Adrian Daub

Adorno's Schreker: Charting the self-dissolution of the distant sound

Franz Schrekers opera Der ferne Klang is usually discussed using the term ‘phantasmagoria’, as a guiding thread. This article argues that this term names not one but two phenomena: as used by Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of Wagner, the term denotes the repression of musical production in order to create a music without origin. In a lesser-known piece Adorno uses the term slightly differently, in a sense pioneered first by his friend Walter Benjamin. This second sense is interested in the repression not of musical production, but of the acoustic means of production that conspire to create a unified, synaesthetic experience (rather than an aesthetic object). This second sense, the denial of any sense data outside of the one experience to be had in an opera house, is exceedingly fruitful when applied to Der ferne Klang , since its hero is questing for the titular sound which is located in that very space the aural phantasmagoria has to pretend does not exist. Reading Schrekers opera keeping both senses of the term in mind may allow us to overcome Adornos own somewhat negative assessment of Schrekers modernism and to locate within the opera a certain self-consciousness of phantasmagoric production.

From Maximin to Stonewall: Sexuality and the Afterlives of the George Circle

The “circle” around the poet Stefan George had as its foundation myth the tragic story of Maximilian Kronberger, immortalized as Maximin. This foundation myth and the homoerotic conception of community it authorized fascinated and repulsed many of Germanys most famous writers and thinkers. This article charts a much more covert reception: How did gay writers, thinkers, and activists grapple with George as a gay poet and with George as a leader of his own aesthetic-religious cult? Under the impression of the popular identification of Nazi Männerbünde with homoerotic coteries like the George-circle, the contributors of the Swiss homophile periodical Der Kreis attempted to create a different George-legend. Their George was cleansed of his authoritarianism, his celebration of the natural aristocracy of same-sex attraction. Der Kreis attempted to strip the poet of his coterie and his communitarian politics, and ultimately sought to establish a homosexuality that replaced the homoerotic “aristocracy” celebrated in Georges orbit with a homosexuality fit for post-war democracy and civil society.

The Ob-Scene of the Total Work of Art: Frank Wedekind, Richard Strauss, and the Spectacle of Dance

This article examines the musical, literary, and theatrical practice of a group of early German modernists — above all Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind. All of them turn to dance, its unmediated physicality, and its erotic charge to articulate a response to Richard Wagner9s theatrical project, specifically the concept of the total work of art. Although Wagner had included a few ballet numbers in his mature operas, he treated the form (and the number as such) as a threat to a specifically operatic plenitude of sensuous meaning—dance, he feared, threatened to dance music and drama right off the stage. I argue that this allowed certain post-Wagnerians to interrogate Wagner9s aesthetic through the category of obscenity — the dancer who, by dint of her brute physicality, could disturb and misalign theatrical spectacle became an important figure in their art. After a planned collaboration on a number of ballets came to naught, Strauss and Wedekind each turned to their native media to stage and interrogate balletic forms: Strauss through the medium-scrambling Dance of the Seven Veils in Salome , Wedekind by inserting his ballet drafts into a strange novella, Minehaha, Or on the Bodily Education of Young Girls . Strauss9s collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which was to prove far more consequential and productive than the one with Wedekind, likewise began with an abortive ballet draft, and again came to reflect on dance9s role in other media (opera and theater, in this case). Their reflections on the role of dance in operatic and theatrical spectacle find their expression in Elektra 9s final dance, which turns on its head the mysterious persuasiveness that Wagner had feared in dance and that Wedekind and Strauss had used to such effect in Salome : a dance so expressive no one is moved by it.