Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Descripción editorial
Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald)
Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera.” An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we.” He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: “Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).”
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The real and imagined history of opera, the landscape of emotions, and the "blast furnaces of the soul," guide Kluge's captivating collection. Over 100 short stories compose a vision of opera as a durable and protean art form. It is both capable of saving lives as when the destructive Turkish occupants of Smyrna visit in the early 20th century and venerate that city's opera house and of deforming them as in "The Great Welaschka," a story about a talented soprano who is "unable to improve on her initial standing" and overshadowed by her lover and his friend. The more historical stories imagine a lost work by John Cage, an East German production called Freedom Opera, and the 1941 Leningrad premiere of Lohengrin, scheduled for what turns out to be the day of the surprise German invasion. Other pieces deconstruct the plots of Norma and Cavalleria Rusticana, given a narrator's conviction that in all operas "the elements operate among themselves... under the skin of events." Kluge imagines his parents sitting a few rows away from Walter Benjamin in 1931 and arguing about Madame Butterfly after the performance. A filmmaker, philosopher, and lifelong devotee of the art of opera, Kluge is a maestro with impressive range; readers will commit to "following the voice where it wishes to go."
