The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Free Page B

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:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  (Darling child, come away with me!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Such beautiful games I can play with you,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  So many colorful flowers on the beach,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  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