Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee

Imagine that you are in Jersey City, a seaport east of Newark. We are at the Loew's Grand Cinema, a half-restored, half-ruined 1920s picture palace that seats two thousand, has marble and velvet in the lobby and Turkish alabaster chandeliers in an auditorium with a ceiling at least one hundred feet up. I have decided that my sons need an "authentic" cinematic experience, so I have taken them to see The Thief of Baghdad, a 1939 Technicolor epic (co-directed by Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan) that is being shown in a 35 millimeter print, projected on period equipment with no modern concessions—no Surround sound or Dolby, for instance, just old speakers, all behind the screen. The audience is made up of people who have traveled to get here (Michael Powell devotées, Sabu fans, old movie palace fans, Orientalists), alongside a local Jersey City crowd, émigré middle Easterners of all ages in mixed East-West apparel. At least one family member is ready to be entertained by absolutely everything on hand. But not four minutes into the film a Wagner proximity alarm goes off. I hear a musical allusion to The Flying Dutchman [Der f liegende Holländer ], more specifically, to measures 32–64 of the overture. And, despite telling myself that I was off duty, I later noted two leitmotivic repetitions of this music about an hour in.

Why would someone hear a fragment from The Flying Dutchman embedded in this soundtrack, and in these places specifically? Not just because there is a musical resemblance: an arc downward over a dominant pedal point (A-natural as the dominant of d minor in the opera, G♯ as the dominant of C♯ minor in the movie) to a pianissimo tremolo punctuated by a few final, sporadic brass chords. Orchestration and harmony are also parallel. But that is not enough—it was not enough to account for my mental synapse, and thus it is not enough to explain this synapse by underlining resonances between the two musical ideas in the abstract. I want to isolate the epiphanic moment when The Flying Dutchman seemed to emerge from the soundtrack, but also to suggest that such epiphanies do not happen in isolation, and that they depend not simply upon two texts but also upon their realizations–their performances, the delivery systems that materialize them.

This opposition between text and performance is hardly unfamiliar, and it is not under-theorized—as fat bibliographies on "the performative" or "performance studies" will attest. Performance theory in general, however, is exactly that—concerned with abstractions; as such, the field suffers no foolishness or failures of objectivity, and that is a great shame. Experiencing a performance, no matter how grim the "work" in question, allows for the spectator's being diverted and amused by human antics and human labor all around; performances thus create perpetual comic counterpoints to "works." But being receptive to this counterpoint? Music of the future. The ludic aspects of performance, predicated as they are on the singular experienced event, have been given no voice: in academic writings on opera, the "danger" of being diverted by them and drawn away from the work seems to lead to unarticulated intellectual panic. And analyses of stagings and mises-en-scène, as far as they are readings of directors' readings of operatic texts, come no closer to actual performances and their counterpoints, though such readings do appreciate the campfire warmth the P-word can convey.

Yet our access to temporal works is through manifestations that lie beyond our fashioning or control—as Stanley Cavell writes (apropos film), one's sense for any given text may well be "dependent on the quality of the individual session of screening"—that is, on a specific aesthetic experience.¹ What follows, then, is in part an attempt to proceed from the individual quality of experience, and on that basis to describe the redemptive potential of opera's fun factor: the absurdities...