THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE HYMEN: Freud at the Opera

OPERA

A Matter to Take seriously

Opera is matter to take seriously. No matter the "Sturm und Drang", the caricature like heroines and heros, the sometimes kitschy storyboard and overly emotional vocal expressions, the origins of the melodrama can be traced back tens of thousands of years and give insights in the human predicament, psyche and need for the spectacular, the surreal and the metaphysical since the beginning of civilization. The absurd and the divine are present and is a constantly changing parameter of the development, culturally, socially and religiosly during a succession of eras, beliefs and the human condition. When the dying soprano sings for twenty minutes before her last breath it represents a projection of intense human fears, Angst, passion and conflict which none of us are spared and the pattern can easily be traced to contemporary life as well as the Caucasian mass movement thousands of years ago. If we find it over the top we are in fact laughing at ourselves because the struggle for survival, life and death has not ceased and we do many irrational things in order to navigate in our daily life.

 I

The opening line of the famous Orphei lament in Gluck´s opera ”Orfeo ed Euridice”differs in Italien and English. Maybe it is not a coincidence. The Italian and the Anglosachsian way of perceiving the world and life in general differs over time and in between themselves.

We all know that the Teutonic sagas and myths are virtually absent in Italian and Anglosachsian legends and mythology, although the latter, interrelated with Germanic Celtic and viking tribes, could easily have been influenced by their Aryan heritage or by the impact from Nordic cosmology, with certain similarity to the Wagnerian ”Weltanschaung” due to a common Germanic heritage. The so called German tribes appear late in the massmigration of Caucasians towards the Black Sea with ribes continuing the northwards, but share a biological descent from what has become (and misused) known as the Aryans, to make a very long story short.

In the English libretto Orpheus asks: What is life without thee?”. In Italian ”Que faró senza Euridice ?” One is dejected, the other confused. The Italian Orfeo, despite his devastating loss, chooses to look into the future and focus on the external changes, whereas the ”British” alter ego is looking inwards, an introspection, seemingly already with a sense of being a living dead, in a catatonic stupor, alienated from Life. The ”Latinized” hero is asking himself what to do, where to go and what to make of himself, which is a totally different approach to life.

The Anglosachsian brooding is esay to find in the Germanic and Nordic Gestalt (conformation) of life. The rhetorical question of what is the meaning of life comes to an all time high when the troubled Danish prince Hamlet asks himself: ”To be, or not to be? Thats is the question”

The Latin (not the Greek) tradition focused often on what to do with life, not so much if it is meaningsless, but how to relate to it and, often, how to conquer it in a bravado stubborness which seems almost extinct in some Germanic contexts. Until the ghosts of mythical Aryan pantheon propels a madness of hitherto unknown proportions because of a sad upbrining of an Austrian little boy, the mishmash of Nazi ideology, incorporating the mythology of the ”Untertan” people ( the lower human races) by stealing the inferior´s cosmology and dress up as Titans and Heros, who were anything but Germanic originally suddenly becomes a constracted and destructive credo.

When the ”Kraft durch Freude” mantra was in dire need of pedigree Aryan heros it seemed to begin and stop with Odin and Thor in the Nordic Valhalla which was a meagre and insufficient heroism to lean on in order to build a paramount Third Reich. The old heredatory Caucasian Aryan myths and legends were reinvented and populated with undefeatable heroes and heroines of prominence, although never heard of before. The Germanic docotyme borderline conception of life as utterly dark and without hope was contradicted by lustful aggression and sagas of bravery, like a Bergman movie which stampedes.

To get a notion of the original concept you will have to turn to Iceland where the sagas and myths have been kept intact to a degree which is stunning. Contrary to their Nordic relatives they are fatalists, sophisticated when it comes to questions of life and death and with a logic of their own which still prevails in Icelandic society. There were no Ibsens or Strindbergs but storytellers of a sublime quality which has been ignored and underrated by epic science for centuries.

By looking into the the dramaturgy of opera, which often is regarded as surreal and caricarturelike, we, however, may find that it reflects the time and the era in which the operas were composed and staged and constitute a mirror, although often larger than life or in undercover rebellion, of the predominant paradigms and the combat between the different ideological creeds and social determinants which are governing the individual life.

As opera develops into an art, not resting on musical and vocal equilibrism solely, and starts to deal with secular matters it also has a storyline which is not biblical, an epic, which enhances the genres in a successful joint venture. In the late Baroque era and onwards the singers are expected to have acting skills in addition to vocal bravura.

II

Freud at the Opera: The Geography of the Hymen

Trust yourself to be baffled by the extensive postulations governing virginity, chasity and inter gender relationships of dominance and submission on the Opera stages. You will be amazed ! The spectacles are dominated by passionate love, hate, aggression and vindictiveness to a degree which in real life would result in most of the characthers to be forcibly instutionalized at a mental hospital.

Cultural Teutonic and Caucasian heritage, as above mentioned, seem to have survived millennia and travelled from the Caucasus region to all parts of the western hemisphere and yet the mountain ridges of the Alps have proven to be a magnificent divider of deep rooted assumptions and diverse Aitions (legends of origin) which constitute the different concepts of how to understand life..

Doctor Freud, vigorously focusing on every human orifice, must have shunned the absurd idea that the Germanic legends and sagas stemming from civilizations some 7000 B.C. and probably a heritage of the Indus Valley Region, were to be regarded as the epitome of Germanic Cultural Mythology, which is an deliberate and manipulated misconception. None of the neurasthenic cardinal symptoms of mental and emotional delicacy or inclinations to hysteria is represented in neither the legends nor the operatic arena north of the Alps.

There is a south alpine obsession with the state of the female hymen that causes the downfall of empires and the dissolutions of nations (Sparta, Hellas, Medieval France etc) due to compulsive collective preoccuptaion with the distribution of an intact hymen or the absence of it.

The sturdy, determined Frauen of the German tribes, with or without winged helmets, are not to be messed with and may indulge in incest, lesbianism and masochism without any questions being asked. These women, with the chutzpa of Nordic goddesses, are neither obedient nor passive but launch themselves in apocalyptic battles, in the lead or at the side of their present paramour and when wounded they squabble with the gods or whomever may be unlucky enough to be at hand. They have no respect for death and blindly believe that they may even raise the death among the corpses of the massive battlefields.

While anorectic Violettas are coughing themselves to death in Parisian boudoirs, obviously being punished for their loss of virginity and the resulting ultimate capital punishment, 110 kilos of Birgit Nilsson drops heavily on the lifeless body of her Tristan while singing a marvelously delicate ”Liebestod” on par with any ”Addío del Passato” and this is where the sublimated fragility of the Teutonic heroines make them easy to love for all their  Übermenschsisu. It is a tour de force of any Wagnerian soprano to convince us of a moving delicacy which enables us to sympathize with her, albeit all her previous sadistic going ons which appalled the Latin audiences until late in the twentieth century. The idea of women equally strong as the men were seemingly repellent to the Latin audiences.

While Freud may have felt at loss by the Wagner operas, he must have been subconsciously impressed by all the sexual and emotional disorders of the protagonists. Any Teutonic legend must have beengefundenes fressen for the old voyeuristic scientist, although the comfort of his small consultatorio in Vienna with a pale and faint bourgeois Hausfrau cozier and easier to handle. He limited himelf to a collection of ancient replicas of Eart Mothers, Fertility symbols, male as well as female and some arcaic early Greek statutues mixed with Asian pottery, meticulously kept in a glass cabinet.

Is there a certain audience that will attend a Wagner Opera and a completely different one enjoying a performance of ”La Wally”? Probably. Or at least, to a certain extent. Latin audiences may have learnt to appreciate the piercing high notes of a Nilsson or a Flagstad Valkyria but probably still prefer the ailments of a Traviata ( the Misled) in the perpetual search for redemption because of a hymen gone astray or unethically lost.

North of the Alps male operatic interest is often related to education and status, even if they are killed by boredom. In Italy there is an obvious and a general and genuine love of music of all kinds. I am stereotyping. So are we all. Otherwise we would live in chaos. One can always have a change of opinion.

The efforts to label, categorize and draw conslusions when it comes to the question of life is an impossible mission, because each one of us has our individually molded idea, resting on our experiences of life althought a certain comformity in behavioral patters and attitudes of our local society affect us. How people perceive life may mislead us to believe that some have found the Holy Grail while the rest of us are searching...

Douglas