Joy Calico
As an extravagant art-form traditionally beholden to wealthy patrons and state institutions, opera may seem a poor medium for speaking truth to power. Yet there is a modernist if modest tradition of deploying opera for this purpose in the twentieth century, established by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill during the Weimar Republic and perpetuated by Luigi Nono and B.A. Zimmermann in the 1960s. German composer Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) contributed to this tradition in 1997 with Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), generally described as an opera even though the composer calls it “Musik mit Bildern” (music with images). The libretto is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Little Match Girl,” but also incorporates quotations from Leonardo da Vinci and Gudrun Ensslin. Ensslin (1940–77) was a founding member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a leftist militant organization established in West Germany in 1970 and designated a terrorist group by that state. She was also a childhood friend of the composer. Instead of treating Andersen’s text as a naïve children’s story, Lachenmann foregrounds its critique of social and political forces that leave the most vulnerable to fend for themselves, most conspicuously by bringing it into dialogue with excerpts from Ensslin’s prison letters. I locate his use of Andersen’s fairy tale within the tradition of Marxist illuminations of folk and fairy tales traced by German folklorist Jack Zipes.
I will argue that this work performs resistance in two ways: it resists the conventions of opera as genre and institution, and it opposes the dominant politics of 1990s Germany. British music journalist Tom Service describes Lachenmann’s musical style as “enacting a kind of politics of musical production,” and quotes the composer: “you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.”1 Here Lachenmann speaks of the resistance of instruments and performers, but he could also speak of resistance on the part of some audiences. The language is that of Marxist critique, even if he eschews an explicit political affiliation. This chapter has three parts: an introduction to the tradition of opera as resistance and Lachenmann’s piece in that corpus; an exploration of Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern from that perspective; and a typology of resistance.
Opera emerged from aristocratic courts in Italy around 1600, and by the 1670s it could be found throughout the continent. The first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, and eventually opera became a more-or-less quotidian component of Italian culture, even if elsewhere it retained stronger associations with the moneyed classes and their political agendas. Well into the twentieth century censors worked diligently in cities across Europe to ensure that nothing incendiary found its way onto the operatic stage. Even so, the performance of a nationalist grand opera in Brussels, La muette de Portici by Daniel Auber, has long been credited with setting off the Belgian Revolution in 1830 (even if scholars have reconsidered the precise nature of its role in recent years).2 More often, opera is a genre that can be fashioned into a tool for social critique rather than a tool of revolution—less of a frontal assault on the political powers-that-be and more of a commentary on the social conditions enabled by those political systems.3 (The same systems, it should be noted, that enable the production of opera itself, so there is always an internal tension at work.) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operatic treatment of Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais’s play La nozze di Figaro from 1786 is an early such example (the plot involves servants outwitting a master determined to invoke his droit du seigneur, or the right of a feudal lord to have sex with his vassals’ brides on their wedding nights). There are two German landmarks in this tradition from the Weimar Republic: Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill; and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), also by Brecht and Weill. Both are socialist critiques of capitalism, and find the composer Kurt Weill wielding popular musical styles with surgical precision to devastating satirical effect.
This kind of tuneful satire was one mode of musical modernism; another dominant strain was atonality, the rejection of functional harmony and melody for other musical languages that were less melodious and more dissonant. Modernist operas with atonal or post-tonal music present a very different soundscape, and can cultivate a very different kind of social critique. There are a few such works from the 1960s. Die Soldaten, written by West German composer B.A. Zimmermann (1918–70) and premiered at Cologne in 1965, may be the biggest and rawest of these. The plight of soldiers and civilians brutalized by warfare unfolds in a howling cacophony, the disorienting effect of which is exacerbated by the fact it takes place yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once. Others are by Luigi Nono (1924–90), the Italian composer married to Arnold Schoenberg’s daughter Nuria, and one of the few who sought to combine atonal music with an overtly socialist humanist agenda. His Intolleranza 1960 arranges the forces of “capitalist exploitation, fascism, and colonialism” on one side, against “an emigrant miner who rebels, the people in opposition, and the struggle against colonialism” on the other.4 In 1975 Nono also composed Al gran sole carico d’amore (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love) with a libretto drawn from texts by a host of Marxist writers (Bertolt Brecht, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin). Both Zimmermann and Nono incorporate pre-recorded material into their sound designs while avoiding linear narrative and musical tonality. Nono was Lachenmann’s mentor, and between the composition of Al gran sole in 1975 and its German premiere in 1978 Lachenmann began to consider writing a “music theater work with a social critical impetus” himself, based on Andersen’s story.5 Lachenmann’s opera is another example in the loose modernist operatic tradition of social critique, and socialist critique, replete with non-linear plot and noisy soundscape. It also offers a prime opportunity for a more rigorous theorizing of opera as resistance.
At age eighty, Lachenmann is the éminence grise of German modernist music. Das Mädchen marked the first time he took his distinctive soundscape into the opera house, arguably the most conservative corner of the art-music art world. Here I use the term “art world” as put forth by Howard S. Becker, referring to “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of artworks that art world is noted for.”6 David Metzer describes Lachenmann’s compositional process as beginning with musical sounds, or musical means of creating sounds, and then “demusicalizing” them in order to alter the surface of that sonority as well as the cultural and semantic meaning that surrounds it.7 The ways in which the instruments of Western classical art music are usually played “and the techniques of what is considered ‘good’ or ‘musical’ sound production only account for a small part” of the sounds the instruments could make (this includes the human voice).8 The composer explores an ever-expanding range of sound possibilities to encourage new ways of listening, in what Laurence Osborn interprets as an attempt to rejuvenate semiotics, “freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners.”9 Crucially, however, in Lachenmann’s estimation as summarized by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “those means of ‘good’ sound production are deeply connected to a historical concept of music that is in turn aligned with bourgeois values, conditions of class oppression, certain market structures, and an all-round tainted system of meaning making.”10 Opera, with its sonic conventions of voice and orchestra rooted in class and market structures, not to mention expectations for discernible plot, theatricality, and patronage, is a genre and an art world ripe for opposition and resistance. Indeed, Nicholas Till writes that, for Lachenmann, “no genre is more challenging formally, ideologically and institutionally than opera.”11
Andersen’s little match girl is a wretched, barefoot child sent into the snow on New Year’s Eve to make money for her family by selling matches. In a futile attempt to keep warm she strikes the matches one at a time, and the flames conjure happy visions: warm ovens, Christmas trees, a holiday meal, and finally her deceased grandmother, who takes her to heaven. Passersby find her body on the street the next day. In Lachenmann’s telling, the story is neither sentimental nor maudlin; it is also scarcely discernible. “The text is so fragmented that it serves more as a collection of phonemes, plosives, sibilants and clicks for vocal exploration than as a conveyer of the story, the very materiality of the language blocking its communicative or expressive function.”12 There are no singers onstage. (In Frankfurt Opera’s 2015 production directed by Benedikt von Peter the only person onstage was the actor Michael Mendl, who remained silent throughout while cavorting with a guinea pig; in the 2016 Spoleto production directed by Mark Down and Phelim McDermott the visual field was largely dedicated to projected texts and shadow puppetry). Two sopranos more-or-less envoice the role of the girl but they sing little intelligible text, while the enormous orchestra and chorus produce few sounds a listener can readily attribute to an instrument. The score is also void of mimesis with the crucial exception of attempts to conjure sonorities that sound cold. These are based on a notion of “music as meteorological condition with naturalistically derived sound categories”: the hollow, brittle timbre of Styrofoam rubbed across string instruments, the use of metal for the clinking or pinging of cold, the snowfall in rising and sinking triads.13
Into this drastically de-familiarized context, Lachenmann introduced texts by Leonardo da Vinci (in which he reported the mixed feelings experienced while staring into a dark cave as a seeker of knowledge) and an excerpt from a letter written by Gudrun Ensslin. As a founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), known colloquially as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, she was involved in five bomb attacks that resulted in four deaths as well as fires in two Frankfurt department stores in April 1968. The RAF represented the radicalized New Left, emerging from the student protest movement determined to confront the apparent failure of denazification with urban guerrilla warfare. Goaded by West German authoritarianism and imperialism, unbridled capitalist consumption, and its attendant global exploitation, they struck back with acts of domestic terrorism.14 She and Lachenmann were both children of Protestant ministers. He says of his childhood friend:
We shared a house in the Tuttling deanery. My father was her father’s boss. Presumably, we have similar religious backgrounds. She was a highly talented student – idealistically inclined, her humane enthusiasm more and more broken by the political events of the time – rearmament, US interventions in the Third World, the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, etc. radically transformed her intellectual and idealistic energy into unbelievable bitterness, hatred for the political system and even preparedness to resort to criminal violence.15
Lachenmann says that fire is the link between the match girl and Ensslin: “she herself is something like an extremely disfigured variant of my ‘girl.’ Not only did she play with matches, she went beyond that and made use of violence, thereby disfiguring her own humaneness.”16 Ensslin’s presence in the opera can be interpreted as an attempt to humanize her by linking her to a sympathetic (albeit fictitious) figure via what Lachenmann appears to see as common ground: two vulnerable characters failed by their respective societies:
There is no excuse for her criminal deeds. But with her conviction in court, the question of our responsibility is not yet answered. Gudrun Ensslin wrote a letter in her Stammheim prison cell using some ugly, violent language, but in the end her words are of touching beauty – beautiful because they call a spade a spade – so that I do not only simply see the unleashed preparedness to use violence and her broken spirit, but also her love for the individual who breaks under the strictures of society.17
In 1972 the RAF leaders were imprisoned together in Stammheim Prison in northern Stuttgart, where they undertook a series of hunger strikes over the years and would commit suicide together in 1977.18 There the prisoners circulated letters among one another and, through their lawyers, to allies on the outside. The quotation Lachenmann incorporates into the opera is from one of these letters, written in early 1973. Ensslin is writing about social systems designed to destroy those for whom the contradiction between wanting to live and being unable to live is an explosive one:
the criminal, the insane, the suicide – they embody this contradiction. they die wretchedly therein. their demise makes clear the hopelessness/impotence of persons in the system: either you destroy yourself or you destroy others, either dead or selfish. in their wretched death is not only the apotheosis of the system: they are not criminal enough, they are not insane enough, they are not murderous enough, and that means faster death through the system in the system. at the same time their wretched death shows the negation of the system: its crime, its madness, its death is the expression of the rebellion of the smashed subjects against their destruction, not thing, but person. (writes on our skin)19
The link he forges between the match girl and the terrorist may be less idiosyncratic than it appears. Jack Zipes has written about the surge in fairy-tale studies by West German Marxists in the mid–1970s as the student movement of the late 1960s “rediscovered, so to speak, the formidable Marxist tradition of the Weimar period, a tradition that had been obfuscated at school and in the university.”20 Zipes is referring to writings about the power of fairy tales by several prominent figures on the Left during the 1920s and 1930s, including Edwin Hoernle’s 1923 essay “The Work in the Communist Children’s Groups,” Ernst Bloch’s 1930 “The Fairy Tale Moves on its Own in Time,” and Walter Benjamin’s 1936 “The Narrator.” He discerns three primary themes in the scholarship of the mid–1970s that grew out of a fresh look at these texts: analyses of the ways in which fairy tales have been transformed to serve the interests of capitalist societies; a belief that fairy tales “can be modernized and reshaped to incorporate a critique of present-day society along utopian lines”; and analyses of the decline of the utopian as the stories are handed down over time.21
Zipes is writing specifically about the German fairy-tale tradition, and the Grimms in particular, but it is not difficult to see a parallel in Lachenmann’s work with Andersen’s tale. He had been thinking about it since at least 1977–8, which coincides with the heyday of the Marxist fairy-tale revival. That was the year he created Les Consolations by adding new movements based on Anderson’s story (Präludium, Interludium, and Postludium) to two other pieces (Consolation I and Consolation II) based on an Ernst Toller text and the Wessobrunn prayer, respectively, which he had composed a decade earlier. It is worth noting that this was also the time of the so-called German Autumn, forty-four days in September and October 1977 during which the RAF tried to force the release of their leaders in Stammheim with a murder, a kidnapping, and a commercial airline hijacking, all of which were badly botched and eventually resulted in the prisoners’ suicides. This was the point at which Lachenmann forged the connection between the fairy-tale character and Gudrun Ensslin. He describes Les Consolations as the first step toward the opera.22 When Pieter H. Bakker Schut’s Stammheim: Der Prozess gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion was published in March 1987, Lachenmann sent a copy to his mentor Luigi Nono and inscribed it to him with a reference to Ensslin. He began sketching a detailed outline of several scenes of the opera on December 1, 1987, and received a commission from Peter Ruzicka at Hamburg Opera in the fall of 1988 for an opera due in 1992; he completed the piece in 1996 and it was premiered in January 1997, twenty years after her death.
In the opera, the text of Ensslin’s letter appears in a scene entitled “Litanei” (Latin for “litany”) just after the girl has lit the second match and it goes out. The title of this section is a liturgical term referring to a series of petitions in a formulaic call and response pattern between clergy and congregants. It gestures toward the religious upbringing that is part of Lachenmann’s public image, something he shared with Ensslin, and obliquely toward the quasi-oratorio nature of the piece (generally understood as an unstaged sung work on a religious theme, such as G.F. Handel’s Messiah).23 The title could refer to the repetitive nature of Ensslin’s text, in which she rages against a litany of societal sins. It can also be construed as an attempt at intercession, asking for mercy (a common refrain in the liturgical form) if not for her personally then for the society that produced her. Sonically this passage is quite typical of the opera as a whole. The choir and two soprano soloists vocalize, mostly on atomized syllables divorced from their semantic content, and instrumentalists use extended techniques to generate sound effects. The line marked “Summe” is added for the conductor’s benefit so that s/he can keep track of the text, since it is virtually impossible to follow its deconstructed distribution among the different voices on the page (Figure 12.1).24
It is impossible to recognize Ensslin’s text audibly, but most opera productions now feature projected texts, so audiences would be able to read the text while listening to its incomprehensible vocalization. I think it is clear from the style and content that this excerpt is not from Andersen’s story, so if it is projected the director must decide whether to provide an attribution for this quotation. In the Spoleto production by Mark Down and Phelim McDermott, the piece was performed in German and the texts were visualized in English translation; this text was not attributed to Ensslin, nor was it marked as anything other than the Andersen story. This production was designed for an American audience—in fact, this was the opera’s American premiere—and this festival audience almost surely had no idea who Gudrun Ensslin was. In the program booklet this text is simply described as “a letter from prison by Gudrun Ensslin”; there is no mention of the RAF, or the link the composer himself forged between the match girl and the terrorist. Is this disassociated text sufficient to qualify as political resistance if no one knows the reference? Perhaps, among an American opera-going crowd, the fact that the criminal, insane, and suicidal are relegated to the margins of society, just as the little match girl is, is sufficient. German audiences are more familiar with that history. The RAF is credited with killing at least thirty-three people and conducting 296 attacks before officially disbanding in 1998—just one year after the opera’s premiere. On the occasion of the opera’s 1997 premiere in Hamburg, there were some cheeky headlines. “Hamburger spielt mit dem Feuer!” (Hamburg plays with fire!) read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung preview, a multivalent play on the plot of the Andersen story, Ensslin’s arson, and the very real possibility that the Hamburg Opera could be making a big mistake by staging this piece. Others then and now struggle to make sense of the connection Lachenmann forged between Andersen’s beloved, pathetic creature and the terrorist who remained a controversial figure even among the old Left, which was conflicted over her zealous commitment to violence.25
Figure 12.1: Helmut Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007, page 173, measures 196–203.
Why bring the RAF into the opera house at all in 1997? In fact, the RAF was already very much in the news that year, as Svea Bräunert’s magisterial study of the group notes, because a new collection of prison letters also appeared that year, and some readers were shocked by the harsh, military-style language members used with one another. Bräunert writes about Klaus Theweleit’s essay from 1998 entitled “Bemerkungen zum RAF Gespenst” (Remarks on the Ghost of the RAF) in which he analysed the prisoners’ language as an unwelcome reminder of and return to the violence that RAF members had inherited from their fascist parents.26 With the benefit of hindsight, Bräunert argues that the “ghost” of the RAF might actually represent something less violent, less of Theweleit’s abstract radicalism and its leftist critique of a haunted relationship to German history, and more of a “memorial-cultural figure, appropriate for certain forms of imagery and temporality” and “traumatic retrospection.”27 It is plausible to me that this is how Lachenmann invokes Ensslin here: as a figure for traumatic retrospection.
Not only was the RAF back in the news in 1997 thanks to the publication of the prison letters, but some conditions were eerily reminiscent of those that first enraged Ensslin in the late 1960s. Germany was more of a capitalist state than ever, still beholden to US policy, and host to numerous US military bases. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had committed German troops to the first Gulf War in 1990; they were mobilized but did not see combat. In 1992 the Federal Constitutional Court declared that the German Army could take part in UN and NATO missions with a parliamentary mandate. From 1992–5 they enforced the no-fly zone in the Bosnian War—the German Army’s first foreign action since the Second World War. In other words, at the time Lachenmann wrote this opera, Germany was just returning to international military engagement. Also in 1997, tensions between Germany’s former East and West remained high, as did unemployment, and an influx of immigrants from post-Soviet states strained the system (2.3 million ethnic German settlers, 2 million asylum seekers). Kohl’s soon-to-be successor, Gerhard Schröder, was proposing reforms to Old-Age Insurance and Health Insurance, among other things, systems designed to protect the most vulnerable members of society.28
The framework for thinking about Das Mädchen as an act of resistance comes from Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, two sociologists whose 2004 article “Conceptualizing Resistance” argued that the term “resistance” was widely used but drastically undertheorized. They eschew debates about definition in favor of identifying “analytically important aspects of resistance.”29 In their survey of the literature, they identified one common denominator—that resistance must include an action against something—and two recurring issues: recognition and intent (534). They also noted that, “resistance is most frequently understood to be aimed at achieving some sort of change,” and that “the change which resistance demands is often assumed to be progressive or at least prosocial” (536). In their conceptualization, then, the two core elements of resistance are opposition and action, both broadly defined; the variants occur most often in matters of recognition and intent.
I would argue that the necessity and degree of recognition and intent are in fact at the heart of interpreting artworks as acts of resistance. Hollander and Einwohner ask, “Must oppositional action be readily apparent to others, and must it in fact be recognized as resistance?” (539). There is considerable disagreement on this point. Some acts of resistance may be illegible to their intended “target,” either because that audience is not acculturated to recognize it, or because those engaged in the act of resistance have deliberately obscured the resistance from the target even while other observers may be able to recognize it as such. Other scholars argue that an act only qualifies as resistance if both the target and other observers recognize it (541). The role of intention is even more hotly contested. Hollander and Einwohner observed that “questions about intent often focus on smaller-scale and ‘everyday’ acts of resistance” because “scholars generally agree that mass-based movements and revolutions clearly represent resistance,” rendering “the intent behind such acts a non-issue” (542). Their survey of the literature on theories of resistance identifies three approaches to the issue of intent. One school of thought maintains that an action can only qualify as resistance if the actor intends it as such; a second rejects that requirement on the premise that knowing an actor’s state of mind is impossible; a third group argues that intent is not central because the “actor may not even be conscious of his or her action as resistance” (542–3). They also note that recognition and intent can be connected: “an observer (such as a researcher) may fail to recognize an act as resistant if she lacks the cultural knowledge to identify the intent behind the action”; and of course, it is possible for the same act to be interpreted differently by different observers (543).
Hollander and Einwohner used their research to develop a sociological typology of resistance, taking as a given the notion that resistance requires an oppositional act of some kind, and then developing categories to account for variants in recognition and intent. Having absorbed their ideas, I set about attempting to think about Lachenmann’s opera through each type, bearing in mind that it appears to operate on two planes simultaneously: performing resistance in a critique of the genre and institution of opera while opposing the German politics of its day, the mid-1990s.
Because this opera does not fall in the category of a mass movement or political revolution—its plot is not about such an event, and, as far as I can tell, scholars do not write about it as resistance—the category of “overt resistance” is a poor fit in terms of high politics. However, Service’s observation that one can hear the material resistance of instruments in the performance of this music, and the negative reactions I observed in the audience at a performance at the Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston in 2016 suggest that it is clearly recognizable as opposition to some “targets” within the opera art world. It is worth remembering, however, that there are denizens of the new music art world, which overlaps slightly with that of the opera art world, who thrill to Lachenmann’s ability to coax new sounds out of conventional instruments in what Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls “his aesthetic of marginality and depletion.”30 Sociological typologies are not zero-sum games.
I can also read Das Mädchen as “covert resistance,” because the decision to include Ensslin’s texts in an opera based on the story of “The Little Match Girl” is an incontrovertible act of opposition meant to inject politics into what might otherwise be read as a sentimental tale about the preventable death of a child from poverty and societal indifference—but it is covert because the manner in which Lachenmann inserts Ensslin into the piece renders that act of opposition virtually illegible. The text setting makes it incomprehensible. Only audience members with considerable knowledge of West German terrorism from the 1970s would recognize her name, and the text he quotes from one of her letters will be comprehensible only if it is visibly projected onstage; the sung text is distributed across multiple performers in such a way as to render it unrecognizable to the ear.
The next three types of resistance—unwitting, target-defined, and externally-defined—all presuppose a lack of intention, and I am reluctant to eliminate actor intention from the analysis. Even if one is inclined to dismiss an actor’s statements about intention as self-serving, performative, or revisionist, several actions indicate intentionality, such as the interjection of a terrorist from recent history into a fairy tale. Despite all its unconventional features (signaled from the outset by the fact that Lachenmann calls it “Musik mit Bildern” (music with images) rather than an opera or even a piece of music theater), the fact remains that Das Mädchen is the result of a prestigious commission from a prominent opera company. The Staatsoper Hamburg is no stranger to radical innovation, but writing a major work for such a large operatic institution unequivocally imbricates the composer and the piece in the cultural apparatus.
We might also speak of unintended consequences here. The work is designed to challenge genre conventions of sound, narrative, and representation as well as expectations for engagement and legibility (to the point, it must be said, that it alienates some audience members in that art world entirely; many patrons walked out of the Spoleto performance I attended). Now, Das Mädchen may constitute an act of resistance against the genre and its consumers, but it is fully complicit in the system of opera as institution because Das Mädchen is prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce. Only a major institution can afford to employ an enormous orchestra, chorus, and soloists of such high musical caliber and retain their services for the extensive rehearsal period necessary, and even then, it may be possible only within the heavily subsidized models of institutional funding one finds in Germany. (The American premiere in Charleston in 2016 took place under the auspices of a major international festival rather than a conventional opera company.) The quotation cited earlier in this essay, in which Lachenmann’s stance is described as critical of the art music world’s “bourgeois values, conditions of class oppression, certain market structures, and an all-round tainted system of meaning making,” rings a bit hollow by this measure.
The last two types—missed resistance and attempted resistance—admit some intentionality even when the acts go unrecognized as resistance by at least one group of observers. The target group must be subdivided in order to account for the multilevel nature of these interpretations. If the target is the opera genre and its consumers, then it is safe to say that Das Mädchen is recognized as such by enough musicians and audiences while simultaneously going un-recognized by the operatic institution (observer) as to qualify as missed resistance. But if the target is actually the citizen, and this is supposed to represent an intervention on behalf of German society’s most vulnerable by linking Ensslin to Andersen’s tragic fairy-tale figure with the hope of affecting political change, then it must stand as attempted resistance because it has not produced that change (as far as I am aware). In sum: if the target is opera and its consumers, Das Mädchen may qualify as overt or missed resistance; if the target is opera as institution, it is attempted resistance; and if the target is the citizen, it may be covert or missed resistance. In my opinion, the opera speaks truth to each of these power structures. The question remains, is that truth heard?
Hollander and Einwohner’s typology is quite useful for clarifying the essential issues underpinning theories of resistance, and I have recounted their work in detail because I think it has much to offer those of us attempting to work at the intersection where art meets politics, activism, or even engaged citizenship. That space will always be fraught because it is the prerogative of art to operate on multiple levels at once, embody simultaneous contradictory meanings, indulge ambiguity, engage in misdirection and subterfuge, and elicit more questions than answers. Many people attempt acts of resistance in their creative work that do not rise to the level of overt resistance, but there is value in thinking more broadly about what might constitute acts of resistance. Not to delude ourselves into believing we are storming the barricades when we are hunkered down in our offices, but to learn to recognize as such those acts that were previously illegible to us.
1Tom Service, “A Guide to Helmut Lachenmann’s Music,” The Guardian, June 12, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/
2See, among others, Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127–34.
3The field of opera studies has boomed in recent decades and there are numerous exemplary studies of the symbiotic relationship between specific oeuvres and their host states, such as Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a general history of canonical opera and politics see Mitchell Cohen, The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and John Bokina, Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
4Mark Berry, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 159–60. Nono’s Intolleranza has been performed only rarely, but a new critical edition of the score prepared by Angela Ida De Benedictis was used for a concert performance given by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York in March 2018. The score is forthcoming from Schott.
5Rainer Nonnenmann, Der Gang durch die Klippen: Helmut Lachenmanns Begegnung mit Luigi Nono anhand ihres Briefwechsels und anderer Quellen 1957–1990 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2013), 314.
6Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), x.
7David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197.
8Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 200.
9Laurence Osborn, “Sound, Meaning, and Music-Drama in Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern,” Tempo 68, no. 268 (April 2014), 20–33; here, 20.
10Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 200.
11Nicholas Till, “A new glimmer of light: Opera, metaphysics and mimesis,” in The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance, edited by Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) 39–64; here, 54.
12Till, 54.
13Nonnenmann, 405–6.
14See Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex (Goldmann Verlag, 1998); translated by Anthea Bell as Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Regarding the West German response see Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
15Liner notes to the recording of Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, Staatsopernchor and Staatsorchester Stuttgart, Lothar Zagrosek (Kairos, 2002), CD 0012282KAI; 23.
16Lachenmann in Kairos liner notes, 23.
17Lachenmann in Kairos liner notes, 23.
18There have been claims from supporters that the prisoners were actually murdered. Without evidence to the contrary the general consensus remains that they committed suicide.
19“der kriminelle, der wahnsinnige, der selbstmörder – sie verkörpern diesen widerspruch. sie verrecken in ihm. ihr verrecken verdeutlicht die ausweglosigkeit/ohnmacht des menschen im system: entweder du vernichtest dich selbst oder du vernichtest andere, entweder tot oder egoist. in ihrem verrecken zeigt sich nicht nur die vollendung des systems: sie sind nicht kriminell genug, sie sind nicht wahnsinnig genug, sind nicht mörderisch genug, und das bedeutet, ihren schnelleren tod durch das system im system. in ihrem verrecken zeigt sich gleichzeitig die verneinung des systems: ihre kriminalität, ihr wahnsinn, ihr tod ist ausdruck der rebellion der zertrümmerten subjekte gegen ihre zertrümmerung, nicht ding, sondern mensch. (schreibt auf unsere haut.)” The capitalization is as in the original, as is all punctuation except the final parenthetical phrase. Ensslin wrote “schreibt auf. unsere haut” but Lachenmann removed the period. The letter is identified simply as “reden wir von uns / gudrun, anfang 73.” From das info: Briefe der Gefangenen aus der RAF 1973–1977, edited by Pieter H. Bakker Schut (Hamburg: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1987), 14–18; here, 18.
20Jack Zipes, “Marxists and the Illumination of Folk and Fairy Tales,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, edited by Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 237–43; here, 238.
21Zipes, 239–40.
22Nonnenmann, 315; see also 345.
23Eberhard Hüppe, “Rezeption, Bilder und Strukturen: Helmut Lachenmanns Klangszenarien im Lichte transzendenter Gattungshorizonte” in Matteo Nanni and Matthias Schmidt, eds Helmut Lachenmann: Musik mit Bildern? (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 71–94; here 85.
24Email from conductor John Kennedy, August 21, 2017.
25Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 24, 1997, 36.
26Svea Bräunert, Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2015), 337–70.
27Bräunert, 370. I am grateful to Svea for corresponding with me on this topic.
28Lutz Leisering, “The Welfare State in Postwar Germany,” in Welfare States and the Future, edited by B. Vivekanandan and N. Kurian (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 113–30.
29Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004), 533–54, here, 535. Also useful is the list of features in Stephen Duncombe’s introduction to Cultural Resistance Reader (New York: Verso, 2002), 8.
30Rutherford-Johnson, 201.