Kundry and the Materiality of the Scream
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As both an extreme vocal gesture and a powerful dramatic device, the scream holds a significant place in Richard Wagner’s creative process-- his use of the scream had a lasting impact on music drama. For Berthold Hoeckner, the screams of Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin mark the very birth of music drama, setting into motion an aesthetic trajectory which extends at least as far as the of Lulu’s death cry in Alban Berg’s Lulu (1934), considered by Michel Poizat to mark the death of opera itself. Examples of screams and cries are to be found throughout Wagner’s operatic output (as comprehensively accounted by Phillip Friedheim). I will argue, however, that Kundry’s scream in particular marks a defining moment in the use of the scream in musical contexts, a point of no return.
The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly as expounded in The World as Will and Representation first published in 1818 became central to Wagner’s own theories on musical aesthetics. As Brian Magee explains, Wagner "had been a Schopenhauerian in many, if uncoordinated, ways before reading Schopenhauer." Music was regarded by both as an external expression of internal experience, linked to the relationship between the conscious and unconscious world. According to Schopenhauer, while other art forms expressed Ideas -- simulations of reality-- music was the most immediate expression of the central will, the unconscious force behind all things in nature, and therefore universally comprehensible outside the systems of language. This was at odds with Wagner’s earlier theory of Gesamtkunstwerk which presumed a basic unity amongst all art forms that would allow for their synthesis. By the time Wagner wrote his ‘Beethoven’ essay in 1870, however, he had firmly aligned his theories with Schopenhauer. This essay brought together Wagner’s developing ideas about music, the unconscious, the dreaming body, and the scream: While sleeping, the consciousness of the dreamer is turned inward towards the will, and, according to Wagner: “from the most troubled of such dreams we awake with a shriek, a cry, in which the affrighted Will expresses itself most immediately, and thus enters at once and definitely, through the cry, into the world of sound, in order to manifest itself outwards”. The scream, then, is the most primal manifestation of the Schopenhauerian will in the waking, daylight world.
Summoned by the dark lord Klingsor, Kundry is roused from the unconscious world of darkness into the conscious world of vision and light; she wakes, pushing out “a terrible cry” [Sie stößt hier ein gräßlichen Schrei aus] and Wagner's interpretation of the Schopenhauerian scream is transferred directly on to the operatic stage. Kundry’s scream is unique in that it is not a reaction to any physical or emotional stimulus provided by events on stage, it is the event on stage. The placing of the scream indicates that the prelude to Act 2 and Klingsor’s opening monologue both act as a build-up to Kundry’s waking, a prelude to the scream, marking it as an ‘event’ in and of itself. This not a cry out to the surrounding characters or a response to exterior dramatic circumstances but a violent wrench from the deepest, most inaccessible haunts of the human consciousness, one of the “great shock moments”, according to Phillip Friedheim, indeed, one of the very few moments of action in the whole opera. The framing of Kundry’s scream as the main event on stage draws attention to the materiality of the scream. The scream is presented as an essence or a ‘thing’ which has its origins in the subconscious world.
The relationship between music and the scream, is analogous to the relationship Schopenhauer describes between the other fine arts and the will. The arts, expressed as ideas, are grades of objectification of the will, while music exists at grades of refinement of the scream (or shriek, as Albright puts it). The scream, in turn, is the “most immediate outward manifestation of the affrighted will” and the primary source material of music. It follows, as Albright points out, that an element of this fright is present to some degree at the heart of all music, just like the Urtrauma at the heart of hysteric symptoms. The importance attributed by Schopenhauer to the power and function of dreams and the unconscious life would have been all the more relevant to Wagner given the rise to fashion of the culture of psychoanalysis and the increasingly common diagnosis of hysteria in the late nineteenth century. Parsifal as a whole is drenched in hystericism which is well documented in numerous psychoanalytic readings of the opera: Wagner is a hysteric, Parsifal is a hysteric, the Quest is hysterical, the Voice is hysterical, the world of symbolic ritual is hysterical, but the most literal representation of ‘the hysteric’ is provided by Kundry: she writhes, she moans, she groans, she laughs, she screams.
In cases of hysteria, an initial trauma becomes a malevolent and unknowable ‘thing’ in the mind, exerting its influence through impulse and emotion which can only be tamed through controlling force of verbal expression, the most satisfactory treatment recommended by Freud being abreaction through verbal utterance. As Schopenhauer describes the external form and shape of music as the signifier, and the inner essence of music, the essence of the will, as that which is signified, it follows that the scream exists as pure materiality, that which is signified without the external framework of notated or codified musical systems to act as signifier. This holds true with Michel Poizat’s distinction between the pure or sheer cry and the musicalized or melodic cry: “But whenever I speak of a pure or sheer cry, I mean specifically a paroxysmal vocal emission beyond the range of music and out of reach of the word. This cry is therefore not supported by the musical notation, nor can it be accommodated on the staff”.
The “suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power”, as described by Bill Brown in his explanation of ‘Thing Theory’, is exemplified in the physical force and sense of ‘eventness’ which accompanies the experience of Kundry’s scream. The materiality of the scream strikes us with the sonic force of a thing that is real. The term 'thing' is particularly useful for describing Kundry’s scream as it conveys the enigmatic or unfathomable nature of the scream as a form of expression beyond the reach of verbal elucidation, on the boundary of perception between sound, speech and music while also acknowledging the haptic reality of the scream as a force which can break through illusory narrative worlds and bring a forceful emotional punch directly to bear on the audience. These characteristics of the scream answer fittingly to John Plotz's explanation of 'Thing Theory':
“Thing" is far better than any other word at summing up imponderable. slightly creepy what-is-it-ness...Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins-- of language, of cognition, of material substance”
While screams in Wagner’s earlier operas approach or allude to this aesthetic, they do so within the bounds of the musical and narrative conventions. Elsa’s scream at her knight’s arrival, for example, is inter-medial in the sense that the scream is not notated but given as a stage direction and would therefore theoretically fit into Poizat’s delineation of a ‘pure’ cry (inter-medial by nature, positioned in some murky territory between voice, language and music). Hoeckner makes much of this moment characterizing it as the birth of music drama as Elsa’s scream (the embodiment of her Will) combines with the “deafening cymbal clash.” Although he concedes that: “the scream is drowned” by the cymbal, he goes on to argue that the cymbal carries the symbolic resonance of Elsa’s scream in the fusion of sound and vision. Yet the sound of the original scream is drowned sonically by the orchestra while the sight of Elsa’s scream must compete visually and dramatically with the arrival of a knight in a boat drawn by a swan.
Unlike Kundry, Elsa's scream is is not the event on stage but rather an accessory, part the flurry of activity which marks Lohengrin's arrival as the focus of the drama. The material force of the scream is muddied by the noisiness of the scene: the scream does not break through the sonic texture, it becomes part of it. The ‘eventness’ of this scene is what clouds the materiality of the scream whereas, as Poizat points out: “The cries, plaints, and moans of Kundry...are Wagner’s “theoretical” or even “metaphysical” cry made stunningly concrete.” (emphasis mine) Kundry’s scream breaks through conventional musical textures, confronting the audience with the physical and emotive force of a phenomenon which begins inhaled as air and ends exhaled as existential crisis.
Poizat approaches Kundry’s entire vocal score as an embodiment of the problematics of the scream, and while the role of Kundry’s voice in the portrayal of her character can certainly be viewed from this kind of macro-level, the scream upon waking remains unique. Kundry’s famous cry of ‘Und Lachte!” is the verbal abreaction: it is undoubtedly a melodic cry, sung on fixed notes spanning the same interval as Kundry’s signature clarinet motif (a minor seventh plus an octave) which accompanies the initial scream. The impact of this gesture comes not with the scream-like vocal gesture, but with the silence that follows it The abreaction always implies a sense of return, a reiteration of a past trauma in order to successfully reconcile the offensive memory of the past with the present and silence the hysteric symtom. Kundry’s cry here operates as a return on more than one level: it is a return to the source of Kundry’s wracking guilt as she laughed at Jesus on the cross and it is also a return to her scream upon waking through imitation of the clarinet part. (clip)
Kundry’s scream upon waking doesn’t ‘return’ or ‘react’ to a prior trauma, it is, rather, the unrefined pure materiality of her pain. A more useful term here than Freud’s reconciliatory ‘abreaction’ is Arthur Janov’s description of the ‘Primal Scream’, which is more of a rupture, a breaking through of the material ‘thing’ at the heart of suffering, what Schopenhauer or Wagner might call the affrighted Will: “The Primal Scream is not a scream for its own sake. Nor is it used as a tension release. When it results from deep, wracking feelings, I believe it is a curative process, rather than simply a release of tension. It is not the scream that is curative, in any case; it is the Pain.” (emphasis mine).
While Wagner’s performance directions and scoring grant performers of Kundry the latitude to produce a unique, personal vocal expression, it is the responsibility of the performer to capitalize on this opportunity. Kundry’s scream has the potential to be drastically different every time which makes it an unstable element, one that can only be known for certain in the real time of performance, or when captured by recording. Wagner provides the context but it is the performer who must produce the scream. Comparing Kundry’s scream in a range performances, from productions of Parsifal over the last sixty five years, shows a variety of approaches, some of which -- to my subjective ear are more affective than others-- but a clear trend in performance practice does emerge that has the potential to upset my lovely philosophical reasoning
I am going to play a series of Kundry’s screams 23 screams from 1948 to 2013. Why would I do that? Well, for a few reasons
→ to compare these screams with the screams of Elsa in Lohengrin, and with Kundry’s ‘und Lachte!’ that we listened to earlier -- do they live up to my claim of being more affective?
→ to compare them with each other, and hear the different approaches...and hence the different effects of each scream
Also to consider what it is like to listen to screams in this way, to hear a ‘great shock moment’ intended as a singular and transitory event captured and repeated, is and odd and somewhat tiring experience: (for a more detailed discussion of this archive, see ‘Collecting Kundry’s Scream')
(they are slightly different versions but are effectively the same)
Singers show a preference for screams that follow, or even cling to the clarinet part. They are unique, and certainly not as ‘sung’ as the examples of Elsa’s scream in Lohengrin and yet they remain stylized and repeatable -- e.g Marta Modl, Maria Callas, or more recently, Doris Soffel, The stylized screams inhabit an odd place where they make sufficient departure from the ‘sung note’ to be an event in themselves and to highlight the material qualities of the scream -- they do have an impact -- and yet they are at risk of becoming just another motif, an aural hieroglyph representing a scream rather than being a scream. Of course, Wagner does not specify either that the singer should drop the operatic technique, and in the context of each individual performance, the screams live up to the unique context that Wagner has constructed for them. It might seem unfair to write them off as ‘bad’ or ‘unsuccessful’ screams. However, I would argue that other screams seem to have something extra... a certain quality which marries the physical reality of the human body producing the scream to the emotional release of the character.
A useful term for this quality is provided by Roland Barthes in his essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’. Barthes uses the example of a Russian church bass, and an operatic virtuoso to compare the pheno-song and geno-song (terms borrowed from Julia Kristeva’s pheno-text and geno-text). The opera singer’s highly trained and refined release of the breath can only provide the dramatic, semantic, lyricism of the pheno-song; expressing the soul and not the body. The geno-song, as exemplified by the Russian cantor, comes from “within language in its very materiality”; is not about expression of a particular meaning or emotion but the diction of the language, how the sounds and letters of language interact with the melody in a “signifying play having nothing to do with meaning”. What the pheno-song is missing is ‘grain’, Barthes describes the grain of the voice as something that is:
“there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that) beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages... The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue: perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance.”
Barthes stresses that the grain is not a question of timbre, but the friction between music and something else. For Barthes, that something else is the sounds and shapes which form the foundations of language, rather than the message, which reveals the signifiance of the piece:“the emergence of the text in the work”. Barthes’ conception of the ‘grain’ does not fit seamlessly with the Schopenhauerian scream of Wagner’s theories. However, we find a correlation here between the scream and the grain where both act as the raw materials from which more codified systems of communication are crafted (music and language), and so to hear the grain within the scream is to hear traces of the human body within musical material before it has been codified into a musical symbol or sign.
The grain of the voice is a helpful in describing the palpable presence of the human body in the screams of performers such as Irene Dalis, Barbara Minton, or Gisela Schröter, which sets them apart from the more dramatic or stylized scream. The materiality of the scream is so affecting because it is a human materiality, like the grain it is a “separate body”. I must relent, as Barthes relents with regard to his perception of the grain, that this is an entirely subjective experience. However, this subjective experience can be considered as the “third meaning”, a term Barthes uses in his writings on the interpretation of texts. The first meaning is purely “informational” and the second, “symbolic” while the third meaning is that which holds our attention and physically affects us, personally and individually in a way that is hard to describe in anything but vague terms, somewhat like the ‘what-is-it-ness’ of thing theory. As Stephen Rodgers points out, the third meaning is essentially synonymous with the term punctum, which Barthes uses in his Camera Lucida essay: the punctum is “that which immediately pricks us, provokes us, animates us, wounds us even”
When the codified structures of language or music are stripped away, what we are left with is the raw material, the pure vocal object, the body, the grain, the will, the primal scream: all of these terms point towards both the “slightly creepy ‘what-is-ness’” and the physical force of a communication which cannot be expressed adequately through codified semiotic systems but is felt, experienced, and relayed through the body. Kundry’s scream --no matter how it is performed-- is a unique and important moment in opera and vocal aesthetics as it presents Wagner’s conception of the Schopenhauerian scream upon waking directly to the audience as the primary event on stage. It is ultimately up to both the performer and as to how this scream is realised and ultimately up to the individual listener to judge to what extent they have been affected by the unleashing of this ‘thing’ upon their bodies. It is safe to say, though, that Kundry’s scream has brought some ‘thing’ to the opera stage which was not there before.
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