(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

SONIC DREAMWORLDS
275
[I therefore performed the experiment of arriving at reflections,
observations about music by something I called “music from the
outside” [“Musik von Außen”], both in the literal and metaphorical
senses, literally listening to music not as it sounds in an opera house
or a concert hall, but as it sounds when you are late in returning to
your box after intermission and you hear this noise from the outside,
the feeling that this reveals a side of the music that one usually does
not see, and, speaking more generally, I realized that describing a
phenomenon involves seeing it as though from the outside and not
just from the inside. 5 ]
In many respects, then, Benjamin’s Moscow Diaries find him practicing
something along the lines of “music from the outside” — the crucial
difference being that he mentions nothing of even the most incidental
sounds of the operatic performance. Adorno’s aural flâneur on the other
hand hears bits of music, noise, applause, the shuffling of feet, nothing
particularly distinct, one imagines, but rather what the radio listener picks
up, tuning in and out of different broadcasts. 6 In his studies on what he
dubbed the “radio voice,” Adorno claims that this approach is doomed
to fundamentally misapprehend music; here, however, he seems to think
there is something in music that the latecomer in the foyer may be better
attuned to than those sitting diligently in their seats inside. 7 What is
it that makes this “experiment” of “music from the outside” theoretically
productive, rather than a state to hurry through on the way to one’s
box? What is it the latecomer gleans from the distant noises of the concert
hall, and how do these distant noises come to attain such evidentiary
quality? The scene is clearly one important to musical modernity, for we
find it recapitulated even in the period’s music itself: The first Nachtmusik
(night music) of Gustav Mahler’s seventh symphony, for instance, constitutes
itself as something like a flânerie past a concert hall. 8 In the words
of Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, “Mahler walks through the town in the
evening and takes in all the music he can hear,” including snippets of
music emanating from an opera house and a music hall. 9
In what follows, I will seize on this act of auditory flânerie as an avenue
into the investigation of operatic phantasmagoria, by which I understand
a type of illusory performativity that masks its own material conditions of
production — a path that can only be followed by relying on both Adorno
and Benjamin as guides. In the process Benjamin’s notion of flânerie and
phantasmagoria serve as important landmarks, even though they reveal
their one-sided focus on visuality. Benjamin’s flâneur, so attuned to the
visual seduction of the capitalist commodity, is strangely deaf to its siren’s
call. His maxim isn’t simply “Alles ansehen, nichts anfassen” (“Look at
everything, touch nothing,” M4,7), it also seems to be “look at everything,
hear nothing.” While Benjamin introduces the term “phantasmagoria” as
something of a theoretical Open, Sesame of nineteenth-century (visual)