, in this context, points beyond what in Igor
Stravinsky’s music is commonly designated as neonationalism, the creative
combination of folk music and modernist idiom in which the supposed au-
thenticity of folk music lends legitimacy to the modernist idiom. As I show,
in Bartók’s art the Romantic notion of finding a community through the folk
turns into yet another alienating strategy, separating artists from their real
social community and thus making their isolation more complete.
104 World War I and Before

Figure 3.1. Schubert, “Der Doppelgänger”

“Doppelgänger” is one of Schubert’s darkest songs—it portrays the self

in its most fragile, most fragmented state. The protagonist’s proposed ser-
enade in front of his lover’s abandoned house turns into the nightmare of a
mental breakdown as he recognizes his own distorted double in the gesticu-
lating figure that apes the outward gestures of his lovesick condition. ­Heine’s
poem is not a traditional love-turned-bitter story: love, or the lack of it,
Echoes of the Self 105

serves here as a symptom of self-absorption that transforms the only re-

maining feeling, self-pity, into self-hatred and self-irony. Schubert’s music
reacts sensitively to all of the minute details of Heine’s psychological drama
(fig. 3.1). He captures obsession with a ceaselessly repeated four-bar motive.
The motive itself consists of two descending minor seconds, separated by a
diminished fourth. The shape of the melodic line bears a strong resem-
106 World War I and Before

blance to the BACH cipher (the German spelling of Bach’s name in music as
B  ♭ –A–C–B  ♮ ), used frequently as a reference to Johann Sebastian Bach. The
four notes of the “Doppelgänger” ostinato can be symmetrically arranged
between two F#s an octave apart, a note that Schubert uses as a continuous,
compulsive pedal that provides the song with its existential core, its “self”
trapped in neurotic obsessions. One suspects that because of the oppres-
sive presence of this note, the possibility of escape from the nightmarish
double can be gleaned only at moments when the menacing F# is absent or
when C appears in the bass as a predominant that prepares B major, domi-
nant of E minor, a key promised but never reached in the song.12
Bartók’s Third Dirge is an abstract fantasy on Schubert’s obsessive “Dop-
pelgänger” motive (fig. 3.2). Bartók uses three variations of Schubert’s motif:
the first, presented in parallel octaves and fifths in the left hand, is the version
Schubert uses only once, in the piano postlude of his song (cf. mm. 56–59 in
fig 3.1 and mm. 1–2 in fig 3.2). Here Schubert expands the last interval into a
major second, thus giving a harmonic context to C that previously appeared
as a functionally foreign note in the given tonal context. Fragments and per-
mutations of Schubert’s main motive also occur in Bartók’s score.13 We hear
Schubert’s original motive four times: twice in the right hand, both starting
from the piece’s tonal center, A  ♭/G# (mm. 10, 12); and twice in the left hand,
played in augmented form in stretto from D (m. 13) and B  ♭ (m. 14).
Parallels between Schubert’s late song and Bartók’s short piano piece go
further than the similarities of their main motives. Both pieces evoke a
sense of emptiness and obsession not only by the recurrence of similarly
shaped motives, but also by frequent open fifths and long, gravitational
pedal tones (F# in Schubert and B—the tonic of Schubert’s song—in Bartók’s
Dirge). Both pieces contrast this static material with a gradual increase in
dynamics and textural density that create an arch-like form with an emo-
tional climax in the middle, followed by a return to the static and quiet
material of the first part (the same arch governs Bluebeard’s structure).
Schubert’s song rises from pp to fff and then moves back to ppp, whereas in
Bartók’s Dirge the dynamics increases from p to ff, which then quiets down
to pp. The violence of Schubert’s fortissimos liberates the voice and allows
the accompaniment to drift from its obsessive path: abandoning its previ-
ous circular motion, the bass finally rises chromatically, until it reaches an
impasse of a tonic-dominant pendulum in D# minor (mm. 43–50 in fig. 3.1).
Instead of a chromatic ascent, the right hand in Bartók’s Dirge rises along an
octatonic (tone-semitone) scale, which also reaches a stalemate as it stalls
Echoes of the Self 107

Figure 3.2. Bartók, Third Dirge, op. 9a (1909–10)

on repeated E  ♭ –E dyads (mm. 16–19 in fig. 3.2). Schubert supports the me-
lodic climax on G in measure 41 by increased harmonic density and the in-
troduction of a German-sixth chord on C. Bartók’s climax manifests itself in
the expansion of range between the two hands, reaching more than five
octaves on alternating C-major/minor chords in measure 18. Melodic libera-
tion, expressed in Schubert’s song by the voice’s final effort to rise above
the restricting F# to G and its ability to sing real melodies in D# minor as
108 World War I and Before

opposed to recitative lines circling around F#, finds its parallel in Bartók’s
postclimactic dolce and dolcissimo phrases that, through the arpeggiated
dominant-seventh chords in the right hand (E7, C7, A7, and B  ♭ 7 in mm. 21–
26), open up unfulfilled tonal possibilities. These chords and their tonal
implications are just as strange in the musical language of Bartók’s Dirge as
the oddly sweet ornamental melisma in measures 54–55 that Schubert as-
signs to the closing line of the poem (“so many nights, in olden times”) in
the otherwise bare-bones style of the “Doppelgänger.” Both gestures sound
artificial and signal a sudden turn to olden times with styles that stand out-
side the main expressive vocabulary of the pieces. More significantly, both
backward-looking gestures are immediately contradicted by contrasting
musical utterances: by the return of the motto in Schubert’s “Doppelgän-
ger” (mm. 56–59) and by the presence of scattered notes from the main
motive in the left hand at the end of Bartók’s Dirge (C–B . . . D#–Cx).14
Despite these striking similarities, Bartók’s and Schubert’s laments about
human loneliness end on a different tone. At the end of the Dirge, Bartók
brings back the first chord, in its original register and hollow spacing. The
piece moves in a full circle and closes where it began—breakout is denied
by the frustrating stalling on the climactic E  ♭ –E, and by the artificiality of the
dominant sevenths. In the last measures of “Der Doppelgänger,” Schubert
replaces the tonic B minor with its parallel major, signaling a possible escape
to different regions. Schubert’s concluding B major is anticipated in crucial
points of his song. At the end it is prepared by a C-major chord (m. 59) that,
functioning as a potential Neapolitan, turns B major into the dominant of E
minor.15 In this context, C acts as a strong opponent to the obsessive F#.
That escape from F# is ultimately denied is not surprising if we consider that
the frightening figure in the poem is identical with the protagonist—­separation
from him would be possible only through a fatal truncation of the personality.
Schubert suggests the unity of the two figures by placing the contrasting C
and F# as the sole accompaniment to the word Doppelgänger in measure 44:
the overlap of these two notes indicates the inherent contradiction be-
tween contrast and sameness in the double identity of the protagonist.
On a much larger scale, Bluebeard has the same dramatic trajectory as the
Third Dirge, while its fundamental dramatic and structural device, the con-
trast between C and F#, recalls “Doppelgänger.”16 Bartók casts Bluebeard’s
dark castle in F# minor. The first, skeletal melodic line, played in unison by
the low strings, starts and ends on F# (fig. 3.3). Bartók modeled the tune on
old-style Hungarian folk songs to match Balázs’s archaic introductory pro-
Echoes of the Self 109

logue, which the poet devised in imitation of Hungarian folk bards who are
believed to have preserved ancient pagan customs. As the curtain rises, the
bard who introduced the opera disappears, and the audience faces a com-
pletely dark stage. Although the stage remains dark until the silhouettes of
Bluebeard and Judith appear in the brilliant light of the open door at the top
of the stairs (at rehearsal 2), the outlines of the cold, cave-like hall with its
seven closed doors slowly become visible despite the darkness. In the stage
directions, Bartók does not specify the source of this preliminary light that
grants the audience its first vision, but the sudden intrusion of nervous me-
lodic figures in the woodwinds, centered on C major above the strings’ F#
pedal (4 before rehearsal 1), forecasts the light that Judith will bring into the
castle.17 Indeed, a few measures later a variation of the same motive marks
the appearance of Bluebeard and Judith in the “blinding white square” of the
door. We hear the motive again (4 after rehearsal 4) as Bluebeard, now at
the bottom of the stairs, looks up at Judith, whose words (“I’m coming I’m
coming, Bluebeard”18) show determination but whose stopping in the mid-
dle of her descent indicates hesitancy. A distorted version of the motive
appears as the castle responds with a sigh to Judith’s aggressive banging on
its first door (2 after rehearsal 25). The motive is thus clearly associated with
Judith, both as a bringer of light and as an aggressive intruder.
In Bluebeard Judith fulfills her promise of light by making Bluebeard open
the closed doors of his castle, gradually revealing the hidden crevices of his
soul. The doors open one by one, exposing Bluebeard’s complex personal-
ity: first his manly attributes—his cruelty (torture chamber) and his bravery
(armory)—then his riches (treasury) and his gentleness (garden). Although
not indicated in the text, the light emanating from the doors of his under-
ground dungeon gradually gets brighter as Bluebeard shows chambers
closer and closer to ground level. The culmination of this process is the
opening of the fifth door, which reveals Bluebeard’s realm—open space
with a vast horizon (fig. 3.4). Bartók marks this moment of maximum light
with a triple forte C-major chord that provides the perfect contrast to the
beginning’s pianissimo F# minor. Not only are F# and C polar opposites on
the circle of fifths, the minor and major keys also spell the conventional op-
positions of negative and positive, dark and bright, closed and open.
Although Judith craved light, here she shrinks back from the brightness
radiating from the fifth door. As if suddenly changing perspectives with
Bluebeard, who proudly identifies now with C major, she shields her eyes
with her hands, quietly opposing his C-major invitation to admire the vast-
110 World War I and Before

Figure 3.3. First two pages of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (piano reduction)

ness of his vistas with stunned, expressionless black-key pentatonic phrases.

Judith’s gesture of protecting herself from the brilliance of the light connects
her to the mythological Semele who, doubting her lover’s divine nature, de-
mands that Zeus appear to her in his full glory but, since no mortal can bear the
sight of a god, is burned to ashes by the flame ignited by Zeus’s lightning rays.
Echoes of the Self 111

In Bluebeard light threatens not the woman but the man, as C represents
not only the polar opposite of darkness (F#) but also a disintegrating power
capable of destroying the spiritual integrity of man’s soul. Because light en-
ables vision and thus potentially leads to knowledge, it can be related to the
biblical forbidden fruit that Eve desires and tempts man to taste. The biblical
112 World War I and Before

Figure 3.4. The fifth door in Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Eve’s curiosity and cunning persuasion of man to act against God’s com-
mand are reflected in Bartók’s Judith, whose curiosity is no less a motivating
force behind her actions than is her love. Her insistence on disclosing man’s
secrets posits a dangerous temptation for Bluebeard, who almost loses his
soul in the forced process of self-revelation. Darkness and light, F# and C
Echoes of the Self 113

thus exchange places as loci of negative and positive forces: F#, the sign of
obsession in Schubert’s “Doppelgänger,” becomes a sign of wholeness in
Bluebeard, while C, commonly associated with purity in Romantic music
and offered as a potential escape in Schubert’s song, appears as a corruptive
force in Bartók’s opera. As in “Doppelgänger” and the Third Dirge, in Blue-
beard the clear vision brought by the climax reveals an emotional impasse
that predicts an ending that reiterates the conflict posited at the beginning
of the piece. The difference between the metaphorical significance of F#
and C in Bluebeard and “Doppelgänger” shows a dramatic shift in worldview
and signals a changed perspective on the possibility of redemption.
This reversal of perspectives becomes even more prominent if we con-
sider the music’s historical associations with Judith’s figure. The impending
doom is already embedded in the first motive connected with her (fig. 3.5a).
While the motive’s snake-like curling melodic line refers back to Eve, its
rhythmic and melodic shape recalls Salome’s impatient, hysterical demand
for the head of John the Baptist in Strauss’s Salome, an opera Bartók greatly
admired (fig. 3.5b).19 As Judith’s name indicates, she is related to the biblical
Salome who, like the biblical Judith, had her male opponent decapitated.20
Unlike Salome, Judith is motivated by patriotic feelings: she seduces and
kills Holofernes, the commander of the Assyrian army, to save her city from
invasion.
Bartók’s references go back even earlier than Strauss. The parallel thirds
of Judith’s motive evoke the leitmotif for the cursed ring in Wagner’s Ring
cycle (fig. 3.5c). This ring, which Alberich forged from the natural gold that
lay hidden at the bottom of the Rhine, brings into play a number of negative
associations: man’s destruction of nature, his thirst for power, his greed, and
his willingness to give up his most human qualities—the ability to love and the
desire to be loved. Whoever comes into contact with the ring in Wagner’s
tetralogy is corrupted by it. In Wagner’s mythology the ring is the symbol
of the original sin, which can be erased only by Brünnhilde’s self-sacrifice at
the end of the cycle. Wagner’s epic ends with redemption, with the return
to the natural state of things, in which the ring loses its destructive power
and becomes part of nature again. Although biblical in its basic conception,
Wagner’s Ring changes the biblical gendering of sin and redemption: instead
of Eve instigating the original sin, in the Ring it is the greedy and sexually
frustrated Alberich who unleashes corruption; instead of Jesus bringing
salvation, it is Brünnhilde’s sacrifice that restores the natural order of the
world.21
114 World War I and Before

Figure 3.5. (a) Motif of Judith’s intrusion in Bluebeard, (b) Salome’s motif in Strauss’s
Salome, (c) motif of the ring in Wagner’s Ring

It is not Wagner’s mythological Ring, however, that has the most reso-
nance in Bartók’s Bluebeard but his Lohengrin. In fact, it might have been
Wagner, and not Schubert, who provided Bartók with the model of present-
ing the polar opposites of good and evil by using the opposing keys of F#
minor and C major.22 In Lohengrin, F# minor is the key of Ortrud, the evil
sorceress and wife of Frederick whom Elsa’s mysterious bridegroom, the
knight Lohengrin, removes from power. Ortrud’s realm is the night and
darkness, which Wagner depicts at the beginning of the second act by tim-
pani tremolos and a treacherously curling unison melody in the low regis-
ters of the cellos and bassoons. Wagner modeled Ortrud’s musical land-
scape on Carl Maria von Weber’s depiction of the midnight scene in the
Wolf Glen in Der Freischütz (1821), where the unfortunate hunter Max and
his evil tempter Kaspar forge magic bullets. Weber contrasts the F# minor
of dark forest music with the purity of C major, a key that stands for Max’s
saintly bride, Agathe, who saves him from Satan with the help of a hermit.
Weber juxtaposes the evil F#-minor music and the pure C major in the
overture, in which the melody of Agatha’s aria serves as the triumphant
contrasting theme that overcomes the threat of the dark forest music as
well as Max’s agitated theme.
Although Judith’s relation to the mythological Semele, the biblical Eve,
the man-killing Judith and Salome, and the curious Elsa mark her as a dan-
gerous, negative character, her C-major key also associates her with the
purity of Agatha and Elsa, successful and failed redeemers of operatic men.
Wagner’s contrast of F# minor and C major in Lohengrin is not as explicit as
Weber’s in Freischütz. Unlike Agatha, Elsa does not triumph at the end. To
take revenge, Ortrud, like the mythological Hera in Semele’s story, makes
Elsa question the identity of her husband-to-be. Wagner’s lesson is clear: no
Echoes of the Self 115

less than blind and unconditional trust is expected from a woman who as-
pires for a noble husband. Elsa cannot pass the test Wagner regularly sets
up for his redeeming female protagonists who are willing to sacrifice them-
selves for the salvation of men. As Wagner formulates it at the conclusion
of part 1 of Opera and Drama, a woman can achieve

full individuality only at the moment of surrendering herself. She is like the ondine
who floats about aimlessly in the waves of her native element, without a soul,
until she finally receives one through the love of a man. The look of innocence in
the woman’s eyes is the infinitely clear mirror in which the man can only recognize
the general capacity for love, until he is able to recognize in it his own image: when
he has done so, then too is the woman’s polymorphous capacity for love condensed
into a pressing need to love this man with the full ecstasy of surrender.23

The triumph of the feminine principle, which Goethe immortalizes at

the end of Faust by the invocation of das Ewig-Weibliche, or “eternal femi-
nine,” still dominates the outcome of Wagner’s operas: the cursed Dutch-
man is saved by Senta’s sacrifice in The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser is re-
deemed by Elisabeth’s pure love in Tannhäuser, and the entire world is saved
by Brünnhilde’s self-immolation in the Ring. In her immense desire to be
united with Siegfried, the wise Brünnhilde gains great power. But her strength,
like that of many self-sacrificing women, is turned into self-­annihilation, the
total dissolution of her own will that is reduced to a will to serve the man
she loves. Ironically, in Wagner’s view salvation through the love of a woman
can come only at the price of the destruction of the woman’s self. As he writes
in Opera and Drama, “To bear gladly that which is received, this is the deed of
the woman,—and to accomplish such deeds it requires only that she be ex-
actly what she is; there is no question of ‘wanting,’ for she can want only one
thing: to be a woman! Thus woman is for man the infallible measure of na-
ture, for she is most perfect when she does not transgress the sphere of
beautiful instinct, the sphere which holds her in thrall by virtue of the one
thing that brings her joy, the necessity of love.”24
This Romantic-bourgeois view of the feminine persisted until the turn of
the century. Staying at home while men braved the perils of the outside
world, women were supposed to be the guardians of men’s soul. In his
­Sesame and Lilies (1865), John Ruskin contrasts the function of men and
women: “The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently
the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for specu-
lation and invention.” In contrast, women were not suited for invention or
116 World War I and Before

creation, only for “modesty of service.” They should “be enduringly, incor-
ruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development,
but for self-renunciation.”25
Already in Wagner’s writings there is a lurking fear that women may not
always want to be limited to this selfless role. What if they want to “trans-
gress the sphere of beautiful instinct”? Liberated women seem to have
posed a serious threat to the bourgeois order of female submission. As Bram
Dijkstra has demonstrated in his Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil
in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, turn-of-the-century culture waged a virulent war on
women, suspected of “dragging man into a grim trough of perversion.”26 In
this misogynist atmosphere, the image of the biblical Judith, previously the
icon of patriotic heroism, was turned into a paragon of female perversion.
Depicted as a lascivious, oversexed female predator, she was reconceived as
a woman determined not only to squeeze pleasure out of Holofernes but
also to take revenge on him for it. In this new interpretation, the decapita-
tion of Holofernes is less a patriotic deed than a metaphorical act of castra-
tion, indicated by the frequent depictions of lascivious Judiths with a
weapon in their hands.27 As Carl Leafstedt has argued, these images were
partially inspired by Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s 1840 Judith, a play that
presented a psychologically complicated heroine who is perversely at-
tracted to her male antagonist. Hebbel’s drama sexualized the Old Testa-
ment story just as Oscar Wilde later sexualized the New Testament tale of
Salome. Hebbel’s drama must have made an impression on Balázs, a Hebbel
scholar himself, and might have inspired him to give the name Judith to his
female protagonist in Bluebeard.28
Judith is just one of the many women whom turn-of-the-century artists
have transformed into femmes fatales: the biblical Salome, Delilah, and Ju-
dith are among the best-known women whose mere existence posed a dan-
ger to men. Supposedly they all lusted after men, but they were also eager
to destroy the object of their desire. Dijkstra argues that decapitation, the
act of severing the head, seat of the brain, from the body, was seen as “the
supreme act of the male’s physical submission to woman’s predatory de-
sire.”29 In art these dangerous women replaced the self-sacrificing heroines
of Wagner’s operas. With the disappearance of female self-sacrifice, the
possibility of redemption through love has also vanished.
Bartók’s Judith must be read in the context of this fin-de-siècle anxiety
about women. The change of perspective on women left a decisive mark on
the old story of Bluebeard, which in Balázs and Bartók’s version became a
Echoes of the Self 117

combination of myths, biblical associations, legends, fairy tales, folk ballads,

and personal resentments. The biggest change in the tale is that the woman-
killer Bluebeard of old legends is transformed into the potential victim of the
man-killer Judith. Unlike Semele or Elsa, she does not need the temptation
of jealous rivals to motivate her inquiry into Bluebeard’s identity and thus
undermine his integrity. She does not perish like Semele and is not forgiven
like Elsa. Her punishment is to be banished to the realm of memory and thus
be denied physical presence in the man’s life. At the end of the opera, man’s
greatest temptation, the physical beauty of woman, dissolves into a mere
mental image.
Bluebeard’s parting words describing Judith’s physical beauty (“You are
beautiful, a hundred times beautiful, you were the most beautiful woman”30)
are still addressed to the real Judith, but the past tense of the farewell has
already expanded the physical distance between the protagonists. Blue-
beard’s farewell is underlined by treacherously curving parallel thirds in the
strings (fig. 3.6, rehearsal 135). Because of their association with Wagner’s
cursed ring, these thirds warn of the deceptiveness and ephemeral nature
of female beauty. The music that depicts Judith’s slow retreat is stylistically
the closest to Bartók’s Third Dirge. At rehearsal 136 long pedals (here main-
tained at the harsh dissonance of B  ♭–A), gradual increase and collapse of dy-
namics, rising melodic line in the upper parts, the gravitational force of F in the
trumpet and trombone, and the gradual expansion of gestures from falling
minor-second sighs to a forceful perfect-fifth scream at the climax all point to
the Third Dirge. As an additional connective link, Bartók inserts a transposed
BACH cipher (G  ♭–F–A  ♭–G, 4 before rehearsal 138), a variant of the “Doppelgän-
ger” motive, into the organ part that, reinforced by the E ­ nglish horn, for four
measures provides the only sonority we hear. He might have intended the
gesture as a little insider joke that associates the sound of the instrument
with its greatest master, Johann Sebastian Bach. Because of its strong reli-
gious overtones, the organ lends a ritualistic aspect to the moment when
the castle closes its doors again and darkness regains its power. The only
other time in the opera Bartók uses the organ is the scene’s ritualistic coun-
terpart, the opening of the fifth door, the moment when the castle achieves
maximum light and openness.
The ending returns to the music of the beginning. We hear the skeletal
F# tune again (at rehearsal 138), combined now with the nervous motives
originally associated with Judith. Since they accompany Bluebeard’s last
lines, one can interpret their integration into the castle music as Judith’s
118 World War I and Before

Figure 3.6. End of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

retreat into Bluebeard’s memory. Alone again on stage, Bluebeard slowly

withdraws into himself, into his dark castle that draws a protective shell
around his ego. Only his vocal line indicates that the experience has left him
scarred. Instead of the perfect fourths of pentatonic scales, his home ter-
rain, he sings distorted fourths—first a diminished fourth (E#–A), then two
Echoes of the Self 119

tritones (G–C# and F#–C), ending, significantly, on C. As the orchestra grad-

ually zeros in on C#, the echo of Bluebeard’s final C gets disguised as the lower
note of Judith’s nervous thirds that rigidify into chords before they yield to the
ominous concluding C# in the bass. What hope can a low-­register C bring
when its promise is promptly contradicted by the text about the ensuing
120 World War I and Before

eternal night (“And it will be night evermore, night . . . night. . . .”31)? Emma
Gruber’s German translation, which Bartók approved, lends further musical
resonance to Bluebeard’s renunciation of love: “Nacht bleibt es nun ewig,
immer, ewig, immer. . . .” The repetition of ewig recalls the love duet of
music history’s most famous lovers, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (“So star-
ben wir, um ungetrennt, ewig, einig ohne End”32), transformed here into its
negative opposite. With this transformation Goethe’s eternal feminine
(Ewig-Weibliche), men’s assigned redeemer, disappears, leaving the eternally
unredeemable lonely man, commemorated in the nostalgic farewell of the
last song in Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (1908–09), which ends with
sixty-four bars of repeated long notes on the word ewig.
Bartók’s Bluebeard does not foreclose redemption altogether—but it
searches for it in an idealized human community, the “folk,” rather than in
romantic love. Casting off Goethe’s eternal feminine that draws men up-
ward into higher realms (“Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan”) as unfeasi-
ble for modern man because it was too deeply rooted in a religious world-
view, the atheist Bartók looks in the opposite direction: not to heaven but
to earth, to nature and its culturally constructed human representative, the
peasant. What distinguishes Bluebeard from other similarly misogynistic
works at the turn of the century is that Bartók casts the male protagonist
Bluebeard, and not the woman Judith, as living in harmony with nature. And
that is why the binaries of male-female, dark-light, and pure-corrupt find
their musical equivalent in the opposing style of folk music (Bluebeard’s
realm) and an assortment of other musical styles (Judith’s realm). Bartók
presents the purest, ideal form of folk style in the strings’ introductory mel-
ody at the beginning of the opera (fig. 3.3). Like old-style Hungarian folk
songs, it is pentatonic and consists of four gradually descending lines.33 In
this simplified form, it sounds more like a prototype of folk song than a real
song, as Judit Frigyesi has put it, the “ ‘melodic essence’ of an old-style pen-
tatonic folk song.”34 Bluebeard’s first notes reinforce his ownership of F#
and of pentatonicism, whereas Judith’s first words, sung on an arpeggiated
augmented chord, immediately posit her as an alien element in Bluebeard’s
castle. Their musical styles do not remain completely separate during their
conflicted encounter. As Frigyesi has shown, their constant wanderings be-
tween musical styles sensitively register their changing emotional warmth
and coldness, symbolizing “the opposition between the belief that love can
bring happiness and the awareness that complete happiness is not possi-
ble.”35 At the fifth door, Bluebeard, feeling himself on the threshold of emo-
Echoes of the Self 121

tional fulfillment, leaves his ascetic pentatonic utterances and approaches

Judith with waltz-like figures (“Come, come, I’m waiting for your kiss”36).
Judith responds to the marvel of Bluebeard’s vast realm with reducing her
music to short pentatonic phrases (“Your country is beautiful and enor-
mous”37). Yet, despite the occasional overlapping of their musical styles in
the course of the opera, the contrast set up at the beginning remains
­decisive.
In its presentation of gender conflict, Bartók’s Bluebeard is a paradig-
matically modernist work, its pessimistic outlook on human relations a prod-
uct of fin-de-siècle disillusionment and anxiety. In the opera, man’s spirituality
can find its nourishing environment only inside the protective boundaries of
his castle. Light cannot penetrate this world without breaking up the whole-
ness of the soul into fragmentary, painful memories. Self-knowledge in
Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” brings relief, even if it is only temporary. In
Bluebeard the revelation of the content of the protagonist’s soul, facilitated
by Judith, makes the darkness of the castle even more impenetrable and
­permanent—man’s loneliness even more absolute.
What is the role of folk music in this context? It seems strange to evoke
folk music, which in the Romantic imagination represented the ideal, uto-
pian community of the nation, as the home of the lonely soul, the isolated
individual who cannot relate even to one other person, let alone a commu-
nity. This combination of modernist disillusionment with the redemptive
power of human relations and the utopian belief in the possibility of com-
munity represented by the “folk” is just one of the many contradictions in-
herent in Hungarian modernism. But in the case of Bluebeard, this strange
combination also points to the autobiographical nature of Bartók’s opera.
Bartók’s discovery of folk music provided him with a protective shield behind
which he withdrew whenever he felt attacked by critics and rejected by the
audience.38 For him folk music functioned not as an entry into a community
but as a means of isolation from his immediate urban circle. Despite the nation-
alist resonance of Bartók’s turn to the peasants, his embrace of folk music did
not initially make him a national hero. On the contrary. The gentry in Hungary
despised peasants and their music and cherished instead urban Gypsy music as
a musical emblem of national identity. Bartók’s integration of the music of the
peasants into art music was part of an active war against this Romantic na-
tional identity, and as such it made him an outcast. Instead of creating com-
munity around him, his mission to collect, preserve, and elevate peasant
music into high culture made him even more isolated. Bluebeard represents
122 World War I and Before

not only man unredeemable by woman but also the artist who, searching
for the “pure sources” of art in folk culture, finds himself alone, without an
audience, as the real community rejects his music, while the folk commu-
nity he has conceived as ideal exists only in his imagination.

Notes
1. “És mindég is éjjel lesz már . . . éjjel . . . éjjel. . . .” In his 1911 revision Balázs
added the line “és mindig is éjjel lesz már” to the end, to which Bartók attached the
twofold repetition of the last word, “éjjel . . . éjjel.” See Vikárius, “Bartók’s Opera”
32, 45–46.
2. Kroó 60.
3. Szegedy-Maszák 246.
4. As Balázs puts it in an annotated edition of the text, “I created this ballad of
mine in the language and rhythms of old Hungarian Székely folk ballads. In character
these folk ballads closely resemble old Scottish folk ballads, but they are, perhaps,
more acerbic, simpler, their melodic quality more mysterious, more naïve, and more
songlike. Thus, there is no ‘literature’ or rhetoric within them: they are constructed
from dark, weighty, uncarved blocks of words. In this manner I wrote my Hungarian
language Bluebeard ballad, and Bartók’s music also conforms to this” (qtd. in Leaf­
stedt 202; and Vikárius, “Sources of Béla Bartók’s Opera” 111). About the folk reso-
nances in Balázs’s text, see Vikárius, “Sources of Béla Bartók’s Opera.”
5. Qtd. and trans. in Leafstedt 19.
6. According to Kodály, Bartók had no respect for the formalities of marriage.
One day he brought Márta to his mother and said, “Here is my wife, she’ll be living
here from now on.” He married Márta officially only because her father insisted on
legalizing their relationship. See Kodály 211.
7. The first competition was sponsored by the Lipótvárosi Kaszinó, one of Buda-
pest’s coffee houses, the second by the music publisher Rózsavölgyi. It was this sec-
ond jury that judged Bartók’s opera “unsuitable for stage performance.” For details of
the competitions, see Leafstedt 144–53.
8. Bartók, “A Fából faragott királyfi” 777.
9. Bartók, Black Pocket-Book.
10. “Nem tündököl az én váram” (7 before rehearsal 20).
11. Vikárius, “Bartók’s Opera” 5.
12. The note is absent only during the second vocal climax (m. 41) and in three
measures during the music's sudden but short-lived move to D# minor (mm. 48, 50–
51).
13. Bartók gradually reduces the motive to its basic elements (Fx–B): in the left
hand of mm. 3–4 the second G# obscures the motive’s diminished fourth; in m. 4, in
the right hand, the diminished fourth (A#–[D]) is missing altogether from the motive.
Echoes of the Self 123

After the climax in mm. 17–19, only the motive’s first two notes, the descending
seconds, remain.
14. As a final parallel: the gradual melodic ascent that assisted the voice’s efforts
to reach its climax in Schubert’s song is balanced by the final descending gesture in
the vocal part. Similarly, the chromatic rise in the right hand of Bartók’s piano piece
is followed by descending gestures that lead back to the initial B.
15. Whenever C appears in the bass, it suggests E minor as a potential escape
route. In three out of four appearances, C serves as a strong predominant to B, either
as a French or German sixth chord or as a Neapolitan (see mm. 32–33, 41–42, 59 in
fig. 3.1).
16. About C and F# as polar opposites in Bluebeard, see Lendvai, especially chap-
ter 2, “A Kékszakállú herceg vára” [Duke Bluebeard’s castle] 65–112.
17. Lendvai describes the motive as representing the first light emanating from
Bluebeard’s torch (70), but the motive appears before Bluebeard.
18. “Megyek, megyek, Kékszakállú.”
19. About Eve’s association with the snake, see Higgins. In a letter to Emma Gru-
ber (24 December 1905) Bartók writes, “I have vowed never to mention the Master
[Strauss] in Budapest unless the opinion of the general public changes. My vow,
however, does not prohibit expressing in writing the absolutely overwhelming effect
‘Salome’ made on me. Last week I started to study the piano reduction—and I was
unable to put the work aside before playing it completely through. . . . At last, a new
opera has been produced after Wagner! . . . What a great idea it was to choose a text
exactly like this!” (qtd. in Vikárius, “Sources of Béla Bartók’s Opera” 122). For more
about Strauss’s influence on Bartók, see Vikárius, Modell és inspiráció.
20. About the biblical associations of the name Judith, see Leafstedt, esp. ch. 7
(“The Significance of a Name”), 185–99.
21. In a speech on 29 Mar. 1935, Arnold Schoenberg identified “Erlösung durch
Liebe” (salvation by love) as one of the three main components of Wagner’s philoso-
phy: “You were no true Wagnerian if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the
ideas of Erlösung durch Liebe, salvation by love; you were not a true Wagnerian if you
did not believe in Deutschtum, or in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagne-
rian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Musik,
‘Judaism in Music’ ” (Schoenberg 503).
22. The polarity of C and F# also plays an important role in Debussy’s Pelléas and
Mélisande. In the climactic love scene of act 4, scene 4, F# is associated with Pelléas’s
passion and C with Mélisande’s purity. Her deliberately understated declaration of
love occurs on C and she reaches Pelléas’s passionate F# only at the end of the scene.
23. Qtd. and trans. in Grey 134.
24. Ibid. 137.
25. “Now their separate characters are briefly these: The man’s power is active,
progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the
124 World War I and Before

defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for
war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the
woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or
creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities
of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into
no contest, but infallibly judges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is
protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world,
must encounter all peril and trial: to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offense,
the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and al-
ways hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by
her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause
of error or offense. This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the
shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division” (Ruskin,
Sesame and Lilies 77–78). Parts of this passage are quoted in Dijkstra, 13.
26. Ibid. vii.
27. Ibid. 376–79. About the fin-de-siècle conception of the biblical Judith and
Salome, see Sine. About interpretations of Salome, see Kramer.
28. Leafstedt 185–99.
29. Dijskra 375.
30. “Szép vagy, szép vagy, százszor szép vagy. Te voltál a legszebb asszony!”
31. “És mindég is éjjel lesz már, éjjel, éjjel.”
32. “Thus we might die undivided, one forever without end.”
33. Debussy also starts Pelléas with pentatonic lines imitating folk music, which
he contrasts immediately with whole-tone sonorities.
34. Frigyesi 253.
35. Ibid. 243.
36. “Gyere, gyere, csókra várlak.”
37. “Szép és nagy a te országod.”
38. Feeling disappointed in his professional perspectives in the United States, he
wrote to his concert manager, “As a composer I am being boycotted, therefore in
such capacity I am as far as possible withdrawing, and shall pursue activities only in
the sphere of music-folklore” (qtd. in Tallián 220).

Bibliography
Bartók, Béla. Black Pocket-Book: Sketches 1907–1922. Facsimile edition of the manu-
script. Ed. László Kalmár with commentary by László Somfai. Budapest: Editio
Musica Budapest, 1987.
———. “ ‘A Fából faragott királyfi’—a M. Kir. Operaház bemutatójához—II: A zene­
szerző a darabjáról” [The wooden prince—to the premiere at the Hungarian Royal
Opera—II: The composer about his piece]. Magyar Színpad 20.105 (12 May 1917): 2.
Echoes of the Self 125

Rpt. in Béla Bartók, Bartók Béla összegyűjtött írásai [The collected writings of Béla
Bartók]. Ed. András Szőlőssy. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó vállalat, 1966. 777.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Frigyesi, Judit. Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.
Grey, Thomas S. Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.
Higgins, Jean M. “The Myth of Eve: The Temptress.” Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 44.4 (Dec. 1976): 639–47.
Kodály, Zoltán. Közélet, vallomások, zeneélet, Kodály Zoltán hátrahagyott írásai
[Public life, confessions, musical life, unpublished writings of Zoltán Kodály]. Ed.
Lajos Vargyas. Budapest: Szépirodalmi könyvkiadó, 1989.
Kramer, Lawrence. “Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex.” Cam-
bridge Opera Journal 2.3 (Nov. 1990): 269–94.
Kroó, György. A Guide to Bartók. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1971.
Leafstedt, Carl. Inside “Bluebeard’s Castle”: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lendvai, Ernő. Bartók dramaturgiája: Színpadi művek és a Cantata profana [Bartók’s
dramaturgy: Stage works and the Cantata profana]. Budapest: Akkord, 1993.
Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Schoenberg, Arnold. “Two Speeches on the Jewish Situation.” Style and Idea: Selected
Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein. Trans. Leo Black. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1975. 501–04.
Sine, Nadine. “Cases of Mistaken Identity: Salome and Judith at the Turn of the Cen-
tury.” German Studies Review 11.1 (Feb. 1988): 9–29.
Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. “Bartók and Literature.” Hungarian Studies 15.2 (2001):
245–54.
Tallián, Tibor. Béla Bartók: The Man and His Work. Budapest: Corvina, 1981.
Vikárius, László. “Bartók’s Opera.” Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, op. 11, Facsimile of the Auto-
graph Draft. By Béla Bartók. Ed. László Vikárius. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2006.
———. Modell és inspiráció Bartók zenei gondolkodásában: A hatás jelenségének értel-
mezéséhez [Model and inspiration in Bartók’s musical thinking: Toward the inter-
pretation of the phenomenon of influence]. Pécs: Ars Longa Jelenkor Kiadó, 1999.
———. “The Sources of Béla Bartók’s Opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911): The Fas-
cinations of Balladry.” Glasbeno gledališcˇe: Vecˇeraj, danes, jutri; 100-letnica rojstva
skladatelja Danila Švare, 17. slovenski glasbeni dnevi April 9–12, 2002, Ljubljana,
Slovenia [Musical theater: Yesterday, today, tomorrow; The 100th anniversary of
the birth of composer Danilo Švara, 17th slovenian musical days]. Ed. Primož
Kuret. Ljubljana: Festival Ljubljana, 2003.
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II Interwar Modernism
Movement and Countermovement
This page intentionally left blank
 4 The Great War and Its Aftermath
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s
“Third-Way Modernism”

Bryan Gilliam

In the 1960s, the classic approach to teaching twentieth-century music was

drawn along the lines of two modernisms, one German and one French. The
German model centered on Schoenberg and was rooted in Wagner and
Brahms, while the French model centered on Stravinsky and was rooted in
Debussy. This dialectic between harmonic innovation and innovations in
rhythm and (perhaps) color was directly fueled by Theodor Adorno’s essay
The Philosophy of New Music (1948; English translation, 1973), which saw
Stravinsky’s atavistic and primitivist innovations as dishonest, even reac-
tionary.1 In this period of high modernism, harmony trumped rhythm, and
the dominant narrative became the path toward atonality, with many ac-
counts culminating (as did Donald Jay Grout’s History of Western Music
[1960]), with Schoenberg’s student, Anton Webern. Of these two ap-
proaches, American academics favored the German model in which a
Schoenbergian modernism led directly to such avant-garde contemporaries
as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt.
In American high modernism, style and ideology were hopelessly inter-
twined in a modernist dialogue that prized technical progress above all else.
It was basically a note-driven discourse about the tendency of the materials
(Tendenz des Materials), insulated from modernist discussions in arts and
literature, which drew from criticism, aesthetics, and other disciplines. The
so-called New Musicology of the 1980s was a direct response to this situa-
tion. At the same time, musicologists such as Kim Kowalke and Stephen
Hinton were arguing that there was, indeed, a second German way, and
they quite correctly reminded their readers that the Schoenberg (of the
time of Pierrot lunaire [1912]) was not nearly as fresh and modern as were
his works in the 1920s. A younger generation of composers had emerged
after World War I: Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek, among
130 Interwar Modernism

others. They were interested in music and technology, and they ­composed—
when they wished—in quirky, ironic tonalities or none at all and were fasci-
nated by American popular music, jazz, and dance.2
What role did Strauss, who lived until 1949 and composed throughout
the Weimar period, play in this post–World War I narrative? Although
Strauss’s modernism is sometimes confined to Salome (1905) and Elektra
(1908)—two milestones along the path to Schoenberg’s atonality—Strauss
always thought of himself as a modernist. Indeed, at the end of his life, he
lamented that few understood his modern attitude, especially in opera:

Why doesn’t anyone see what is new [modern] in my works, how, in [these
works], the individual becomes visible as only in Beethoven—this already begins
in the third act of Guntram (the rejection of the collective), Heldenleben, Don
Quixote, Domestica—and in Feuersnot the intentional tone of mockery, of irony,
the protest against the run-of-the-mill libretto, the uniquely new, is obvious.
Thus, the humorous satire of Wagnerian speech, as a result of Kunrad’s speech
(which should not be cut) this entire little non-opera came into being. The con-
fession of Intermezzo, of Capriccio, is precisely what differentiates my dramatic
works from the typical operas, masses, variations in direct succession to
Beethoven, Berlioz, [and] the followers of Liszt. Music of the 20th century! The
Greek-German.3

There are two key terms that might require some explanation for those not
versed in the Wagnerian debates, especially the debates that followed after
his death. The first, “the rejection of the collective,” is part of Strauss’s
worldview that modern music (including Schoenberg) should get beyond
Wagnerian metaphysics, beyond redemption (by the collective), be they
Meistersingers or Knights of the Grail. He had concluded early on that in a
modern world the subject and the object would remain separate. The sec-
ond key term, to which I will return later, is the Griechische-Germane, sug-
gesting Germany’s roots were not in Christianity but in Greek culture. Nei-
ther the rejection of collective redemption nor the embrace of Greek myth
is to be found in Wagnerism, which became conservative in Munich and
Bayreuth.4
Adorno recognized in Strauss’s unique modern attitude the protean
composer’s desire to undermine a transcendent and metaphysical world-
view, even as the latter used Wagner’s own technical and musical apparatus
of a massive orchestra, chromatic harmonies, a system of leitmotifs, and the
like. More significantly, Strauss created characters who rejected the collec-
The Great War and Its Aftermath 131

tive (unlike Walther von Stolzing and Parsifal),5 and he cared nothing about
redemption.6 But in an essay entitled “Richard Strauss at Sixty,” written in
1924, Adorno registers his disappointment with Strauss’s musical atheism,
seeing in the older man a great but self-satisfied and soulless composer.7
What the twenty-one-year-old Adorno might not have perceived in 1924
was that Schoenberg’s atonal modernism retained a post-Wagnerian meta-
physics; to the end Schoenberg associated music with a mystical, redemp-
tive, transcendent space. How confusing it must have been in the period of
materialistic high modernism to deal with a composer such as Schoenberg,
who eschewed tonality yet embraced romantic idealism (Kant, Schopen-
hauer), and Strauss, who eschewed such idealism and embraced a tonal
language.8 This apparent paradox is an integral part of what might be called
third-way modernism, a modernism based on aesthetic content—Strauss’s
rejection of nineteenth-century German idealism—not merely musical in-
novation. The music of Adorno’s favorite nineteenth-century composers
could not work through this crisis of the modern age, a crisis that had grown
out of the schism between subject (what he called the psychologisches “Ich” )
and object (Strauss’s “collective”), and that earlier composers had sought to
resolve through older “authentic” forms, whether it was Mendelssohn’s
“shivering classicism,” Schumann’s “block sonata repetitions,” or Bruckner’s
“congregationless chorales.”9 According to Adorno, Wagner tried and failed
to resolve this crisis with the impotent wave of a magician’s wand, but what
unnerved the young critic was that Strauss seemed not to care at all. Read
in this context (a context missing from American Strauss scholarship), Ernst
Bloch’s remark that Strauss possessed a “brilliant hollowness” is hardly a
shocking indictment.10

The Prewar Operas

An aspect of Strauss’s third way (later abetted by Hofmannsthal) was
finding the profound in the seemingly ordinary and everyday aspects of
modern life, especially in bourgeois marriage. As Leon Botstein observes,
“In The Egyptian Helen [Die ägyptische Helena, 1928] the mythological and
historical are rendered ordinary, in contrast to Wagner. . . . In the mundane,
ordinary, and intimate there was sufficient ambiguity and poignancy for se-
rious art.”11 Adorno himself was among the first to proclaim how the institu-
tion of marriage had been given “bad press” by Wagner.12 Wotan/Wagner
(the “bourgeois terrorist”) contemptuously consigns Hunding (“the primor-
dial husband”) to the underworld with a mere wave of his hand: “Geh’ hin,
132 Interwar Modernism

Knecht! Kniee vor Fricka.” (Be off, slave! Kneel before Fricka [the goddess
of marriage].) For Wagner there was no place for lasting marriage in a world
where metaphysical love broke all boundaries. In his essay “The Social Char-
acter,” Adorno points to the void between the sexual and the ascetic, two
opposite poles that can be reconciled only through death.13 Parsifal, Tristan,
Tannhäuser, Siegmund, Siegfried, Lohengrin, the Dutchman—none can
marry or (in Lohengrin’s case) stay married. Those who are betrothed—such
as Wotan and Fricka, King Mark and Isolde, Siegfried and Gutrune—live in
a state of what we would now call marital dysfunction. Outside of the do-
mestic contract, Wagner offers the promise of highest bliss, an alternative
world to a bourgeois audience suffering from the routine and ennui of fam-
ily life.14
Adorno, who was one of greatest experts on Strauss in the twentieth
century, saw it coming. He viewed Guntram (1894), Strauss’s first opera, not
as Wagnerian imitation but as the rejection of the collective and Wagnerian
metaphysics. He also understood that the purpose of Strauss’s Feuersnot
(1901) is to rail against the current Wagner philistines who had run Wagner
out of town decades earlier. Salome, likewise, was intended as a lampoon of
Parsifal with a redeemer not redeemed but beheaded. It is not the harmo-
nies of the work that make it modern but its mockery of John the Baptist “as
a clown.”15
Salome was a great hit after it premiered on December 9, 1905, and
shortly thereafter it gained international stature. On October 21, 1905,
Strauss saw the actress Gertrude Eysoldt (the original spoken Salome) play-
ing Hofmannsthal’s Elektra at the same theater under the direction of Max
Reinhardt. Against his better judgment—which was always to compose
contrasting, adjacent works—he saw the opportunity for further advantage
in setting another femme fatale to music. Salome had, after all, met with
great financial success, and Strauss now expressed his desire to set Hof-
mannsthal’s play to music.16 The composer changed his mind, however, say-
ing that Elektra could be put on hold, and it took much of the spring of 1906
before he returned to the opera.17 By the time Strauss had finished, his
tragic vein was depleted, as was his interest in Nietzschean and Freudian
ego assertion. In 1963, Ernst Krause, an East German and a brilliant Strauss
commentator with a Marxian slant, called these works “abysses.” Salome
was old-fashioned and decadent—representative of a Secessionist, false
modernism—and the title character’s final monologue was a horrifying re-
gurgitation of Wagnerian Liebestod.18
The Great War and Its Aftermath 133

The protean Strauss, worn out by the strident twin tragedies, wanted to
distance himself from a movement he perceived to be waning in the new
century and happily engaged himself with Hofmannsthal in a new project
called Der Rosenkavalier.19 The Goethean Strauss joyfully reinvented him-
self, seeking a new avenue that turned away from the narcissistic and to-
ward the social. Although the libretto bears an intentional resemblance to
Da Ponte’s Marriage of Figaro, it conflates a far wider range of sources, includ-
ing Beaumarchais, Molière, Hogarth, and even parts of Wagner’s Meister­
singer. What had inspired Strauss, the lover of contrasts and juxtapositions,
was the conflation of comic elements with those of genuine profundity. In
order to realize such a wide range of emotions, Strauss developed a musical
language more complex and challenging than Salome’s chromaticism or Elek­
tra’s dissonance, for what Strauss sought in Der Rosenkavalier was a critical
layering of musical styles (Mozart, Johann Strauss, Verdi, and others).20
Taking a step well beyond the old-fashioned, decadent, fin-de-siècle Sa-
lome, Strauss realized that the musical language for the new century would
be stylistically diverse, a language that reflected the modernist preoccupa-
tion (not unlike that of T. S. Eliot or James Joyce) with the dilemma of his-
tory, one that arguably foreshadowed the dissolution of the ideology of
style in the later twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Through the
lens of Rosenkavalier, with its mannered anachronisms, we may see a com-
poser who keenly recognized the disunities of modern life and believed that
such incongruities should not be masked by a unified musical style. We find
as much, if not more, stylistic variety in Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), an opera
within a play written at the precipice of war and revised—in the midst of
European conflict—as a musical prologue followed by an opera (1916). The
work simultaneously features opera seria and commedia dell’arte.

The Postwar Period

The economic and political collapse that followed the conflict of World
War I caused sweeping change throughout modern Europe but especially
among the defeated Axis powers. Germany, beyond paying draconian repa-
rations, not only lost lands to France, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, and
Czechoslovakia, but also colonies in Africa, while the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was divided east from west and its main constituent parts, driven by
ethnic nationalism, produced various sovereign states: Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, parts of northern Italy, and a confederation of
Slovenian entities that became Yugoslavia.
134 Interwar Modernism

Massive social, political, and economic changes were occurring all over
Austria and Germany, as the two countries’ respective republics were estab-
lished in haste. There were important literary and musical ramifications to
this historical cataclysm as manifested in the collaboration of Strauss and
Hofmannsthal, which had already lasted thirteen years by 1919 and contin-
ued up to the poet’s death in 1929. But their collaboration experienced a
temporary interruption at the end of the war. Their most recent opera, The
Woman without a Shadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten), was conceived before the
war, composed during the conflict, and premiered only after the armistice
in October 1919.
The premiere was intended to celebrate Strauss’s move from Berlin to
the codirectorship of the Vienna State Opera. The endeavor had exhausted
both composer and poet, who agreed that it would be their “last romantic
opera” and that any future work would be more modern, less metaphysical,
and stripped of its “Wagnerian musical armor.”21 Strauss’s solution (his next
“reinvention”) would be a light Zeitoper based on a modern marital misun-
derstanding (Intermezzo, 1924). It was even too ordinary for Hofmannsthal,
who thought that it lacked psychological depth and literary quality. Going
his own way, Strauss wrote the libretto and composed the music for the
opera, garnering even Schoenberg’s admiration.22 Indeed, much of the spirit
of Intermezzo is to be found in other contemporary operas of the period,
such as Schoenberg’s Von heute auf morgen (1929) and Hindemith’s Neues
vom Tage (1929), both of which deal with the problems of modern marriage.
With its lively subject and unique cinematic qualities, Intermezzo proved a
moderate success, but it was always Strauss’s intention to return to Hof-
mannsthal, which he did with The Egyptian Helen.
In their mutual exploration of a subject that seems at first glance so
banal, Strauss and Hofmannsthal articulated a theme of everyday marriage
with far larger ramifications. Indeed, that theme seems to have connected
with other post–World War I German modernist movements, such as die
Neue Musik (the New Music) associated with Schoenberg and die Neue
Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) associated with Weill and Hindemith.
The larger question, which gained significant resonance after the war, was
the very nature of the modern human being in a postwar age of technology
and sociopolitical turbulence, where death, dismemberment, and destruc-
tion had to be dealt with on a daily basis. We might even read Strauss and
Hofmannsthal’s postwar project The Egyptian Helen (set just after the Trojan
War), with its ironic tonalities driven by jazz or popular music, as another
The Great War and Its Aftermath 135

aspect of their third-way modernism. Here the third way was a course
charted between Neue Musik (atonality and serialism) and Neue Sachlich-
keit (the turn toward the ordinary and everyday).
Although Strauss and Hofmannsthal had both supported their empires
and were disappointed in defeat and uneasy about the new republics that
followed, their personal reactions to contemporary events differed signifi-
cantly. Part of this divergence can be explained by their respective nation-
alities and cultures, but more importantly these two artists were entirely
dissimilar men. Letters between them show a temperamental, thin-skinned,
neurotic librettist. Time and again Hofmannsthal expressed offense at
Strauss’s abruptness, his lack of intellectual depth, his pettiness, and his ap-
parent coolness, even lack of empathy. How much of this is true we shall
never know, for the Bavarian Strauss took Socratic delight in appearing un-
reflective and pretending that composing was just another job. We do
know, however, that Strauss was obsessed with work, composed every day,
and found artistic activity as natural as breathing. For the temperamental
Viennese Hofmannsthal, by contrast, artistic creation required special cir-
cumstances, whether it was perfect weather or an inspired frame of mind.
Hofmannsthal was a true believer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
as a reserve officer was recalled to the war ministry. For the self-absorbed
Strauss, the war was mainly a nuisance, keeping his librettist from working
on Woman without a Shadow. “Poets ought to be permitted to stay at home,”
Strauss observed, adding, “There is plenty of cannon fodder available: crit-
ics [as well as] stage producers who have their own ideas.”23 The composer
could never fully comprehend his poet’s bitter disillusionment at the fall of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially the loss of the cultures of the East.
For Hofmannsthal, the empire was an ideal amalgam of the Occidental and
Oriental (das Abendländische and das Morgenländische), and after the war
he was fixated on the possibility of its reunification, if only in the imagina-
tive realm of literature and opera.
Strauss saw the crisis on a far more personal and practical level. With the
collapse of the monarchy and the economic difficulties that ensued, the shift
from imperially run to state-run musical institutions had disastrous effects in
terms of day-to-day management, with Strauss himself calling the newly ad-
ministered Berlin Opera “ein Narrenhaus” (a mad house).24 The composer’s
solution to crises, however, was to immerse himself in work, reinventing him-
self by composing, which in this case led to the proto–Zeitoper Intermezzo, an
autobiographical domestic comedy dealing with love and intrigue. Although
136 Interwar Modernism

both composer and librettist now lived in Vienna, they had never been fur-
ther apart, and it was not clear that they would ever collaborate again, in
which event their third-way modernism might never have emerged. Surre-
alism and expressionism were the most popular movements in the early to
mid-1920s, though, at bottom, they were rooted in the Sturm und Drang of
Wagnerian Liebestod.25 Intermezzo offered something fresh and new, as
Strauss explained in his preface to the opera: “By turning its back upon the
popular love-and-murder interest of the usual opera libretto, and by taking
its subject matter perhaps too exclusively from real life, this new work
blazes a path for musical and dramatic composition, which others after me
may perhaps negotiate with more talent and better fortune.”26

On the Way to Reconciliation

It was a seemingly insignificant idea of Strauss (the self-proclaimed mod-
ernist, the Griechische-Germane) that rekindled their relationship. In July
1921, he asked Hofmannsthal whether he would be interested in creating a
treatment for a possible ballet to be based on Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens
and The Creatures of Prometheus.27 The idea resonated deeply with the poet,
who saw the project as an allegory for postwar cultural revival. The work
would be set in Greece to which—in Hofmannsthal’s thinking—one could
trace the Occidental roots of Austro-German culture. In a critical scene in-
vented by Hofmannsthal, a character named the Wanderer, a German artist
“of half-forgotten days,” muses on the ruins of the past in a deserted Athe-
nian market at sundown. In the manner of Goethe’s “Prometheus,” the Wan-
derer asks Athena, “Let me go up to your citadel, my goddess. Will you re-
ceive me with all the light of your evening?”28
Strauss treated this text as a melodrama and seemed less possessed by
Goethe than by Beethoven as he underscored the text with excerpts from
the latter’s Third and Fifth Symphonies. The piece is, admittedly, a modest
pastiche of Beethoven, but it paved the way for Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s
first opera after World War I, The Egyptian Helen, where the East, lost with
the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is reunited with the West. Hof-
mannsthal’s third and final mythological work (after Elektra and Ariadne auf
Naxos) was rooted in the realities of personal and global trauma. His experi-
ence in World War I had exposed him to the horrors of sustained European
conflict and, more broadly, had shattered his faith in the Habsburg Empire.
But, as the essays and speeches of the 1920s demonstrate, he was not a ni-
hilist. He envisioned a unique “Austrian Idea,” a “United States of Europe,”
The Great War and Its Aftermath 137

whose center would be Austria—more specifically Vienna—and it was this

idea of a renewed, utopian embrace of ancient Greece that he sought to
realize in The Egyptian Helen.29
One important aspect of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s third-way modern-
ism was to embrace classical mythology for the new century and to em-
brace it in a manner that was neither tragic nor satirical. For this there was
no precedent in German opera. Paradoxically, although Elektra is usually
cited as Strauss’s most modern work via the path-to-atonality paradigm,
both Hofmannsthal and Strauss viewed it as old-fashioned and overwrought,
tied to a darkly Dionysian (read Nietzschean) worldview. Hofmannsthal
wanted a mythology without gods and metaphysics (as did Strauss), with
modern costumes taken from Vogue and events depicted “as if [they] had
happened two or three years ago, somewhere between Moscow and New
York.”30 The Egyptian Helen is a work where myth meets Zeitoper, with fash-
ionable costumes and an omniscient seashell as a spoof of the radio, or
perhaps even the telephone. Hofmannsthal himself suggests that it might
amuse “if the Sea-Shell were to sound distorted like a voice on the tele-
phone when one stands beside the receiver.”31
The librettist wanted the audience to recognize the post–Trojan War pe-
riod as an analogy for current European conflict. Indeed, the opera con-
cerns itself with what Hofmannsthal calls the “terrible and redeeming expe-
riences” immediately following war, when Menelas experiences a kind of
shell shock familiar to many veterans of the First World War.32 In a state
“close to insanity,” Menelas arrives at Poseidon’s palace with Helen, whom
he would have killed but for Aithra, who pacifies him with a lotus potion.
By the end of act 1, she has convinced Menelas that the Helen he thinks he
knows is a phantom and that the “real” Helen is now asleep in an adjacent
room; thus he retires to her bed as they drift toward the Atlas Mountains.
If it had stopped there, Hofmannsthal explains, it would have ended as
an operetta, “a short, frivolous comedy.”33 Ariadne auf Naxos demonstrates
that the movement from comic to serious was always an integral part of
Hofmannsthal’s creative process. If act 1 is about the dominance of the past
and its ramifications with and without anesthesia, then the second and final
act is about the present and those characters who can live on, make the
transition from past to present and so survive. Menelas and Ariadne are able
to make this change, while Elektra is not. But the artificial, drug-induced
tranquility between Helen and Menelas fails to make an honest or authentic
connection between yesterday and today.
138 Interwar Modernism

The lotus potion may protect Helen’s life, but, having robbed her of her
past with Menelas, it leaves her half dead. Just before Menelas returns from
a hunt, Helen orders Aithra to make him a potion of remembrance, which
will either result in her death or enable her to live a fuller and more honest
life. She has reached the critical hour, the one also reached by Ariadne, where
life might turn into death but—more important—death might become life
(“Tot-Lebendige! Lebendige-Tote!”).34 In his preface to the libretto, Hof-
mannsthal maintains that Helen’s strength is “that she must possess com-
pletely the man to whom she belongs,” and a tranquilized Menelas is only
half a man (just as Bacchus in Ariadne is only half a god).35 As in Ariadne, the
goal of transformation or renewal is reached by forgetting while remember-
ing, by finding each other without losing sight of the past:

Half-forgetting
makes for sweet remembering
you will feel a deep assurance
of your divine lover’s return!

(Ein halbes Vergessen

wird sanftes Erinnern;
du fühlest im Innern
dir wiedergegeben
den göttlichen Mann!)36

Helen must bring him back to the deadly point he reached the night
before. Returned to lucidity (and anger), Menelas raises his dagger but then
lets it drop, falling into her arms. Hofmannsthal observes that a poet “can
make his characters grow above and beyond themselves into gigantic pro-
portions, for this is what mortals do in rare moments.”37 In this decisively
modern moment, Helen moves far beyond the passivity of the fin-de-siècle
femme fatale. She insists on winning Menelas through her strength—not
merely her beauty—but the latter and the former are ultimately reconciled
in her dynamic nature.
In his preface, Hofmannsthal reminds us that Menelas and Helen repre-
sent opposite allegorical-geographical poles, the Occident and the Orient
respectively, following the lines of contemporary masculine-feminine
(Apollonian-Dionysian) conceptions: object-subject, light-dark, outward-
inward, marriage-hetaerism. But there is an asymmetry to these reductive
binaries, insofar as marriage itself may be said to symbolize these dualities
The Great War and Its Aftermath 139

in each of us. For both Hofmannsthal and Strauss, marriage represents equi-
librium, which they regarded as socially and politically desirable in the wake
of World War I. Philip Graydon sees The Egyptian Helen as “a critical docu-
ment of Hofmannsthal’s post-war, cultural-restorative mission: as no mere
l’art pour l’art libretto or opera, no mere re-hash and re-mix of timeless sub-
ject matter, it stands instead as Hofmannsthal’s modern attempt to encap-
sulate the conflict and contradictions of his era.”38 It is, as Hofmannsthal
asserts, “This influx of Orient and Occident into our self, for the immense
inner breadth, these mad inner tensions, this being here and elsewhere,
which is the mark of our [modern] life. It is impossible to catch all this in
middle-class modern dialogue. Let us write mythological operas. Believe me
it is the truest of all forms”—far truer, he believed, than a bourgeois, marital
comedy such as Strauss’s Intermezzo.39
Romain Rolland observes that Hofmannsthal could never write pure
comedy because he always ended by believing his own irony. In a work such
as Der Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal delighted in casting out threads of com-
edy and irony but rightly realized he had a responsibility to tie them up by
midway through act 3. The pace of that third act suffers for that reason.
Rolland may well be right, but it is also true that for Hofmannsthal comedy
always meant the integration of the social, something he found lacking in
his own tragedies, including Elektra. The ruins of contemporary Europe
were never far from his mind as he was writing his opera about the fall of
Troy; Menelas and Europe were a fractured whole.40 To Hofmannsthal’s
thinking, the Orient was the foundation of Greek civilization, which in turn
was the bedrock of modern Europe.
With a certain linguistic nostalgia, he called for a new postwar Ausgleich,
or “compromise” (as had once been established in 1867), between East and
West to be centered in Austria (on the threshold of the Eastern Realm) and
founded upon a renewed sense of Greek antiquity. The mission was recon-
ciliation and rejuvenation for a united Europe, with Austria at its center,
Hofmannsthal’s self-described Heimat in which a new Europe would be his
Vaterland.41 Helen sets the stage for Strauss’s next and far better-known
opera, Arabella, another marriage of West (Arabella) and East (Mandryka).
But despite Hofmannsthal’s assertion at the end of the preface to Helen that
a modern American playwright could have written the myth with the work
taking the form of “psychological drawing room play,” Hofmannsthal did
just that in Arabella: “Anything mythical [in the old fashioned way] or hero-
ical makes a modern audience uneasy, anything somber and grand (which,
140 Interwar Modernism

moreover, tends to conjure up associations with the Ring) terrifies them to

the marrow of their bones: but give them a hotel, lounge, ballroom, betrothel,
officers, cabbies, tradesman, and waiters, and they know where they are.”42
Hofmannsthal wanted an opera set around the Gründerzeit (roughly
1850–73), a time of growing prosperity (and financial speculation) com-
bined with political instability, which culminated in the Ausgleich of 1867.
The interface of East and West, whether in the form of Menelas and Helen
or of Mandryka and Arabella, continued to be the central theme of Hof-
mannsthal’s final project with Strauss, Arabella. In the wake of its defeat
after the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, Hungary had seen the opportunity
for secession from a weakened Habsburg Empire, which Franz Joseph II
curtailed by compromise in the form of a so-called dual monarchy, recog-
nizing Hungary as a kingdom in a new Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its very
name is a hyphenation of East and West (like Mandryka-Arabella). But that
hyphen, which meant both union and separation, was not as symmetrical as
it appeared to be, for although each kingdom had its king, there was only
one emperor. The compromise promised new stability, and there was a new
sense of economic optimism. There was also the recognition, however, that
this optimism might be false, as evidenced by the overspeculation of the
liberal class, which led to the stock market crash of 1873—a year before
Hofmannsthal was born—and which set the tone for the decade of his for-
mative boyhood years.
The economic collapse after World War I only brought back Hofmanns­
thal’s childhood memories in the form of Arabella. The poet saw an entire
continent in not only economic but also cultural turmoil, noting that Eu-
rope’s “collapse . . . [was] a shattering experience.”43 For Hofmannsthal, as
for many Austrians and Germans of his generation, Europe was neither a
political nor a geographical entity but a cultural one. To his thinking, the
task for the future of Europe (by which he meant only the Continent) was a
uniquely Austrian one. Thomas Mann articulates a similar view in his Reflec-
tions of a Non-political Man (1918), where art, music, and literature exist in a
sacred space removed from the everyday, politicized world. The German
nation, as a cultural phenomenon, could nurture an individual, but the Ger-
man state—the product of consensus and compromise—could only rob art-
ists of their individuality. However, whereas Mann ultimately reversed his
opinion in 1922, embracing democracy and the Weimar Republic, Strauss
and Hofmannsthal held on to their nostalgic, antirepublican views.
We shall never know how Hofmannsthal’s views might have evolved,
The Great War and Its Aftermath 141

given his untimely death in 1929. Strauss, of course, decided to participate

as president (1934–35) of the Reichsmusikkammer during the National So-
cialist regime but soon discovered that it was, for him, even worse than
Weimar-era democracy. For Hofmannsthal, the Austrian mission was the
only hope for Europe. Republican France was out of the question; Prussia
was too homogeneous, too uncompromising and unwilling to assimilate
with the East.44 “This Europe that wants to give itself new form needs an
Austria,” writes Hofmannsthal. “It needs Austria in order to comprehend
the polymorphous East.”45 Austria was the model for Europe’s future, and
its historic fluidity of borders was integral to this model, as Hofmannsthal
explains in his 1917 essay “The Austrian Idea” (“Die österreichische Idee”),
which in his mind could just as easily have been called “The New European
Idea”: “The primary and fateful gift for compromise with the East—let us
say it precisely: toward compromise between old European, Latin-German
and the new European, Slavic world—this only task and raison d’être of Aus-
tria, had to experience a kind of eclipse for European consciousness during
the decades 1848–1914.”46
The action of Arabella takes place on Shrove Tuesday, when carnival he-
donism is about to give way to Lenten sobriety, as the mass consumption of
Moët et Chandon (“halb trocken, halb herb”) ordered by Arabella’s mother
in act 2 is replaced by the abstemious glass of water that ends act 3.47 On a
historical level, the hedonism of speculation gives way to the stock market
crash of 1873. Arabella represents a prophetic warning to post–World War
I culture that Austria’s shift from liberalism to conservatism might return
during the late 1920s. Within this vital political context, the musical quota-
tions of Slavic folk songs in the Arabella score are far more than superficial
local color—at least for Hofmannsthal, who had read thoroughly an anthol-
ogy published just a few years earlier of Slavic folk songs gathered by Pavel
Eisner.48
Compared to the economically corrupt Viennese liberals and their spec-
ulative gambling, the Slavs offered the poet a sense of rustic purity. To Hof-
mannsthal’s thinking, a Slav such as Mandryka needs no money in his world
and opens his pocketbook to Arabella’s needy gambler father without
flinching. Hofmannsthal’s essay “Czech and Slovak Folksongs” suggests how
such spiritual essence and “authenticity” may be preserved in their lyrical
outpourings. Such an authentic outpouring is the tender love duet between
Arabella and Mandyka in act 2 that is based on a Slavic-Croatian love song
(“Und du wirst mein geliebter sein / Ci ja je ono djevojka”).49 Creating these
142 Interwar Modernism

moments of Eastern lyricism was central to Hofmannsthal’s project, and

Strauss was surely delighted with their exotic flair, but I doubt he under-
stood their richer cultural meaning as Hofmannsthal did, especially in the
sense that they became an essential part of the latter’s postwar Austrian
ideal.
In summer 1929, significant dramaturgical work remained to be done on
acts 2 and 3; Strauss pointed them out, and Hofmannsthal was hardly in
disagreement. But their first act with the added monologue of Arabella at
the end was perfect, and Strauss sent his poet a telegram to express his
pleasure on July 15, 1929. However, Hofmannsthal never opened it. Two
days earlier Hofmannsthal’s son had shot himself, and while preparing to
attend his funeral, Hofmannsthal suffered a fatal stroke, marking the end of
this fruitful collaboration of several decades.
The opera that outlived Hofmannsthal—it was performed in 1933—
shows that his views on language had significantly evolved from the days of
his youthful Chandos Brief ([1902] The Chandos Letter), which expresses such
skepticism about words as the sole bearer of expressive or emotional con-
tent. The older he got, the less he saw language and gesture as a zero-sum
game. Language, especially Eastern language, had moved far beyond the
so-called Sprachkrise (language crisis) of 1902.50 In his postwar nostalgia, in
his essays, and in his “Czech and Slovak Folksongs,” he envisioned a lan-
guage that could be purer than German.
Gesture may have trumped language in Elektra (1908) and in those mar-
velous prewar Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas that followed. But after World
War I, when German Kultur had become exhausted and powerless for Hof-
mannsthal, the embrace of the East was not necessarily “a weakening” but
rather a new synthesis, a new strength for postwar modern Europe. Of
course, the ensuing years proved Hofmannsthal to be entirely wrong. Op-
eras such as The Egyptian Helen and Arabella were hardly reflections of a
grand European tradition, mythological or not, in Hofmannsthal’s imagina-
tion. Indeed, after the premiere of Arabella on July 1, 1933, little about Europe
seemed great. In the wake of the World War I, the rest of the world got to see
the sad underside of that “grand” tradition, whether in the examples of Span-
ish and Italian Fascism, German Nazism, or Soviet ­Communism.
In Germany alone many operas failed the Nazi censors. In Strauss’s case,
The Silent Woman (1935) was cancelled after four performances because its
librettist, Stefan Zweig, was a Jew. Strauss’s Day of Peace (1936), conceived
by Zweig as a last hope of reconciliation and carried out by the uninspiring
The Great War and Its Aftermath 143

Joseph Gregor, was banned after the invasion of Poland (1939) because it
sent the “wrong message.” The Love of Danae (1939), the most Wagnerian of
his operas, with its focus on love versus gold, never made it past a dress
rehearsal in Salzburg in 1944.51 At the same time, Kurt Weill, who was a Jew,
faced similar losses after the Reichstag fire in March 1933. His opera The
Pledge was banned within a year of its premiere in 1932 and his Silver Lake
premiered in February 1933, a little more than two weeks after Hitler be-
came Reichskanzler of Germany. Schoenberg’s stage works of the 1910s and
1920s were banned, and he and Weill ultimately emigrated to the United
States. Korngold, another Jew and the interwar celebrity opera composer of
Vienna, was promised a Vienna premiere of his fifth opera, Die Kathrin (1938),
but the date coincided with the Nazi annexation of Austria on March 12,
1938. These are but a few examples of a negation of Hofmannsthal’s nostalgic
grand plan for a Europe that had passed him by after his death in 1929.
Hofmannsthal was, however, not the only Austrian to have postwar
dreams for a United States of Europe, though the center would be not Vienna
but Berlin. With Hitler’s rise to power, both Neue Musik and Neue Sachlich-
keit emigrated to the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.
The short-lived third way simply collapsed with the death of Hofmannsthal.52
Curiously, the Salzburg Festival—a by-product of H ­ ofmannsthal’s nostalgic
grand plan, which many anti-Semites viewed as Jewish i­ nspired—continued
after Austria’s annexation because of the support of Strauss and others.
Flashing forward seventy years from the end of World War II, the 2015
Salzburg season has moved well beyond the so-called ideology of styles,
featuring such diverse composers as Schoenberg, Weill, Strauss, and Boulez.
If modernism, like opera, “is dying in the hope of being reborn,” then we are
clearly in a new manifestation of das Neue where first-, second-, and third-
way modernisms can be equally appreciated at the same venue.53

Notes
1. Albright 16.
2. See Kowalke. Bryan Gilliam expanded from Weill to Hindemith, Krenek, and
others in Music and Performance of the Weimar Republic. These and other books such
as Susan Cook’s Opera for a New Republic firmly established a secondary musical
modernism in the study of Austro-German music of the twentieth century.
3. Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen 182. My translation.
4. Major figures from this school of thought were Cosima and her son Siegfried
Wagner, Hans von Wolzogen, and Alexander Ritter, among others.
144 Interwar Modernism

5. It is as if Kunrad, the hero of Feuersnot, were the Walther in an act 3 of Meis-

tersinger who ended the work with “Nicht Meister, nein.”
6. Strauss once remarked to Otto Klemperer that he was puzzled by Mahler’s
focus on redemption: “I don’t know what I am supposed to redeemed from. When I
sit at my desk in the morning and an idea comes into my head, I certainly don’t need
redemption” (Klemperer 147–48).
7. Adorno, “Richard Strauss at Sixty” 407.
8. For a different account of Schoenberg’s view of German idealism, see Richard
Begam’s “Schoenberg, Modernism, and Degeneracy” in this volume.
9. Adorno, “Richard Strauss at Sixty” 408.
10. Bloch 37.
11. Botstein, “Enigmas,” 22.
12. Adorno, “Social Character” 15.
13. Ibid.
14. By this yardstick we recognize a strong anti-Wagnerism in Strauss’s first opera,
Guntram.
15. Strauss to Stefan Zweig, 3 May 1935, in Strauss, A Confidential Matter 85–86.
16. The profits from Salome paid for his villa in Garmisch.
17. Music historians might ponder how Strauss’s reception might have changed if
Strauss had first produced his comedy and then composed Elektra.
18. Krause. See the chapter “Abysses,” 295–311. The translator is not cited.
19. Strauss, of course, had set Hofmannsthal’s play, Elektra, to music, though
Hofmannsthal had little to do with the operatic process, save adding some verses so
that Strauss could round out the final scene with his powerful music.
20. Leading Viennese music critic Julius Korngold decries the opera as being de-
void of the German idealism that had informed Meistersinger in “Strauss and the
Music Critics” (350).
21. Richard Strauss, “To Hofmannsthal,” 28 July 1916, Hofmannsthal and Strauss
259; Richard Strauss, “To Hofmannsthal,” 16 Aug. 1916, Hofmannsthal and Strauss 262.
22. Gilliam, “Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo” 283.
23. Letter to Gerty von Hofmannsthal, 31 July 1914, quoted in Kennedy, 58.
24. Strauss, Chronik zu Leben und Werk 402 (13 Nov. 1918).
25. Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909/24), Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1922/25),
Hindemith’s Cardillac (1926), and Weill’s Royal Palace (1926), among many others
exemplify these trends.
26. Gilliam, “Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo” 263.
27. May, p. 48.
28. Strauss, Die Ruinen von Athen 16.
29. See David S. Luft’s translated essays in his collection, Hugo von Hofmannsthal
and the Austrian Idea. The Austrian idea is a call for conservative revolution that is
consonant with the rappel-à-l’ordre movement in France. I recommend Malachi Haco­
The Great War and Its Aftermath 145

hen’s 2009 essay, “The Culture of Viennese Science and the Riddle of Austrian Liber-
alism,” which puts Hofmannsthal’s conservative revolution in a darker pre-Nazi con-
text.
30. Hofmannsthal, preface 305.
31. Hofmannsthal and Strauss 371. Hofmannsthal goes as far as to suggest that
with the removal of the mythological elements, the magic tricks and the like, an
American playwright could have written it as a modern “psychological drawing room
play” (preface 311).
32. Hofmannsthal, preface 302. Spellings of Menelas or Menelaus are inconsistent
in the correspondence. I have chosen this spelling as it is indicated in the score.
33. Ibid. 309.
34. Hofmannsthal, libretto 86.
35. Hofmannsthal, preface 310.
36. Hofmannsthal, libretto, 37.
37. Hofmannsthal, preface 312–13.
38. Graydon 193.
39. Hofmannsthal, preface 313.
40. Hofmannsthal, “The Idea of Europe,” 90.
41. Hofmannsthal, “The Austrian Idea,” 101.
42. Hofmannsthal, preface 311; Hofmannsthal to Strauss, 18 Oct. 1928, in Schuh
510.
43. Hofmannsthal, “The Idea of Europe,” 90.
44. Hofmannsthal was not a politician, and he could visualize his idea only artisti-
cally. The foundation of the Salzburg Festival (along with support from Max Rein-
hardt and Strauss) had an international intent, though based in the most Austrian of
cities. It also served as an alternative Bayreuth, which at that time was a conservative
German festival.
45. Hofmannsthal, “The Austrian Idea,” 101.
46. Ibid.
47. See Werley 130.
48. Eisner.
49. Kuhač 1:15.
50. For a discussion of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter and the language crisis of
1902, see Gilliam, Rounding Wagner’s Mountain 91.
51. With Goebbels’s declaration of “total war” (1944), music festivals were closed
throughout the Reich. The politics of persuasion allowed for the exception of the
dress rehearsal for invited guests only.
52. Much of the spirit of Die Liebe der Danae (The love of Danae [1939]), however,
is steeped in Hofmannsthal’s original scenario (1920); the work made it to a Salzburg
Festival dress rehearsal (1944).
53. See Begam and Smith’s introduction to this text, 1.
146 Interwar Modernism

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Albright, Daniel. Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Forms. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2000.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Richard Strauss at Sixty.” Richard Strauss and His World. Ed.
Bryan Gilliam. Trans. Susan Gillespie. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 406–15.
———. “Social Character.” In Search of Wagner. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London:
Verso, 1985.
Bloch, Ernst. “Philosophy of Music.” Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Trans. Peter
Palmer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Botstein, Leon. “The Enigmas of Strauss: A Revisionist View.” Richard Strauss and His
World. Ed. Bryan Gilliam. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 3-32.
Cook, Susan. Opera for a New Republic. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
1988.
Eisner, Pavel. Volkslieder der Slawen: Ausgewählt, Übersetz, Eingeleitet und Erläutet.
Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1926.
Gilliam, Bryan. Music and Performance of the Weimar Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
———. “Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo: Innovation and Tradition.” Richard Strauss: New
Perspectives on the Composer and His Work. Ed. Bryan Gilliam. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1992. 259–84.
———, ed. Richard Strauss and His World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
———. Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Graydon, Philip Robert. “Die Ägyptische Helena (1927): Context and Contemporary
Response.” Diss. Queen’s University Belfast, 2005.
Hacohen, Malachi. “The Culture of Viennese Science and the Riddle of Austrian Lib-
eralism.” Modern Intellectual History 6.2 (2009): 369–96.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “The Austrian Idea.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Aus-
trian Idea. Ed. David S. Luft. Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. 99–102.
———. “The Idea of Europe.” Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea. Ed. David S.
Luft. Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. 89–98.
———. Libretto. Die ägyptische Helena. Decca CD 430 381–2.
———. Preface. Die ägyptische Helena (1928). The Essence of Opera. Ed. Ulrich Weiss-
tein. New York: Norton, 1969.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, and Richard Strauss. The Correspondence between Richard
Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Ewald Osers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Kennedy, Michael. Richard Strauss. New York: Schirmer Books, 1988.
Klemperer, Otto. From Klemperer on Music. London: Toccata Press, 1986.
Korngold, Julius. “Strauss and the Music Critics.” Trans. Susan Gillespie. Richard
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Strauss and His World. Ed. Bryan Gilliam. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992. 311–71.
Kowalke, Kim. Essays on a New Orpheus: Kurt Weill. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986.
Krause, Ernst. Richard Strauss: Gestalt und Werk. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1963.
English translation, Boston: Crescendo, 1969.
Kuhač, Franjo K., ed. Collected South Slovakian Folksongs for Voice and Accompaniment
in Four Volumes. Agram: K. Albraecht, 1878–82.
Luft, David S., ed. and trans. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea. Purdue,
IN: Purdue University Press, 2011.
May, Jürgen. “Hugo von Hofmannsthals und Richard Strauss’ Festspiel Die Ruinen von
Athen nach Ludwig van Beethoven—mehr als ein Kuriosum?” Richard Strauss und
das Musiktheater. Ed. Julia Liebscher. Berlin: Henschel, 2005. 45–60.
Schuh, Willi, ed. Richard Strauss-Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefwechsel. Zürich: Atlan-
tis, 1978.
Strauss, Richard. Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen. Ed. Willi Schuh. Zurich: Atlantis,
1981.
———. A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig 1931–
1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
———. Richard Strauss: Chronik zu Leben und Werk. Ed. Franz Trenner and Florian
Trenner. Vienna: Richard Strauss Verlag, 2003.
———. Die Ruinen von Athen in Der Unbekannte Strauss. Koch CD 3–6536–2.
Werley, Matthew. “Analysing Arabella’s Past: The Cultural Politics of the Waltz and
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stag (1938).” Diss. Oxford University, 2010.
 5 Adorno’s Shifting Wozzeck

Bernadette Meyler

Although Alban Berg’s 1924 opera Wozzeck furnished the first full-length
atonal work of its kind and was publicly received as a radical departure from
extant operatic tradition, several features of its composition seem to con-
trovert its claim to an uncompromising modernism. Rather than searching
out the newest of dramatic works to set to music, Berg resorted for his
source material to Georg Büchner’s early nineteenth-century play Woyzeck.
Rather than emphasizing the fragmentary disposition of the parts of this
work—never completed during the playwright’s lifetime and reconstructed
only posthumously—Berg insisted upon regimenting the disparate compo-
nents into three acts, each divided into precisely five scenes. Rather than
producing new musical structures for the opera, Berg deployed the classical
tools of absolute music, such as sonata form, and the resources of popular
music, such as conventional dances and folk tunes. Rather than demanding
an avant-garde staging, Berg specified a meticulously realist approach to the
dramatic action. And, rather than casting aside all residues of Wagner, Berg
employed that most characteristic of Wagnerian techniques, the leitmotif.
Given these features, one might anticipate that Theodor Adorno, that
most rigorous of dialectical critics, ever insistent upon the necessity for
art—including music—to accord with its historical situation, would critique
Wozzeck as he did even Schoenberg and certainly Stravinsky. And it is true
that Berg does not entirely escape Adorno’s scathing pen in The Philosophy
of New Music. Yet almost every time that Adorno treats Wozzeck, from his
1925 essay on the opera for its Berlin premiere to his 1929 writing on the
work to the 1968 book Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link to a radio ad-
dress soon before Adorno’s own death the following year entitled “Alban
Berg: Oper und Moderne” (Alban Berg: Opera and modernity), he accords
the opera the highest praise. What, then, accounts for Adorno’s attitude
Adorno’s Shifting Wozzeck 149

toward Wozzeck? Does Adorno simply ignore those aspects of the opera
that might seem to conflict with its claims to modernism, his critical vision
succumbing to his personal association with Berg, or does Wozzeck, despite
or perhaps because of its anachronisms, fulfill Adorno’s vision of the neces-
sary relation between art and history?
An intense reverence for Berg, whom Adorno first encountered at the
1924 premiere of fragments of Wozzeck, certainly emerges from the pages
of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link.1 After meeting Berg, Adorno began
studying music composition with him, and a friendship developed, although
the relationship may have been of more importance to Adorno than to
Berg.2 Despite the somewhat neurotic affection evinced by Adorno’s letters
to Berg and the suggestion within these epistles that Adorno’s writings on
Wozzeck were designed to promote the merits of the work to the opera-
going public and allay criticisms of the composer, these pragmatic and per-
sonal considerations remain insufficient to account for the depth and dura-
bility of Adorno’s engagement with Wozzeck.
In fact, the title of Adorno’s final treatment of Wozzeck—“Alban Berg:
Opera and Modernity”—suggests the philosopher’s effort to understand the
particular form of modernity represented by his friend’s works. In this radio
address, Adorno acknowledged Berg’s adherence to aspects of the past, ad-
mitting that “a traditional element exists from the outset in Berg” while also
claiming that “the advanced and the past interlock in him as in no other
composer of his time at a comparable level.”3 Through his successive explo-
rations of Wozzeck, Adorno progressively illuminated the initial and endur-
ing modernity of the opera. Nor did these engagements simply represent
further elaborations upon a work fixed in amber. Rather, Adorno considered
the persistence of Wozzeck’s modernity even decades following its pre-
miere. In accordance with his prescient observation in a letter to Berg from
1925 that “there will certainly be a history of Wozzeck interpretation, just as
Büchner’s drama had its history,” Adorno as rigorously interpreted the sig-
nificance of Wozzeck’s posthistory as he did the posthistory of Woyzeck that
Wozzeck realized.4
At the same time, Wozzeck continued to challenge Adorno himself and
provoke developments in the philosopher’s thought.5 When attempting to
fulfill Berg’s request for a new piece on the opera in 1926, Adorno explained,
again in a letter, that he was unable to compose the essay at the time be-
cause of the transformations his philosophy was undergoing. As he wrote
to Berg, although he would not have abandoned the points made by his al-
150 Interwar Modernism

ready-published writing for the Wozzeck premiere, “I am in the process of

adding to them: from the metaphysical points of departure via epistemol-
ogy through a positive philosophy of history and political theory,” remark-
ing that “to tell you that politically it has brought me decisively closer to
communism perhaps offers a drastic clarification of the development.”6 The
shift in Adorno’s own philosophy and increasing orientation toward the
political-historical import of the aesthetic rendered it impossible for him to
write again immediately about Wozzeck. At the same time, however,
Wozzeck itself had, in part, prompted the alteration. As Adorno claimed,
“The interpretation of the text [Wozzeck] led me to the problem of the re-
currence of external reity [Dinghaftigkeit]—which dissolved in language—in
music (incidentally in Wozzeck as in Mahler: the way in which the choice of
a drama that already has its own history corresponds exactly to the choice of
the Wunderhorn poems and to the objective intention, for example, that
draws Kraus to Matthew Claudius).”7 From this problem, and “the connec-
tion ‘proletarian tragedy–opera,’ ” Adorno claimed to have “arrived at a new
theory of opera toto genere based on Wozzeck,” one that was still, however,
not ready for its airing in relation to Wozzeck itself.8 Nor was the dynamic
relation Adorno depicts between the opera and his theoretical writings re-
stricted to this particular episode. After each successive attempt to capture
Wozzeck philosophically, a residue of the work remained to provoke Ador-
no’s further inquiry. What Adorno concluded about the relationship be-
tween philosophy and music generally in his essay on the subject—that
“critique reveals itself as what it has always secretly been, the law of form
of the works themselves”—describes with particular aptness his relation to
Wozzeck.9 Despite Adorno’s continued efforts to apply his critical approach
to the opera, the work persisted in demonstrating the inadequacy of these
attempts, constantly prompting further critique while suggesting that such
critique should be derived from the opera’s own self-deconstruction.
After outlining the aspects of Wozzeck that Berg’s contemporaries and
subsequent scholars have considered less than modern, this chapter turns
to Adorno’s successive engagements with Wozzeck and his account of the
paradoxical modernity of the opera. It then examines in more detail two
particular aspects of Adorno’s account of Wozzeck’s modernity—Berg’s
treatment of the relation between language and music and the connection
between the temporality of the opera itself and its temporality within history.
The chapter concludes with an account of Adorno’s changing conception of
the “caesura” within Wozzeck; the shift in his analysis of the ­caesura—a term
Adorno’s Shifting Wozzeck 151

borrowed from Benjamin’s reading of Hölderlin reading Oedipus—both indi-

cates the influence of Wozzeck itself upon Adorno’s aesthetics and demon-
strates the affinities between Wozzeck and even later avant-garde works, like
the plays of Samuel Beckett.

The Anachronism of Wozzeck

A number of features of Berg’s opera undermine its claims to a thorough-
going modernity, among them its choice of source text, its rearrangement
of the material furnished by that source into a more coherent structure, its
deployment of seemingly archaic musical forms, its use of leitmotifs, and
Berg’s insistence on a realistic presentation of the piece. According to one
of Berg’s students, the composer conceived the intention to compose an
opera based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck upon first seeing the Viennese
premiere of the play in 1914.10 Despite having been written in the early
nineteenth century, Woyzeck had received its first performance only a year
earlier in Munich.11 The text itself had been left uncollated and unper-
formed by Büchner’s untimely death in 1837 at the age of twenty-four, and
it was written