FLURRIES

Writing on Walls is a long essay about Bernard Tschumi and Richard Wagner.

Incipit: This is about the acoustic realisation of walls. It concerns a moment where the odd, microphonic fabric of an important European wall was once constellated by a collusion of opera with haircuts. The stage sets that Jurgen Flimm designed for the performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring-cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 2000 represented a kind of millenial commentary on relationships between the actors of European capitalist enterprise and the forms of modern urban architecture in the twentieth century. It may be that the staging of these same works in the centennial collaboration between Patrice Chereau and Pierre Boulez at Bayreuth in 1976 marked an enabling turning point for this awareness of the musical dramatic possibilities of such architectural relationships. The specifically urban political dimension of Wagner’s oeuvre is clearest, however, in the representation of the architectural fabric of Nürnberg, in his late work Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: and especially so in its second act.

Architectural fixation is evident even in the earliest, graphically linear representations of the stage sets, for Die Meistersinger; those which were made by Theodor Pixis or Angelo Quaglio, and which were approved by Wagner himself. It is the musical equivalents to the graphic line that will be of importance here. It is the suggestiveness of this linearity which occasions a relationship with the politically makeshift line famously drawn through Berlin in 1961. This line was eventually reified in concrete terms as a wall, in order to shore up the porosity of a line already drawn though Germany in 1952. Separating the towns of Nürnberg and Bayreuth from Dresden, by 1972 this wall showed signs of a renewed political porosity. The moments either side of 1961 are represented acoustically by the details of recorded performances of Die Meistersinger. In a sense it is possible to understand the Berlin wall as the product of strictly technical, musical arguments. Strangely, a recognisable hairline is the clearest motif for this reticulation of musical and architectural meanings

fig. 1

Waxing on Walls (A Burden for Microphony)

The decoration of this anterior proscenium is – in its motifs, orders and proportions – the same as the posterior stage proscenium, although its actual dimensions are different. Thus there comes about a perspective distortion since the eye is unable to distinguish the true dimensional differences within the perspective. It is an illusion that, according to every condition and circumstance can be enhanced and modified by every possible trick of illumination. - Gottfried Semper

Don’t dither. Simply say: we’ll make a fraction line. After that you’ll manage somehow. - Miroslav Holub

Yet, though I should have felt I had received less than my money’s worth had I travelled to Bavaria to hear this performance, it was sufficiently good to be a valuable study in one’s home with the text open and one’s imagination and memory to supply what was wanting. Dyneley Hussey

In the previous chapter we heard how a Mies van der Rohe’s hammer blow signified a relationship to an anachronistic and puzzling view of skilled labour withing the rhetorics of architectural Modernism. During the course of this chapter, we will return to a similar blow and its maeanings in order to … microphony and the acoustic presupposition of a European wall of particular note.

i. Herbert’s Haircut “Where everything you want belongs to someone else” Lyrical, it is almost a catchphrase; one of Bernard Tschumi’s. Any rehearsal of the general familiarity with Bernard Tschumi’s architectural procedures would properly highlight a habit of borrowing in his articulation of the unseizable qualities of the ‘event’. Such a rehearsal would also admit that, in helping secure the event as an interruptive enviration of ‘Function’ for architectural thought in the last decades of the twentieth century, Tschumi has demonstrated a reserved, rather nostalgically formal interest in a well-established vein of darkly upsetting urban humour. Evincing via his teaching of Franz Kafka’s short story, The Burrow, as a means of introducing the agonisingly forked situation of a tinnitally apprehended subject of architecture, this bitter and caustically mirthless humour also presents through Tschumi’s recounting and hiring of visual gestures made by Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock, amongst others. It is a humour that appears at times in Tschumi’s work to approach a perception of lived urban politics. Bernard Tschumi’s liking for specific modes of black civic comedism has a precedent in the form of a commercially successful operatic recording. On its release by EMI in 1972, this was very well received as something of a landmark in the history of recorded music. Though much appreciated in some circles for a variety of reasons, it has also been greatly despised in others, often for much the same reasons. Principally, these are to do with the ubiquity of the sonorities hawked by the conductor involved (fig. 1).

Not formally involving Tschumi in any way, and perhaps unusable for any plausible exegesis of his work, this recording nevertheless circulated most popularly at the temporal threshold of the formulation of some of Tschumi’s most influential early projects. They provoke each other profitably, however. In the process of forging an introduction between them here, the idea of linearity for architectural perspective will announce itself as a way of making sense of the kinds of spaces sutured by recorded opera; or, perhaps more correctly, music drama. This thematic is directed towards whatever it may have been that architect Gottfried Semper meant with the phrase “every possible trick of illumination”.

It is probably best to start with a specific image of Bernard Tschumi; though admittedly a partial one. For the depiction of the otherwise architecturally imperceptible, Tschumi’s use of the term notation remains his most convincing theoretical contribution. Presented in the projects for his book The Manhattan Transcripts, it is through the term notation that Tschumi most eloquently and influentially staged his dismay at the imperious hypostases invited to architectural perception by the implications of an overly discerning Functionalism. In The Transcripts the device of the photographed figure of the acrobat, paused in trajectory or in momentary balance, is one of those allowed to establish a dialectical aggravation between, on one hand, that which is arrested by the conventions of architectural depiction, and, on the other, that which is endlessly transformed by the inhabitation of architectural space; in whatever concrete or abstract locations that space may be found.

In the later passages of The Transcripts, the toppling acrobat serves as a contracted simile for a remedial delight in the production of architecture exactly as an attention to the vernacular, irregular, self-licensing, unpredictably changing usage of space heralded by architecture’s inhabitation, as well as the adrenalised whiff brought thus to its atmospheres. Tschumi’s notation of this specialised form for architecture has become familiar. Indicated by a set of urban routes of traverse, intersection and escape, each were sympathetically and definedly pedestrian, and each sponsored by a sordid and desperately trivial crime divers; whimsically here, a murder. In reprising the relationship of the frozen and determining instant to that of the durational fluidity of a variously observable, plurally narratable and diverging whole, Tschumi’s notations were allegorically paralleled by his finely muted renderings of fireworks. Cooler in emotional temperature, these synechdochic figurations of the festal city were augmented by an epithet on the perfected ability of fireworks to reflect on a proposed ontological condition of architecture – that is to say, one “burned in vain”, illuminating, constellating, and, as a figure of capitalist spectacle, at once diachronous and synchronous. It is a remark that has since worn the kind of garlanded virtue of anything muttered by Henry Wooton about commoditie, or indeed by Le Corbusier about the masterly play of architectural forms “brought together in light”.

It is light, in the sense of its cinematic manipulation, which pervades the work done by The Transcripts. And precisely, it is the fragmentary light, inferred by the instant of the cinematic still in its volatile relation to the duration of an unfolding cinematic diegesis that figures Tschumi’s proposal of a novel interpretation of an event-founded architectural demeanour. This apprehension of architecture, whilst it may remain possessed of structures and episodes, refuses to defer to the kinds of integratedly monothematic narratives demanded by the evaluative criteria of Functionalist aesthetic and organisational principles. Tschumi’s gesture, in combing the cinematic figures for architecture, was a small one; tiny, in fact. Nevertheless, this cinematic interest opened influentially onto a whole field of study; helping to recalibrate a gamut of approaches to architectural narrative.

In the section titled ‘The Block’, the denouément of The Transcripts brings his varied cinematic references together, through the deployment of visual leitmotifs. Of these devices (fig. 2), one in particular cumulatively improvises, through visual sequence and spatial syntax, a cinematic meaning for the kind of chirpily neo-classical proscenium arch which came to be one of the most irritatingly regular architectural features of civic and commercial façadism in the later 1970s and early 1980s. In this graphic passage, through a number of drawn migrations, the decorative details of this arch become indistinguishable from the sprocket holes of celluloid film; perhaps especially so, when seen perched upon by some gigantically mythic, Harryhausen-esque bird. More importantly, the development of a male romantic support in these drawings, laces Tschumi’s architectural view with a crucial issue of cinematic auteurship. The act of taking on loan the habits and signatures of another’s conceptual persona has, as indicated, been important to Tschumi’s methods. Amongst the cineastes that he informally invited subjectively to animate his architectural mises en scene, it is the name of Alfred Hitchcock with which Tschumi’s own is most closely associated.

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The acceptance of the idea of a murder as the civic architectural act par excellence is not new as an understanding. As Roland Barthes has implied in his account of species of speculative political epistemography made manifest in both raked and unkempt hair in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1952 film Julius Caesar, murder for the civic good is, in fact, a thoroughly classicized thought. Through a dozen formal allusions, though, it is a Hitchcockian dimension that is requested at this particular, morbidly comic point in Tschumi’s imagery of urban violence. Not Mankiewicz’s. This is a choice of auteurial reference with its own political implications. Moreover, in adopting these images as the graphemes of an architectural manifesto, whether what Tschumi delivers here can quite equal Hitchcock’s bubbling pleasure in the handing about of guilt, sexual anxiety and larceny, or his chortling glee at the punishment of all forms of minor vanity, incompetence and impropriety, is certainly a moot point. Despite this, what remains important about the suggestion of Hitchcock that hangs about these drawings, is a seemingly sought approval for the view that, as architectural qualities, his cruel and entertaining humiliations may constitute fundamental conditions of urban civility, as well of national esteem and self-reflection.

Whilst the male support figured in this late passage of The Transcripts may carry traces of Hitchcockian meaning, it is always ambiguous. The thickly approximate manner employed in Tschumi’s graphic line helps claim a degree of play in this. The liberty afforded by graphic width is a recognised polemical device; itself borrowable from the technical repertoires of architectural rendering. It is vivid in the kinds of approximation that Le Corbusier set to work in the diagrammatic allusions he made between antique and modern proportion in the section on the regulating line in Vers une Architecture (fig. 5), for instance.

fig. 5

For Tschumi, the broad-limned architectural detail of the glossily flopping haircut sported by his urban character here, a suggestive conflation of references to any of Hitchcock’s severally compromised men may appear (fig. 6). James Mason or Rod Taylor may be seen, or Herbert Marshall or Ivor Novello, even Peter Lorre. Caught romantically, in what appears to be a death throe, this suited figure also brings an acoustic imagination to Tschumi’s architectural argument. Whether, where sprocket holes have become bullet wounds, it is in the punctuating crack of a pistol-shot, or if it is simply in the recalled affective tensities of Bernard Hermann’s scoring techniques, special aural synchronies are lent to architectural space. At this point, the convulsion of this dubiously heroic figure is not entirely explicit or insistent in its connotations. That may well be a handgun seen trickling from straitened mortal fingers. However, the deject glamour drawn erotically into the stricken and crumpling innocence of this criminal body could, at the same time, suggest a grammar of generic postures struck around such an iconic aural and visual image as the Shure 55c microphone; the ‘Big Elvis’ (fig 7).

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fig. 6b

The ‘Big Elvis’ microphone is an icon with a rather different set of cultural connotations to those other, contemporary and equally near-mythical microphones of the period; the Neumann M-50 or U-47, and we’ll return to this (figs 7a & 7b). For Tschumi then, this may just be Elvis, or any of the number of similarly-styled vocal tragedians that followed. Ian MacCulloch, who sang with 80s psychedelics Echo and the Bunnymen, might be seen; or Martin Fry who stood at the front of ABC. There may even be a hint at Joe Strummer’s period quiff.

fig.7a    
fig. 7b

As a means of figuring vernacular romanticism for architectural perception (bypassing a functionalist diagrammatics, in the process), Tschumi’s graphic line appears complex and historically various in the pop-iconic referents it may suture. One thing is tolerably certain: this line, particularly this hair-line, was probably not intended to have at its connotative disposal the image of the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan (fig. 8). This is despite the fact that, as can be seen, Karajan’s was a striking coiffure, appearing to inhabit a common poetic fluency not just with Elvis, but also others. We’ll see that German conductor Hans Knappertsbusch could figure in this minor aspect of traditional musical iconography, or Arthur Nikisch.

fig 8

An unpreluded and unrequited introduction of Karajan to Tschumi at this point, merely exploits a possibility. Whilst Hitchcock may be present in Tschumi’s early urbanism, as an epistemological footnote or temporarily occupiable vantage of address, it may be that he is not evoked to the extent of declaring a shared methodological structure; even if that should turn out to be something actively wished for by Tschumi. Tschumi’s cinematic auteurs are not meant as mere applied architectural decoration. That is true enough. Neither, though, do any of them exemplify a single methodological gravity for the findings of The Transcripts. This is because in terms of a comment on the means of architecture’s achievement of vernacular spatial narrative, what is offered by The Transcripts is the tableau structure of the cinematic storyboard itself; and not any exemplary authorial usage of it.

Tschumi took care around this matter. In a pedagogic introduction to the conceptual conceits employed by The Transcripts, Tschumi provided a table of approved procedures for manufacturing appropriately characterised spatial propinquities. He recommended devices derived from cinematic editing techniques, such as repetitive, disjunctive, distorted, fade-in and insertive sequences, as they have been exercised and developed by his cinematic heroes. In this tabulatur of possibilities for the editing of architectural space, however, Tschumi specially celebrated the ambiguities opened onto by the unexpectedness of the jump-cut, for the way this device avoids connotative ridgidity. Through the different types of dramatic spatial revelation technically allowed here, Tschumi proffers a hope that architecture will be realised as the medium of surprise; one which announces new modes for the representation and effecting of architectural transition. If successful, the relict poetic insistences of linear perspective would be left fumbling and disintegrated.

Tschumi’s relationship to Hitchcock appears as one only of pragamatically nostalgic disposal. If only in terms only of shared compositional means Tschumi has more in common with Richard Wagner. Tschumi’s variously placed remarks on a desire for an architecture of “love and death”, may already signal a Wagnerian sentiment. But the parallels between these two characters, each involved in their respective ways with a re-envisioning of architectural drama, is perhaps clarified most in Wagner’s darkly unsettling, urban romantic comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

A representative vestige of eighteenth and nineteenth-century images of the festal city sung, Die Meistersinger is a work of overt civic commentary. Rewoken and critically exploited in the decade and more around the 1970s, in diverse popular forms ranging from the cheery sunshine of Burt Bacharach to the darker lights of Joy Division, similar forms of musical commentary on urban sensibility have not gone away. This latter temporal context is important because the similarities between the The Transcripts and Die Meistersinger lay principally in the former’s affinities towards the technical and poetic details of the studio recording of Die Meistersinger that was conducted by Herbert von Karajan in the 1970s.

Made in a joint enterprise between EMI and the East German state-owned company VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, this particular rendering of Wagner’s late music drama drew on the talents and reputations of singers Theo Adam, Geraint Evans and Helen Donath, as well as the members of the Dresdner Staatskapelle orchestra. Commencing in November 1970, this stereo recording of Wagner’s musically most debt-laden work was made in a series of sessions in George Weidenbach’s war-damaged and recently rebuilt Lucaskirche in Dresden (fig. 9). Amongst other promotional gestures, the release of the recording provided the occasion for Karajan to famously repeat his agent’s observation that the playing of the Staatskapelle “shines like old gold”. It is in both the soundplan technically contrived by editing the fragmented performance of the work made in these studio sessions at the Lukaskirche, and the cognitive expectations and changed aesthetic preferences of a commercially imagined, listening subject that was anticipated by the completed recording, where aspects of the character of The Transcripts appear to be predicted.

fig. 9

Wagner and Tschumi share certain devices and figural grounds. The finger-twisting humour, the exercise of the cumulating leitmotif and the eruption into easy violence of an apparently genial urban sociabilityare common to both. As a spatial technician whose instruments, as Glenn Gould remarks, included the sound engineering staff as much as the baton, choir and orchestra, Herbert von Karajan was one of those who contributed to a radical rethinking of the plausibilities of spatial representation during his career. Much of this rethinking was articulated by this recording. This was a politically complex production, too. It involved producers and sound engineers from both EMI (Ronald Kinloch Anderson and Christopher Parker) and VEB Deutsche Schallplatten (Diether Gerhardt Worm and Klaus Strüben) who were unfamiliar to each other. None of them could be said to be regular studio colleagues of Karajan either. This recording required State diplomacies too, and required them at a moment of political possibility, not just between the East and West Germanies, but also the respective international powers with which they each established their often troubled alignments. The aural representation of what happened in the Lukaskirche then was made and informed as much by these other cadres and individuals as it was with the more usually celebrated musical participants – Adam, Evans, Donath, the Staatskapelle, et al. Glenn Gould’s appreciation of Karajan is important here for the suggestion of an apparent change in the representation of musical events which was fostered by shifts in the aesthetic habits of engineering teams in the period from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. By 1970, Gould had already argued that a movement was perceptible in Karajan’s recordings. It was one that signalled a lessening determination to provide for the listener the spatially perspectival “evocation of a concert experience” in favour of a practice which “subscribes to that philosophy of recording which admits the futility of emulating concert hall sonorities by the deliberate limitation of studio techniques”. Gould’s distaste for the hobbling of studio techniques in the pursuit of a plausible single-point aural perspective, and his view of the deliberate reassessment of aural-spatial possibilities through the furthering of what may be possible in the studio, cannot pretend to be representative of all commercial recording practices in the twenty or so years after the end of the Second World War. The London based imprimatur Westminster, for instance, continued to make ‘natural balance’, monophonic recordings with a single, judiciously-placed microphone well into the 1960s, with the aim of fostering an aesthetic pleasure by making a convincing representation of the space in which the performance occurred. Their recordings, some of which have been recently revived in vinyl formats, are still fondly recalled; some celebrated as masterpieces of the art. Moreover, by the early 1970s even the technical possibilities of stereo had led to differences over the probities of the acoustic representation of space. These ranged between those spaces found by the ascetic ‘minimal-pair’ procedures adopted by RCA and Mercury, for example, and the theatrical fancies invented by Decca; especially in the recording of George Solti’s remarkably popular recording of Wagner’s Ring tetralogy, from 1958 onwards. It is also true that in that short period after the advent of the lp (c.1952) and before 1958 (the moment when new disc-cutting technologies enabled the pervasiveness of stereo), a complex aural-spatial vocabulary was developed both by recordings and by music critics. It was a vocabulary that, largely unconcerned with the conceits of plausible, single-point aural-architectural perspective, was challenged by the advent of stereo spatiality. Communicative, there is in such critical writing as that offered in the inventive language of critics Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, for instance, a spatial poetics marked not by any single characteristic, but by a variousness. Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor were of a type of critic at the time who, rather than confining themselves to remarks on the history of a piece, or the interpretation of it documented by a particular release, felt licensed to speak sensibly and determiningly of the qualia of a recording. Their language is instructive. Music that is “blurred” by the studio acoustic, “like a watercolour left out in the rain”, is an exemplary response to simple technical insufficiency. Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor could worry about sections of an orchestra lost to a recording, or complain about surface noise from a poor pressing like anyone else. More significantly, a general tone of playing captured in a recording might for them be “pleasantly forward, clean and agreeably sinewy”. It may be tubby or wiry, dry or cheap. It might be intelligent. It may even be grateful. There is an ethics of acoustically apprehended space in the imagery of Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor which, given their standing and reception as critics, seems to have been widely understood, if it was not always agreed with. What their subjective poetic grammar of aural space did not bother to fetishise was a conservatively perspectival spatial reproduction of a soundstage. Given the technical circumstances of the monophony of the commercial recordings that they dealt in during the mid-1950s, this cannot be surprising. Though for them there may be forms of depth to a soundstage, these could not be of the specific kinds that stereo was soon to make available. The comments of Shawe-Taylor and Sackville-West are cited here not so much to suggest the idea that the advent of stereo recording represents some kind of further, Adornoan, technically-effected, strain of regressive listening. This is despite the fact that the sensationalist bait offered by Decca’s early Adventures in Stereo recordings went a great way in sponsoring the view that what was to be primarily gleaned and aesthetically appreciated from stereo was a specifically calibrated, rhetorically mimetic, spatial perspective. Rather the purpose is to indicate that, during the period from the end of the Second World War into the very early years of the Cold War, the perception of acoustically recorded space, as occasioned by musical performance, had relied not on a restrictive, and indeed fallible, generally comprehended and imaginable analogy to stereoscopic vision, but derived a spatial metaphorics from a complex and fluxing monophony; not so very different, in its allusive capacities, from the function of Tschumi’s unshaded graphic line.

ii. Occasional Events Recorded opera, or music drama, produces a coincidence of different apprehensions of space. Opera has its own monumentally dedicated buildings, with their own special spatial-acoustic as well as decorative complexities, and their own local cultural traditions of preferred repertoire and performers. The temporal and geographic places indicated by set and costume design, the psycho-dramatic spaces inhabited by the musical agonists, the acoustic and other characteristics of the concert hall or the recording studio, even the places in which recordings of such musics are later heard; on gramophones in parlours or bedsits, on personal stereos on buses and at bus stops, each of these contribute to a complex spatial faceting. Ancillary spaces, such as the offices of historians and critics, or those patrons that supply for opera “the protection of civil law and regular royalties” are also implied; often to decisive extent. In the case of Wagner, the entire apparatus of Bayreuth may be connoted; including the workshops and rehearsal rooms where the technical competences of idealised forms of Wagnerian staging and performance have been the object of public controversy since the founding of the summer festival in 1876. As a locus of desirable aesthetic contrast, also, Bayreuth itself may signify other theatres, Munich or Covent Garden, for instance; other studios, too. The microphone, the types of microphone deployed and directed in each case, their proximities and directional sensitivities, how their signals are technically processed, the ways in which what they apprehend is blended, added or filtered at later stages, these things also clearly suggest the ways in which recordings of opera are caught in a web of surprising aesthetic, geographic and spatial complexity. The appreciation of Die Meistersinger is also something that is susceptible to occasion. There is something festively inaugural to the historical demeanour of the work. For instance, at the same time Marcel Journet was making an ‘acoustic’ recording of Hans Sachs’s ‘Wahn-monologue’ in Italian for The Gramophone Company in 1924, and Albert Coates was leading a long, English-language recording of excerpts of the piece, Fritz Busch conducted the performance of Die Meistersinger which opened the first of the post-war reinaugurations of the festival. This was the moment when the foundling NSDAP adopted Bayreuth as a spiritual home. Like others, in reviewing the Die Meistersinger that later opened a second post-war reinauguration of the festival in 1951, critic Adolf Aber expressed his reservations about new production values in the festival overall. Deploring what he saw as the inadequate, rather than preferably absent, lighting of Wieland Wagner’s spare settings of the Ring-cycle, he applauded the quiet disinclination of the audience to burst into the spontaneous verses of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, with an emphasis on an imperial rather than unificatory sentiment, that had marked the end of the performance of Die Meistersinger conducted by Busch in 1924. It is yet possible that a recording of Busch’s 1924 Bayreuth performance may surface. Who knows? Portable acoustic recording techniques, though far from refined, had already been used outside the studio to capture crowd noises and other fugitive yet marketable features of modern urbanity. A possibility: it hasn’t been found to date. So, there is an acoustic void represented in this kind of aural history of Bayreuth; monumental, and approachable only infinitesimally, by anecdotes. Never a darling of the Nazis, Fritz Busch in time discovered the fleeting value of Aryan credentials, no matter how impeccable. In order to preempt an S-A staged riot, he left the stage just moments before starting a performance of Rigoletto in Dresden. For his vocal antagonism towards Naziism, and perhaps too for family ties with the Jewish pianist Rudolf Serkin, he was forced to stand down from his position as director of the opera house there, and eventually to leave Germany altogether. In 1933 at Bayreuth, there also came a further historiographic highlight, in the form of the astonishing performance of Die Meistersinger directed and designed by Emil Preetorius and Heinz Tietjens, with a chorus numbering eight hundred thought necessary to produce an appropriate, communally martial flavour for merrily ritualised humiliation of the character of Sixtus Beckmesser that concludes the work (fig. 10). Die Meistersinger wasn’t to be presented again at Bayreuth until 1943, this time under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwangler. By this point Berlin and Munich had become the State-preferred venues for the performance of the work in the intervening period. Even this 1943 perfomance was a staging directed not for a German bourgeois audience, but rather a group of munitions workers. In 1944 another hole appears. Helmut Kruger and Eva Derenburg, sound engineers with the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, produced a stereo recording of a live performance of Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth. As with the other many stereo recordings of classical repertoire made in Nazi Germany, and before the availability of domestic stereo record players, the tapes of these performances are now famously lost. Even in absentia, then, it seems that occasional recordings of Die Meistersinger are made capable of reminding of an awkward past.

fig 10

And so it goes. From 1924, to date and retrospectively, at all points, and often with good enough reason, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been broadly judged in the critical literature against the burden of both the fractured political narratives of Nazi-ism in German culture, and Richard Wagner’s apparently prescient sympathies for them. Either Die Meistersinger is thought to exemplify Nazi ideological traits; or, in each production it is caught in more or less successful attempts at the recuperation of itself and its author. These themes form the fabric of a refrain for much critical commentary, regularly and interestingly improvised upon. Against this critical ground, however, the general tenor of the political performances around the Bayreuth festivals from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, have also been caught up in a struggle to make radically renewed relevance for Wagner’s music, and to make aesthetically convincing arguments for the continued place for his works in the operatic repertoire. This continuing stain on Die Meistersinger insists on a symptomatic, rather than what we’ll come to see as a sinthomatic character for this most populist of Wagner’s mature compositions.

The earliest full recording of Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth, incidentally again conducted by Karajan for EMI/Columbia, was not made available until early in 1952, and came as a documentary epiphenomenon of the second post-war re-inauguration of the festival in 1951. Edited together from several recorded concert performances, it was released initially as a bundle of thirty-six, 78 rpm shellac discs. This represented quite a commitment of space to the pursuit of musical culture for any home. The act of subjective endurance countenanced by listening to a four-hour opera in four-minute sections, like this, has its own ramifications for a history of aural attention. Released again, that same year, in the more compact form of five 12” lps, which were pressed to allow for use with new automatic disc-changing facilities on gramophone reproducers, this first complete recording of Die Meistersinger with Karajan, is one that marks a point of considerable transition in the architectural and temporal impact of recorded sound on domestic space. With this change, an easy repeatability of long pieces meant that such music started to become domestically unobtrusive; an option for the background to domestic chores. Only two years after this, in 1954, the preliminary commercial experiments with stereo were to start, and things began to change. The conventions of stereo spatialisation became standardised over time, enabled not just by advances in cutting-head technology, as mentioned already, but by new microphone set-ups, such as those eventually agreed and adopted by Decca, French Radio (ORTF), RCA, Mercury, and others; each improvising on techniques devised and heralded by engineers like Alan Blumlein, Arthur Haddy, and later Jürg Jecklin. To the context of an emergent history of stereo-spatial standardsation, it is worth adding that the short period of the production of monoaural lps in the 1950s is interesting exactly because a the lack of microphonic standardisation; which lent veracity to the poetic investigations of critics like Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor. The spatial burden to which stereo recordings may be made critically accountable can be sternly uninventive, and in its most authoritarian forms demanding a subscription to an oversimple understanding of the model of Renaissance visual perspective; and one lacking in a knowledge of the mystical narratives frequently articulated by its acheivement of space. This is, again as mentioned, despite the kinds of invention brought to the popular impression of Wagnerian space by Decca’s recordings of his work with Georg Solti after 1958. The dramaturgical effects to which stereo was put in these Solti recordings, loved and vilified by different constituencies, includes the often cited moment of the sudden spatial omnipresence of the invisible Mime, in Das Rheingold, as he scolds and pokes at Alberich.

In its recorded forms Die Meistersinger habitually sits at several occasional thresholds in the rapidly changing historical landscape of aural-architectural poetics; thresholds which are technical and aesthetic, political, as which also concern the domestic practicalities of modes of attention to recorded sound. As period bookends, the two Karajan recordings (those from 1952 and 1972) are perhaps too easily marked in terms of their relevance to European political history. The unseemly enthusiasm of Karajan in joining the Nazi party twice during 1933, for instance, has been a repeating and embarrassing trope for his biographers. In 1952, this knowledge came to figure politely in the critical reviews of the release of EMI/Columbia’s Die Meistersinger. These two recordings also carry a Cold War burden which seems just as difficult to shake. Whilst signalling polar conceptions of the articulation of the space produced and poetically exercised by a performance (one monophonic and live, the other stereo and studiobound), Karajan’s two Die Meistersingers are paralleled by other historical events in the conception of the Germany. In March 1952, two months before the border between East and West Germany was closed, Joseph Stalin arranged for a note to be sent to the negotiators for the Allied Forces in Berlin. Stalin suggested that since Germany was so important for the stability of post-war Europe, all interested parties should settle their differences and collude to maintain a thriving and unified Germany. Stalin may have benefitted greatly in this. Suspicions over Stalin’s intention here has produced one of the great conundrums for Cold War historiographers, and the question of what was meant by this gesture is unlikely to be settled. In the period from 1969 to 1972, Egon Bahr was engaged in the conversations that led to the forms of rapprochement that were to enable Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik initiatives to come to something. And, it is difficult to imagine Karajan’s journey across the Berlin Wall to Dresden, to engage in an artistic collaboration over one of the key texts of the meaning of Germany, without conjuring as a pretext Egon Bahr’s serruptitious deliberations. Both of these are, as Jacques Rancière has skilfully shown, just two further historical circumstances that have shaped understandings of some of the very many commercially available recordings of Die Meistersinger.

iii. The Raked and the Unkempt The hairline has a distinguished place in the history of critical remarks relating to the emotional tenor of Wagnerian performance. Acidicly regarding a diminution of Wagner’s music to an indifferent background comfort for a nobiliary and exclusive mode of cultured association, Claude Debussy noted of pianist-conductor Alfred Cortot in 1903 that he was one who has “most profited from the pantomime customary amongst German conductors … He has Nikisch’s lock of hair”. Debussy described its fascination:

“See how it falls, sad and weary, at moments of tenderness in such a way as to interrupt all communication between Monsieur Cortot and the orchestra; then see how it stands proudly on end at warlike moments”.

Concerning the focus on emotional atmosphere which has characterised many other passing remarks made about the kinds of experience occasioned by the performance of Wagner’s music, it is worth isolating two specific strands of thought which lend something further to the subjectively reticulated possibilities of carefully raked hair. The first of these concerns the illumination of the audience. In a short essay, once, Romain Rolland described his introduction to Wagner, and the performances conducted by Jules Pasdeloup at the Circe d’Hiver in Paris:

“I was taken there one dull and foggy Sunday afternoon; and as we left the yellow fog outside and entered the hall we were met by an overpowering warmth, a dazzling blaze of light, and the murmuring of the voice of a crowd. My eyes were blinded, I breathed with difficulty and my limbs soon became cramped; for we sat on wooden benches, crushed in a narrow space between solid walls of human beings. But with the first note of the music all was forgotten, and one fell into a state of painful yet delicious torpor.”

Towards the end of his essay, Rolland recounted a later conversation with his friend Malwida von Meysenburg. In 1876, she said, whilst staring through the Bayreuth darkness at the stage, two hands reached from behind her to cover her eyes. And there was Wagner’s impatient voice: “Do not look so much at what is going on. Listen!” Sage advice, Rolland recommended, to listen to Wagner with eyes closed, but completely at odds with what seemed to preoccupy him in his essay. This is because, here, Rolland’s most telling remarks are to do with the visual convening of community. Thrilled with pleasure and pain, invigorated, strengthened, gladdened by the music and its novelty, it seemed, he wrote, as if “my child’s heart were tore from me and the heart of a hero put in its place”. Rolland spoke of the irrelevance to him of the poor acoustics of the hall, and of the incompetence of players that ruined musical design. Nevertheless, in an audience of “poor and commonplace people” with their “faces lined with the wear and tear of a life without interest or ideals”, he nevertheless saw his own emotions reflected. This near-Baudelairean shifting of interest to ancillary social details, those of the audience, characteristic of much of Rolland’s writing, is recognisable as a predominating strain of criticism. George Bernard Shaw is another who enjoyed lending critical decisiveness to the shoulder-rubbing foibles of an audience, as was Frederick Nixon. Writing, in 1952, of the same period that Rolland remembered, though at Covent Garden, Nixon said that “no person of taste would speak of seeing an opera, one saw a play, but one heard an opera”. The appropriateness of the epithet was, he said, due to a lack of production values in any “modern”, perhaps Wagnerian, sense. No distractingly indelicate onstage physicality was allowed, and the music, as opposed to the “beautiful singing”, he thought unremarkable. Vitally, for Nixon as much as for Rolland, the spectacle of opera was the audience itself. Wagner’s own aversion to the idea of opera as the occasion for a bourgeois audience to narcissistically admire its brilliantly-lit self is well documented. When he would, he preferred to reflect upon, police and stage such intersubjectively unruly aspects of association within the constraints of a text like Die Meistersinger; a text which barely conceals itself as an allegory of bourgeois cultural habits. His disdain for the ordinary incontinences of an audience was one of his stated reasons for insisting on a murky darkness for the theatre at Bayreuth. In some senses, the collapse of class distinctions, such as those noted by Rolland and Nixon, through a principled and conservative renewal of music, is the core proposal of Die Meistersinger. Ability shows where it will, whether it is in the guildsman’s brilliance of Hans Sachs, or the vital noble novelty of Walter von Stolzing. Only a scheming or critical naivety could find in it a parable of democracy, however. In giving meaning to the convened irregularity of a visible and illuminated audience, Rolland and Nixon undercut some of the assumptions of vernacularity hedged by Wagner. In promoting the image of a collection of differently attentive listeners, and in resisting the image of an audience’s communing self-sacrifice, Rolland and Nixon both align neatly with the vernacular imperatives of Tschumi’s upsetting of the ordering requirements of architectural Functionalism. Moreover, the physical substantiality of this illuminateded audience, has a particular architectural impact on the tuning of atmosphere for recorded performances. This figural illumination of Wagner was taken up elsewhere, by Ernst Bloch. He focused more on the philosophical work of Die Meistersinger, than on the determining features of the rude politics caught up in the image of its audiences. In a series of commentaries, scarcely ever departing from the poetic terrain of light as a means of figuring musical meaning, Bloch turned to the thwarted, prohibited and unrequited loves which act as the vehicles for Wagner’s further meditations on relationships between art and civility. Specially, Bloch attended to the way that the libidinously self-sacrificing cobbler, Sachs, characterised the dynamic of these relationships in his ‘Wahn-monologue’. Bloch paralleled one distinction between line and light with another distinction: that between the indexical presence of a raw, irrepressible, eruptive, unsynthesised, gloriously vulgar and unconventional nature (natura naturans) and the depictions of it found in the figuration of a reflective, gestural, elegant, muscular or dainty poetics of nature (natura naturata). Resting on Schelling, Bloch suggested that whilst a composer, Bach for instance, may have been concerned with depicting what was geometrically fixed or frozen in a mathematical cosmogony, he said that the “Romantics” fixed “natura naturans not as a diagram but as phosphorus”. This romantic light appears vividly in the ‘Wahn-monologue’, and does so as the form for the libidinal grounding of carelessly pretergressing manners of civic association that runs through Die Meistersinger. In singing the ‘Wahn-monologue’, this morbidly pessimistic consideration of the fevered state of social relationships of all kinds, Sach’s mood often lightens fractionally, in performance. This is at the moment when he alludes to the relationship between Eva, the daughter of local, proto-bourgeois pillar, Veit Pogner, and the itinerant knight Walther von Stolzing, the character who represents a locus of Wagner’s repining at the hobbling effects of a conservatively entrenched attachment to cultural tradition. At this moment, Sach’s apprehends these hero-lovers in the image of the flickering light of a pair of glow-worms. They are irresistibly drawn to each other, and respond not to social trammelling, but to other, more natural, less regularizable, more precarious, less civicly affordable desires. To say that Sachs’s flickering glow-worms, which figure that snatch of timeless dark light Wagner developed in the Ring-cycle, match the flickering fragments of cinematic light represented in Bernard Tschumi’s endgame for The Transcripts, possibly pushes an analogy too much. Nevertheless this does draw out some important allusions for the architectural meaning of the thickness of Tschumi’s graphic line. Bloch went on to make an overbroad historical observation. Music, he argued, entered the quadrivium of suitable humanist studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at some expense. This cost, as has also been beautifully detailed in architectural terms by Rudolf Wittkower, was a requirement to consider music, spatially, as a mathematical function. This is to say, as Bloch argued, the price of music’s philosophical acceptance was that it should be frozen, mathematically, as a species of natura naturata; essentially modular, proportional and diagrammatic; borne more by the perspectival techniques seen in Piero de la Francesca or Filippo Brunelleschi, than that seen in, say, the flower paintings of noted Wagnerite, Odilon Redon. The lesson of Bloch, one seemingly understood by Tschumi, lies in Bloch’s worries over the pretence of romantic art forms in the “copying of nature as the unearthing of nature”. It is certain that it is only the phenomenal, cartoon superficies of Tschumi’s drawings which exercise a Renaissance-derived, perspectival diagramatics. Otherwise, more like Redon, Tschumi’s lines, in their critically allusive width, approach fluxes.

The second strand of thought regarding the line, concerns more abstract conceptions of the architectural structure of music. Of the most fluently put arguments about the formal architectonics of Wagner’s works, it is those of Alfred Lorenz which have held a pivotal position. It should be said that their importance derives greatly from the way they have been derogated by other critics. His analyses of the formal emotional unfolding of each of Wagner’s music dramas return eventually to the powerfully abbreviated argument that he made about Die Meistersinger, for the occasion of the Bayreuth Festival of 1925. Arguing that, unlike any predecessor, Wagner was able to surpass the traditional operatic habit of linking a series of numbers (arias, ensembles, finales etc.) with passages of recitative and dialogue, Lorenz proposed that Wagner had evidently been able to hypermetrically resolve the emotional narrative of each of his works in a single appropriate form; a form which “arises out of the innermost core of the work at the very moment of its artistic conception”. In the case of Die Meistersinger Lorenz suggested the architectural image of the arch for this form. The precedent for such a form may perhaps have been sponsored for Lorenz, in part, by the setting of the opening scenes of Die Meistersinger in St. Catherine’s church in Nürnberg; incidentally indicating a Catholic cultural location for its narrative. Gravity-bound and geometrically simple, Lorenz’s architectural view was one, perhaps forgivably constrained by loadbearing architectural forms, such as the Gothic, Romanesque or other kinds of arch. Such an image has worked well in providing a spatial analogue to the possible, architecturally descriptive aspects of Bruckner’s music, but is perhaps less apt for Wagner. Theodor Adorno rather disagreed with Lorenz. At least, in drawing attention to Lorenz, he articulated his own reservations towards the notion of the simple predictive architecture for Wagner’s music that is suggested in the apparent fidelity of the arch. Adorno did this by proposing a radical complexification of the emotional line taken by the work. Having already introduced the formal picture of the ‘wave’ in an argument regarding the threshold of limits in Wagner’s attempt to “invalidate anything with a definite shape, to make everything flow and obliterate every clear frontier” , Adorno later said, of Die Meistersinger, that its “continuity is created, over long stretches, by an unconstrained redrawing of the dramatic curve, from moment to moment”. With this figuration of a surprising, vertiginously emotional calculus for the appeal of Wagnerian linear structures, Adorno followed the specific mathematical disdain articulated by Bloch. At the same time, Adorno refused the proposed relation of the Wagnerian emotional instant to any a-temporal predictability architecturally insisted upon by Lorenz. In this, Adorno handed to the listening habits of an audience a view of such features as the leitmotif, not as burden-bearing elements, predictable in their affects, but as infinitesimals, anecdotes. This view comes with a proviso that, insofar as the proximal character of such features approach but never partake in a line, anecdotal experiences of Wagner’s music also bring to the interpretation of the endlessly redirecting line of the music something of the diverting remous of civic association.

This cluster of partial theoretical observations on Wagner is arranged here, pragmatically. They rake together Here, the intersubjective variousness of Rolland and Nixon’s audiences, as they are bought together as a felicitous emotional plebiscite in a flux of light, is raked together with a series of reflections on the conventionally understood imprecations to the limiting and descriptive function of the musical and the architectural line. For Adorno’s conception, it seems that the hair-line, as differingly deployed by both Tschumi and, as we’ll see, Karajan, may provide the perfect analogue from which it is now possible to depart. More importantly, Adorno musically shapes a means, via which it is possible to see the socio-architectural relationships between line and light in Tchumi’s notation of the adrenalised content of unexpectedness for architectural narrative. In his very handling of the graphic line and in his decorative mobilisation of motivic nostalgias gleaned from fractions of cinematic light, it can now be seen that Tschumi warrants an effective dislimning of one of architecture’s representational means.

iv. Engineer’s Aesthetic (Wo bist du?) It may be only through the exercise of familiarity, nevertheless, it is possible to acquire a marked proficiency in identifying the microphonically construed spaces in which music is performed. On occasion, the acoustic signatures supplied by BBC radio of the Wigmore Hall in London, for example, or the Ulster Hall in Belfast, St. Davids in Cardiff, or the Saturday matinée broadcasts from the New York Metropolitan Opera House are, on tuning-in, frequently much more recognizable than the music being performed. The apprehension, or rather the articulation of an architecturally characteristic ambience is, as we’ve seen, vital both to the aesthetic experience of recorded music, and its criticism. This is in terms of the pragmatics of containing unruly eigentonic effects of a venue, through the judicious placing or balancing of microphones, or in vitiating the deleterious effects of overlong resonances on the cognitive abilities of musicians’ attentions to volume. Regarding this, in his influential technical manual on sound recording, Alec Nisbett described a procedure of ambiophony. Ambiophony is a means which uses a number of microphones and loudspeakers to produce for the performers the aural impression that they are playing in a smaller hall than the one they are actually in. This helps prevent a tendency to overdrive their playing to an imagined audience at the back of the hall, when theirs’ may in fact be a much more intimately imaginable audience of phonographic listeners. For critics, a shared grammar of motifs to describe the sound of a space is regularly caught in references to light. A luminousness or a radiance is one of the stakes in a positive review of a recording. The significance, here, is that as much as sound engineers and producers need to attend to the physical and intellectual conditions of a good performance, so too they must attend to the representation of the place of the performance for the recording. Acoustic dramaturge, John Culshaw, the producer of Decca’s early stereo cycle of Wagner’s works, recalled an incident in his autobiography. It involved Wilhelm Furtwangler. During a recording session at Kingsway Hall, Furtwangler insisted that just a single microphone be placed in the hall, emulating what he thought to be the techniques of the German engineers with whom he was more familiar. With no time to experiment with the placement of the microphone, the result of the session was an unpublishable acoustic disaster. The poetics of architectural representation for sound recording is an enormously nuanced art, and despite various audiophiliac insistences on the superiority of one or another commercially adopted method, there is no single ideal way of recording a room, monophonically or sterophonically. This plurally creative dimension remains vital to the fabric of the meaning of any piece of recorded music. The narrative necessity of an acoustically convincing fiction of architectural ‘place’ is quite dramatically revealed, for example, when it comes to digitally mixing the apprehended source materials in more recent multi-microphone recording techniques. These approaches, essentially monophonic, involve the placement of microphones close to each performer. The aim is to get, so far as is possible, a recording of the individual without any overspill of sound from neighbouring players. Their sound may be panned into spatial position later, recreating, perhaps, the effect of a more conventionally gained stereo image. The costliness of the time of studios and performers makes for this practice, as it saves the effort of balancing the microphones to the resonances of the performers and venue. In order to overcome the lack of any larger spatial dynamics to the aggregated recording, it is then possible to wetten this dry preliminary recording by adding the sound signatures of specific venues through convolution softwares. These are often provided as industry standards. This technical development, financially driven, shows the degree to which commercial recording can be said to both value and to have lost architecture and, in the process, to have become profoundly nostalgic about it. As a fetish here, and as an instance, this elegiac possession of architecture reveals a further portal onto the political character of the aurally recorded space occasioned by Die Meistersinger.

iv. Twisted Pairs In the year that Karajan made his first full recording of Die Meistersinger with EMI, 1951, the duties for conducting it at Bayreuth fell equally to him and to Hans Knappertsbusch. Within the broader context of Wieland Wagner’s post-war renovation of Bayreuth productions, the first stagings of Die Meistersinger sit awkwardly, like revenants. The productions of Parsifal and the The Ring tetralogy were, in 1951, subject to complete reassessment and radically abstracted from the traditions of Wagnerian dramaturgy. But, for the ‘New Bayreuth’, the first Die Meistersinger – that work most overtly figured as an ideal of German, urban, vernacular community, the work with the most compelling inaugurative manner, and the one most tainted by its recent political associations – it was old hands, in the shape of Rudolf Hartmann and Hans Reissinger, who controlled the production and staging (fig. 11). Like Hartmann and Reissinger, many of the figures involved in the second re-inauguration of Bayreuth had compromised political histories. It is known that, like Karajan, conductors Clemens Krauss and Karl Bohm had done well while staying on under the Reich. Even the sublimely avuncular Hans Knappertsbusch, remembered fondly for, amongst other things, the way he eventually fell out with the regime, was, it has been argued, partly responsible for the forced exile of Thomas Mann. And, in his discussions with the Allied administration in Germany, after the war, it was made clear to Wieland Wagner that the Festival would not go ahead at all without the certain and explicit distancing of his mother from the project; the far from non-political Winifred. It is worth noting that here is something of the hyperbolic expressionism of Great German Art exhibitions to the details Hans Reissinger’s set designs both for his 1933 staging and this first post-war Bayreuth production.

fig 11

The Reissinger/Hartmann production was put on again in 1952, and it was to be the last Die Meistersinger to be seen at Bayreuth in their architecturally naturalistic manner. Next time, in the 1956, the ‘Meistersinger ohne Nurnberg’ which was produced by Wieland Wagner had marked visual differences (fig. 12). The recognizable, stylised architectural depiction of Nürnberg, familiar until the time of Reissinger was reduced to a set of a-historical natural ciphers. In the Second Act, for example, the set consisted only in the form of the symbolically blooming, suitably-lit trees (Elder for wisdom, Linden for ardency), which stood respectively outside the houses of Hans Sachs and Veit Pogner, in keeping with Richard Wagner’s instructions.

fig. 12

In 1952, it was Hans Knappertsbusch alone who conducted Die Meistersinger at the Festival. Apart from some swapping about of roles, and the notable absence of Erich Kunz and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf (she was replaced by Swiss soprano, Lisa Della Casa), the production was much the same as that of the previous year. (fig. 13). As much as Knappertsbusch’s performances from 1952 may seem to wear the accoutrements of the end of one aspect of the history of the performance of Die Meistersinger, especially in its de-Nazification, they also represent a form of beginning. So, before returning to Karajan’s later EMI recording and its connections to Tschumi, we should pay some attention to the nature of this beginning, in the form of a latterly released recording of Knappertsbusch’s reading of Die Meistersinger, made and broadcast by Bavarian Radio in 1952.

fig. 13

In some regards, the larger part of Wagner’s oeuvre is taken to represent an upsetting of at least one dimension of perspective: vis., musically, in the deployment of chromatic compositional means to produce allusive evasions of a fixed tonal perspective. Historically, critics have taken this, along with Wagner’s facility with more conventional devices, such as the layering of differently grouped voices, as heard in the blithely spontaneous urban riot at the end of Act Two of Die Meistersinger, to represent either acute and neurotic vice (Cui, Berlioz, Ruskin), or the means through which Wagner redeemed music from the perceived calamities of a steady degeneration of its forms (Liszt, Newman, and in his ways, Adorno). There are forms of perspective other than tonal ones at stake here. The careful tuning of its lightly-plastered, wood-panelled walls and ceiling contribute to the celebrated acoustic familiarity of the theatre at Bayreuth, when that architecture is brought to light and aurally detailed musically. That peculiar resonance is augmented by the role played by the cover over the orchestra pit, and by the further facts that the orchestra pit is mainly underneath the stage, that the stage house is peculiarly large, and that there is only one storey to the auditorium. For a live recording like Knappertsbusch’s, there are further aural-architectural facets. The coughing, the conversation and applause, the way the wicker seating seems to amplify the audience’s ordinary physical adjustments to suggest a restlessness, and the acoustic absorptiveness of the very bodies of that audience all manifest themselves. For one preferred mode of fantastic attention to recorded opera, the delinquencies of these and other apparently extra-diegetic, Rollandian motifs, such as the clattering of instruments, the rustle of shirtsleeves and costume, footfall and the crinkling of scores, should be intellectually deleted by the listener, as an act of aesthetic felicity. These aggregated indices of presence, which figure pronouncedly in Knappertsbusch’s recording, partly constitute the kinds of qualia that the recording may occasion for its listeners; that is to say its atmosphere. What all these little, acoustic effets réel also signify is an uncertainty as to the location of microphones, and what microphones themselves interrupt as well as sustain, in the apprehension of the performance. In the 1952 Bavarian Radio recording of Knappertsbusch’s Die Meistersinger, it isn’t possible, for instance, to tell if the sound of turning pages arises from a member of the audience, from a player or a prompt, or from Knappertsbusch himself. The placing of microphones at Bayreuth was a commercially contested topic at this time, and one subject to a deal of serruptition. Mythology suggests that it was permitted at Bayreuth, in the early 1950s, to array ‘opera-mice’ at the edge of the stage, and to place microphones under the lip of the cowl covering the orchestra, only (fig. 14).

fig. 14

The cowl is important to the sound at Bayreuth. In keeping with Wagner’s aural architectural aesthetics, it serves both to hide the musicians, to blend their sound with that of the singers, and to direct this sound upwards to reflect off the ceiling. In their recordings, as John Culshaw and others have related, Decca’s engineers were able to secure markedly different spatial images of the Bayreuth auditorium, from those of EMI and Bavarian Radio, during these first two years of the Festival. Arthur Haddy managed to steal a favoured microphone into the roof space. It has been remarked that, in 1951, Karajan wished to cut a hole in the cowl covering the orchestra pit, perhaps so that he could be seen. This may, had he his way, have disturbed the spatialising function of this acoustic-architectural fitting. Karajan did certainly rearrange the seating of the musicians in 1951, and this may in part account for the spatial differences between the Knappertsbusch and Karajan recordings. It is also evident from the number of recordings made at Bayreuth in the early 1950s that the voices of singers were rather foregrounded over the music, and that this changed after 1955. This somewhat giganticist vocal foregrounding exists in the Knappertsbusch recording, too.

This issue of the aesthetically appropriate blending of orchestral sound at Bayreuth, stems directly from the influence of Gottfried Semper in the design of the theatre. The tale of theft, personal betrayal and official subterfuge that describes the reasons for Semper not overseeing the building of the theatre himself, is an agonizing one, recounted elsewhere. The key idea of locating the orchestra below the stage is fully attributable to him, in his discussions of the renovation of orchestral sound with Wagner. As figures in a historiography, Semper and Wagner were close for long periods, especially during their insurrectionary activities as progressive nationalists in Dresden in 1848. They were both present at the barricade built outside Semper’s house. Semper, in fact, demanded that this makeshift wall, swiftly assembled fom carts and domestic furnishings, be dismantled and reconstructed to his exacting architectural specification. Their friendship, their mutually acrimonious parting and the paper nature of their eventual, resigned and distant reconciliation, are all parts of the mythology of Wagner’s work. Keen to borrow the agencies of others where it suited, Wagner, it seems from the historical picture of him, scarcely squandered aesthetic opportunities to capitalize on his poisoned relationships with former friends and allies. Yet, unlike in other cases, that of Eduard Hanslick for example, it is difficult to see where Semper figures in Wagner’s oeuvre as an exploitable caricature – except architecturally. Fully thought-through as architecture, Semper’s insurrectionist’s wall, contingent, both in geo-political terms and in the sense of scavenged and donated domestic materials used to construct it, is emblematic of the comradeliness, rancour and diplomacy that passed between Wagner and him, as the social currency of Dresden’s vigorously critical artistic milieux. It also reflects on the eventually makeshift construction of the theatre at Bayreuth. In the end, this was built hurriedly, intended as a temporary structure, by Otto Bruckwald. Bruckwald derived his building from the plans that Wagner had purloined from Semper, in the full and happy knowledge that the assurances of State remuneration Wagner had passed to Semper, would come to nothing. Though lightly built of resonant timber, rather than the more substantial materials Semper had in mind, Bayreuth’s happy and singular acoustic still derives directly from an act of technical cultural theft. The theoretical understanding that Semper ascribed to the wall for architectural vocabularies, especially its symbolic impermanence, is pertinent here. His own, idiosyncratic views of antique culture placed the temple as the centre of ritual social activity; the convening dramas of which supplied the armatures about which other civic interactions arrayed themselves. Wagner saw his own proposed Festival in a similar light. In a famous section of The Four Elements of Architecture (1851), Semper wrote, attacking entire schools of architectural history as he did so, that architectural opinion overlooks:

“the more general and less dubious influence that the carpet, in its capacity as a wall, as a vertical means of protection, had on the evolution of certain architectural forms. Thus I seem to stand without the support of a single authority when I assert that the carpet wall plays the most important role in the general history of art.”

The craft of the weaver is crucial to this understanding of the wall. Semper’s wandbereiter, or wall-fitter, is an architectural figure specifically disinterested in the load-bearing, stereotomic arts of the mason. The weaving-in of symbolic meaning to the carpet-wall, as the portable and theatrical device most essential to the social dramas of early civic association, at least as guessed at by Semper, appears also as one of the ideological accoutrements of the proscenial political dramas of 1848, and the role of his barricade in them. It figures too, in a further feature that Semper brought to the auditorium at Bayreuth. His organisation of the applied decoration of the auditorium includes the disposal of the Corinthian columns that dress the supports for its visually and acoustically uninterrupted space (fig. 15). These decorations are arranged to perspectival effect. The handling of the scale and intervals between the columns as they approach the stage, especially at the inner and outer proscenium, produces for the audienc not only an impression of giganticism for the onstage agonists, but a sense that the drama unfolds at some mythic distance. Ironically perhaps, in Semper’s articulation of the walls of Bayreuth, Wagner’s perspective-worrying, musically-chromatic fluxes are architecturally dramatized and augmented by the naturata of Semper’s diagrammatically achieved deceit.

fig 15

There is a further acoustic detail which was perhaps for some imperceptible. It adds to and refigures the political themes of this perspectivalism. The second act of Die Meistersinger starts with intrigue, is interrupted by lessons on probity, and ends in riot. During this, Sachs the craftsman, and Sixtus Beckmesser, the wretched bureaucrat, musically and spatially signify the differing authenticity of their cultural presences.. The narrative here is littered with thwartings and interruptions of different kinds. On two specific occasions, once when he sees Eva Pogner and Walther von Stolzing attempt an elopement on foot, and once when he sees Beckmesser approach the Pogner residence to woo Eva at the window, Sachs sets to exercising his cobbler’s skills; singing, whilst loudly beating shoes on a last. On both occasions he successfully prevents an undesirable course of action. On both occasions he takes the opportunity to lecture. On both occasions, with that instructional and learned hammer blow, as loud as any pistol-shot or firework, he signifies an index of cultural presence. Convention has it that Hans Sachs, as performed, will hit a shoe. The blow will be augmented in the strings, but it is a shoe that he hits. The syncopations produced by this beating are central to the form of both the music and the narrative over the next twenty minutes. This is so, even though, by the end of the Second Act, the meaning of the blow has migrated from a preserving celebration of worthy national cultural virtues of handcraft, to a punishment beating meted out to Sixtus Beckmesser, for his lousy songwriting and his importune ardency. This is a comic beating, intended to signify the utter civic humiliation of Beckmesser, and the murder of his cultural reputation. On the other hand, Beckmesser, performed as an, at first, seriously menacing figure by Heinrich Pflanzl in the Knappertsbusch recording, is required to mug, to engage in eye-rolling ludicrousness and, importantly to mime (fig. 16). The lute, which Beckmesser carries to accompany his lambasted song to Eva, but which, for the stage, he is so clearly not playing, is ventriloquised by the orchestra’s harp. For Knappertsbusch’s reading at Bayreuth, with the conventional seating of the orchestra, rather than that adopted by Karajan, the harp may have been as much as twenty feet away from Pflanzl, deep below the stage and at the back of the steep, downwardly-raked orchestra pit. These two hammer blows, interrupting Eva and Walther at one point, Beckmesser at another, lauding one, humiliating another, are key moments in the text of Die Meistersinger. They represent instants where the audience is invited to sympathetically cathect with the narratives of German cultural presence. Post-war, in 1952, in the context of the de-Nazification of Bayreuth, and in the further context of Konrad Adenauer’s inclination to follow the interests of the Allied administration in Germany, and to rule out the reunification, despite Stalin’s apparent offer, these two missing blows may nevertheless come to speak of something; precisely in the nature of their non-presence. Despite all the other rustling reality effects of this recording, which may assist in the fabrication of a radio listener’s desire for the shareable presence of the audience at Bayreuth, to commune in the unilluminated space of the auditorium, Sach’s correctional interruptions are themselves interrupted. They are technically, rather than intellectually or aesthetically, deleted.

fig. 16

This distinction of instrumental immediacies for Sachs and Beckmesser has its meanings for Wagner’s allegory. Sach’s is lent cultural authority with that indexical hammerblow. The presence and authentication signalled by it, licenses his habit of advisory interference. Also, the onomatopoeics of the “Jerum, Jerum” with which he accompanies the rhythm, speaks of yesterday; of a latinized, mediaeval sense of legimating tradition. It is because of this authority that he can see and can admire the spontaneous, unreflective aristocratic prodigy of Walther von Stolzing, for instance. Beckmesser, who as Marker in the singing competition in Act One, had earlier indicated, graphically, in chalk, the manifold failings of Stolzing’s song-writing, comes himself to be judged by the authority of Sach’s hammer. At all points after his interruption of the elopement of Eva and Walther, the tools of Sach’s, the poet-shoemaker, describe the vernacular locus of aesthetic probity. In this scene, Beckmesser, the bureaucrat, in reaching to tradition for his own authority, is rendered increasingly culturally irrelevant and disconnected by each error nailed by Sachs. Here, for one version of his cartoonery, it is thought that Wagner may have publicly crucified his critic Hanslick.
Crucially, in the Knappertsbusch recording of Die Meistersinger in 1952, neither of the interruptive hammer blows delivered by Otto Edelmann in his performance of Sach’s is heard. The microphones at these narratively vital points are, to borrow from another language, overexposed. All that is heard is anacrustic; a diminuendo, the trailing resonance of the blow, as it bounces off the walls and ceiling of the auditorium, and as it is absorbed by the bodies of the audience, who, of course, hear the blow fully, absorbing it’s meaning utterly; exhausting it. The radio audience to this performance, at the time, may not have read allegorical significance into this non-presence of the blow. The longer stain on the memory of the blow may have fulfilled and rendered this non-presence imperceptible. They may have heard it, despite.

The microphones, supplied to capture Knappertsbusch at Bayreuth in 1952, may surrender such cultural-political ambiguities in the representation of the space of the hall. As an intentionally monophonic recording, which is to say one which relies only on volume and intensity to figure its spatialities, and as such readable in the manner of Desmond Shawe Taylor and Edward Sackville West, there was a particular temporal coherence underwriting it. It is and was known to be a live recording, taken from a single performance; unlike Karajan’s early Bayreuth essay, which is collated from several. In this sense, then, the non-presence of Sach’s blows may be thought anchored by one, specific, indexical spatio-temporal acceptance. The case with Karajan’s second recording of Die Meistersinger, the one made in stereo in Dresden, in the early 1970s, is rather different, epecially in terms of its time. It’s spatial anchors are visual; photographic, in fact, and, in the end, fabular. These same passages from Act Two involve Theo Adam’s interpretation of Sach’s. His same hammer blows are heard clearly enough, though almost as distant claps. Beckmesser’s part is taken by Welsh bass-baritone Geraint Evans. His then widely recognised abilities in playing the braggart buffoon is exercised to comic effect; even though this actorly expertise is not made available in any visual way, except perhaps where, in the documentation of the recording in the sleevenotes, it may be mnemonically improvised from the stain of Verdi’s Falstaff on his photographic portrait (fig. 17a & 17b).

fig. 17a

fig. 17b

What is also interesting is the way that Evans’s rolled rs and his nasal whine work in this. For a European audience, renewed in its apprehensions of alterity, Evans’s Welsh accent goes a great way in re-locating the meanings that are caught up in the narrative of the ‘Jew in the Thornbush’; the tale often taken as the representation of the culturally dislocated character of the bureaucrat. New to Wagnerian roles, lacking somewhat the culturally nuanced German diction of Pflanzl in 1952, Evan’s comic voice is shaped as much by the heroic precociousness of the chapel and rugby field, as it is by the vocal requirements of Verdi, and the special sympathies of his nationalism. The subtleties of Evans’s braggadoccio are heard clearly in his arguments with Sach’s, as his attempts to woo are interrupted. Most vividly, they are heard as he sings the first line of his song to Eva, under the agreed instruction of Sachs, who again will strike every time Beckmesser ‘unsings’ himself. With the words: “Den tag seh’ ich erscheinen / der mir wohl gefallen tut” (The day I see appear / which pleases me well), two things becomes apparent, at once. Firstly, Evans’s Welsh intonations and syntax, and secondly the cool resonances of the architectural space of the Lukaskirch with its expectant silence, into which Evans sings, and which is brought to light with his warbling of the word “erscheinen” (appear). Sach’s strikes, and what is clear from the evidential resonance of the blow is that it was made in a different space. It may be that it was sounded in one of the booths that can be seen in the photographs in the accompanying sleevenotes. Perhaps. From these photographs it is possible to see the paraphernalia of the recording and the appearance of the church itself; the booths, the placement of those telling, though largely distracting Neumann microphones, the distribution of the musical forces, the place of Karajan, his hair, the arrangement of the recording desk. All of which, though superficially convincing, in fact relate very little concerning the aural spatialities of the finished product. The sound of Sach’s blow is interrupted, on its way to Evans and elsewhere, both by a microphone and by the walls of a booth. In fact, the sound never reaches either Evans or even, significantly, Theo Adam’s Sachs. It is not he, in this performance, who strikes the blow. The blow’s sound simply doesn’t figure in the larger dislimning delineation of the Lukaskirche occasioned by Evans’s voice. This effect is something that may be achieved by recording from a booth with a limiting resonance, by using a microphone with a limited range, or more simply, by just opening a window (fig 18a, b, c).

fig. 18a     
 fig. 18b

fig. 18c

Variously, the expectations of synchronic presence caught up in the spatial musical conventions of Die Meistersinger, as sharpened by the poetic effects of the hammer blow, become unhinged here. In part, these disappointments are shared in the Knappertsbusch and in the later Karajan recordings. All the tinily convincing reality effects of the Knappertsbusch recording were (are) available to the audience of the recording and its radio audience, but not necessarily to those present at Bayreuth on July 12th 1952. However, the temporal stake is different for Karajan at the Lukaskirche. Each of these recordings is dependent on separate regimes of microtemporality for its achievement of architecture. The monophonic Knappertsbusch recording depends on the differences in the short times taken for sounds to reach a microphone, and as they bounce of the walls of Bayreuth auditorium and are absorbed by the bodies of the audience there. They are however determined, in their production of monophonic space, solely by the respective volumes of direct sound and resonant sound. The Karajan recording relies for its difference on another, much smaller psychoacoustic temporal differential; one that is fundamentally exploited by stereo techniques. This, the microtemporality of the Haas or ‘precedent’ effect, governs the smallest unit of time by which it is possible to trigonometrically determine the direction from which a sound comes. A third microtemporality is an interruption. It involves a temporal contraction effected by microphonically taking the sound made in one part of the hall straight to the mixing desk, without allowing it to figure in the more general aggregate sonority of the space. It is this microphony, in seeking to address the theatrical interests of a specifically phonographic, rather than a radiophonic audience, that shapes the architectural separation of Karajan’s Sach’s from his hammer, here. This phonographic audience was one habituated to aesthetic and ethical differences between the historically developing spatialities detailed here: the indecidable monophonies of the Knappertsbusch recording, the inventiveness of what was heard by Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor, the spatial totalitarianism of the RCA and Mercury minimal pair arrays, and the more juicily pluralised and discontinuous spaces conjured by John Culshaw and Georg Solti for Decca.

To recall Semper’s wandbereiter, the use of microphones at the Lukaskirche and the blending together of what they hear, did not attempt a linear perspective. Rather they play a role in the reticulation of an aural architectural fabric. On one hand, this fabric is something that is much akin to the kinds of figural function of the line in trapping an audience that were described by Jacques Lacan in the relevant sections of The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis: those which deal with the psycho-poetic relationships between line and light. In this regard Lacan’s writing might serve as a theory of microphony. On the other hand, such an indication of fabric and line might parallel a rather earlier text. Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Speech address. It was here that Churchill revised the meaning of the term Iron Curtain, a term incidentally borrowed from Joseph Goebbels. For all his talk of the strong parent races of Europe, for all his focus on the essentially western European character of Italian communism and its difficulties with Stalin, Churchill’s was a speech profoundly figured by notions of reticulation. One one hand there is a reticulation of the interests of American and British imperial endeavour. Here, like a figure in the carpet, the international significance of the Commonwealth countries appears shot-through by a thread of cultural consistency; the administrative concerns of British imperialism. On the other hand there are the similarly reticulated interests of the Soviet bloc countries. With this precursory statement, the idea of the line drafted through Germany in 1952, dividing Bavaria, separating Dresden from Munich and Bayreuth, comes to epihenomenally represent an interface of these reticulates; a nexus of political conflicts, negotiations, proposals and refutations. This nexus supplies a set of contesting predicates about the meaning of Germany, and which tug to attention those figures of Germany represented by the agonists of Die Meistersinger. As vanishing points in a more broadly construed, Tschumian acoustic perspective, as well as in the political contexts of the meaning of Germany at the respective moments of their recording, both of the orders of acoustic non-presence and temporal theft found in these productions of Die Meistersinger, announce moments which may reflect on those circumstances for different types of phonographic audience. The way these recordings each sponsor a redirection to some or another symbolic ‘elsewhere’ of the hitherto indisputable presences of key actors in Wagner’s florid romcom, remains important. This is as part of an ongoing drift away from a mimetic appeal to an idealised concert hall experience, as effected over time by Karajan’s use of the possibilities of stereo sound manipulation. More importantly perhaps, it is as part of the texture of a representation of Germany to an international audience of Germany, or rather of many possible Germanies, each coming to meaningful terms with the divisions articulated by a line drawn through Berlin in August 1961. The suggestion that there is something to be made of the acoustic articulation of this dramatically urban line, in light of its similarities to the hair-lines of Karajan and Tschumi, is then perhaps not so silly.

iv. Recrimination (it is like singing, the phallus instrument ) These two recordings, act in their varied temporal differences, and in their different cultural political moments, to produce what might be regarded as a recognisable, though ambiguous, acoustic constellation of the meaning for the Berlin Wall. Somehow, they may bring together the Stalin Note of the summer of 1952, and Willi Brandt’s signing of the Transit Agreement, and later the Basic Agreement, in 1972. It may be pleasing to imagine a poetic, yet cognitive, relationship between the line drawn through Berlin, and the fluxing meanings of the political fringes of Karajan, Knappertsbusch, and others. In fact, however, and as Gottfried Semper’s view of the wall-fitting architect implies, it is not the line that is entirely at stake here.

“An obedient daughter speaks only when asked”, observes Eva Pogner, at the start of Act Two of Die Meistersinger. “How wise, how good”, nods her father. For all that this account of a suggestive conversation between Tschumi and Wagner has thus far worn exclusively male figures, and inasmuch as it has allegorically suggested an interpretative terrain of nostalgically dreamed étatist politics, the non-presences articulated here (which are really neither absences or lapses), point to an otherwise engenderable set of intrigues. No matter how delighted or irritated a critical audience may become with the performances of here, Lisa Della Casa, there Elizabeth Schwarzkopf or Hilde Gueden, or elsewhere Helen Donath, the character of Eva Pogner appears superficially as little more than a squabbled-over token of desirably distracting, if somewhat gemütlich youth. The words critically expended on Herbert von Karajan’s controversial choice of singers for the roles of Beckmesser and Eva at the Lukaskirche, all return to two themes. First: the anecdotally relayed reassurances of Karajan to his protégés that he is, like Wagner, incapable of aesthetic error. And, second: the indexically appropriate years of Helen Donath – which is frankly odd, given that in gueden, schwarzkopf and casa were all young singers in the 1950s when they ….. Within the constraints of the demanding erotic landscape of Die Meistersinger, in her blonde wig, Eva is pushed biddably about, much in the ways that may be expected of mild-mannered female operatic characters. She is not Carmen. Eva is at all points drawn as subject to her desire to please, respectively, Veit Pogner, Hans Sachs, Walther von Stolzing, Sixtus Beckmesser (more politely, it has to be said), and even, at an amicable remove, her maid’s lover, David, the excitably inexpert apprentice to Hans Sachs. The delineation of that reticulated subjective space is repeated elsewhere in the oeuvre of a Wagner. The Cosima Wagner of her published diaries was a bitterly nostalgic, recriminatory individual. In her plangent refrains about how things used to be, especially when she detailed the endlessly redrawn trajectory of her husband’s relationship with Gottfried Semper, as well as her own pious mercilessness towards Semper, there is a fear; one of abandonment. Along with everything else, she recorded her husband’s dreams. One of these dreams came at the time of Wagner’s attempts to trick the plans for the Festspielhaus out of Semper. Her recounting of it perhaps figures a pathological desire to support and to please. She wrote:

“R. had a curious dream: Semper with a plaster mask, annoyed at being recognised, the Wesendoncks, I suddenly vanished, anxious searching, till suddenly my voice as clear as silver but frightened is heard calling “Richard”. He cannot reply, which surprises me, but at last, struggling to wake up, he calls out, ‘Here I am’.”

The narrated status of this dream reminds very much of one of the key moments where Sigmund Freud developed a category of wahn, for his own purposes. This enormously broad and encryptable term, was one with special domestic and aesthetic significance for the Wagners; Wahnfried. Moreover, in the special context of a close reading of the fictionalised dream at the heart of Wilhelm Jensen’s short story Gradiva, Sigmund Freud proposed the meaning of wahn as a species of waking delusion. Cosima’s recording of Richard’s dreams, and what she may have inadvertently contained in them by her surprise at them, are clearly available to some form of psychoanalytical interpretation. As shown by Cosima, however, Richard is here only as the result of a psychography, not as a historically specific and analysable unconscious. This act of recording may say something of Cosima’s anxieties about her husband’s desires for a relationship with Semper; one which, by this point, Semper was unlikely to agree to. Her account may also parallel the sublimated behaviour of Eva, and further parallel even that of Della Casa, Schwarzkopf, Gueden and Donath to Knappertsbusch or to Karajan. The whole may even evince a certain marital iciness towards Richard, and his itinerant libido. These are all indexical functions, demanding a policeably symptomatic connection between historically archived psychic materials and their meanings. The phallic characteristics of the role of Eva are hidden exactly by their superficies. Eva’s ambiguities lie, in part, in her plural availability to the libidinal requirements of each of the male supports in Wagner’s drama. Whilst she may be reduced to a prize, she cannot represent the same prize to each. Though minor in terms of singing time, the role is a crucial one. It is Eva, after all, who sings into hierarchical relationship the various characterizations of civic probity assumed by the drama. She does so in a way that Beckmesser, in his wretchedly instrumental ambition, is utterly unable. The very slightness of the role revises many of the aural-architectural issues raised by the performance of Die Meistersinger here. At those moments when the staging of Die Meistersinger comes forward, a formational appeal to its always various audiences, especially its international audiences, keen perhaps to see how the subjectively fraught issue of German nationhood might respond to its most recent political tests, the almost transparent figure of Eva presents in a suturing capacity. In providing the promise of a single and pertinent image to each, she definitively embraces all, and refuses the superiority of any one possibility. This of course depends on how Eva is sung. The phallic and intimidating insistence of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, tells a different tale to the more reticent affective qualities of Lisa Della Cas’s voice, for instance. Nevertheless, it is in Eva that the thoroughly sinthomic aspect of Die Meistersinger, as offered by the recording of the spaces of its performances, announces itself. And, it is in this sense, for the manifold, microphonic, aural-architectural conditions of Die Meistersinger, that Eva represents the figure of an acoustic drama.

We should return to a view of another culture of the 1970s, to which this essay has continually alluded, and to a moment in time when the image of German nationalism was not its frequent vivid colour; a moment that also shares the anniversary of the eventual publication of The Manhattan Transcripts. In September 1979, in Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, since destroyed and rebuilt, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure played. I saw them. This was at a time before the Wagnerian, romantic darkness of the term ‘Goth’ had come to significantly figure in the reputations of these or other post-punk bands. It was also only a matter of days since guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris of the Banshees had made unexplained departures. After the Cure’s supporting set, the Banshees took the stage. Budgie, longstanding friend of the band, filled Kenny Morris’s place. Robert Smith of The Cure took McKay’s role. Holding his then trademark instrument, a Vox Teardrop electric guitar, Smith read for chord changes and progressions from a sheet of paper on a chair, upon which he occasionally rested his foot. His delirious eye-rolling distraction was occasionally compromised by a need to concentrate on the more mundane business of anticipating middle eights. There was something of Beckmesser here. Susan Dallion, in singing Siouxsie Sioux, addressed the crowd, and gave them license to beat Kenny Morris and John MacKay on sight, for their abandonment of her. It was here that I first saw a plane of variously styled hair as a legitimately transient architectural feature of concert halls. For all the pink kilts, bondage gear and plastic bike jackets, for all the Doctor Marten shoes, zipped suede winkle-pickers and scruffied blazers, for all the rest of the burbling sartorial vocabulary that lay beneath this plane, it was the complexity of an adrenalised flux of hair, lit fragmentedly from the stage, that figured the cultural complexity of that moment. And, whether it be raked and rowed as in the auditorium at Bayreuth, or back-combed and bobbing in the moshpit at Scala in London, that coiffeured plane remains a viably Tschumian feature of the aural architectural event, for precisely as long as the music plays.