Opera somehow lives a perennial life: just when it seems dead or obsolete, it springs up again. In contemporary visual art alone there’s a resurgence of operatic productions (e.g. Shirin Neshat, Kentridge, etc.). It almost seems that opera is a rite of passage or the final trial for any ‘serious’ artist working today. At some point in an artist’s career, they are inevitably confronted with getting ‘serious’ about their work, and like the devil, opera reappears as the serious art form. Even the already ‘great’ or established artists of our era are required to pay homage to the opera: both Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett were nauseated by opera yet produced one anyway! But beyond careers and institutions, opera reemerges today because opera itself was historically the reemergence of a lost or suppressed human art, Greek tragedy. At least to Nietzsche, who argued that tragedy was an art form exemplary in offering a self-critical experience of society. Ancient Greeks congregated by the thousands to take a hard look into the ramifications of their ethos. With a positive turn into a self-righteous Alexandrian web of knowledge, this critical insight into society became buried, only to reemerge, seemingly mysteriously, with opera in the Renaissance. In other words, opera was the return of something repressed, in degraded form. It is an art form whose very existence grew out of a need of a repressed social situation. In Nietzsche’s words, it was symptomatic of a tragic need for art within a tragic culture. Opera didn’t fulfill this need, as the “musical discharges” it offered were constrained by the era’s morality. It’s as if Opera stimulated accidental orgasms in its audience. But even though these meaningful discharges were still repressed, it pointed to a real need.

Concerning the pseudo-sexual concept of discharge, Nietzsche says that “philologists are not sure whether it should be included among medical or moral phenomena”! Discharge might be at the core of drama itself, as it is a fascination with natural discharge that prompted the earliest cults to create Zeus: lightning is a charging and discharging of energy. Accumulation and release captivated the minds of the earliest humans. The earliest mystery cults who created Zeus were ultimately led by the imagination to a fertility god of Dionysus (sex and death), speculated to be a remnant of matriarchal society. One of the many productive tensions between Dionysian and Appollonian themes could also be the sexual tension between matriarchal and patriarchal society. Tragedy is rife with unresolved ‘gender conflict’, and all art since then is likewise burdened. But is art today able to meet this challenge?

Gender conflict — to phrase a harrowing social problem in trivial modern terms — is a theme in Berg’s Wozzeck (1922). [1] Franz is a castrated man. He senses a deep rumbling underneath the wet Earth, which could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for a long repressed musical art. The pond’s impenetrable murky surface is confounding and foreboding, tragedy lurks beneath the gurgling stream of opera. Franz is morbidly drawn towards it and has to be pulled back by a ‘friend’. Franz struggles with controlling his bladder, which, if we’ve learned anything from psychoanalysis, isn’t limited to urination, but the entire orgastic function. He says it’s natural, to which the knowledgeable Doctor — who lords about town like a tyrant instilling fear in everyone, including the state — pedantically responds that humans have mastered nature. And yet Franz pisses in the alleys. He never received the contract. Franz is cuckolded; his wife cheats on him with a more decorated officer while he expresses a maternal concern for their child. Bar songs that should be friendly and communal take on the nightmarish appearance of a community hunting him down. They “smell blood” on him — either because he cares too much, a bleeding heart, or because he ultimately murders his wife, Marie. Either way, the smell is all the same. In Baudelairean fashion, the drunkards in the bar are the wisemen! They alone understand the “river of time”, and for a moment Franz tries to join them, but can’t. Arguably, this humiliation happens not despite his attempts to do the right thing, but because of it: an inverted moral that Franz learns too late. Deprived of his woman —“She’s all I have” — and his property, he is stripped of all identity as a man. From a moralistic contemporary perspective, this should have liberating consequences — patriarchy is ‘bad’ — but instead, both Marie and Franz suffer miserable psychological torment and then die from no discernible cause. There is no intelligible meaning to their demise in their world, just a faint gurgling din emerging from the pond of death, which Franz finally penetrates. When his curiosity is sated the story ends.

Operas are historically about love, and in a repressed manner, sex. The repressed aspect is part of the form that contemporary operas are inevitably hard-pressed to find a way around and often ‘resolve’ through dressed-up asceticism. Regarding sexuality, the concept of discharge is most thoroughly ‘fleshed out’ by Wilhelm Reich’s insights into orgasm. At its most basic, humans build up energy in various ways and discharge it. At the simplest and most visceral level, one only need think of physical friction as a charging force. Friction, between individual and society, family and society, individual and family, etc. is the poetic motive of both tragic drama and opera. Is it possible that operatic character frictions are metaphorical playacts of latent sex drives?

The invention of musical instruments itself is expected to fulfill a lack in modern, mystical humans enmeshed in the Alexandrian web. Art still hasn’t completely wriggled free from its old religious skin, so art today is bound to complete this shedding. The “religious man” who still lurks within the contemporary artist like a golem…

Succumbs to a feeling of being incapable of happiness in this world. In view of the fact that he is a biologic creature and cannot under any circumstances forego happiness, release, and gratification, he seeks illusionary happiness. This he can obtain from the forepleasure of religious tensions, i.e., the vegetative somatic currents and excitations with which we are familiar. Together with his fellow believers, he will arrange entertainments and create institutions that alleviate this state of physical excitation and are also capable of disguising the real nature of this excitation. His biologic organism prompts him to construct a musical instrument, an organ, the sound of which is capable of evoking such currents in the body. The mystical darkness of the church intensifies the effect of a superpersonal sensibility to one’s own inner life and to the sounds of a sermon, a chorale, etc., intended to achieve this effect. In reality the religious man has become completely helpless. [2]

This isn’t exactly what Nietzsche had in mind with the term discharge, which described the capacity for Dionysian suffering, often expressed in loving passion, to expend itself in Apollonian imagery, but it does frame the problem in light of artistic pathos in Alexandrian culture, which yearns for the love that cultivates the possibility for cosmic orgasm. For Reich, sexual liberation is not promiscuity, but the ability to abandon oneself to another in sex, and, as a result, release built-up tension. The invention of the organ merely recapitulates the origins of drama in its early religious cults, e.g. the bull-roarer that simulated Zeus’ thunderous discharges. Both instruments are oscillatory — literally charged — and form the foundation for the electronic musical currents and seance-like sensuous happenings today. But music is more than mere sonority.

Like Wozzeck, Euripides’ Medea is also about the death of love. The entire tragedy is composed by Medea’s oscillation of extreme psychic states. She desires for a “Lightning bolt, pierce through my head!” Medea’s story is nearly a monologue, with almost no props, and is expressed in the charging reverie-space where action is suspended. Medea operates in a caesura of activity. Her wise servant hints that her secret endeavor is to use music to cure sorrow, but it will fail:

The men of old had little sense;

If you called them fools you wouldn’t be far wrong.

They invented songs, and all the sweetness of music,

To perform at feasts, banquets, and celebrations

But no one thought of using

Songs and the lyre to banish

The bitterness and pain of life.

Sorrow is the real cause

Of deaths and disasters and ruined families.

If music could cure sorrow it would be precious.

But after a dinner why sing songs?

Medea is profound for implicitly understanding deferred gratification; she doesn’t expect immediate action, but begs Creon for more time to charge the situation. Her servant’s (er, personal assistant’s?) textual descriptions of burning flesh and blackened eyes are far more visceral for not having seen them and accomplish far more than any amount of props or special effects ever could. It is literally fleshed out. Medea’s tension is also charged by the complete commitment to an idea — in this case hatred — and the feeling of love for her children. Medea is not the personification of so-called ‘female passion’, but embodies a full tension of opposites. It’s not enough to go halfway, to use knowledge for one’s advantages in life; the very idea of hatred, since it exists and is real, has to, of its own inner logic, be followed through until its bitter end. It isn’t truthful enough for Medea to use hatred as a plaything, to discard it when she wants to be done with it, since the truth of hatred is that it is a bottomless cup: it must be complete and perfectly fleshed out. Unlike Wozzeck’s fearful-pathetic character, who we originally suspect might not even be physically capable of crushing his enemies, Medea brutally flays her enemies, but the endless reason buried within revenge compels her further to still more action. The sensuousness of the idea itself demands the sacrifice of her children, which is deferred by her extreme love for them. Ultimately hatred wins out: “I loathe you more than I love them” is a very real feeling that anyone who has been spurned in love knows. She is rewarded: for her love of reason, Medea is given the gift of music, which only she can hear in some distant aether. The culmination is not a ‘petite mort’, but a cosmic orgasmic death-release that delivers Medea soaring into the heavens in a chariot of fire. And fire always represents music. 

It’s difficult to imagine artists today committing to an idea that might undermine their lifestyle choices and accommodated hopes, let alone fully flesh out difficult critical realities. Moreover, in the constant expectation for immediate gratification, it’s difficult to imagine artists having the integrity to withhold such gratification from audiences expecting the somatic effects of entertainment (even and perhaps especially in the realm of ‘serious art’). Moreover, when passionate love and suffering inevitably emerge out of our narcissistic social situation, will artists be prepared to recognize and represent it? Likely not. Medea and Jason’s isn’t the love of ‘sincerity’, but a love of life and death. We may want opera, but are we capable of loving enough for it? Better maybe to find and work through existent stories that help us experience the love that we can only train for in the inchoate and unclear suffering of real life. Even in the eternally protected realm of artistic semblance, we delude ourselves with the self-affirmation of “fellow-believers” who lovelessly, sexlessly, and robotically build institutions that aestheticize attitudes that prevent taking cold, hard looks in the mirror. If tragedy offers social cautionary tales, and if we are in a tragic culture, then what does a self-righteous art foretell? [3] We are truly living in a time when art slithers back into the comforting husk of religion, when our ‘great’ artists are sermonizers, pathologically preaching to their choirs in mystified art bunkers. Wherever there is only self-righteousness, there is no love, sex, or music. Just as in loving sex we critically and fearfully risk doing the wrong thing, maybe an art of self-wrongfulness would be more gratifying for our trampled libidos. [4] To get ‘serious’, artists will also have to brave wrongness, and risk life and death, to love. Until then we will not have earned access to music, and it will elude us. It will be predigested suffering. We might want opera, but can we have it? //

Lars Von Trier’s Medea extends the reverie space into an endless wilderness, an elegy for love lost made more powerful by Lisa Gerard’s music. The pain is not Medea’s alone, but the entire family’s: Jason’s eyes (closest to that of ours as viewers) seem about to burst with sadness; the children willingly and awfully go to their grave. I ask you this, Dear Readers, for what music did Medea’s family tragically die?)

[1] We’re in a better place to comprehend Wozzeck’s meaning today, if Adorno was correct when he said the Büchner play was ripe enough for Berg’s moment only because it had properly aged enough to recede into nature. The key to composing an opera — or any creative music — is in finding the right ‘kindling’ that has been dried and hollowed out of its immediacy, and where the music can “catch fire”. The composition of a (good) opera requires dead social material that ultimately clarifies its own moment by serving as a foil. This is not new; Greek tragedy always took as its social content other stories, people, places, etc. that were considered dead...until the musical fire transformed them. 

Theodor Adorno, “On the Opera Wozzeck” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California, 2002

[2] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, Penguin, 1975, p. 147. 

[3] Of course not all art needs to be tragic. But self-righteousness cripples comedy even worse, nothing is less humorous than people doing the right things.

[4] Or an aesthetics of blindness