The Politics and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism

Abstract

A survey of European trends and works suggests that the extent to which operatic modernism resists the pull of ideology may well depend on two factors: the post-Wagnerian recuperation of the primacy of voice and the proclivity of modernist operatic texts and music to engage (rather than repress) nostalgia. One work not usually included in modernist canons, Erich Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, presents an interesting model.

The drive we call modernism was first articulated in 1859 and most plausibly (though not decisively) dispatched, finally, in 1999. Its impresario was Charles Baudelaire, who offered the term "modernity" (modernité) as a vessel for those aesthetic values that embody "the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, one side of art, of which the other is the eternal and the absolute." Baudelaire coined the term in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life," which focuses not on one of the canonic painters (Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, the young Édouard Manet), about whom Baudelaire had much to say, but rather on Constantin Guys, who specialized in pen-and-ink representations of the fast pace of modern Parisian life. Baudelaire's modernité can mean both modernity and modernism, to the enduring consternation of his translators. It cannot mean "modernization," however. Baudelaire embraced the urban culture of speed and change and the new ways of engaging it through aesthetic forms. But he despised Eugène Haussmann's Paris of rationalized spaces and authoritarian control. Baudelaire's modernité is an aesthetic drive, a cognitive and political style, even when not expressed through a specific form or genre. We tend to favor the term modernism when recognizing this aesthetic stamp, but this usage often assumes a formal genre—painting, architecture, music, literature, etc. Modernism/modernity as a style thus suggests that the world can be grasped and articulated, even if only fleetingly, through the senses.¹

Confidence in such a claim has long been shaken. The general arguments of postmodernism are the obvious place from which to trace this erosion, but the overall question as to whether the postmodern constitutes a rejection of the modern or a rescue of its innermost principles has long reached a stand-off. In this context, we might propose the date 1999 and Clark's recent work as the points of modernism's most recent, most serious challenge. Twenty years ago, Clark's book The Painting of Modern Life extended Baudelaire's paradigm to the art of Manet and his followers. Clark's more recent and more pessimistic work, however, has come to argue that the cruelty of the modern world, a world that follows the rules of "modernization," has overtaken and invalidated modernist hope. Modernism, "so cold and optimistic," has been defeated, reduced to evermore-unreadable ruins.²

Baudelaire and Clark both understand the modern in terms of the contingent. "Modernity," affirms Clark, "means contingency." Such contingency is structural and temporal, social and historical. Modernism thus remains contingent on a valid claim and hope of emancipation and hence connected to the Enlightenment and its bonding of knowledge and freedom. When modernism chooses to pursue freedom through aesthetic principles and practices, it is asserting the aesthetic—that is, the sensory and the stylistic—as constitutive and indeed restorative of human energy, creativity, and indeed, freedom. At the same time, modernism criticizes and revises the Enlightenment's confidence in the transparency and comprehensibility of the world. In this sense, we might also understand psychoanalysis, for example, as a modernist endeavor.

Modernism covers many genres. The modernism that Clark calls "cold and optimistic" might best describe the anti-ornamental architectural modernism that governs the work of Adolf Loos in Vienna and Mies van der Rohe and his followers "from the Bauhaus to our house," from Germany to New York to Brasilia and beyond. The liberation from ornament carried the claim of transcending history. Thus, the legacy of architectural history becomes synonymous with historicism—the heavily burdened style in which past models are imitated both for their structural and symbolic qualities. Schorske has recently reaffirmed the ahistoricity of this sort of modernism, describing the modernist turn of...