The Void of Utopian Potentials: Heiner Muller's Production of Tristan und Isolde

Abstract

Heiner Muller's opera debut with the production of Tristan and Isolde at the 82nd Bayreuth Richard Wagner Festival in July of 1993 came as a surprise.1 Long before the premiere, the news about Muller's appointment at one of Germany's world-famous, yet also controversial institutions of high culture2 gave room for speculation about the outcome of the event. How would the East German playwright, known for his uncompromising efforts at excavating the contradictions of German culture and history, approach Wagner's music drama? How would he stage a piece from the nineteenth-century composer whose musical modernism and-now suspect-monumentalism brought him as much fame and appraisal as his notorious anti-Semitism and nationalism distrust?3 Muller's opera debut was a surprise also for another reason. After all, he was hardly known for having a particularly strong interest in opera, let alone a taste for the music of Wagner (though he does claim that Wagner's dramaturgical ingenuity had always been important to him).4 And did not the Brechtian dimension of his thinking seem to be at odds with any deeper engagement with the work of Wagner? Again, was it not Brecht who, in a politically and aesthetically substantiated verdict against Wagner, had insisted that Wagner's operas should not be performed because of their educational and ideological abuse by the Nazis?5 Yet Brecht's postwar stance against Wagner was relativized when in the 1970s several Brecht students, such as Ruth Berghaus,6 who sought to contextualize Wagner within the parameters of dialectical enlightenment, showed a renewed interest in Wagner and staged path-breaking productions of his work. In his autobiography, Muller describes his relation to opera as having been disturbed for a long time.7 He mentions seeing a performance of Tristan and Isolde in 1948 that, however, made no lasting impression on him. It was primarily through the music of the Brechtian composer Hanns Eisler and through his collaboration on Paul Dessau's modern opera Lancelot in the late sixties, that he discovered the potential of music in theater and beyond.8Yet it was not until much later that he developed a more genuine interest in opera.9 Nevertheless, the work with Dessau and his modern opera resulted in a short article entitled Sechs Punkte zur Oper [Six Points about Opera] that appeared in the East German theater journal Theater der Zeit in 1970. In this article, Muller argues for the larger utopian potential of opera in comparison to the theater, and he maintains the possibility that opera in the GDR might generate an innovative theater practice: What one cannot yet say, one can perhaps already sing [Was man noch nicht sagen kann, kann man vielleicht schon singen].10 This peculiar and surprising programmatic optimism about the innovative aesthetic and social function of opera, which regards opera music as a vehicle for utopias, must be understood against the backdrop of the playwright's repeated disillusionment with East German censorship. This includes the scandal surrounding the premiere of his play about the land reform, Die Umsiedlerin, in 1961, and the critique to which the notorious eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee in 1964 subjected his industrial play, Der Bau. These experiences led Muller to turn to Greek mythology in order to address topical issues of power and politics in his plays. Eventually he abandoned the theme of socialist reconstruction altogether and focused on larger questions of German history and civilization, depicting what Joachim Fiebach has aptly described as the collision of human bodies with ideas.11 The increased hermeticism as well as the surreal and allegorical forms of representation in his plays since the 1970s are a consequence of these concrete historical experiences as a result of which negation became for Muller the only form of expressing the unbearable impossibility of social innovation.12 More than a decade after the publication of his article on opera, in one of his numerous televised conversations with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge that took place shortly after the premiere of his production of Tristan and Isolde, Muller's profoundly pessimistic outlook with regard to the function of opera clearly replaced his earlier optimism. …