Circling Opera in Berlin By Paul Martin Chaikin B.A., Grinnell College, 2001 A.M., Brown University, 2004 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in the Department of Music at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 This dissertation by Paul Martin Chaikin is accepted in its present form by the Department of Music as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_______________ _________________________________ Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_______________ _________________________________ Jeff Todd Titon, Reader Date_______________ __________________________________ Philip Rosen, Reader Date_______________ __________________________________ Dana Gooley, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_______________ _________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Deutsche Akademische Austauch Dienst (DAAD) for funding my fieldwork in Berlin. I am also grateful to the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for providing me with an academic affiliation in Germany, and to Prof. Dr. Christian Kaden for sponsoring my research proposal. I am deeply indebted to the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden for welcoming me into the administrative thicket that sustains operatic culture in Berlin. I am especially grateful to Francis Hüsers, the company’s director of artistic affairs and chief dramaturg, and to Ilse Ungeheuer, the former coordinator of the dramaturgy department. I would also like to thank Ronny Unganz and Sabine Turner for leading me to secret caches of quantitative data. Throughout this entire ordeal, Rose Rosengard Subotnik has been a superlative academic advisor and a thoughtful mentor; my gratitude to her is beyond measure. The Graduate School of Brown University has been an ideal academic setting for me, and I can scarcely begin to thank all of the people at Brown who have helped me get to this point. I am particularly grateful to Jeff Todd Titon, Dana Gooley, and Philip Rosen for working with me on my dissertation. I feel lucky to have had opportunities to work with Katherine Bergeron, Marc Perlman, and the rest of the faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Music. Beyond the brick confines of the Orwig Music Building, I would like to thank Kevin McLaughlin, Rey Chow, William Beeman, Russell Berman, Lydia Goehr, and David Levin for helping me make sense of critical theory. iii Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends—in Berlin, Paris, and on both coasts of the United States—for being supportive for the past seven-and-a-half years, and in many cases, for accompanying me to the opera. I am especially grateful to my father, George Merrill Chaikin, who taught me to think deeply about the nature of beauty. iv Table of Contents Signature Page ii Acknowledgements iii List of Illustrations vi Chapter I: Introduction – Opera and Aura 1 Chapter II: The Opera House 41 Chapter III: Opera and Administration 80 Chapter IV: In the Audience 103 Chapter V: The Meaning of Regietheater 132 Chapter VI: Conclusion – How Things Come to Life 172 Appendix: Operas that I attended in Berlin 186 Works Cited 192 v List of Illustrations 1. Map of the path of my commute from Prenzlauerberg to the 42 Staatsoper Unter den Linden 2. Photograph of the reflective paneling of the Palast der Republik, the 44 former capital building of East Germany. The building has now been completely dismantled, and it set to be replaced by a palace that resembles the palace that once occupied the same plot. 3. Photograph of the Altes Museum in the evening, adorned with a neon 45 installation by Maurizio Nannucci. 4. Engraving of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden dating from the 46 mid-19th century. 5. Reproduction of Knobeldorff’s plan for the façade. 52 6. Illustration of the Staatsoper and St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, circa 1750, 53 by Georg Balthasar Probst. 7. Plans for the new auditorium of the Staatsoper, set to open in 2012, 58 by Stephan Braunfels Architekten. 8. Engraving of the auditorium in 1844. 67 9. Photograph of the Apollosaal, the second-story foyer of the 74 Staatsoper. 10. Still of the scandalous scene of Hans Neuenfels’ Idomeneo at the 101 Deutsche Oper. 11. Woodcut of the Opera Ball, circa 1875, based on a drawing by Knut 107 Ekwall. Kaiser Wilhelm I can be seen in the left foreground. 12. Still of the auto-da-fé in Phillip Himmelmann’s production of Don 133 Carlo. 13. Reproduction of László Moholy-Nagy’s design for a Krolloper 145 production of Tristan und Isolde. 14. Still from Stefan Bachmann’s production of Tristan und Isolde, with a 154 set by Herzog & de Meuron. 15. Still from Doris Dörrie’s production of Turandot. 156 vi 16. Still of Maria Bengtsson as Konstanze in Calitxto Bieito’s production 157 of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Komische Oper. 17. Still of Lucio Gallo and Sylvie Valayre in Peter Mussbach's 160 production of Macbeth at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. 18. Still from Ruth Berghaus’ 1972 production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia 167 is the oldest production in the Staatsoper’s current repertoire. 19. Still in which the penguins take the stage in Peter Mussbach’s 175 production of Die lustige Witwe. Photo: Monika Rittershaus 20. Photograph of the author in a penguin costume at the Staatsoper’s 184 Nacht der Offenen Tür. vii Chapter I: Introduction – Opera and Aura Benjamin’s pronouncement about the decline of aura pertains more exactly to opera than to almost any other form. Music in which the dramatic proceedings are a priori doused in atmosphere and exalted is aura pure and simple.1 – Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music On a typical night at the opera, the musico-dramatic synthesis that takes place on stage is “doused in atmosphere,” as Adorno puts it, but the proceedings off-stage are no less extravagant. A bejeweled crowd congregates in front of a stately façade, and inside, marble tiles and mirrors intensify the white light that emanates from the innumerable chandeliers. The auditorium itself is upholstered in velvet, and the crowd behaves in accordance with an implicit sense of ceremony. A gilded aura permeates the entire affair. My dissertation is a study of this lavish tradition as it persists in contemporary Berlin. I focus on extra-musical context, with chapters on opera house architecture, the politics of public subsidies, the experience of being in the audience, and the currency of a good scandal. I hope to show how these contextual constraints help shape opera into a meaningful field of experience. This mosaic of operatic affairs doubles as a critique of the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. The notion of aesthetic autonomy first emerges in European thought in the late 18th century, when aestheticians begin to regard works of art as inviolable objects that serve no secondary purpose.2 In the burgeoning market economy, these functionless 1 “Benjamins Wort vom Verfall der Aura trifft die Oper genauer als fast jede andere Form. Musik, welche a priori dramatische Vorgänge in Atmosphäre taucht und überhöht, ist Aura schlechtin.” Theodor Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 261. 2 On the ideological genesis of aesthetic autonomy, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 1–30; Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, translated by Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–17; Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 35–54; and Martha 1 2 vessels of beauty come to exemplify the inverted logic of commodity fetishism, in which exchange-value eclipses use-value. As members of the bourgeois public begin to pay for access to museums and concert halls, they learn to value individual works of art as objective distillations of the autonomy that they crave in their own lives.3 The value of any commodity is contingent on its outward appearance and the context of its presentation. When the use-value of a commodity is vague—as in a work of art—the object in question is even more likely to rely on atmospheric charm. As Schopenhauer observes in the early 19th century, this axiom extends all the way into the presentation of self: “Like cheap commodities, the lives of men are shellacked in a deceptive shimmer.”4 By examining the context in which operatic works take place, I hope to show how the notion of aesthetic autonomy prolongs its outmoded existence by ensconcing itself in a luxuriant aura. The doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is, in many ways, a naïve ideology, but it continues to regulate experience in the world of opera.5 This ideological commitment manifests itself in every facet of operatic culture. In each of the following chapters, I examine a different aspect of opera in Berlin, and in each case, contextual details reveal themselves to be instrumental variables in the elaborate operatic superstructure and its associated belief system. Though incomplete by any measure, this portrait of operatic affairs will extend the conventional parameters of opera studies into a web of extra- Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 3 For an exposition of the presumed correspondence between freedom in art and freedom in life, see Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 4 “Freilich ist am Menschenleben, wie an jeder schlechten Waare, die Außenseite mit falschen Schimmer überzogen.” Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: Brodhaus, 1879), 383-4.