The Devil's Pleasure Palace (3 page)

Conventional musical wisdom has long held that Kotzebue's libretto is the principal reason for the opera's neglect—an explanation applied to all Schubert operas, as it happens. More likely, the cause is Schubert's inexpert handling of the dramatic necessities inherent in operatic composition; what works so brilliantly for him in songs and song cycles failed him as a composer in the larger forms of vocal compositions (although, curiously, not in his symphonies, each of which grew in sophistication and scope).

But, seen in another light, Kotzebue's work is entirely in line with European philosophical thought of the time as expressed through art. Recall that this is the early nineteenth century, not the twentieth; the horrors of 1914 and 1939 are still far in the future. The happy ending (a victory of love over death) is not a cop-out but the proof of the promise of redemption—that we must suffer the temptations and travails of Christ and face our worst fears in order to win in the end. That its conclusion (“And then I woke up . . . and it was all a dream!”) has since become a groan-worthy cliché is not Kotzebue's fault, given that he wrote in a less cynical age, but anyone ever tempted to throw a shoe at the end of Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir,
The Woman in the Window
, knows what I mean. Not to mention
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
.

And who represents the saving power of divine grace? Almost invariably, the woman, whose own self-sacrifice rescues and transfigures the flawed male hero. In Goethe's famous words from the second part of
Faust
: “
Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan
,” or, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward.” The Eternal Feminine, a sexually anti-egalitarian concept that feminists of both sexes today would regard as laughable, is one of the organizing principles of the cosmos, and a crucial factor in the hero's journey. Even the pansexuality of today, try though it might, cannot replace this naturally primal force: the union of opposites into a harmonious, generative whole.

Crucially, then, Oswald is saved by the love of a good woman; so is the Flying Dutchman in Wagner's opera; so is Robert le diable in
Meyerbeer's opera of the same name; so is Max the
Freischütz
in Weber's masterpiece. And so, in another Wagner work, is Parsifal, whose sexual rejection of Kundry (the Magdalene figure) and her alluring Flower Maidens ultimately releases Kundry from Klingsor's curse; without her compelled attempt at seduction, Parsifal could never have found strength through sexual sublimation, a potency that allows him to conquer the evil magician and regain the Spear, thus causing Klingsor's own infernal pleasure palace to crumble into dust.

In short, in these tales, the twentieth-century cynicism of the inter-war generation does not yet hold sway in the larger culture. The age of anxiety, alienation, nihilism, and anomie still lies in the future. But it will come, creating along the way its own secular Xanadu, another poetic
Lustschloss,
to tempt and seduce Western civilization into self-destruction, with shame and self-doubt its principal snares.

Two years after this ambitious but abortive effort, Schubert wrote the song that made his reputation, “Erlkönig,” based on a text by Goethe. The hammering octaves and rolling bass line in the piano would later inspire silent-movie pianists around the world, but they perfectly express the song's terrifying tale of a desperate father, his deathly ill son in his arms, riding furiously on horseback to bring the boy to safety, and chased by the
Erlkönig
, the Elf King, the figure of Death, who sings beguilingly to the boy in a voice that only the child can hear:

       
Du liebes Kind, komm, geh' mit mir!

       
Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,

       
Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,

       
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.

       
(Darling child, come away with me!

       
Such beautiful games I can play with you,

       
So many colorful flowers on the beach,

       
My mother has many a golden robe.)

The music grows in intensity as the father speeds for safety, but Death's seductive song is faster, his blandishments richer, and the boy is so desirable. The child cries that the Elf King has grabbed him, the anguished father arrives at his destination, and . . . “
in seinem Armen das
Kind war tot
” (“in his arms, the child was dead”). In one stroke of youthful genius, Romanticism in music had begun.

Des Teufels Lustschloss
may never have found its place in the operatic repertory (nor has any other Schubert stage work). It is important nevertheless for what it tells us about the state of European theatrical thinking at the beginning of the philosophically tumultuous, watershed nineteenth century—what the taste of the audience was and what effect the work had upon later generations of creative artists. A straight line runs from the penultimate sequence of Mozart's
Don Giovanni,
with its whiff of the diabolical, and the entirety of
The Magic Flute,
with its battle between good and evil, through Schubert's youthful works to Meyerbeer's Parisian spectacular,
Robert le diable
, and Marschner's supernatural
Hans Heiling
, and ahead to the spooky German landscapes of Carl Maria von Weber's
Der Freischütz
, the haunted seacoast of Wagner's
Flying Dutchman
, and right through to the end of Wagner's
Ring of the Nibelung
cycle—which is to say, the end of the world.

Or, to put it another way, these operas convey mankind's innate desire to come face to face with the hidden forces behind our origins: good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and Satan. From this primal conflict emerges our yearning for dramatic narrative and the daemonic in art (“daemonic” in the sense of uncanny or supernatural)—signposts pointing the way toward a meaning of life that science (which rejects the daemonic) cannot provide, if only we pay attention and follow where they lead.

The more the hero tries to avoid his fate, the more it rushes toward him. This paradox is the dilemma of modern Western man emerging from the abattoir of the twentieth century's battlefields, understandably shell-shocked and conflict-averse, and it is also one of the central themes of every tale from Gilgamesh to Disney's animated version of
Tarzan.
Only by embracing his doom—to use the old English word—and facing down his greatest fears, fears far more terrifying than the actual combat will eventually prove, can he overcome his broken humanity and become godlike.

We like to think that, as Aristotle teaches in his doctrine of mimesis, art imitates life, that our all-too-human creations of drama, poetry, theater, and literature are reflections of the human condition, scenes glimpsed through the glass darkly of imperfect understanding. But what if the opposite is true? That far from being mere
imitation
s of deeper
truths, art is born deep in the unconscious and shaped according to historical principles of structure and expression, and is God's way of leading humanity to a deeper understanding of its own essential nature and potential, and of its own fate? What if art is not so much imitation or reflection as it is revelation and pathway? What if it reveals deeper truths about the essence of humanity than narrow science ever could; and that the twentieth century's belief in the primacy of materialism (invested with such explanatory numen as to become indistinguishable from faith) has misaligned the natural order and imbued us with a false consciousness of reality (to use a Marxist term)?

Art, as I will argue in these pages, is
the
gift from God, the sole true medium of truth. The nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel famously declared that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” meaning that in growing from embryo to adult, the individual organism goes through stages that mimic the evolutionary stages of the species. The stages that an individual passes through in his lifespan from fertilized egg to maturity (ontogeny), will “recapitulate,” Haeckel theorized, all the stages that the species itself passed through in the course of evolution (phylogeny). But perhaps it is, in an artistic and religious sense, precisely the opposite: It is phylogeny that recapitulates ontogeny. The evolutionary development of the species—its teleology—was adumbrated in the first moment of life. Think of art, therefore, as the Big Bang Theory applied to the soul instead of the body; by imagining the creative process in reverse, we can approach the instant of our origins and then beyond.

The key to time travel is to move faster than the speed of light, for from the movement of light (at 186,000 miles per second) comes our notion of time; to travel faster than light moves us not through space but back in time. Rolling the Big Bang all the way back would end, at least temporarily, in the winking out of a spark, and then nothing: infinite, eternal void, no space, no time, no being. But if that is true, then where did the spark come from? Or has the universe, as current theory is now beginning to favor, existed eternally, raising the possibility that the universe is itself God?

It's a question that artists have been trying to answer longer than scientists have. “
Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn' ich mich schon weit
” (“I've hardly taken a step, yet it seems I've already traveled far”), observes the “perfect fool” Parsifal to Gurnemanz in the first act of Wagner's
eponymous opera. “
Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit
,” replies Gurnemanz (“You see, my son, here time becomes space”). The context is Parsifal's search for the Holy Grail—the lasting symbol of man's quest for truth and something that he can attain only in a transcendental dimension where time and space are one and the same thing.

The search for the originating spark of creation lies at the center of the human experiment, in just about every facet of study, whether called religion, philosophy, science, or art. It sits at the heart of every human culture, no matter how primitive or sophisticated. Indeed, cultures at the fringes of each extreme resemble one another in at least one salient way: They reject other forms of knowledge in an attempt to believe in
something
. A cargo cult on a remote Pacific island bears a very close resemblance to, say, the global-warming cult of the Western sophisticates; both believe passionately in simplistic cause and apparent effect, and neither wants to hear contradictory evidence, even of the plainest kind.

Nor is it any accident that the quest myth is basic to every society, whether told around tribal campfires or in Hollywood tentpole movies. In
The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Joseph Campbell limns the universal “monomyth” (what I am calling the ur-Narrative) this way: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The quest has many apparently different objectives, but in reality there is only one: salvation.

The quest for the Grail—the chalice that held Christ's holy blood, the physical manifestation of the sacrifice on the cross and the redemption of God's promise—is the theme of one of Western civilization's most venerable narratives, essential to every redemptive fantasy. Whether it is a physical object or an abstract idea, a thing or person—and it is instructive that Parsifal asks Gurnemanz “
Wer ist der Gral?
” or, “Who [not
what
] is the Grail?”—the Grail is that which may be sought but never fully understood, a goal receding at speeds faster than light the closer we approach it, a secret knowledge that can be revealed only at a later time, often at the price of the hero's own personal sacrifice, in the imitation of Christ.

But there is another important aspect to Campbell's heroic quest, the obstacles that the “fabulous forces” of darkness must throw at the hero in
order to frighten him from his mission. From the time of Aristotle, the quest has been expressed in what Hollywood today calls the three-act structure, which I might summarize thus: The hero is called away from his normal existence, usually against his will or despite his unworthiness; he encounters all manner of setbacks, dangers, and temptations, which imperil him so greatly that it seems to the audience he can never escape; and, finally, he overcomes, accomplishes the mission, and returns as best he can to the status quo ante—but he is irrevocably changed.

(It is instructive to note that the tale of Christ's Passion conforms exactly to this structure: the entry into Jerusalem to confront his destiny; the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion; and, at last, the triumph of the Resurrection.)

One of the Aristotelian conditions of storytelling is that the story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This arc is so fundamental to the Western way of design that the entire history of drama and literature is unthinkable without it. Obviously, such is not the case with the ongoing struggle between Right and Left, but that is only because we are experiencing the story as it is occurring, having been born into it, and we will almost certainly depart from it before the outcome is clear. We are merely the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the plot. But outcome there must certainly be.

A good example of this structure from the Homeric era is the figure of Ulysses. In love with his wife, Penelope, he (in the non-Homeric versions of the story) feigns madness in order to escape his call to duty in the Trojan War (Act One). When that fails, he fights bravely and victoriously alongside his legendary comrades, breaking the stalemate with the invention of the Trojan Horse (Act Two, Part One); he then must endure a decade of wandering and many dangers (Act Two, Part Two). He finally manages to return home to Ithaca and oust the suitors who, like locusts, have descended on his wife and property in his absence (Act Three). It is a rare tale that does not follow this intuitive narrative structure.