Two Notes, One Ending (Three Operas) at the Boundary of the Great Divide; or, Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche

Abstract

Opera … puts normality into question. It's fair to say that subjectivity needed opera; it's a good deal more certain that opera needed subjectivity—or, better, the anxieties associated with subjectivity—for opera to have taken on the cultural force it enjoyed, particularly by the time history puts Wagner into the equation. As a principal site where subjectivity could be staged, witnessed, and indeed celebrated both visually and aurally, opera was at the same time a discourse that, by the very nature of its social standing and interpellative agency, attracted serious philosophical attention—witness Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche: opera was serious cultural business. Wagner in particular regarded opera as a form of cultural pedagogy, such being the ultimate function of Bayreuth, after all, in the composer's megalomaniacal urge for full and eternal control of his discourse and its social impact. The potential for entertainment as such had little purchase in Wagner's imaginary (and even without bothering with any of his endless musings on such matters, one gets that notion firmly established by nearly every thought that entered Cosima's head concerning her husband and duly confined to her diary). Bayreuth's hard-luck bench seating, not for nothing church-like, somatically reinforced a form of listening deemed appropriate for the wished-for Bildung of the proper bourgeois,1 no matter Wagner's ambivalence toward his social class; and, like church, the music was to be experienced, to borrow a phrase from Peter Gay, in “worshipful silence,”2 but certainly not without effect.