Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories

by Alexander Kluge, Donna Stonecipher (Translator), Isabel Cole (Translator)

Overview

Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald)

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera.” An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we.” He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: “Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227490
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alexander Kluge, born in Germany in 1932, is a world-famous author and filmmaker (his twenty-three films include Yesterday Girl, The Female Patriot, The Candidate), a lawyer, and a media magnate. He has won Germany’s highest literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize.
Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir, Souvenir de Constantinople, and The Cosmopolitan. She also translates poetry and prose from French and German. She grew up in Seattle and Tehran and has lived in New York, Paris, Prague, Iowa City, and Berlin.
Isabel Cole grew up in New York City and studied at the University of Chicago; since 1995 she has lived in Berlin as a writer and translator. In 2006 she co-founded www.no-mans-land.org, the online journal of new German literature in translation. In 2013 she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award to translate Franz Fühmann’s At the Burning Abyss, and in 2014 her translation of Fühmann’s The Jew Car was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Table of Contents

Preface by the author xi

I The Opera Principle

Total Commitment 3

The Phenomenon of the Opera 4

Is Opera Poison or Nourishment? 6

In His Existential Crisis 7

Conversation Between Siblings 9

Opera Scene that Makes Me Cry 11

Rules for Crying 12

Godard's Fragment 13

Correct Slowing-Down on the Transitional Point … 16

Weren't They Glad to Be Liberated? 17

The Scapegoat Principle 18

Rachel in La Juive 18

A Relationship between Two Women 19

The Opera with Two Roles for High Tenors 19

The Heroine of the Third Volume … 20

Silk-Road-Inspired Opera Project 21

The Aging Singer Stood upon the Stage 24

Nearly Every Night They Expected an Air Raid 25

II "In the First Act I Can't Know the Awful Denouement in the Fifth Act"

Conversation with the Kammersänger 29

The Forgetful Diva 30

The Chance of Victory Had Already Been Squandered 32

Hitler's Favorite Operetta: The Merry Widow 34

"When I see you; I must weep" 36

Appearance and Reality in the Operetta 37

The Bandits (Jacques Offenbach) 39

My Passion Burns Hotter than Goulash 40

Nothing but Music between Body and Mind 41

The Impotence of an Ordinary Understanding 45

An Emotional Weapon of Terror 50

Dark Tidings from Days of Splendor 51

"How Much Blood and Horror …" 53

Verdi. Rigoletto or La Maledizione. Genealogy 54

Rigoletto, the Gnome 54

Xaver Holtzmann's Project: "Imaginary Opera Guide" 57

Disarmament of Tragic Action 58

The Theatrical Demolition Expert 59

A Society Does Itself Honor 62

Walter Benjamin Comes to Halberstadt 64

III Fatal Vocal Force vs. Generosity in the Opera

A Resolute Voice Can Kill 69

Remarks by Adolf Hitler 69

Intermezzo for Big Singing Machines 70

Lohengrin in Leningrad 71

Götterdämmerung in Vienna 79

In the Last Year of His Life 89

Napoleon and Love 90

Love, Recognizable 91

The Great Welaschka 92

Moment of Decision 93

The Death of Wieland Wagner 97

Norma, an Agglomeration of Magnanimity 99

A German Philosopher in Persia 109

"Take the violinist on the sinking liner …" 118

IV Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing

Snow on a Copper Roof 121

Commitment to a Colleague with a Sore Throat 121

The Iron Ring that Conquered the Cliff 122

Reality Challenges Theater for Top Billing 123

Sunday 4 August 2013, Elmau 127

Night of Decisions 128

Lament of the Goods Left on the Shelf 130

Alcina's Implacable Sadness 132

Lament for the Death of the Improbable 134

The Resurrection of Musical Theater 135

V "When We Were Still Reptiles, We Did Not Have Feelings"

Small-Statured Woman in High-Heeled Shoes 141

Is Revolution Founded on Work or Ideas? 142

The Complete Version of a Baroque Idea 145

A Second Titanic 147

Cavalleria Rusticana, An Opera about Strangers' Lives 149

VI Blast Furnaces of the Soul

One Morning, Seven Days After My Fifth Birthday 151

Following the Voice Where It Wishes to Go 152

"It was one romantic relationship, no superfluous words" 154

"Temples of Seriousness" 155

Santuzza and Turiddu 155

Nights in Empty Opera Houses 157

Madame Butterfly's Happier Cousin 160

Misunderstanding between Two Worlds 161

The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Renunciation 163

Why Cinema Was Unable … 164

An Archeologist of Opera 165

"A Scarecrow of Religious Fury" 169

Can Hearts Set Buildings on Fire? 170

The Fire at the Ringtheater 171

When the Audience Heard the Familiar Melody 173

Death of a Thousand Souls 173

Phoenix from the Ashes 175

War in the Huts 176

The Contrat Social of Families 178

"Blast Furnaces of the Soul" 179

Medea's Decision 180

The Troublesome Sister 181

The Aggressive Gaze of Blood 182

Love as a Hard Laborer 184

Flu at the Opera 186

The Original Form of Opera 186

A New Type of Opera in Vienna 187

Plato's Ban on Music 188

Lost Sketch by John Cage 188

Snot and Water 190

"Infiltration of a Love" 191

"Oh My Heart, This Thunder-Sheet" 192

Editorial Reviews

11/06/2017
The real and imagined history of opera, the landscape of emotions, and the “blast furnaces of the soul,” guide Kluge’s captivating collection. Over 100 short stories compose a vision of opera as a durable and protean art form. It is both capable of saving lives—as when the destructive Turkish occupants of Smyrna visit in the early 20th century and venerate that city’s opera house—and of deforming them—as in “The Great Welaschka,” a story about a talented soprano who is “unable to improve on her initial standing” and overshadowed by her lover and his friend. The more historical stories imagine a lost work by John Cage, an East German production called Freedom Opera, and the 1941 Leningrad premiere of Lohengrin, scheduled for what turns out to be the day of the surprise German invasion. Other pieces deconstruct the plots of Norma and Cavalleria Rusticana, given a narrator’s conviction that in all operas “the elements operate among themselves... under the skin of events.” Kluge imagines his parents sitting a few rows away from Walter Benjamin in 1931 and arguing about Madame Butterfly after the performance. A filmmaker, philosopher, and lifelong devotee of the art of opera, Kluge is a maestro with impressive range; readers will commit to “following the voice where it wishes to go.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers."

W. G. Sebald

"Finely drawn and often ingenious analyses of opera as a genre...Unlike anything Kluge has ever written before..."

Bookforum - Ida Hattemer-Higgins

"Alexander Kluge is a gigantic figure in the German cultural landscape. He exemplifies—along with Pasolini—what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist. Essential, brilliant."

Susan Sontag

2017-10-31
Essayistic stories by German writer/filmmaker Kluge (The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century, 2004), all centering on the world of the opera.By some theories, classic opera represents an attempt in the Renaissance to reconstruct Greek tragedy. Kluge is attuned to the storyline of each of the operas that have captured him, but he confesses to being moved more by the music in these "enigmatic musical dramas" than by librettos whose plots are often absurd and nonsensical. The music often moves him, he writes, even if he doesn't always understand why: "I don't know why, but tears always come to my eyes in the third act of the Meistersinger when the shoemaker and poet Hans Sachs enters.…The point of my tears is to wash away the feeble remnants of critical thinking that seek to prevent me from believing in SELFLESS ABANDON." And why the capital letters? Call them the acmes of his arias—or so one supposes. Autobiographical at many turns, seldom anything but realistic, these sketches connect the emotions evoked by operas with moments in history, personal and global: his parents' divorce against Pagliacci, the rise of Nazism against Offenbach's The Bandits, the excesses of Maoist cultural revolution against revolutionary operas such as Taking Tiger Mountain by Storm ("These cultural products built up a stronghold of idealism, which stirred up emotions"). Kluge plays off other writers, as when, with respect to the Viennese critic Karl Kraus' likening of an opera house to a volcano, he asks, "Can hearts set buildings on fire?" The answer is, of course, just as music can bend the hardheadedness of obdurate emperors and invokes a physics by which "with each outburst of passion I give off tiny quanta of my being."Elegant provocations to seize an opera addict's imagination from a voice not well-known to readers on this side of the pond.

Kirkus Reviews