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Language in the Dark The Legacy of Walter Benjamin in the Opera Shadowtime Charlie Bertsch “Is it possible to forget without remembering that one has forgotten?” The words ring out clearly, in stark contrast to the ones that precede and follow them,forming an island of sense in a sea of sonic confusion.The woodwinds and horn notes that punctuate the preceding minutes of the score, distracting from the singing, have fallen away. And for once, only one voice is heard. Even so,the words don’t sound right.There’s a trace of a lisp in the voice.The pronunciation of “remembering”is askew,with a delay on the second syllable, creating an aural hyphen. The strings in the background underscore the vocalist ’s mannered delivery with a tension that holds no promise of release. If Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland had been properly set to music, this is what his hookah-smoking caterpillar would have sounded like. Yet this remains one of the more accessible moments in composer Brian Ferneyhough’s 2004 opera Shadowtime. Most of the time, even when a phrase or two can be discerned without difficulty, the overwhelming impression is anarchy, voices and instruments so at odds with one another that the music sounds more like an orchestra warming up than an actual performance. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine more uneasy listening. For those music lovers who keep their home or car stereo tuned to a frequency that plays a steady stream of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Shadowtime is bound to be offputting . Whereas the music of the masters creates a bubble of comfort that wards off everyday pressures,Ferneyhough’s composition stabs violently into the personal space of its audience, savaging the illusion of serenity promoted within the world of mainstream classical music. But because Shadowtime reflects on the life and work of the leftist Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, noted for the density of his melancholy, and focuses in particular on the tragic circumstances of his passing,as he was trying to flee German-occupied France in September 1940,the work’s edginess is understandable.The burden Language in the Dark 311 of hearing Shadowtime serves a purpose. This is art that refuses to let you forget what you should always bear in mind.That means the Sho’ah,first and foremost, but also loss more generally. The most obvious loss with which the opera confronts the listener is the meaning of the words it contains. The score’s mannered cacaphony plays havoc with the poet Charles Bernstein’s libretto, which uses Benjamin’s fate as the starting point for a rich engagement with his ideas about language, time, and spirituality. Considered apart from the music, the text superbly demonstrates the poet’s ability to balance theory and craft and could easily be considered one of the crowning achievements of his rich literary career. Drawing upon a startling variety of techniques, the text manages to be both accessible and esoteric, channeling the populist cadence of the Beats and the avant-garde silence of OUILIPO with equal aplomb. As impressive as the libretto is, however, reading it in isolation is deceptive . Bernstein’s words function differently when placed within the context of Ferneyhough’s unapologetically avant-garde score. In many cases, they do not function as words at all. Indeed, the opera casts the bulk of the libretto in shadow, making the quest for comprehension feel futile. And that’s no accident . Ferneyhough likes to layer voices, often presenting different portions of the text at the same time, until it becomes a palimpsest in which language is liberated from meaning. Even the portions of the opera that play the libretto “straight”tend to obscure meaning through the interplay of word and music. Interestingly, Bernstein has expressed complete approval for the violence Ferneyhough’s score does to the libretto,emphasizing the importance of,“the different things that you can’t hear, that are not audible,”and those,“that become audible at the price of other things not being audible.” From his perspective , it is crucial that “you can’t hear everything all at once in crystal clarity.” Indeed, the very title of the opera testifies to the impossibility of full comprehension, drawing our attention to the interplay between what can and cannot be discerned.“The idea of the shadow or the echo is crucial to the whole meaning of the opera. And it’s played out in this very issue of only partial legibility...

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