Distant Sounds - Fallen Music: "Der ferne Klang" as 'Woman's Opera'?

Distant Sounds - Fallen Music: "Der ferne Klang" as 'Woman's Opera'?Author(s): Peter FranklinSource: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1991), pp. 159-172Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823605 .

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 3, 2, 159-172

Distant sounds - Fallen music: Derferne Klang as 'woman's opera'?

PETER FRANKLIN

Wagnerian gestures were from the outset translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the public - the murmurings of the people, applause, the trumpet of self- confirmation or waves of enthusiasm. In the process their archaic muteness, their lack of language, proves its worth in a highly contemporary instrument of domination.

The music of Salome is at the centre of this book. Not morals, not religion, not even politics, but music. It is after all the music that an opera-lover goes to hear!2

These two quotations - the one from Adorno's critique of Wagner, the other from Derrick Puffett's introduction to a recent book on Strauss's Salome - face each other across an abyss that splits the landscape of opera studies like a wandering crevasse. 'Pleasure' is the mysterious mist that obscures its depths, specifically the musical pleasure that Adorno makes fearful in Wagner and Puffett would have us embrace uncritically in Salome.3 Beneath the mist lurks Music itself, an innocent angel ensnared by wicked theatre folk or a malicious demon aiding and abetting the late bourgeois composer in the subjugation of his contem- poraries.

My exploration of one possible path around this abyss will take some of its bearings from Catherine Clement's feminist anti-musicology; but it will lead towards, and not away from music,4 more specifically towards the distant sounds of the partly forgotten Franz Schreker (1878-1934). The reasons for his having been forgotten are related to the historically conditioned problem within opera studies to which I have alluded: Is opera redeemed by its music, or is music debased by opera? The reception of much late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European opera was and is dogged by the notion of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian musical drama as slipping away from the dominant values of high culture and towards audience-orientated forms of the mass- entertainment industry. Adorno's observation that Wagner's leitmotif technique led 'directly to cinema music' was intended to hurt.5 Then, as now, the canonic 1 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1981), 35. 2 Derrick Puffett, Richard Strauss: 'Salome', Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge,

1989), 8. 3 Puffett, 9. 4 I am mindful of this central point in Katherine Bergeron's review of Catherine Clement's

Opera or the Undoing of Women, this journal, 2 (1990), 93-8. Clement's book was translated by Betsy Wing (London, 1989).

5 Adorno (see n. 1), 46; note also his reference to 'film-like technique' in Parsifal, 109.



Peter Franklin

status of operas depended on evaluation of their music's intrinsic worth and 'transcendence'- not least of the words and 'usually banal' ideas of librettists.6 Here Schreker asked for trouble by providing his elaborately pleasurable music with pleasure-orientated libretti of his own devising (orgies inspired by music and other artistic stimulation feature in Das Spielwerk [1913/20] and Die Gezeichneten [1918]).

The continuing attempt to rescue opera as 'pure music',7 even pure drama, betrays an idealising tendency that is more revealingly compromised when dir- ected towards the supposedly transitional period of Schreker and Puccini than in formalistic analytical approaches to earlier operatic music, or self-consciously modernist-operatic music in the wake of Wozzeck. From a contemporary perspective, the issues were clear. Long before the advent of the sound film, German critics had used the term 'Kino-Oper' with reference to Puccini,8 whether or not they were aware of Becce's influential Kino-Bibliothek of 1919, which cited the Italian along with Massenet, Rakhmaninov and others in context- tailored suggestions for silent-film accompaniment.9 The idealistic German critical establishment mocked the foreigner Puccini as tasteless, in deliberate spite of his alluring popularity.10 Its rejection of populist opera11 capitalised more efficiently on Establishment values when rounding on Germans and Austrians suspected of being followers of Puccini and verismo. Their duty should have been to beat and not join the frivolous Italians; and their consequent margin- 6 The phrase is from Peter Kivy's review of Paul Robinson's Opera and Ideas: From Mozart

to Strauss, this journal, 1 (1989), 87. 7 Following Michael Tanner's review of three Cambridge Opera Handbooks (including

Puffett, see n. 2) in The Times Literary Supplement, June 15-21 (1990), 642, correspondence ensued about his suggestion that analytical emphasis on the music can be at the expense of a full and humane critical perspective (Strauss's Salome was particularly in question). In a subsequent letter, Craig Ayrey dutifully protested that 'nothing could be more humane ... than the attempt to reveal the full extent of Strauss's technical mastery and structural control beneath the "tawdriness" of the Dance of the Seven Veils' (The Times Literary Supplement, June 24-July 5 [1990], 695). Ayrey finds subtle support in Arnold Whittall's review article '"Forceful Muting" or "Phatic Dithering"? Some Recent Writing on Opera', Music and Letters, 71/1 (1990), 65-71. Accusing Carolyn Abbate (see n. 29 below) of tending to do more justice to the text than the music of Tristan, he concludes his article with the full-scale idealist plea 'that a great composer can be more than the mere prisoner of psychological and cultural forces outside his own innate creativity'.

8 See Artur Seidl's article 'Madame Butterfly und Tiefland' (1910/11), reprinted in his Neuzeitliche Tondichter und zeitgenossische Tonkiinstler, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 1926), II, 58.

9 A relevant page, citing a passage from Puccini's Lafanciulla del West under the headings 'Hohepunkt/Katastrophe (Schweres Verhangnis)', is reproduced in Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film Music (London and New York, 1957), 55. 10 In his 1932 biography, Richard Specht addressed the Germanic problem with Puccini. He noted that 'men of merit' might confess to liking his music only 'with a touch of embarrassment, just as they might be ardent readers of Eugene Sue or Conan Doyle without quite liking to admit it'. See Giacomo Puccini- The Man, his Life, his Work, trans. Catherine Phillips (London, 1933), 3.

n Works that styled themselves 'comic opera', 'light opera' or 'operetta' (for example) were exempt on the grounds that they aspired to entertain only within wholesome and unthreatening generic limits.

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Derferne Klang as 'woman's opera'?

alisation by German critics was validated in the 1930s by the defection of some of them, like Korngold, to Hollywood as composers of the functional and fallen film music that Adorno had scented in Wagner.

Schreker's position as apostate modernist of the Weimar period was prepared in an exemplary way in Der ferne Klang (1912), which already occupied a deliberately ambivalent position between 'high' and 'low' forms of musical theatre (alongside his Italian affinities, Schreker's two identifiable French models, Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-bleue and Charpentier's Louise, reflect that ambivalence). My intention is to abandon altogether the effort to redeem the opera and the genre it helped create for the pantheon of traditional high art. To accept that a whole stream of post-Wagnerian opera did indeed tend towards the functions and forms of twentieth-century mass culture could open discussion on a range of post-Adornian approaches to popular forms. Wary critical attention must still be focused on the nature of the gratification they supply, but it will require neither self-indulgent endorsement nor prescriptively genre- or taste- orientated censure. Derferne Klang, in other words, thematises critical concern about the nature and role of music in a way that will further illuminate my questioning juxtaposition of Adorno's politics and Puffett's pleasure.

1

Schreker's music for Der ferne Klang characteristically both invites and resists attempts to rescue it from the context into which the opera as a whole draws it. For all its decadent concern for beauty of texture and harmonic nuance above line or structure, it functions like the background scoring for a Hollywood film, and in many of the ways that post-Adornian film studies have observed of music in classic narrative cinema. In fact, the veristic contextualisation of Music as sensuously materialised sound ('Klang') is one of the central themes of the opera, where it is deliberately brought into a stubbornly resistant Real World. This context must first be considered in its own right, in the manner anathematised by orthodox opera studies - by briefly 'telling the story' (and for a moment perhaps deliberately engaging in the strategic muting and highlight- ing wisely attributed by Nelly Furman to such summaries):12 The action begins in the faded living-room of a lower middle-class provincial family that has known better times. Grete, the daughter of the house, tries to persuade her boy-friend, the aspiring composer Fritz, to take her with him in search of the 'distant sound' he romantically longs for as a source of creative enlightenment and economic success. He promises to come back when he has won fame, but the dissolute behaviour of Grete's father soon forces her to run away from home. She is lured into prostitution and (in Act II) becomes the central attraction of a grand Venetian bordello into which Fritz one day wanders unsuspectingly. Their reunion is marred by his violent rejection of her as 'a whore' when he realises how she is living. Time passes, and in Act III Grete has descended to the level of a common street-walker. She visits the theatre 12 See Nelly Furman, 'The Languages of Love in Carmen', in Arthur Groos and Roger

Parker, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 170.

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Peter Franklin

where Fritz's opera is being premiered and, perceiving the autobiographical nature of its subject-matter, is overcome with emotion. She is escorted to a nearby cafe where an old friend recognises her. He takes her to Fritz who, unsatisfied with his opera's widely criticised conclusion, has begun to understand that the 'distant sound' had been close to him always, in nature and remembered love. Grete arrives and there is a passion- ate reconciliation; but Fritz dies in her arms as the curtain falls.

Rehearsed in this way, Schreker's plot helps to explain the accusation of dilettante eclecticism that was levelled at him by sterner critics. There are elements of the German-Romantic Kiinstlerroman, of Naturalism (the stage dir- ections even require us to hear the sound of a distant railway train in Act I scene 2), of Expressionism (shades of Wedekind), of Symbolism. All this might have reflected an admirable synthesis, of course, had not Der ferne Klang also dispensed popular, sensual-identificatory pleasure with licentious readiness (the Nazis later stigmatised Schreker not only for his partial Jewishness, but also as a musical illustrator of sexual perversions).13 Lavish aural effects and scenic exoticism played a significant part in the opera's sensational opening-night success in Frankfurt in August 1912. They certainly helped ensure its continued presence on the German stage until the Nazi ban. In retrospect the work's attraction seems to have been problematically close to that of a certain kind of popular fiction, or of the ideologically coercive bourgeois theatre scorned by Brecht for its fantasy, identification, melodrama and frisson of 'tragic' evolutionary determinism.14 Even before Eisler and Adorno denounced music for purveying such things in Hollywood movies (by assuming 'the function of en- snaring the customer'),15 this type of theatre would establish itself in the so- called 'woman's film' of the 1930s and '40s. Brecht had nevertheless already characterised the music of bourgeois opera as 'dishing up', 'heightening' and 'painting the psychological situation' in a way that squared with Adorno's critique of Wagner and anticipated my more deliberate linking of early twentieth- century popular opera with a mass-entertainment cinema to come.

The wider Germanic antipathy towards linking naturalistic opera with decadent musical manners is reflected in Adorno's unease about Schreker,16 as it is in Dahlhaus's. The latter clearly appreciated the innovative modernism of Derferne Klang's dramaturgy, but discerned a regressive reliance on 'the meta-

13 Hans Severus Ziegler, initiator of the Nazis' 'Entartete Musik' exhibition in Diisseldorf (1938), branded Schreker a Jewish 'scribbler' (Vielschreiber) in his accompanying booklet, adding: 'There was no sexual-pathological aberration that he did not set to music'. See Albrecht Dumling and Peter Girth, eds., Entartete Musik: Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion zur Diisseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938, 2nd edn (Diisseldorf, 1988), 133.

14 In 'The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre', Brecht compared features of Dramatic Theatre and Epic Theatre, then of Dramatic Opera and Epic Opera. See John Willett, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964; rpt. London, 1984), 37-8.

15 Hanns Eisler [with Theodor Adorno], Composing for the Films (1947; rpt. London 1951), 61.

16 See Theodor Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I-III, Gesammelte Schriften, XVI (Frankfurt a.M., 1978), 368-81 and Musikalische Schriften VI, Gesammelte Schriften, XIX (Frankfurt a.M., 1984), 272-3.

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Derferne Klang as 'woman's opera' ?

physics of Tristan'.17 Dahlhaus further identified the opera as representative of an historical situation:

where, on the one hand, the spirit of the age pressed towards naturalism and, on the other, music - apart from verismo - was post-Wagnerian ... [and] opera presented itself as an overlapping of a naturalistic level with an emphatically musical one ... 18

It is odd, although perhaps typical of traditional Germanic idealism, that he should thus make a move in the direction of denying music any direct expressive involvement in that naturalistic level:

Music can indeed bring art and life together, as is the case in Der ferne Klang; but it cannot express the contrast out of which the dramatic dialectic develops. In the words of Wagner, the antithesis remains a mere literary intention, without realising itself for the emotions by means of music.19

Although Dahlhaus does not elaborate on this point by addressing the music 'in itself', the possibility is problematised in advance. Contemporary and later assessment of Schreker's music saw it reflecting the failings of his eclectic, dis- organised and dilettantish libretti, and necessarily separable from them if it were to be valued as a link in the supposed evolutionary chain from 'late-romanticism' to 'expressionism' and beyond. That tendentious historical construction is best revised by accepting that the music of Derferne Klang might be no less complica- tedly involved with its dramaturgy and strategies of naturalism than the music of a real Hollywood movie by a composer at least as skilful as Korngold or Max Steiner. As the film critic Claudia Gorbman has written:

classical Hollywood cinema is predicated on the subject's unified body, the effacement of discourse in favour of story, and a trance-like spectatorial immersion in its world. ... pseudo-Wagnerian orchestrations and harmonies draw on a well-established reser- voir of emotional signification. ... A Steiner score explicates, underscores, imitates, emphasizes narrative actions and moods wherever possible; it wears its heart on its sleeve, contributes towards the depiction of a dramatic universe whose sole transcenden- tal morality might be that of emotion itself.20

2

Such a description - the very idea that music might wilfully seek to incite un- principled emotion and thus merit ideological criticism - is inimical to idealist musical aesthetics, although its implications have been explored before in this journal (most recently in Lawrence Kramer's discussion of 'The Salome Com-

7 In 'Schreker and Modernism: On the Dramaturgy of Derferne Klang', in Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 199.

18 Dahlhaus, 200. 19 Dahlhaus, 197. 20 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. Narrative Film Music (London and Bloomington,

1987), 7.

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Peter Franklin

plex').21 It is certainly helpful in the case of an opera like Der ferne Klang, which resists the search for organic coherence or for some unified musical discourse that can be analytically peeled away as a redemptive translation of the wicked, worldly words.22 After the short prelude, Schreker initially employs his post-Wagnerian repertoire of musico-dramatic techniques innocently enough, to establish a conventional manner of 'transparently' accompanied arioso. Within the conventions of opera this generates a relatively prosaic rhe- toric that tends towards actual 'melodrama' (employed by Schreker at times, as in Act I scene 4). The sung dialogue floats over unobtrusive underscoring, its tempo and rhythm close to those of actual speech. Only when Grete tries to exert persuasion over Fritz is she permitted a clear melodic phrase that sets out as if it might turn into an aria. Although it soon reverts to prose, revealing itself to be a deliberate figure of musical speech, it introduces Grete's potential for musical power in a scene otherwise dominated by Fritz (see Ex. 1).

Another kind of more strongly self-characterised background music 'sneaks in and out' (in Hollywood studio parlance) to add materially to the dialogue, as when Fritz communicates to Grete his vision of the 'distant sound' and its implications (see Ex. 2). The orchestra now takes the part of his fantastic image of Music, persuading us (and Grete) of its powerful reality at his words: 'weifit du, Gretel - wie wenn der Wind mit Geisterhand fiber Harfen streicht' (You know, Gretel - like when the wind plays over harps with a ghostly hand). Here Schreker employs one of the standard coercive devices of the film- composer, underlining the moment of 'significant' experience in a way that invites our unquestioning identification with its subject. In opera, however, the characters can sing, can themselves enter music's realm of externalised inwardness. Grete is drawn into it with Fritz when she repeats his 'like when the wind' phrase in trance-like unison with him, one bar after cue 20. Like the thematisation of the spectatorial gaze discussed by film theorists, we have here an on-stage exemplification of the female auditor being passively 'swept away' by the hero's fantasy, for all that the larger unfolding of the drama will reveal the partial mendacity of that fantasy.

Two important issues emerge: firstly the supposed 'femininity' of the experience such music appears to demand, and secondly a confusing strain of self- consciousness in the operatic narrative. This now beckons towards the more self-aware modernist theatre that the music at this point seems intent on preclud- ing. The 'contextualisation' of music in this opera seems to become deliberate. Before confronting this issue more fully, however, we might register other, perhaps contradictory ways in which music functions in Der ferne Klang. Far more neutral in their designs upon the audience's emotions, for example, are 21 Lawrence Kramer: 'Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex', this

journal, 2 (1990), 269-94. Kramer's concerns fruitfully overlap with my own in a number of ways.

22 I am thinking in particular of Paul Robinson's extraordinary but clearly serious suggestion that 'an operatic text really has no meaning worth talking about except as it is transformed into music'. See Paul Robinson, 'A Deconstructive Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera', in Groos and Parker (n. 12), 341-2.

164




I91 In warmer Bewegung

Grete (putting her arms around his neck, as if imploring): A (innig) --

(dringend) ' T~7

Doch schau, Fritz, lie - ber Fritz,muBt du denn fort, muBt_ du von mir,

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Ex. 1. Translation: 'But look, Fritz, dear Fritz, if you have to go, ... do I mean nothing to you? Can't you achieve here what you ...'

have to leave me

instances of what film critics would call 'Mickey Mousing', as when, after Fritz's departure, Dr Vigelius recounts what has happened in the already partly heard (off-stage) skittles game in the nearby inn. Grete's drunken father had wagered his daughter in a last-ditch match against the inn-keeper... and lost. From his 'Das war ein lustiges Spiel!' (What a merry game it was!) the music paints Vigelius's narration in naive illustrative fashion. The orchestra onomatopoeically laughs and jeers, mimicking the onlookers as Vigelius describes them, and it punctuates his story with brief, stylised sound-pictures, as at 'Es flog die Kugel, es flogen die Kegel' (The ball raced, the skittles flew). The accompanying chorus enthusiastically relives the experience, responding like the orchestra to the game retold as it had to the game itself. Does the drama now stress music's public function as a more neutral agent of enthusiasm where previously it had exempli- fied its efficacy in individual persuasion?

Vigelius's 'Mickey-Mousing' remains, by virtue of its stylisation, firmly within the frame of the opera - the rhetorical device of one minor character used upon others. On the other hand, Fritz's visionary music flowed out of the frame to involve us, as it involved Grete, and forge a link between himself

I - rei- chen_

165



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Langsam (geheimnisvoll) rit. Fritz 1 3 . >,, 3 1 ' 3 ---3--- Tempo rit.

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and the composer of Derferne Klang. The orchestral prelude had already established the manner and tone of the meta-musical voice whose motives and textures had re-emerged from the musical background in his description of 'the distant sound'. Although most nearly emancipated from local enslavement to textual detail, this fragmented musical discourse is the one that functions most like Hollywood film scoring within the opera. It is not, however, sufficient simply to associate it with a male meta-musical voice linking Fritz to Schreker. One particularly dominant and extended passage in Act I is unconnected with Fritz and yet seems to heighten the implications of Grete as female observer and experiencer of such music in a way that would hardly surprise the feminist critic of 'women's films'. The relevant stage-direction drew an appropriately strong expression of disapproval from Adorno:

Sie hebt die Arme, wie um sich in den See zu stiirzen. In diesem Moment geht der Mond auf und verwandelt die Landschaft. Der See glitzert in seinem Lichte, Gluhwiirm- chen schwirren, eine Nachtigall singt, Rehe gehen zum See, um zu trinken. Schwiile Liifte umfangen das Madchen. Nachtlicher Waldzauber.23

[She lifts her arms, as if intending to throw herself into the lake. At this moment the moon emerges and transfigures the landscape. The lake glitters in its light, glow-worms hover, a nightingale sings, deer come to the lake to drink. Sultry air sweeps around the girl. Nocturnal woodland magic.]

'Music' - the music that had swept her away in Fritz's vision, Grete's version of Fritz's music, perhaps the inner music of Grete herself - now halts the action and projects a naive fantasy-vision of itself on stage: reconciling, overpowering. The distraught girl who has just run away from home is caught up in a Disney- like dream whose 'sound', far from distant, envelops us and her in a cocoon of lyrical melody over sustained bass pedal notes. For Claudia Gorbman such music in romantic film scenes 'signifies emotion, depth, the obverse of logic'.24 Its stereotypically 'feminine' features are apparently stressed in a stage picture that includes its own emblematic viewer: the woman who, as Mary Ann Doane observes, habitually represents a resistant principle to (male) narrative in feminist 23 Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I-III (see n. 16), 369-70. The translation of the stage

direction is my own, as in other cases where no translator is cited. 24 Beyond any specific emotional connotation, that is. Gorbman (see n. 20), 79.

F. Z pR " .l j.

167



Peter Franklin

film theory: 'For the figure of the woman is aligned with spectacle, space, or the image, often in opposition to the linear flow of the plot.'25 If the standard question of male voyeurism is raised by the gender of the composer-librettist (despite an increasing focus on Grete at the expense of the absent idealist Fritz), the apparently deliberate 'feminisation' of music as wayward, improvisatory, emotional and given to collage rather than linear 'development', begins to emerge almost as a theme of Derferne Klang.

Another aspect of the opera's critical, contextualising impulse is strikingly manifested in the second, 'Venetian' act, set in La Casa di Maschere ten years on from Act I. Grete (now 'Greta') has become the bordello's self-possessed central attraction. Music here renounces the manner of conventional operatic omniscience, save in connection with Grete's own subjective experience. Instead, it seems to have split into a number of 'diegetic' musics that emanate from performers within the fictional world of the drama. The magical atmosphere of the famous opening of this act is created by a simultaneity of 'source'-music elements (long known to opera, of course, if rarely on this level of complexity). The siren-voices of the girls beckoning their clients may tend towards deliberate symbolism, but the 'Venetian music', like the elaborately notated improvisatory 'gypsy music' of the on-stage band, is presented in such a naturalistic way that the festive bustle of the pit orchestra seems to beg interpretation as yet another diegetic 'source' generated within the bordello. When Fritz makes his appearance after the song-contest (Grete is again the prize of a game played by men), the larger, omniscient Music with its recurring motive seems to be generated by Grete's recalled emotion. Certainly it is she who banishes it when, following Fritz's sullen and hurtful treatment of her, she wilfully calls to the band to strike up the closing wild czardas. Cheated by the lie of his music of individual aspiration and 'soul', she turns to the honestly functional dance- band in her active reconciliation with the Real World.

Yet the desperation of that cancellation of 'Fritz's' music, in extremis, only reinforces the hold it once had on her, a hold reasserted in the remarkable third act, set five years after the second. Grete no longer has power in that real world and has become reduced to a sickly representative of stereotyped femininity, renamed Tini. She is now 'swept away', not by Fritz's first-person evocation of his vision, but by its artistic representation in his autobiographical opera at whose premiere she has collapsed. A policeman helps her to the open-air cafe where the opening scene of Act III is set. Here the simultaneous contextualisation and feminisation of music is pushed further by Schreker with exemplary bravado. For it is not just 'music' that takes its place overtly as a functional element in the world of the drama, but the opera itself. The very first sounds we hear in the act are of the diegetic, 'opera-house' music off-stage, within the extended imaginary space of the action beyond the proscenium. And it is unequivocally a motif from the opera we are watching.

25 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (1987; rpt. London, 1988), 5.

168




More interesting still, when a persuasive and foregrounded Music once again 'sneaks in' amidst business-like underscoring of the naturalistic, parlando dialogue, it is associated directly with Grete's subjectivity as aroused and disturbed by the opera that has so moved her. Now her defences are down and she remains half lost in the music whose sounds flood through her and, increasingly, through us. Having implied that Fritz still loves her, Vigelius sighs over the sins of the world ('und wir alle mit ihr' [and we're all part of it]). The street noises cease and the lamps go out as Grete, 'ganz Leise, im Traum' (very softly, as if dreaming), murmurs: 'Die Biume rauschen ein wundersam Lied ... Ach, die wilde Musik!' (The trees are whispering a wonderful song... Oh, the wild music!). The stage-struck woman consigns herself to the incoming tide of sound that sweeps all before it in the ensuing Interlude, which functions as a strikingly modelled stream of consciousness. But whose consciousness? It certainly leads into the final scene, where we find Fritz in his study listening to a naturalistic dawn chorus of birds. But the Interlude, which might have been interpreted as a revelation of Fritz's own meta-musical subjectivity, has clearly given way to this strange new sound-world. Its extended musical discourse had in fact previously abandoned material associated with Fritz for that generated by Grete herself. Her original Act I motif, 'Ach vergifi dein armes Gretel nicht ganz!' (Oh, don't forget your poor Gretel entirely!), had then been presented 'ausdruckslos' (expressionless), like a marginal quotation, above a delicately scored 'expressivo' recollection of her 'nachtlicher Waldzauber' (see Ex. 3).

When at last Fritz re-hears the 'distant sound' in the quasi diegetic off-stage arpeggios of the celesta (with piano), it is with dawning understanding that Grete herself had been its mysterious source. The unsatisfied composer realises too late the problem with the conclusion of his opera; he too is ecstatically 'carried away' in Grete's arms. Whereas at the start of Act III Derferne Klang had become a diegetic element within its own frame, opera and frame now become a single diegetic element within the larger theatre that contains us, the audience. We experience with horror the coarse melodramatic cliche of his death and the closing E flat minor chords: for we have heard them before, off-stage, as the unsatisfactory ending that he now regrets. The whole show is put into quotation-marks; we will never know how either this or Fritz's opera might otherwise have concluded. The latter is a lost cause, the former consigned to a now unseen, extra-artistic reality that is entirely Grete's responsi- bility.

3

By retreating between those implied quotation marks that alienate the hitherto involved audience and problematise its pleasure, Derferne Klang seems, after all, to reject categorisation as an operatic 'woman's film' and validate its description as a failed or transitional experiment in modernism. Schreker himself certainly spoke in deliberate, 'high culture' terms of his attempt to set 'das reale kleinbiirgerliche Leben' (the reality of petit-bourgeois life) against 'die

169



Peter Franklin

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Vision des Kiinstlers' (the artist's vision), and of his fascination, in Act II, with 'die technischen kontrapunktischen Probleme des Ineinanderklingens der Musikkapellen einer grof3en Vergniigungsstatte' (the technical, contrapuntal problems of the simultaneously sounding orchestras of a great pleasure resort). He then went on to describe 'der Kontrast, den musikalischen, einsamen Kiinst- lermenschen mitten in dieses Getone, das seine Sinne verwirrt und sein Ethos zu zerbrechen droht, hineinzustellen' (the contrast of placing the solitary musical artist in the midst of all this noise which confuses his mind and threatens his moral principles).26 Does the opera in fact conclude its implied brinksmanship by permitting Fritz to redefine his moral and artistic principles only at the moment of surrendering himself to the woman who had been at the centre of all that 'noise and confusion' - by dying in Grete's arms?

It is here that the work proves such an interesting mixture of the conceptual and the musical, of alienating modernist idiosyncracy and involving popular spectacle. Der ferne Klang's historical consignment to the popular realm must remain problematic in that it fails, within that realm, to accommodate either

26 All the extracts are from Schreker's essay 'Wie entsteht eine Oper?' (1930), quoted in H. Schreker-Bures, H. H. Stuckenschmidt and W. Oehlmann, Franz Schreker (Vienna, 1970), 15.

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of the standard critical definitions of the Popular, reduced by Tony Bennett to 'a pure and spontaneously oppositional culture "of the people" and a totally administered culture "for the people"'.27 Here, on the contrary, is what Bennett describes as an historical example of Gramscian 'confluence': a work in which a later mass-cultural form (film) is anticipated within a high-culture form (opera) in the spirit of fin-de-siecle modernism. By providing an invaluable site for the examination of artistic 'pleasure' on the move between two phases of bourgeois culture, it thus presents an exemplary case-study for considering the role played by music in the construction of that ambivalent pleasure. Music seems almost to 'catch itself in the act' in the revealing context of a new kind of post-Wagnerian opera in which, released from the constraints of older conven- tion, it can move at will amongst 'ordinary' characters and even the audience: a shifting spirit-medium acting now as a stage-prop, now as a mask; now stealing behind us to make us weep or quiver with the thrill of atavistic exaltation. We who (as Puffett has told us) apparently 'go for the music' are moved by Grete for her willingness to be swept away by sounds that, with Schreker and Catherine Clement, we both love and suspect. In her ever stronger association with 'music' in this opera, Grete, the fallen woman, comes to represent the fallen muse that Fritz had so long sought, perhaps even a fallen Music, lost to manly control and become what Adorno would castigate in Schreker as the music of adolescent improvisation, the 'music of puberty'.28

A lesser man, in a male chauvinist moment (perhaps after reading Carolyn Abbate on the subversively 'operatic' music within Wagner's Tristan)29 might describe it as the music of women - emotional, disruptive, coercible and coerc- ing. In this light Derferne Klang, far from being no more than a faded picture- postcard from the Jugendstil period,30 seems precisely to welcome feminist pro- blematisation of such a negatively valued stereotype as a projection of masculine fears and fantasies. Schreker, for all that he claimed to have lost faith in women before writing Act III,31 deliberately drew back from the 'undoing' or 'defeat' of Grete.32 Nothing in the opera's self-conscious conclusion undermines his

27 See Tony Bennett, 'The Politics of the "Popular" and Popular Culture', in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacot, eds., Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1986), 19.

28 Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I-III (see n. 16), 379. 29 See Carolyn Abbate,'Wagner, "On Modulation" and Tristan', this journal, 1 (1989), 41,

where she speaks of the 'robust and manly rhapsodies to largeness, vastness, immensity' of English-language Wagner analysis as compared with German, post-Adornian attention to Wagnerian detail. Sympathising with her 'frustration with large-scale structuralist and reductive analysis' (37), my suggestion here is precisely that the textual-musical disjunction of which she writes becomes ever more extreme in the early twentieth-century opera type under discussion, but to the end of music's meaningful contextualisation rather than the re-achievement of mysterious autonomy for its traditional forms and processes, as in Wozzeck.

30 A suggestion from Adorno's review of the 1929 Berlin revival of Derferne Klang under Schreker, Adorno, Musikalische Schriften VI (see n. 16), 272.

31 H. Schreker-Bures (see n. 26), 13. 32 Translated as Opera or the Undoing of Women, Catherine Clement's book was originally

published (Paris, 1979) as L'opera ou la defait desfemmes.

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172 Peter Franklin

manifest love for her music, which is also his music. He openly accepts its new role as a richly meaningful chaos of the unmeant and (supposedly) unmean- able that maintains the highest ideals while being eagerly complicit with the shady and even shocking motives of opera librettists and Hollywood film pro- ducers alike. Thus, all too pleasurably perhaps, we are swept back to that abyss where opera scholars still strive to remythologise Grete and send music back to the celestial spheres of the ancient Greeks. The musicological descendants of Fritz, recalling Plato's far from celestial desire to control male emotions and keep women in their place, might well prepare to die in the arms of a newly feminised Music. Challenging our gaze, it rejects our constructed images of its nature, source and purpose; not least in the rich repertoire of critically margin- alised operas produced in Europe between Wagner's death and the advent of mass-entertainment cinema.



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Distant Sounds - Fallen Music: "Der ferne Klang" as 'Woman's Opera'?

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