NEW STATESMAN * 4 DECEMBER 2000

Edited by Frances Stonor Saunders

What do opera and adultery~~~~----- havein-cmmon-R-card-en___ o
What do opera anid adulterv have in common? Richar-d Senneft on
how music keeps up with illicit love
Playing away
pera has always had an affinity to adultery. Secret
meetings, betrayals, sudden discovery - this is the
i erotic stuff that unleashes shameless musical display.
But, like all passions, adultery has its own history, and music
has had to follow changes in the meaning of illicit love.
Up to the industrial era, adultery had an impersonal, eco-
nomic side. Bastards (and, much more rarely, divorce) mud-
died the clear transmission of family property from genera-
tion to generation. Yet, when marriages were arranged for
gain by parents, the hope that newlyweds might actually love
each other proved just that - a fond hope. In reality, young
couples were more likely to find love for themselves else-
where. Practising the art of adultery in everyday life meant
learning tojuggle; the guilty couple needed to manage appear-
ances. Adultery also provoked the complicity of silence
within marriages. Although a spouse might well have known
the other was unfaithful, an affair could be accepted only so
long as it remained unspoken. Madame de Sevigne's letters
reveal the arts of adultery practised sensibly among the upper
classes; with equal finesse, the working class do so in Defoe' s
Moll Flanders.
By the end of the 18th century, however, this juggling act
had started to break down; people wanted to marry for love,
only love. In the world of money, inheritance meant ever
less, and bastards could get work. Indeed, work was now
seen as an effoi-t of self-creation - as was family life. The
Victorians easily used the phrase "founding a family", which
would have sounded strangely egoistic a century before.
This sea change in society transformed the meaning of
adultery: if family love is a form of self-expression, then
falling out of married love implies a cataclysmic upheaval at
once personal and social. One hasn't really known oneself.
Adultery opens the gates to a delayed personal truth, it
becomes the remedy of a mistake, and this personal discov-
ery had to out in society - continued deception of others
would mean only more lying to oneself. That's the distance
travelled in the century or so between Moll Flanders and
Aunna Karenina.
The opera composer, no less than the novelist, had to come
to terms with adultery as a form of self-discovery. In music,
the distance travelled lies between Mozart's Marriage of
Figaro and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. In Figaro, true
love eventually wins out; and in Mozart's Cosizfan tutte, the
main characters discover new desires. But Mozart's genius
40 flourished in dramatising acts of seduction and deception,
while the librettos of his operas gravitate
to the theme of social appearances. (The
stunning music celebrating fidelity at the
end of The Magic Flute is, perhaps, the
exception that proves the nile.)
In Tistan, we are thrust unashamedly
into adulterous love itself, as a trans-
forming, consuming act. Wagner dug
deep into the medieval past for his
story, making use of newly unearthed
manuscripts of the Tristan legend.
Consideredjust as a libretto, Tristan is a
bit ludicrous: there is a magic love
potion, a ship that fails to arrive in the
nick of time (although Wagnerian
transport is far more reliable than our
own beloved Railtrack) and neatly
symmetrical killings. But the music
makes these stage devices powerful to
the ear in a way they could never be on
the page.
In this opera, written midway between
his four epics of the Ring, Wagner delves
deep into the possibilities of chromati-
cism, the half-tone steps that are the
fundamentals of western music. Long
melodies pour forth from narrow half-tone movements.
Wagner sets this chromatic thrust against both crude
harmonic shifts, such as the plagal cadences of church
music, and more recherche' harmonics, such as elaborated
"Neapolitan-sixth" cadences - the harmonic adventure
that, later, Debussy liked to use. In Tristan, the aural result
no only compresses melody but also extends it through har-
monic rupture.
This chromatic thrust helps Wagner the musical dramatist
to achieve the intensity that transforms a creaky libretto into
a compelling stage work. The great love duet in Act Two
carries forward on chromatic melodic waves that are dis-
solved then recomposed, again and again. Although the Q
signposts of musical memory, Wagner's leitmotifs, are used
carefully in this opera, as in all his mature work, they are less ,
important; the yet-to-be, the thrust forward, puts a different t
mark on the music of Tristan.
All of Wagner is long, and orchestral players like myself 5
do occasionally get bored, losing contact with the music. r
'the back half
Love-madness: Gabriele Schnaut as Isolde in Tristan and
Isolde (The Royal Opera)
But not in Tristan. For us, as for the audience, the intensity
of the score makes it seem almost too short.
The crafting of Tristan's sound particularly suits its
subject, adultery. The chromatic thrusting conveys to the ear
the sense of transfiguration that adulterous passion displays
on the stage. Some critics maintain that this opera is Wag-
ner' s version of Romeo and Juliet, which would make it a
stoiy of doomed love, but that's not quite right. Just as the
music keeps evolving, so does the love between Tristan and
Isolde. The philosopher Jerry Fodor aptly remarks that, by
Act Three, the dying Tristan no longer needs assurances
of Isolde's love - "what he wants is her permission to die".
And, by the end of the opera, Isolde's love-madness has
changed from the abandoned lust that came upon her when
she first drank the love potion: it has become sweeter, mater-
nal. So, too, the chromatic shifts of her "Liebestod" aria
have a new harmonic context.
What marks Tristan as a work of its time is the crime that
the lovers commit; the intensity of illicit love is intense
because illicit-it is not "normal" to feel so much. Hans
Sachs - perhaps Wagner's only truly sympathetic
character, and just a man - will mock boundless love
in Die Meistersinger. But in Tristan, Wagner sought to
express Eros without restraint in an era when people
believed in moral discipline. No transforming love
without transgression, then: this was the conundrum
written out in the pages ofAnna Karenina, sounded out
in this amazing opera.
It may be that the passions of adultery today can no
longer fuel opera as an art form. At least, that possibil-
ity occurred to me when I attended the recent produc-
tion of Tristan at the Royal Opera House in Covent
Garden. The director, Herbert Wernicke, announced
in the press his desire to make something modern of
this work. On stage, he has stripped away the element
of transgression by the simplest of dramatic means:
Tristan and Isolde never touch. They are isolated from
each other, moving up and down two ramps that are
like separate bedrooms. The reason for this, Wemicke
said, is that he conceives the opera to be a story of indi-
vidual longing, of Sehnsucht. Desire has replaced pas-
sion, and pent-up desire commits no crime. So it is,
indeed, quite modem: adultery has lost its bite.
Much modem opera production, particularly in Ger-
many, pits director against composer - directors such as
Wermicke arguing with the music, rather than appearing
as the composer's servant. There is nothing wrong, in
principle, with converting Tristan into an opera about
masturbation rather than coition. But even with a pro-
duction worthy of his gifts, Wemicke could not, I
believe, have brought off this particular argument.
Wernicke, who has done brilliant work in Frankfurt
and Salzburg, was poorly served by his two principal
singers. Gabriele Schnaut, the Isolde, shouted
throughout; Jon Frederic West, the Tristan, bawled.
At least Schnaut has a good ear, and so delivered on
Wagner's chromatic distinctions, while West wandered
uncertainly from tone to tone. The conductor Bernard
Haitink, however, perforned beautifully - the sound com-
ing from the pit was ravishing.
So was the look of the stage. Wernicke designed it like a
Malevich painting, using simple planes and strong colours.
He has sensed, as has the American director Robert Wilson,
how closely the experience of colour complements that of
hearing sound; musicians constantly talk about colouring a
sound, something we intuitively understand, although have
difficulty explaining. However, just in the look of the set,
Wernicke began to lose his argument.
Whereas the music becomes ever more gripping, the stage,
after the first shock of its visual beauty, becomes quite bor-
ing. The bold, stark colour planes remain static, while the
colours of the music shimmer, dissolve and recombine. Sim-
ilarly in the dramaturgy, Tristan and Isolde on their separate
ramps desire each other in Act One, Act Two and Act Three.
Then the curtain falls. Desire has no narrative. > 41
NFW STATESMAN * 4 DECEMBER 2000
1> My sociological self tells me that there is something
socially significant about the failure, of Wernicke' s argu-
ment. Transgression and violation give value to the evervday
world, as well as to the forbidden. Take the illicit out of social
life, and you wind up with what Herbert Marcuse called a
one-dimensional society; provocation becomes just a little
prick of sensation, nothing more. In love, as in politics, our
desires have to strain against the rules to carry weight.
I don' t mean that the Victoriatns got it right. Adultery is no
crime, although marriage ought to be more than just another
affair. But it does seem to me that artists - writers, as well as
composers - have trouble fashioning dramas from love, as
Wernicke does, when love itself is reduced to desire.
Moreover, love carries its weight because it can be danger-
ous, to oneself and to others. This is the element of adultery
that opera has exploited, through all the twists and turns in
the meaning of adultery itself. And that's why, I think,
Wagner won the argument at Covent Garden.
Richar I Sennett is a musician and writer. His latest
book, The CorTosion of Character: the personal
consequences of work in the new capitalism, is
published by W W Norton ({9.95)
The state of sodomy
FILIM
JOAN BAKEWELL slopes off to view
Pasolini's most controversial film
figure in a shapeless mac sneaks into an obscure
cinema to join other loners in watching scenes of sus-
Atained depravity. It could be the regular pornography
routine of sad men seeking pleasure from the sexual antics
of others. Except the cinema, in this case, is at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts, the powerhouse of the
avant-garde situated just down the Mall from
Buckingham Palace. The film is released by the
British Film Institute, another pillar of the nation's
cultural campus, and 1, its chair, am the person in
the mac.
The film is Salo, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975
version of the Marquis de Sade's novel The 120
Days of Sodom. The audience is, indeed, mostly A
men on their own, but they are clearly not the dirty
mac brigade, for this is art-house porn, the sort that
can summon, as did Lady Chatterley 's Lover in its
day, legions of cultural pundits to verify its high
purpose and justify its availability.
But this is more than so-called "art-house" porn.
This is intended by its maker as a meditation on
pornography itself. "An immense sadistic
metaphor", Pasolini claimed of what was the
Nazi-fascist "dissociation" from its "crimes
against humanity". Unhappily, watching a
metaphor involves being exposed to actual activi-
ties played out by actors in front of the camera.
One's first reaction, before getting round to the ideas, the
thesis, the thinking, is a gut sense of horror and repulsion.
Feelings register first and overridingly as the film proceeds.
Only later could I salvage, from my visceral response, the
energy to address the film's deep seriousness and substan-
tial achievement. Easy porn it is not. As Quentin Falk
remarked whenrushes ofthe filmwere stolenbypresumably
over-excited thieves, what they got was 120 days of sod all!
So what do we get? Pasolini set his film not in the 18th-
century France of the novel, butin Salb, abeautifulresort on
Lake Garda, in 1944. Here, as support for fascism crumbled,
Mussolini, together with his most fanatical followers, set up
the headquarters of his puppet republic. In Salo, a group of
men - referred to as President. Excellency, Bishop and so
on - come together to enjoy sexual orgies orchestrated for
them by four elegant and ageing procuresses. The film opens
with the rounding up, one by one, of young people by fascist
soldiers - rather as though they were capturing partisans.
But this is worse than warfare - where, after a fashion, cer-
tain rules apply. Instead, they are taken to an ancient Italian
palace where rules of any kind are abandoned, and they are
progressively abused and tortured for the remaining 90 min-
utes of the filn.
The agony is unrelieved. An appeal to God or religion by
the young victims is punished by instant death. And when
two of them enjoy some warm and natural sex, they are
immediately shot. How much of this did I need, I wondered,
before getting the point that power is dangerous and knows
no limits. Certainly, the repetitive monotony of it all rein-
forces Hannah Arendt' s point about the banality of evil. The
guards in the concentration camps must have had a similar
response. And that is Pasolini's point.
We live in times when the climate of censorship is chang-
ing fast. Pasolini's film, much reviled when it was first
made, is now on the film club and national film theatre
circuit, and is being paid respectful attention by the critics.
But it is not alone. Film-makers are exploring the darker
42
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TITLE: Playing away
SOURCE: New Statesman (London, England: 1996) 129 D 4 2000
WN: 0033905316018
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