Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema

Christopher Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317094593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media, not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres, and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.

Chapter 1
Across the Abyss: Tiefland on Stage

Reviewing a recent production of Tiefland in the German daily newspaper Die Welt, critic Kai Luehrs-Kaiser began by summarizing an anecdote once related by Martin Heidegger:

Recently I got a second invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin. I listened to what the mountain and the forest and farmlands were saying, and I went to see an old friend, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspapers. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. It meant: absolutely no!¹

The resonance in German culture of this seemingly trivial account of indecision can be difficult for non-Germans to fathom, but the critic clearly imagines that the readership of Die Welt will understand its implication, adding that the “philosophy [Weltbild] of Tiefland can be understood along similar lines.” At stake here is a German encounter with modernity, an encounter marked by suspicion and resistance. What is registered in Heidegger’s loyalty to his rural home is an attachment to a sense of community and to a communion with the land and nature that modernity appears to endanger. In its drive toward urban life, industrialization, and rationalization of labor, modernity threatens to displace, to uproot, and to fragment; rootedness in community beomes only a memory of something, and for some, a promise of something to be recovered.

Or at least this is how the issue was presented by intellectuals, artists and politicians confronting Germany’s industrialization and urbanization. Germany’s encounter with the forces of modernity in the nineteenth century famously lagged other emerging industrial powers, but the gap was quickly erased in the early decades of the twentieth. By the 1920s, the the era of the celebrated culture of the Weimar Republic, Berlin had become a model modern metropolis. Yet it was precisely when the pace of change seemed most rapid and disorienting—around the turn of the century—that a discourse of resistance and critique surfaced most powerfully. Central to that counter-voice was the concept of Heimat, a sense of home more imaginary than real, lost but never actual, promised but never realized. Heimat, in Ernst Bloch’s famous definition, was the “childhood that no one had ever had.”² The term itself has a long pedigree, but it began to acquire new resonance in the nineteenth-century German struggle between regional and national identities. By the turn of the twentieth century those resonances had proliferated with anxieties about the modern threat to identity and rootedness, a threat embodied in the German state’s seemingly inexorable drive toward technological, social, and economic rationalization. Heimat offered a solid counterweight to an increasingly unsettling sense of transcience, and a situatedness in relation to the perceived dispersal and re-formation of traditional community.

Just as importantly, Heimat found new discursive forms in which to circulate: commentators were now hailing the emergence of literature and painting celebrating its values. No specific place or time is Heimat per se; rather, something becomes Heimat when it is represented as such. Representation, then, is critical to the notion of Heimat because it actualizes it, gives it substance. That is, representation functions here not as the sign of some absent referent but as a performative: Heimatkunst (Heimat art) re-presents not an existing phenomenon but performs the contours and textures of that phenomenon in the first place. Opera’s relationship to Heimat is typically, operatically, paradoxical. How does a genre with such a history of appealing to the exotic, to the spectacular, to confused identities, lend itself to comforting representations of a homeland that secures identity? In what follows I consider some of the implications of the operatic representation of Heimat, focusing on Tiefland. How, I ask, did Tiefland engage historically with prevailing notions of Heimat? But framing the issue as history raises thorny problems, and I go on to consider the implications of recent performances of Tiefland and their potential to complicate the work of the historian in telling ways.

An Operatic Home

A useful starting point might be to approach Heimat as a form of self-exoticization. Its articulation of a safe, grounded, maternal space depends on a dynamic of opposition between self and other, the same dynamic that fuels exoticism. Heimat can be understood to invert the dynamic of exoticism while retaining its oppositional character: as an imaginary space, Heimat is no less dependent on a desiring gaze, on fictionalized constructions, than the remote exotic. Likewise, opera’s well-documented fixation with the exoticized other depends precisely on its institutionalized foundations in official culture and bourgeois taste. Put another way, opera’s very groundedness as an insitution is a springboard for its flights of fancy. Not that this dynamic works only in one direction: not all operatic protagonists follow Wagner’s Dutchman and wander the earth in a state of pertual homelessness. To arrive at the place of the other is also to trigger the desire to return home, and that desire for home fuels many an operatic quest. Likewise, the desire to leave the Heimat (Fernweh, the desire for the far-away) oscillates with and depends on a desire to return (Heimweh).

But we can take this invertability further and challenge the very stability of the borders established between self and other. What happens when these borders are breached? When, say, the outsider is assimilated in ways that undermine assumed differences, or when we recognize that our (negative) dependence on the other for our identity might imply a role for the other in our own constitution (what Judith Butler terms “constitutive exclusion”³)? In Heimat discourse the outsider can be welcomed in ways that suggest that the Heimat, while cordoned off from other spaces, is not exclusionary. Opera, too, undermines difference when its (in) famous surplus of material means and media signifies in conflcited and ambiguous ways. Equally, what happens when borders work too well? The limits established around a Heimat keep the other out, but they can also trap the subject inside, stifling and restricting in ways that generate Fernweh. In opera, the tendency toward semantic spillage is often offset by a strong drive toward polarization, the kind of polarization that strips literary sources of nuance and generates obsessive protagonists driven by intense affect. Finally, a persistent critique of Heimatkunst is that its representations of the homeland as idyll descend too easily to sentiment and kitsch, charges that have famously dogged opera.

What is so telling about the mountain Heimat (Bergheimat) is how graphically (topographically) it embodies the critique of modernity that fuels Heimat discourse. Life in mountain communities is represented as an idyll in part because it embodies a rural existence far from the ever-expanding metropolis. But it also suggests a liminal form of existence, perched at the very edge of civilization and bordered by the inhabitable, hostile domain of the high mountains. It is as if only the elements themselves—rock, ice and extreme weather—impede the flight from civilization. The very altitude, too, can be mapped on to the Heimat idea. Nietzsche’s later writings express suspicion about the bourgeois, kitsch character of Heimat, but the Zarathustran investment in mountains as symbolic of overcoming convention fueled the Zivilisationskritik (critique of civilization) inherent in so much of the discourse of Heimat. Living in the heights offered the possibility of looking down—literally and figuratively—on the civilization of the plains. And this commanding position is also represented as a place of purity: the rarefied air of the high mountains suggested not only purification from the polluted, stifling atmosphere of the lowlands, but its very sparseness could stand for a spiritualized state shorn of the bloated, decadent morass of the modern psyche. In part this investment in purification through nature rested on long-established notions of a utopian return to nature. The investment of Rousseau and Herder in nature as a locus of an authentic existence and community drew upon and further fueled a dynamic of nostalgia for a state of idealized reunification with nature, a possibility that would haunt the nineteenth century’s faith in progress and surface with renewed force and in new guises as part of the resistance to the effects of modernization.

The heights seemed to represent resistance to and refuge from an urban reality increasingly identified as dystopian. Mountains offered liberty and purity as antidote to the daily grind and stifling congestion of the cities on the plains. Launching the Munich-based arts journal Hochland in 1904, editor Karl Muth glossed the “highlands” of the title as a “high and free perspective” on the issues of the day.⁴ At the same time, the liminal quality of the Bergheimat articulates not only the limits of habitable space but also of Heimat discourse itself. Beyond it lies an alpine domain claimed in the name of the sublime, that overwhelming experience of nature marked out by Enlightenment philosophy and conceptually colonized by the Romantic artist, for whom lofty peaks represented its truest form. The mountain dwelling, then, has a double aspect: it is a space of refuge and nurturing, like any Heimat, but it also edges toward the uninhabitable, to a topography hostile to human settlement. And whereas the Heimat sustains community and social engagement, the mountain sublime gestures, like Nietzsche’s prophet, toward individualism and solitude.

This overlapping of modes of engagement with the mountains surfaces clearly in the work of Rudolf Lothar, librettist of Tiefland. A Hungarian-born journalist, novelist, and playwright, Lothar published widely on theater history. In a biography of Ibsen published in 1902 (the year before the premiere of Tiefland) Lothar declared that Ibsen’s celebration of solitude in the mountains, his capacity to “learn from the heights how to stand above life,” finds a parallel in Nietzsche.⁵ Both, he continues, championed sovereign “aristocratic” subjectivity against the rise of mass politics and social life, and, in an observation that summons the contemporary vocabulary on race and nation, Lothar concludes that the parallel between the Norwegian dramatist and the German philosopher is no accident: “Individualism is a specifically Indo-Germanic racial characteristic and is the principal foundation of the Germanic character”⁶ This celebration of the individual, however, doesn’t discourage Lothar from extolling, three years later, the more lowly and socialized virtues of Heimatkunst. In his Das deutsche Drama der Gegenwart (1905), Lothar traces the origins of Heimatkunst in naturalistic “peasant art” (Bauernkunst) and the “art of the soil” (Bodenkunst). Naturalism, he explains, came from outside Germany but awakened “national feelings,” finally “blossoming in the Heimat art of contemporary Germany.”⁷

This contradictory vision of a Germany at once aristocratic and rooted in rural community qualities surfaces in the libretto for Tiefland. Here is a dramatic enactment of the encounter between mountain Heimat and mountain sublime, both set against the corrupt and debased environment of the lowlands. Lothar’s source was Àngel Guimerà’s play Terra baixa, a parable of modern corruption set in the Catalan plains beneath the Pyrenees. Translated first from Catalan into Italian, then by Lothar into a rough German translation, and finally adapted as a libretto, Terra baixa bears the hallmarks of contemporary naturalism: a graphic portrayal of deprivation and inequality, a fatalistic culmination of struggle in violence, a pervasive pessimism. That Guimerà situates this struggle within the context of modern social upheaval in Catalonia—specifically, between increasingly modern and prosperous Barcelona and a hinterland blighted by poverty—further enhances the play’s naturalistic credentials.

Yet critical commentators have been reluctant to categorize Guimerà’s work so neatly, pointing out the powerful resonance of myth, heroism and idealism in Terra baixa. No doubt the shepherd Manelic, cynically exploited by the landowner Sebastiano, embodies the classically naturalistic trait of instinctive, almost animalistic violence. Yet he also becomes a liberator of sorts: not a social/political figure but a Romantic hero who embodies a utopian potential. Having been lured to the lowlands by Sebastiano with the offer of an arranged marriage with Marta, the mill-owner’s daughter, Manelic discovers that the marriage is a sham: Sebastiano is using the union as a mask of respectability while he carries on an affair with the powerless Marta. On discovering the arrangement and, more importantly, Marta’s growing affection for him, Manelic resolves to kill Sebastiano and return to the mountains with Marta. “Up there,” he tells her, “everything is forgiven and nothing is corrupted.” In the final scene, as he pushes through a stunned crowd gathered around Sebastiano’s dead body, he leaves behind a community transformed by his intervention.

Crucially, though, Terra baixa offer no hint that the transformation might take the form of social action or revolt. Rather, Manelic’s strongman intervention remains on an individual and “heroic” level, while his message, if he has one, is based on little more than the moralistic restoration of honor combined with revulsion at the corrupt lowlands and an unshakeable attachment to the purity of the heights. What Terra baixa ultimately proposes, to quote Josep Miguel Sobrer, is a “flight to the world of myth,” a gesture he relates to a Romantic Rousseauism that informs much of Guimerà’s work and to the broader Romantic-nationalist revival of Catalan culture (Renaixença) ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Across the Abyss: Tiefland on Stage
• 2 Nature and Nostalgia: The Last Tone Poem
• 3 Thoroughly Modern Mountains
• 4 The Voice of the Glacier
• 5 A Last Refuge: Tiefland on Screen
• Conclusion and Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index