SHERRY D. LEE ‘Alles, was ist, endet:’ On Dramatic Text, Absolute Music, Adorno, and ’s Ring

ABSTRACT The crux of the operatic genre has always been the perennially problematic relationship between text and music. attempted to solve this con- undrum in his new art form of music drama – first embodied in his monumental Ring cycle – which he theorized in gendered terms as a union of poetry (male) and music (female), an imagined marriage between the qualities of Shakespearean drama and Beethovenian symphony. But according to Theodor Adorno, the very notion of symphonic music, which follows its own musical logic, is antitheti- cal to the genre of , which demands that music construct itself according to its relationship to language. From the impasse between the demands of the opera- tic art form and the increasingly autonomous music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he theorized the end of opera itself in the age of mod- ernism. This article entwines Wagner’s concept of music drama, the - dramatic character of Erda who prophesies the end of the world in the Ring, and Adorno’s diagnosis of opera’s fatal condition in the decades following Wagner, to examine the principle of ending in opera, and of opera, and how the former can be read as a prefiguration of the latter.

‘All that is, ends.’ This terse announcement is made by the goddess Erda in act 4 of , the opening opera in Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle. The prophecy of an inevitable end, which hangs over the entire remainder of this fifteen-plus-hour opus, arrives near the end of the begin- ning of the Ring and dramatically signals the beginning of the end. ‘Neither from the musical nor from the aesthetic point of view can we avoid the impression that the operatic form is obsolete’ (Adorno, ‘Opera’ 71). In 1959, Theodor W. Adorno made this pithy pronouncement in the chapter of his Introduction to the Sociology of Music devoted to the genre of opera, which he characterized as ‘a species of art that is outliving itself and will hardly survive the next blow,’ whose ‘condition is unalter- able’ (83). What follows here is an examination of ending, in opera, and of opera, and of how the former can be read as a kind of prefiguration of the latter.

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My investigation draws upon an approach in Wagner criticism that treats his music dramas and his theoretical writings as, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s term, ‘interlocking texts’ (8). I adopt a similar approach – perhaps some- what like the temporal threads in the rope of history spun by the Norns in Go¨tterda¨mmerung – of intertwining elements of Wagner’s theory of music drama with features of his Ring cycle. Significant implications arise from reading the character of Erda, whose knowledge and musical identity encompass the origins of the world of the Ring and the end she foretells, in light of Wagner’s theories of the relationship between word and music in the origins of the music drama. However, I also bring a third element into this constellation (there are, after all, three Norns): that of Adorno’s critiques of Wagner’s oeuvre and of the fate of the operatic genre. The word–music relationship Wagner posited as the beginning of the music drama is also at the centre of Adorno’s theory of opera, in which their association becomes irreversibly adversarial. When Wagner’s theories, his music in the Ring, and Adorno’s critique intertwine, the end prophe- sied by Erda resonates with the end Adorno predicted for opera itself. Perhaps appropriate to my interest in the idea of ending, I prefer to embark on a discussion that is terminable, that does not threaten the sense of potential endlessness that may occasionally seize hapless audi- ence members who find themselves in the midst of any one Wagner opera, let alone a cycle of four of them; and for that reason I am choosing, on the advice of Linda and Michael Hutcheon, to circumscribe my focus. Given the ‘sheer length’ of the Ring, not to mention the very real possi- bility that ‘the Ring is about everything,’ the decision to focus on a single theme or character may or may not be ‘inevitable,’ but at the very least it is practical (73). The Hutcheons choose for their part to focus on the figure of Wotan, arguing that, although Wagner initially con- ceived his work as the story of Siegfrieds Tod, ‘it soon became the story less of ’s death than of Wotan’s dying’ (74). The cycle can thus be read as ‘a moving narrative about Wotan’s process of adaptation to the con- crete understanding of his imminent end’ (75). Although my preoccupa- tion is similarly with ending, my focus is instead on the very different character of Erda. In all the vast literature on the Ring Cycle – archival, analytical, descrip- tive, hermeneutic – certain of Wagner’s characters have been investigated quite thoroughly, while relatively little attention has been given to others. The figure of Erda is a case in point. She is rarely discussed at length, but the relative neglect of her character is undeserved, for her role is crucial in the cycle as a whole. Erda is something of an enigma.1 Both her

1 Studies of mythic models for the Ring point out that she does not appear in the poetic and prose Eddas, or in any of the other Teutonic sagas. She appears to be Wagner’s com- bination of the Norse concepts of Earth-Mother goddess and the volva, or prophetic wise-

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 924 sherry d. lee origins and her personality are mysterious. In her two appearances during the cycle, her speech is cryptic, delivering nebulous warnings of unspecified future disasters, and failing to provide clear answers to ques- tions asked of her. Perhaps because of her mysterious nature, she is con- sidered unknowable, yet the very enigma of Erda does tend to spark curiosity. It has prompted me to examine her dramatic and musical per- sonas and relationships to other characters in an attempt to achieve a clearer view of the significance of her role in the Ring. This examination leads to considerations of temporality and transformation, the entangle- ment of word, music, and gender, and the state of sleep. And it leads me to suggest that the figure of Erda not only dramatically and musically encompasses the principle of ending that governs the Ring from the very beginning, but that it also embodies quintessential features of Wagnerian music drama that, according to Adorno, pointed toward the impending end of opera itself.

DAS ENDE DER OPER

For Adorno, writing on opera in the 1950s, the notion that the operatic genre had entered a state of crisis was in some respects old news, having surfaced previously during the Republic, hardly more than three decades after the death of Wagner. The question of an Opernkrise was hotly debated in German journals and newspapers and tended to revolve around two issues. One was the new trend of compos- ing on contemporary themes in contemporary settings, with realist characters and plots, and at times incorporating contemporary musical influences (particularly jazz from America). A second issue was the then-new and controversial practice of restaging classic works in contem- porary, updated, or avant-garde settings. The rise of Regieoper was a phenomenon especially associated with the Kroll in Berlin, and the ‘Kroll Experiment’ of radical reinterpretation of the operatic canon was central to debates about opera’s form and function, on which many intellectuals and composers, including Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schreker, Weill and others, weighed in.2 Adorno’s doubts about the effectiveness of Regieoper’s attempts to reinvent the genre are evident in his 1955 article entitled ‘Bourgeois Opera,’ which begins,

To focus our thoughts about contemporary theatre on opera is certainly not justifiable in terms of opera’s immediate relevance. Not only has the crisis of

woman, with some inspiration thrown in from Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie. See Cooke (226–28); also on the possible mythic origins of Erda, see Cord (110–16). 2 For more on the increasing importance of the role of the director in opera performance, see Savage (350–420).

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opera been well known and persistent in Germany for thirty years, not only have opera’s place and function become questionable in today’s society, but, beyond this, opera in and of itself has ... come to seem peripheral and indifferent, an impression which is forcefully combated to a limited extent by attempts at innovation. Indeed, it is hardly a coincidence that these attempts at innovation usually get stuck halfway ...’(15)

Adorno took the questions concerning opera’s continuing relevance as indicating a larger trend in the life of the genre, but one that was less a sign of a changing genre than of a moribund one. His perspective on the issue is incisive and broad-ranging; his dialectical view of the so-called crisis is evident in the ‘Opera’ chapter from the 1959 Introduction to the Sociology of Music, wherein he offers the following:

What thirty years ago induced the judgment that opera was passe´ was not mere surfeit with the world of its forms ...The dawning insight, rather, was that in style, in substance, and in attitude the opera had nothing to do any more with the people it had to appeal to if its outwardly pretentious form was to justify the prodigal extravagance required. (‘Opera’ 71)

This suggestion of the nature of opera’s appeal to its public brings into focus the sociological dimension of Adorno’s view of opera, one that he asserts is in no way straightforward and is even in some respects paradoxical. It is worth noting that, even though he goes on to make what may now seem a commonplace connection between a lack of widespread popularity for this art form and the dominance of film and mass media, Adorno does not suggest that opera is disappearing; it is not a lack of per- formances nor a failure for those performances to find an audience that gives rise to the critique. In fact, he acknowledges the opposite, in charac- terizing opera as ‘a form that is incessantly consumed’ (‘Opera’ 81). Even today, although other forms of entertainment undeniably have a far larger market share, Michael Steinberg notes that ‘opera, especially regional opera, is booming’ (1). Yet for Adorno, in the mid-twentieth century, the fact that people continued to go to the opera required more expla- nation than it would if they did not; even during the time of the Opern-krise, he noted, the improbabilities served up by opera clashed with the aesthetic of the mass medium of film, which taught consumers ‘to watch for the authenticity of every uniform and telephone set.’ Adorno referred to this clash as ‘the antagonism between the disen- chanted world and a form that is illusionary to the core and remains illu- sionary even where it borrows from so-called realistic trends’ (‘Opera’ 77). Illusion has always been central, indeed essential, to the operatic genre. The defining features of an art form in which existence, however exalted or gritty, is accompanied by music and stylized into song, fix the limits on

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 926 sherry d. lee realism as an aesthetic goal. Yet to the extent that the trend in modern society has been one of demystification in favour of increasing rationality as a process of disillusionment, the very improbability of opera would seem to bring it into conflict with the spirit of modernity. In Adorno’s words, ‘Opera ... governed by the element of illusion [Schein] ... has reached a state of crisis because the genre cannot dispense with illusion without surrendering itself ... Opera runs head on into the aesthetic limits of demystification’ (‘Bourgeois Opera’ 16). It had been some time since this bourgeois aesthetic had been in conflict with the anti-realism and anti-rationalism that are a part of all opera. The historical progress of increasing rationality, which clashes so unmistakably with opera’s illusionary essence, is of course a central and recurring theme in Adorno’s larger philosophical endeavour.3 Adorno in fact traced within the development of musical notation a historical trajectory of increasing rationalization in music: that is, the process of Enlightenment itself. Whereas the historical process of Western music has been one of growing rationalization of the work in terms of its increas- ing specification within the musical score – and this through writing, a mode of signification that music shares with language – this same process has been the means of making music more autonomous, less reliant on non-notated, gestural, and so-called verbal elements, and so has forced an increasing separation between music and the non-musical.4 It is unsurprising that, for Adorno, this separation indicates a growing problem with the genre of opera that presumes a meaningful relationship between music and language. Simultaneously, the history of greater rational control over musical-compositional elements points toward the composers of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, whose works effected the rupture of atonality and the subsequent imposition of the twelve-tone system for rigorous organization of the new post-tonal realm. These two tendencies – musical rationalization and autonomy – meet in Adorno’s recognition of a kind of culmination toward an end point for opera itself at this modernist historical moment, encapsulated in the incomplete twelve-tone operas of Berg and Schoenberg:

After Berg, resistance to the operatic imitation of states of mind became universal. Self-conscious producers no longer found a general denominator for the demand of autonomy for a music that wants to be itself and

3 This is particularly evident in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer in the 1940s. 4 For more on Adorno’s theories concerning the development of musical notation as a rationalizing process, and the resultant rift between the embodied and orally transmitted dimensions of musical performance and the written trace of the ‘work’ in the musical score, see Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, esp. 57ff.

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imageless, and for the requirement of opera that music must be similar to language and the image of something else. (‘Opera’ 77)

Adorno here highlights a rift between the nature of opera as a genre in which music works through its relationship to the non-musical – such as the text, scenic representation, and dramatic action and gesture, all rep- resentational elements that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe considers under the issue of musical ‘figuration’ – and the autonomy-character of music, which increases in the age of modernity to the point where it is rationalized beyond the possibility of reconciliation with its irrational past. Opera has seemingly succumbed to the ideology of absolute music. That the non-intentional language of music developed in a direc- tion antithetical to the very premise of opera is at the crux of Adorno’s thesis of opera’s demise. These two elements, then – the rift between music and language and the clash between illusion and realism – are the two poles between which my discussion moves, poles that converge in Adorno’s critique of the musical-dramatic oeuvre of Richard Wagner. Lacoue-Labarthe’s excursion on the history of the problem of musical figuration – musica ficta – begins from the birth of opera in the Baroque era as ‘the figuration of the metaphysical structure that is the very prin- ciple of the new art’ (xviii). He recognizes Wagner as the composer in whose oeuvre musical figuration becomes part of a compositional and philosophical program: the development of music drama, in which the problem of opera – its internal conflict between music and text – was addressed finally in favour of music and an aesthetic of accumulation. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, ‘It is no doubt not impossible to say that ulti- mately Wagner saturated opera. One proof of this, albeit an indirect one, is that everything that followed, without being exempt from the tremendous ambition he had imposed, bears the stigmata of an ending’ (117). He is here explicitly following Adorno in asserting the exhaustion of the possi- bility of opera in the decades after Wagner. In tracing the Adornian path to the word-music-representation impasse that is the subject of Schoenberg’s incomplete sacred opera Moses und Aron, Lacoue-Labarthe looks back to the Wagnerian model of religious-metaphysical music drama in his final opera, . Though it does not carry this weight of marking the end of the composer’s oeuvre, the Ring is my focus instead, not least because ending is in no small measure its very subject matter. But the Ring, according to Wagner, is the beginning of his working out, in the new art form of the music drama, of the theoretical principles con- cerning the relationship between music and poetry. This relationship, which Wagner considered in gendered terms that regarded music as feminine and poetry as masculine, was at the heart of what the composer imagined as a marriage between the qualities of Shakespearean drama and the symphonic music of Beethoven (Hoeckner 115). In other words,

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 928 sherry d. lee it was to be a fusion of opposites: text and absolute (purely instrumental) music. Wagner’s theoretical writings are continually preoccupied with attempts to resolve ‘the conflicting aesthetics of the operatic and the sym- phonic, in which a discursive music that takes its shape and voice from words becomes a symphonic music that pursues its own sonorous logic’ (Abbate 95), and to assert, by retrospective analysis of his earlier works, a consistency in the historical progress toward his solution to a problem as old as opera itself. ‘The solution he found,’ explains Carl Dahlhaus, ‘was primarily musical: the technique of the ’ (79). This answer is spelled out by Wagner himself in the following formu- lation that explains the Beethovenian symphonic aspirations of his music in terms of thematic material and its development as instrumental music: ‘to be an artwork again qua music, the new form of dramatic music must have the unity of the symphonic movement ...[T]his Unity consists in a tissue of root-themes pervading all the drama, themes which contrast, complete, re-shape, divorce and intertwine with one another as in the symphonic movement’ (‘Application’ 183). When conceived as sympho- nic themes taking part in purely instrumental-musical development, the leitmotifs – those musical-motivic entities that accrue extramusical sig- nificance via their textual and dramatic associations throughout the music drama – attain a significance that is distinct from (and in a sense antithetical to) their well-known dramatic connotations. Wagnerian opera thus becomes a paradoxical form in which the composer attempts to realize the compositional logic of absolute music within the context of texted music drama. Maintaining what Carolyn Abbate terms the ‘Wagnerian myth’ of symphonic opera was the central preoccupation of his theoretical writings – this mythologizing consciousness being echoed within his dramatic narratives themselves. Wagner claimed that this totalizing form of the music drama, for which he claimed the status of the artwork of the future, spelled an end for traditional conceptions of opera; I will argue that it not only figured its own end, but also the larger end that loomed, according to Adorno, for opera itself.

WA L A E X M AC H I N A

The Hutcheons point out that the Ring text’s ‘insistent repetitions of the subject of mortality ... are reinforced by the obsessive verbal repetitions of the word “Ende” (end) – not “Tod” (death), but “Ende” – a word whose reminder of finality is hammered home by its textual insistence’ (83). However, this insistence is not uniformly evident throughout the entire cycle, but is instead concentrated in certain moments. Wagner care- fully reserves his use of the word throughout Das Rheingold until the first appearance of Erda, after which it recurs twice in that closing scene. ‘Ende’ is again notably absent in the opening of Die Walku¨re, but surfaces during

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Wotan’s act 2 monologue as he tells Bru¨ nnhilde of Erda’s prophecy, and recurs with obsessive persistence thereafter. Similarly, the word is heard only twice in Siegfried before the act 3 confrontation of Wotan and Erda, when it echoes and re-echoes in their words. Only in Go¨tterda¨mmerung, after it is pronounced repeatedly by the Norns, Erda’s daughters, as the rope breaks and they descend to their mother, does it resurface more fre- quently, until Bru¨ nnhilde’s final pronouncement of the gods’ end in the final moments. But even more significant than this inextricable textual linking of the end with Erda is her musical identification with ending, manifest from the moment of her first appearance. When Erda materializes for the first time in scene 4 of Das Rheingold, no one knows who she is. And when she speaks, slowly, in riddles, she seems stranger still. No one understands what she means, and she will not explain. After a few moments, she disappears with as little warning as when she came, and it is almost like a dream, as though she was never there at all. Her initial appearance comes at a moment when the drama onstage has reached an impasse. Wotan has the Ring, the Giants have Freia, and neither will give way. The action comes to a screeching halt and there seems to be no way that it can continue. Then, unlooked-for and unbidden, Erda appears. Her entrance is unprecedented; she rises out of a cleft in the earth, but really – dramatically speaking – she comes out of nowhere. It is as though Wagner suddenly turned to the fan- tastic world of Baroque opera seria: just when the conflict is hopeless, the knot so complex that it can never be untied, the divinity, a deus ex machina (‘god of the machine’) appears to cut the knot, and suddenly the conflict is resolved.5 In reality, rising from below to half her height, as Wagner directs, Erda probably does require some stage machinery; and she requires special lighting as well. Wagner’s stage directions highlight her appearance of difference from the other characters onstage: out of place in this race of fair, northern gods, her face is framed by a great mass of black hair. Surrounded by a strange, otherworldly, bluish light, shrouded in mystery, she is a clearly visible Other. In Adornian terms, that light resembles the flickering glow of apparitional magic lantern effects – in other words, phantasmagoria, a central concept in his critique of Wagnerian music drama. Adorno’s usage of the concept of phantasmagoria has its roots in Karl Marx’s theorization of the concealment of labour within the fetishized commodity and its illusory role in the social relations between individ- uals. For Adorno, the crucial aspect of the phantasmagorical nature of the commodity is its quality of illusion, which pertains to the

5 John Deathridge similarly likens elements of the Ring to Baroque drama and opera seria; see ‘Don Carlos and Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Two Operatic Endings and Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel,’ in Wagner beyond Good and Evil, 79–101.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 930 sherry d. lee technological dimensions of the work of art as product. He specifies the musical means through which the phantasmagoria, the quality of techni- cal concealment of the means of production and the resultant illusory effect, is achieved in Wagner’s works: in essence, a spatialization of the music through the foregrounding of the atemporal qualities of sound and sonority, from which the traces of production are removed through clever orchestration, leaving the listener with an awareness of only the sensual qualities of sound. The focus on the sonorous aspects of orchestral colour and instrumental points toward the most problematic aspect of such phantasmagorical moments: the privileging of the spatial dimension over the temporal. ‘Time is the all-important element of pro- duction that phantasmagoria, the mirage of eternity, obscures,’ Adorno says. It ‘represent[s] the moment as that which endures’ (In Search of Wagner 76). The phantasmagoria represents the musical privileging of myth over history that is also played out in Wagner’s dramatic narratives, especially in the Ring. Erda’s music-dramatic identity not only incorporates the phantasma- goric qualities of the use of technology to produce magical effects, she also embodies the effects relating to time that are characteristic of phan- tasmagorical events, wherein the temporal art of music gives an illusion of atemporality. For Erda collapses time. Creating a tonal rift in the C-minor texture, Erda’s leitmotif is announced in C sharp minor in the orchestra as she slowly intones her warning to Wotan: the end of the gods is approaching; he must relinquish the Ring. The leitmotif itself and its musical relationships to other motifs are of signal impor- tance. As has often been noted, Erda’s motif is a minor-mode variant of the music that opens the entire Ring cycle, the Rhine motif, an indication of her primeval status as Ur-wala. Equally significant is another motivic relationship: the motive of Go¨tterda¨mmerung is itself an inversion of Erda’s own motif (see example 1). Even as Erda’s warning sounds, the end sounds in her music. The result is not just a musical-spatial inversion, but a temporal paradox: as the motif is inverted, constituting a reversal, we are simultaneously cast forward into the future. Thus, from a musical point of view, Erda and Go¨tterda¨mmerung are one. When she sings her warning, she sings the end: it is already present from this early moment of the cycle. The motivic intertwining – indeed, identity – of Rhine-origins, the goddess who knows all of past, present, and future, and the end of time, collapse the vast temporal scope of the entire cycle into this single moment. But rather than scenic or dramatic qualities, it is the musical- technological dimension itself that is at the crux of Adorno’s critique, and in this respect the motivic equivalency of the Erda and Go¨tterda¨mmerung motifs with that of the primeval Rhine motif is key to their phantasmagorical significance. Indeed, the opening of Das

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Example 1. Motivic materials associated with the character of Erda 932 sherry d. lee

Rheingold has always been perceived as embodying the principle of mythological timelessness in musical form, with its slow, static unfolding; with the ‘ur-’ quality of its pure and primal triadic harmony, arising ‘natu- rally’ out of the overtone series; and with the way it gradually appears as if from the inarticulable mists of time itself, starting so softly that it is almost impossible to tell the precise moment when it begins. Wagner’s own recounting of the origins of this music takes on the character of myth:

I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, which continually re-echoed in broken forms: these broken chords seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognized that the orchestral to the Rheingold, which must long have lain latent within me, though it had been unable to find definite form, had at last been revealed to me. (Wagner, My Life 2: 603)

Wagner’s fantastically sentient dream state somehow resembles Erda’s sleep of primeval world-wisdom. Both dream the dream of origins whose motivic identity and phantasmagorical essence turn it into a dream of ending. Technologically, the Rhine-music’s overall effect merges the ostensible purity of triadic harmony with an accumulative layering of instrumental colours, from low brass to high strings, in a move that anticipates, for all the archaic quality of the harmony itself, the modern music of the post-Wagnerian era. Following Adorno, Dahlhaus recognizes that ‘Wagner was the first great exponent of the discovery that “sound” (Klang), the central category in the music of around 1900, should be understood in the sense that harmony and instrumentation are insepar- able’ (155–56). Not least important is the stasis of the harmony itself, the extraordinary extension of a single E-flat-major triad that ripples across layers of the orchestra, rising and swelling throughout measure after measure as the illusion of incessant motion that in fact never advances. ‘The absence of any real harmonic progression,’ Adorno realizes, ‘becomes the phantasmagorical emblem for time standing still ...The standing-still of time and the complete occultation of nature by means of phantasmagoria are thus brought together in the memory of a pristine age’ (In Search of Wagner 76). It really is the quintessence of the Wagnerian illusion of art as eternal nature, the phantasmagoria par excellence. Thus the figure of Erda, as both a narrative-dramatic and musical- technological entity, is inextricably entangled from the very first

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 dramatic text, absolute music, adorno, and wagner’s ring 933 moments with the workings of operatic illusion, which eventually clash fatally with the modernist aesthetic of demystification in the decades of operatic crisis after Wagner. What Adorno’s dialectical gaze perceives is the historical trajectory of the illusionary technique of motif and instru- mentation in the Ring toward the technological reproduction of realism that characterizes the modern medium of film. ‘The Wagnerian phantas- magorias,’ he asserts,

are among the earliest ‘wonders of technology’ to gain admittance to great art, and Wotan is not just the allegory of the self-denying will to live, but also the reliable exponent of a natural world that has been perfectly reproduced and wholly mastered. The phantasmagorical style immortalizes the moment between the death of and the birth of realism. (In Search of Wagner 80)

Phantasmagoria, as instrumental illusion, plots the demise of the operatic genre to which it is essential.

OPERA ‘ ASSOLUTA’

I have managed, through this excursus on illusion in the form of the instrumentally generated phantasmagoria, to circle back to the problem of absolute instrumental music as a model for texted musical drama. The two poles of Adorno’s opera critique, illusion and the music-language divide, are dialectically drawn together toward the central issue of music’s role in the Wagnerian music drama. The relationship between music and text, between sung word and instrumental motif, always remains a problem. Despite the leitmotif’s theoretical semblance as a syn- thesis of poetic concept with symphonic theme, it rarely works that way in practice. As all Ring aficionados know, those famous leitmotifs are usually carried not by the singers’ voices, but by the orchestral instruments. Indeed, many motifs are so clearly instrumentally conceived that they are hardly singable; and to the extent that their effect depends, as described in the quotation from Dahlhaus above, on an inextricable synthesis of harmony and instrumental timbre, vocal renditions of them can hardly convey their full significance. Dramatically, of course, the words and motifs ‘go together,’ and Wagner always insisted that the drama made the music intelligible; as Adorno characterized it, language is ‘the interpreter of [the music’s] allegorical images, the leitmotifs’ (In Search of Wagner 48). But their dramatic coincidence is not equivalent to a union of the two elements. Erda is far from the only character to whom this principle applies, but she is certainly exemplary in this respect, for she never sings any of the motifs associated with her. Neither do other characters sing them when

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 934 sherry d. lee they refer to her, although her motif proper, or that of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, sounds in the orchestra. It seems that Erda’s musical-motivic identity is strictly instrumental. Her music, which is notable for its triadic straight- forwardness in her first appearance in Das Rheingold but becomes strik- ingly chromatic in her last appearance in Siegfried, similarly partakes in the music’s historical rationalization towards modernist autonomy. Its increasingly chromatic advances in harmony and its moments of extreme melodic disjunction push toward the very limits of the signifying system of tonality and its attendant potential for musical figuration. In her confrontation with Wotan in Siegfried, act 3, she utters her first words of the scene, an invocation of the interconnection of her wisdom with prime- val sleep and dreaming, to the accompaniment of the well-known Schlafakkorden (sleep chords) from the closing of Die Walku¨re, linking the daughter Bru¨ nnhilde’s magic sleep with her mother Erda’s sleep of wisdom. In this passage Wagner variously harmonizes an upper chro- matic descent over a rising in minor thirds and semitones with a series of chords that have no functional connection to each other, or to any governing key structure (see example 2). Adorno points to this music as a moment of tonal dissolution that looks forward to Schoenberg’s rationalization of the post-tonal sphere. Here, he says, ‘[the] force of production makes its boldest advances at the level of harmony: inventions like the sleep-motiv in the Ring resemble magic spells that are capable of enticing all subsequent harmonic discoveries from the twelve-tone continuum’ (In Search of Wagner 52). Not only the tonal suspension affected by the harmony itself but the autonomous char- acter of the musical progression, its distinction from the verbal-narrative content, anticipate the modernist operatic fatality Adorno diagnosed. Over and among the tonally nebulous orchestral harmonies, Erda’s vocal line becomes ever wider in range and more disjunct as the conflict with Wotan escalates, but voice and orchestra remain separate through- out. Adorno’s summary of the issue is devastatingly precise: ‘In Wagner’s music the most vital elements, song and the orchestra, necess- arily diverge ... the singing voice ... is separated by force from the actual musical content’ (In Search of Wagner 92). From the beginning of the cycle in which Wagner first began to put into compositional practice his newly theorized music-dramatic principle of a symphonically governed unity of music and text, it is as though the word–music tension – indeed, antithesis – is held in a kind of impossible suspension for the long duration of the Ring, its negative consequence becoming most audible in Go¨tterda¨mmerung. According to Abbate, Go¨tterda¨mmerung ‘contains symphonic stretches in which the musical idea overwhelms and subdues the meaning of the text’ (105). John Deathridge has similarly analyzed a breakdown of Wagner’s music- dramatic ideal of poetic and musical unification toward the ending of

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Example 2. The Schlafakkorden accompanying Erda’s awakening (Siegfried, act 3, scene 1) 936 sherry d. lee the Ring: ‘In Go¨tterda¨mmerung generally,’ he explains, ‘many motifs are closely tied to meanings while others are relatively indifferent to them’ (94). More remarkably, he also recognizes that the purely ‘absolute’ musical ideal of symphonic development, which Wagner had said would be accomplished through ‘themes which contrast, complete, re-shape, divorce and intertwine with one another as in the symphonic movement’ (‘Application’ 183), likewise deteriorates as the cycle draws to a close. Like Adorno, Deathridge sees the Wagnerian leitmotif function- ing as allegory, a kind of petrified emblem.6 The very presumption that the motif will retain its identity sufficiently to be identifiable according to its dramatic significance poses a difficulty for the principle of sympho- nic development as ‘constant repetition, fragmentation, and metamor- phosis of thematic material’ (Abbate 102). Deathridge’s clearest example is drawn from the Ring’s final scene, at Hagen’s attempt to take the Ring from the hand of the dead Siegfried: ‘the descending motif ... which accompan[ies] Erda’s words to Wotan ... appear[s] practically in [its] original form, undeveloped, with similar orchestration ( and strings) ... at the original pitch’ (95). It is this kind of motivic stasis – in which, notably, Erda is again implicated – that leads Deathridge to con- clude that the closing moments of the cycle represent ‘the usurping of quasi-symphonic development by motivic allegory’ (96). However, all this focus on the end of symphonic development and musical-poetic unity at the end of the Ring does not obscure the fact that, just as Erda revealed the presence of Go¨tterda¨mmerung within the very opening motif of the Rhine, the failure of Wagner’s leitmotivic principle was imminent from the beginning. This becomes clearer in the work of Berthold Hoeckner, who has taken up the approach of treating Wagner’s music dramas and theoretical writ- ings as ‘interlocking texts’ in a brilliant reading of . Hoeckner notes that recent studies employing this ‘interlocking’ critical approach have involved a search ‘to interpret Wagner’s operas as allegories of his most conspicuous theoretical concept from : music as woman, poetry as man’ (117). His reading of Lohengrin, viewed through the lens of Wagner’s gendered concept of the musical–poetic relationship, interprets the significance of the central liaison between Lohengrin and Elsa in light of the role that the opera itself played in Wagner’s evolving theory of music drama. Lohengrin is understood as a crucial moment in which Wagner’s conception of music drama evolves as a set of tensions: between word and music and between the vocal and the instrumental.

6 Deathridge’s analysis of Go¨tterda¨mmerung is accomplished via a reading of Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels; given Adorno’s close friendship with Benjamin and familiarity with his works, it seems reasonable to assume that these two uses of the notion of ‘allegory’ are similar.

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Turning back to Lohengrin is a significant move, one that Wagner himself made in attempting to trace the historical development of his theory of music drama as a consistent process: not as a sudden recognition or, worse, a change of mind, but as the natural outgrowth of the seeds that were planted in the earlier romantic operas (Der fliegende Holla¨nder, Tannha¨user, Lohengrin), and that came to fruition in the Ring. Hoeckner’s study queries the implications of Lohengrin for Wagner’s developing idea that drama would be born from the union of poetry (characterized as male) with music (characterized as female). In the theoretical writings that refer to Lohengrin, as Hoeckner shows, the com- poser viewed the relationship between Lohengrin and Elsa along the lines of the poetic–musical relationship he envisioned for his future music drama. Ironically, the very failure of their union, then, can be read as the analogue of the music–language divide in opera. Hoeckner suggests that the Elsa-Lohengrin pairing, typifying the concept of ‘music as woman, poetry as man,’ sets a precedent for the Ring, in which other critics have analyzed the union of Siegfried and Bru¨ nnhilde through the same theoretical concept, ‘a union of which Tristan and Isolde are a variation and Parsifal and Kundry the antithesis’ (117). Another such antithetical relationship, I suggest, is that of Wotan and Erda, whose forced union between the first and second operas of the Ring cycle produces Bru¨ nnhilde (she who ultimately brings about the end of the world). The essence of Wotan’s authority as the ruler of the gods is indeed the word, in the form of the inscription of law upon his spear; meanwhile, Erda’s essence, as I have shown above, seems to draw upon the absolute musical ideal embodied in the purely instrumental motifs that represent her. In this configuration, the word– music relationship is not one of failed love, as with Lohengrin and Elsa, but of downright antagonism.7 Hoeckner’s subtle argument gradually reveals the cracks in Wagner’s carefully constructed view of Lohengrin as an attempted solution to ‘the perennial problem: how the relationship between music and poetry is nested into the difference between symphonic and dramatic music’

7 The two characters themselves relate differing stories of their brief union: Wotan tells Bru¨ nnhilde that he ‘overcame’ the Wala ‘through the magic of love,’ thus gaining the wisdom he sought from her, while Erda says that her wisdom ‘felt a conqueror’s force’ resulting in the bearing of Bru¨ nnhilde. He suggests love while she suggests rape. Admittedly there is room for disagreement over the nature of Erda’s and Wotan’s sexual encounter between Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re. Lisa Feurzeig, for example, suggests that Erda’s accusation is false, arguing that ‘whether someone was a willing or an unwilling partner may well be determined, in her own mind, by what happens later’ (90). However, given Wotan’s propensity for untruth that is manifest throughout the cycle, I find highly implausible the suggestion that, in this special instance, he is suddenly truthful, while Erda – whose few words preceding this moment amount to demonstrably truthful prophecies – becomes suddenly mendacious.

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(143). Along the way, Hoeckner proposes an inspired re-hearing of a dramatic event that he refers to as ‘Elsa’s scream.’ This moment occurs during her first when, under accusation of murder, she tells a story of a dream. Exhausted by grief, she says, she sank into sleep and dreamed of a knight, a saviour, who would arrive from afar in response to her fervent prayer for rescue. As she sings of the cry of desperation she uttered in her anguish, the orchestra seizes on her E flat on the word loud, seamlessly transforming that vocal utter- ance into an instrumental one that prolongs the sound far beyond the range of a human voice (125). This momentary transformation from sung text to purely instrumental sound is emblematic of what is, para- doxically, a dramatically motivated move away from language toward music. What Hoeckner’s inspired reading uncovers as a moment of creation, the birth of music drama out of the scream of Elsa (154), is equally a moment of dissolution, a moment wherein music and words come unglued in the operatic utterance. The two are simultaneously drawn together and wrenched apart. According to Adorno, this Wagnerian occultation of sound, epitomized in its almost imperceptible technological transformation in the moment of Elsa’s cry, prefigures the future of opera, which, ever since Lohengrin, was preoccupied with sound as a represen- tation of space. And here the two elements of phantasmagoria as illusion and the irreconcilable word–music divide merge within a moment of almost overwhelming significance. It voices the failure of Wagner’s musico-dramatic conception even before the Ring has begun its narrative of endings; and it prefigures the crisis that Adorno hears later as the end of opera. Thus Elsa’s dream-narration re-echoes within Wagner’s dream of the Ring’s origins. While the essential operatic quality of illusion takes up residence in the phantasmagorical instrumental sound, the central relationship of instrumental music with dramatic word in Wagnerian opera is revealed as illusory. That maintaining the illusion of their union was Wagner’s primary task is one of the principal theses of Adorno’s study of Wagner. That task acquires the dimension of myth, which mirrors on the theoretical level the mythical, timeless element the composer prioritized within his works. Composing out that mythol- ogy in his theoretical writings, though, was the work of creating a history of opera; correspondingly, the musical result of composing out that myth within the music dramas themselves had historical impli- cations for the future of the genre. ‘Wagner claimed in his autobiographi- cal writings to have preceded work on the Ring with a tortuous debate with himself about the choice of history or myth as the focus of his future music drama,’ explains Deathridge. ‘He says he definitely came down in favor of myth ... It is not hard to prove that far from simply

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 3, summer 2010 dramatic text, absolute music, adorno, and wagner’s ring 939 choosing myth over history, he actually blended the two’ (93). Similarly, the intertwining of Wagner’s music, his theories, and Adorno’s critique allows a way for the timeless phantasmagoria to re-enter history as the operatic illusion that prefigures opera’s fate. Wagner’s dream of the time- less music of the Rhine, composed in a somnolent state, becomes Erda’s dream of the world’s course, conceived in primeval sleep, and then becomes history as it encounters the disillusionment of modernity. Adorno hears it too, not as the origin of music drama but as the end of opera. The resounding wordless phantasmagorias of the Ring give new resonance to Erda’s prophetic words: ‘Alles, was ist, endet.’

WORKS CITED

Abbate, Carolyn. ‘Opera as Symphony, a Wagnerian Myth.’ Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner. Ed Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. Berkeley: University of California Press 1989, 92–124 Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Bourgeois Opera.’ Sound Figures. Trans Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999, 15–28 –. In Search of Wagner. Trans Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso 2005 –. ‘Opera.’ Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Trans E.B. Ashton. New York: Seabury 1976, 71–84 –. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata. Ed Henri Lonitz. Trans Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity 2006 Cooke, Deryck. I Saw the World End. London: Oxford University Press 1979 Cord, William. The Teutonic Mythology of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. Vol 3. Lewiston, New York: Mellen 1991 Dahlhaus, Carl, and John Deathridge. The New Grove Wagner. New York: Norton 1984 Deathridge, John. Wagner beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press 2008 Feurzeig, Lisa. ‘The Interrelationship of Knowledge and Will: Erda, Experience, and Epistemology in the Ring.’ Opera Quarterly 20:1 (Winter 2004), 71–94 Hoeckner, Berthold. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002 Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: The Art of Dying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner). Trans Felicia McCarren. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1994 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation. Trans Stewart Spencer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993 Savage, Roger. ‘The Staging of Opera,’ The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera. Ed Roger Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994, 350–420

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Steinberg, Michael P. Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2006 Wagner, Richard. My Life. 2 vols. English trans. New York: Dodd, Mead 1911 –. ‘On the Application of Music to Drama.’ Richard Wagner’s Prose Works. Trans William Ashton Ellis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1892–99, 6:176–93

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