(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

SONIC DREAMWORLDS
285
The phantasmagoric techno-totality is not so much supposed to drown
out the noise of traffic and people; rather, it is ultimately supposed to
attune us to them. After all, it doesn’t combat noise by silence but with
more carefully structured noise.
Not only do phantasmagorias shut us off from reality, then, but
they gradually and artfully reconcile us to reality, in spite of our very real
alienation from it. This is precisely how a modern opera house works: its
greatest work goes into shutting out the world beyond the “magic circle”
of stage and audience; within the space of silence thus created, the modern
opera can lay out a new geography, an anaesthetic one. The conductor
Bruno Walter relates the following story about Gustav Mahler: on a
visit, Walter expressed admiration of an alpine panorama, to which the
composer replied that there was no need to do so, since “I’ve composed
all this away already.” 48 Composing means simulating and erasing that
which might lie “behind” the simulation. The anaesthetic, particularly in
the case of Wagner, can be extremely noisy, but it provides a composed
assault as art or as entertainment, which prepares the audience for the
world outside, both because it hardens them to it (makes them ready for
it), and because it leads them to ignore it.
Of course, this cognitive autarky of the concert hall somewhat
paradoxically enables the unfolding of what Adorno elsewhere calls
“symphonic space.” 49 Because the membrane between the concert hall
on the one hand and the foyer, the coat checks, in short, the building
shell itself, have been rendered impermeable, music can now undertake
to simulate distance within the confines of the concert hall. Adorno
claims that the New German School (by which he means mainly composers
influenced by or reacting to Wagner) is guided by the idea of a
“distant sound,” by which he means something very much like phantasmagoria,
in which “Musik verräumlicht innehält” (music becomes
static and spatialized). 50 Even on a purely empirical level, the question
of distance enters into the compositional as well as the technological
equation through Wagner. In Mahler’s symphonies, for instance,
horns, trumpets, and other instruments routinely chime in from offstage,
for instance the distant call of the postillon’s horn in the scherzo
of the Third Symphony. The horn can be heard from the distance and
launches into a duet with the horns on stage; Adorno himself comments
that this dialogue “versöhnt . . . das Unversöhnte” (reconciles
the unreconciled) 51 — in other words that it creates precisely some
kind of falsely coherent (phantasmagoric) space. Just as world exhibitions,
according to Benjamin, at once spatialize an “Universum der
Waren” (“universe of commodities”) and just as Grandville caricatures
bestow “Warencharakter aufs Universum” (GS V.1:51; “commodity
character on the universe,” AP, 8), Mahler’s post-horn dialogue annihilates
(real) space, only then to unfold its own simulated space.