History As Spectacle

by Eve McPherson

 

Before the nineteenth century, generally speaking, opera librettos were often based on mythological subjects and ancient history. The use of contemporary events and depictions of the lower classes (the verismo school of opera) steadily increased, however, during this time period. But setting recent real-life events could at times be controversial. In one famous example, Verdi faced the Neapolitan censors when he tried to have his opera Un ballo in maschera (1857) staged. The opera, based on the assassination of the Swedish king Gustavus III, was deemed too threatening to the status quo, the changes requested of Verdi were increasingly extensive, and it never realized its intended premiere in Naples. Ultimately it was performed in Rome in 1859.

Today, however, recent history is a standard subject for opera composers and few people question its appropriateness. John Adams, for instance, has made significant contributions to the operatic canon with his works Nixon in China, the title of which reveals the subject, and Dr. Atomic, which concerns the Manhattan Project. And, if you have been following recent news in the classical music world, you may have noticed the slew of works premiered or recently programmed on the subject of the Holocaust.

The work that perhaps garnered the most attention was Stefan Heucke’s Das Frauenorchester von Auschwitz, which premiered in Germany in September of 2006. The opera tells the story of this Jewish women’s orchestra, composed of concentration camp inmates, forced to play for the benefit of their captors. Several days ago, another work directly related to the Holocaust, Viktor Ullman’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, was programmed at the Houston Grand Opera. This work, while not directly on the subject of the Holocaust, was written by the composer while he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, and is a loose allegory for Ullman’s contemporary world. The composer ultimately was deported to and died in Auschwitz. And, in just a few days, the University of California at Santa Barbara will present a concert version of Udo Zimmerman’s White Rose, which tells the story of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group. It was written in East Germany in 1967, but it was several decades before it was performed in the West.

These are by no means the only operas based on the Holocaust. Another example is the opera based on William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice. With Styron’s death several days ago, this work has also received frequent mention in the press. The opera by Nicholas Maw premiered in 2002 and details the life of a woman, albeit fictional, who survived Auschwitz and finds herself in a tragically dysfunctional relationship.

But, just as in Verdi’s time, the use of recent historical subjects does raise questions, particularly when the events concern an especially painful and tragic event. Let us consider the question of when is it permissible to approach an historic event and to exploit the material for artistic purposes. Perhaps “permissible,” however, is too loaded a word. Artists should naturally be allowed access to all topics.

That being said, it is nonetheless a reality that when recent events are the subjects of artistic exploration, the final product will necessarily affect living people. In the case of White Rose, for instance, the opera is based on historical writings that have been shown to be commendable but flawed in their accuracy, and unfortunately omit the contributions of most of its members. And, to deviate briefly from the world of opera, take for example the films on 9-11 (World Trade Center and United 93). For many Americans this event is simply too fresh a wound and it is too soon to be able to understand its long-term ramifications and even our own feelings about it.

The Holocaust, to be fair, is now sixty years past. Fewer and fewer survivors from that era are here to tell their stories and it seems that now, large-scale works on the tales from that time are both appropriate and necessary, lest we forget the lessons of the past.

Opera is by its nature a grand spectacle and is perhaps well suited to the exploration of profound tragedy. In conversation with my husband, however, he made the point that often such spectacles are necessarily reductive: complex stories become polarized. And this aspect of spectacle is perhaps the most daunting part of writing an opera on a recent historical subject. Is opera a form that is suited to portray what Hannah Arendt has so famously called the “banality of evil?” Is our understanding of history diminished when its tales may be made to seem somehow distant from our everyday experiences?

So what is the point of these questions? Certainly it is not to condemn the works I mentioned earlier in this essay. In all fairness I have not been able to see them for myself. What’s more, I strongly believe in an artist’s right to examine world events and to offer a particular and hopefully unique view of them, even at the expense of historical accuracy in some cases. However, when reality is tapped for subject material it is also important to evaluate the way it may shape our own perceptions of history.

A Culture Of One

by Greg D'Alessio

 

It is always a strange thing to read accounts of the popular advent of new technologies: the first time someone saw a skyscraper or road on a train, talked the phone or logged onto the Internet. We have the momentary awareness of the enormity of difference between our lives as they are and those other lives “back then,” before there was…. This is particularly true in reading about the advent of the gramophone as a household “appliance.” Previous to that time—the 1910’s and 20’s –the “talking machine,” as it was sometimes called, was to be found mainly in big city arcades along with other cheap diversions where, for a nickel, one could hear a brief rendition of some popular ditty of the gay 90’s while waiting for a train or something like that. In this way, it wasn’t a remarkably different experience for people from listening to a brass band on the street corner or any other of the myriad” live” musical performances that made up the sonic landscape of the day.

As the gramophone moved into the households of millions of people around the world though, some previously unencountered taboos had to be confronted. For instance, the formerly impossible act of someone listening to a piece of music all alone. It is hard for us to imagine the social resistance to this now completely ordinary act. But at the time, coming upon someone sitting by themselves, perhaps in a darkened room, listening to Fritz Kreisler, or Caruso all by themselves was considered unseemly, and quite embarrassing. As though they were sneaking a drink or a pull on an opium pipe. There were even articles on the subject in the new periodicals of the day, trying to allay the apprehensions and discomforts of the new class of gramophone listener that such an activity as solo listening was not as outré and mortifying as all that, and might even have its admirable aspects.

Another disconcerting possibility of the new machine was that one could choose to listen to a piece of music at any time of the day. One could finish breakfast, read the paper and then listen to music, in the morning! Well! It simply wasn’t done. It smacked of decadence, and eccentricity, and the world gone all topsy-turvy—which, of course, it had.

Consider now that our basic social model for listening to music these days is of one person alone, with earphones on, with their own private play-list of individually selected music—music that others couldn’t hear even if they were in the same room. This means we have totally inverted the expected social positioning of music in the 80-odd years since the use of the gramophone became widespread. Music has gone from being a necessarily public experience, to a largely private one; from being something like attending the theater to being something like reading a book.

Well, so what? What difference does it really make how many other people are listening to the same piece at the same time as we are? After all, doesn’t the real event of the act of listening always take place within the heads of individuals, whether or not they sitting in a room alone or in a crowded concert hall?

The answer to this depends, of course, on what we think the “real event” of listening is. We have become so used to conceiving of ourselves as autonomous individuals and of society as no more than a common space for ourselves and other autonomous individuals—with no sensible demands of its own other than to provide freedom for people to live as they choose (with some basic laws thrown in for the protection of life and property). This is the real triumph of consumerist democracy, and in so many ways it is a good thing.

The story of the last 8o years has been the falling away—like the unnecessary rocket stages in a moon launch—of the constraints and demands of society. We can hardly imagine now the totality with which it governed people’s lives in earlier times. What one could wear or, say, how one could gesture, the people one could talk to, each and every moment was laced around with social codes that we have quite cheerfully chucked onto the ash-heap of history. These days, billionaires and indigents alike wear the same tracksuits, talk in the same happily inarticulate slang, watch the same TV shows and yes, listen to more or less the same music.

One of the results of this leveling of the cultural topography, it seems to me, is that the possible sign of music has been narrowed considerably to accommodate the essentially one-man/one-meaning aspect of commodity culture. Which is to say, we no longer much view music as a symbol or as an expression of communal values or social structure—much less as “progress.” The belief in a culture, wide evolution to a finer, more sophisticated state, has to be one of the most thoroughly dispensed with ideas in history. It simply couldn’t stand the trial of world wars, social science and Gilligan’s Island. These days, “progress” is every single person getting to act as close to they do in their own living room as often, and in as many places as possible, with no one raising a peep.

Music used to cause riots and herald social revolts. The Italians staged a revolution to Verdi’s music and a man was knifed at the premier of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder. Music could cause such intense reactions then because people believed that it actually contained within it the emotional core of all that was most significant about their society. With that belief, of course, came an enormous constraint, a stultifying conservatism that was a constant torment to artists well into the 20th century. Along with the torment, however, was a goad to profound expression: most of the great works of the 18th through early 20th century were formed in opposition to the forces of societal demands.

With the loss of social constraint came the loss of possible meanings for art. This is something seen recently in the Communist bloc countries where people used to memorize banned poems and risk imprisonment to hear forbidden music; but, after the political system liberalized, re-runs of Kojak and second-generation ABBA knock-offs suddenly seemed sufficient. It is one of the more perplexing aspects of human behavior that we need to be a bit miserable to appreciate beauty.

Truth be told I wouldn’t really want to go back to those times, even with the intensity and the profundity they inspired—at least, most the time I wouldn’t. I love stepping off into that private world of my own little musical kingdom as much as anybody. And, as a culture, I would wager that we generate more happiness hours (or at least contentedness hours) per individual than any in history. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that something hasn’t been irrevocably lost in getting rid of all that social super-structure. Something was lost, too, when the first gramophone user closed the door and softly, discretely, hungrily, set the needle into the groove.