What do you think?
Rate this book
Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories
Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald) Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of “Total Commitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom,” “A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are),” and “Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera.” An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we.” He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest “Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off).”
288 pages, Paperback
Published January 23, 2018
4 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Kluge
137 books63 followersKluge was born in Halberstadt at the year 1932.
He studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School.
In 1960 he shooted his first films, before the launch of the New German Cinema.
He also is a remarkable fiction writer, which tend toward the short story form, significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics.
He studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School.
In 1960 he shooted his first films, before the launch of the New German Cinema.
He also is a remarkable fiction writer, which tend toward the short story form, significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 17, 2018
Collection of miniature essays and musings on all facets of opera. Much to ponder here. A mixture of fact and fiction; I can't tell which is which unless the individual selection is very obvious. Reflections on various singers, opera houses, and opera plots.
Some of my favorites:
"Total commitment": Leonard Warren, his dedication to his art and his unfortunate death onstage during a performance.
"Nearly every night they expected an air raid": During a performance of Tosca, how two people met then later married.
"Conversation with the Kammersänger":
He's always hopeful during Act I; he doesn't know the horrible denouement in the last act. Maybe someday it'll change to a happy ending.
"The bandits" [Jacques Offenbach]: the composer's foreshadowing the events of the next 69 years in a work written in 2 weeks. "What a Cassandra!"
"Can hearts set buildings on fire?": The incompetence of the Cairo Fire Department in not saving the city's opera house from a fire, not people's passion for opera, caused the opera house to burn down. But like the phoenix, it rose from its ashes.
"Aggressive gaze of blood": what happened to Norma's children after their parents' death and succeeding generations.
Highly recommended for music lovers.
Some of my favorites:
"Total commitment": Leonard Warren, his dedication to his art and his unfortunate death onstage during a performance.
"Nearly every night they expected an air raid": During a performance of Tosca, how two people met then later married.
"Conversation with the Kammersänger":
He's always hopeful during Act I; he doesn't know the horrible denouement in the last act. Maybe someday it'll change to a happy ending.
"The bandits" [Jacques Offenbach]: the composer's foreshadowing the events of the next 69 years in a work written in 2 weeks. "What a Cassandra!"
"Can hearts set buildings on fire?": The incompetence of the Cairo Fire Department in not saving the city's opera house from a fire, not people's passion for opera, caused the opera house to burn down. But like the phoenix, it rose from its ashes.
"Aggressive gaze of blood": what happened to Norma's children after their parents' death and succeeding generations.
Highly recommended for music lovers.
October 9, 2022
4.5/5
In the spirit of his famous proclamation that “there is no poetry after Auschwitz”, Alexander Kluge’s mentor Theodore Adorno advised him to give up a literary career. Kluge went on with filmmaking and, along with Fassbinder and Herzog, founded the New German Cinema. Fortunately though, he kept coming back to literature as well and to this day at the age of 90 remains a prolific author. Besides a cinematic and literary dedication, throughout his life he has been a passionate opera lover. His passion for opera led to this collection of essayistic stories, a sort of collage of factual and fictional fragments, appropriately accompanied by photographs of the opera scenes, singers, impresarios, and stageworks, that reflect his philosophy about the intersection between art, history, and life.
In his opening story about the American baritone Leonard Warren, he takes as a starting point the singer’s tragic death from a heart attack that really did happen on the Met stage right at the climactic moment when he is about to triumphantly sing “O gioia” in Verdi’s La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), when the life/death ominously coincides with the art. Kluge then inserts a fictionalized conversion of an opera critic from his previous reservations about Warren’s singing abilities to a new appreciation.
At other times, episodes about opera intersect with private lives as when he revisits the divorce of his parents in 1942 that later had dire consequences for his family - he and his mother moved to West Germany while his father and sister stayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Could the music have saved the family from this fateful separation? The episode, actual or fictional we never know, with his father in the crucial moment whether to attempt to save his marriage, listens to the Pagliacci recording all way to the tragic end only to immediately put the record back to listen to the famous Prologue. Kluge and his sister disagree about what that moment meant for their father.
In the spirit of his famous proclamation that “there is no poetry after Auschwitz”, Alexander Kluge’s mentor Theodore Adorno advised him to give up a literary career. Kluge went on with filmmaking and, along with Fassbinder and Herzog, founded the New German Cinema. Fortunately though, he kept coming back to literature as well and to this day at the age of 90 remains a prolific author. Besides a cinematic and literary dedication, throughout his life he has been a passionate opera lover. His passion for opera led to this collection of essayistic stories, a sort of collage of factual and fictional fragments, appropriately accompanied by photographs of the opera scenes, singers, impresarios, and stageworks, that reflect his philosophy about the intersection between art, history, and life.
In his opening story about the American baritone Leonard Warren, he takes as a starting point the singer’s tragic death from a heart attack that really did happen on the Met stage right at the climactic moment when he is about to triumphantly sing “O gioia” in Verdi’s La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), when the life/death ominously coincides with the art. Kluge then inserts a fictionalized conversion of an opera critic from his previous reservations about Warren’s singing abilities to a new appreciation.
In this way, Warren’s total commitment — his readiness to sacrifice his own life — had had a final, decisive effect on the person who had criticized him so unjustly.While seemingly about Warren’s real tragic fate and a fictional skeptical critic, Kluge effectively relates the story to his conviction that any genuine artistic expression requires a total abandon and commitment. No compromises, even if needed at the price of life.
At other times, episodes about opera intersect with private lives as when he revisits the divorce of his parents in 1942 that later had dire consequences for his family - he and his mother moved to West Germany while his father and sister stayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Could the music have saved the family from this fateful separation? The episode, actual or fictional we never know, with his father in the crucial moment whether to attempt to save his marriage, listens to the Pagliacci recording all way to the tragic end only to immediately put the record back to listen to the famous Prologue. Kluge and his sister disagree about what that moment meant for their father.
His sister claims our father put the first record back on after listening to the third so that he wouldn’t remain stranded in the despair of the third act (“Murder in the Theater”). […] But I argued: the surging of the music should have given our father strength to call our mother back to him.It is the private family debate that never got resolved, still haunting the siblings, about the crucial point in which their lives could have taken a different course had their father’s inner turmoil taken a different turn while repeatedly listening to Pagliacci. Kluge believes that the art has a liberating force on our lives if we would let it help us “undo” our regrettable actions and have strength to salvage what could be lost.
Music lets people overcome all emotional obstacles to recover the dearest thing they have.Kluge’s belief in art as a liberating medium extends from private lives to historical tragedies. In two back-to-back stories, he fictionalizes the productions that take place in two actual events. In the irony of history, Kirov’s opera theater in Leningrad performed the regularly scheduled Wagner’s Lohengrin the night before Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasion of the Soviet Union. In his imaginary recreation of this real event, Kluge moves that night to the actual day of attack with a fictional account of the decision to go ahead with the performance in a modified form in defiance to the incoming air raids.
As in all stories, Kluge’s interest is in a larger, universal and humane idea: this performance was a sign of the future victory that the war was not immediately able to divide everyone and everything into friend and foe, but that at least for a short time, i.e., for one day, an exceptional capacity for differentiation could be worked out, coming to life for one evening: a space between aggression and art.Lohengrin in Leningrad is immediately followed by another story, a mix of an actual event and his imagination, about the performance of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in the besieged Vienna in the last days of World War II. I checked the Wiener Staatsoper archives, the performance never took place but that’s not the main point here. Kluge envisioned another act of artistic courage in the face of destruction by imagining the performance moving from the ruins of the opera house to the improvised stage in the air-raid shelters.
As was the case in the Leningrad episode, it was the resurrection of music out of the spirit of contemporary history.While the main preoccupation of the collection is with art itself, its ultimate purpose and meaning, it is the music and opera, for Kluge, that embody the essence of arts in their pure form.Why opera? Because,
[it is] about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas.I share my life-long passion for opera with Kluge and this was for me a riveting reading. While familiarity with this art form might be needed for understanding some of the stories (for example, understanding the significance of the curse - maledizione - in Rigoletto is essential to appreciate Kluge’s musings on four alternative libretto scenarios), it is not necessarily the case with most of the others in this collection that should be accessible to all readers. It is a fascinating panorama of philosophical and artistic thoughts of this wholly original, occasionally eccentric, utterly committed and humane artist.
November 8, 2019
A very quirky and unusual read, "Temple of the Scapegoat" is a very aesthetic and contemplative book more than it is a book about anything, from a conventional perspective of linear storytelling. It is, after all, about opera to varying degrees. A few of the fragments were especially moving, others were a bit difficult to process either because I didn't know the historical figure/event/opera/character that Kluge was writing about, or because I THOUGH it was above one of these things when, really, it had been a work of fiction. It's an eccentric book, but I think it'll grow on me.
December 23, 2021
The most striking event
unexplainable by Darwinian categories
say the Chinese
in their report on the Giessen scientists
is the safeguarding
of the smooth transfer of experience
from generation to generation
though why this is advantageous for reproduction
is not at all apparent
at first glance.
...
Medea is used as material in 44 operas.
All 44 operas are based on the tragedy by Euripides.
The tragedy of Euripides is based upon a myth that recounts the story of Medea.
The terrible experience(s) that led to that myth are not known to us.
unexplainable by Darwinian categories
say the Chinese
in their report on the Giessen scientists
is the safeguarding
of the smooth transfer of experience
from generation to generation
though why this is advantageous for reproduction
is not at all apparent
at first glance.
...
Medea is used as material in 44 operas.
All 44 operas are based on the tragedy by Euripides.
The tragedy of Euripides is based upon a myth that recounts the story of Medea.
The terrible experience(s) that led to that myth are not known to us.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews