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<b>Walhalla's Frigid Joys</b></font></td></tr> <tr><td valign="top" width="5%"><br></td> <td colspan="2" valign="top" width="90%"> <br><font face="BOOKMAN" size="3"></font><p align="justify">
<font face="BOOKMAN" size="3">Perhaps the most touching scene of the entire <i>Ring</i> occurs towards the end of Act II of <i>Walkure</i>, when Brunhilde, in her cold majestic beauty, approaches Siegmund, informing him that every mortal who sees her will soon die - she is here to tell him that she will take him to Walhalla after he will lose the battle with Hunding. Siegmund refuses her offer if Sieglinde cannot join him in Walhalla, preferring the love of a miserable mortal woman to Walhall's <i>sproeden Wonnen</i>. The shattered Brunhilde comments on this refusal:</font></p>
Bayreuth, which was proclaimed dead, dismissed as outdated, at its very conception, is today more alive than the majority of those who organized its funerals. Again and again, it reemerges as the Mecca of European cultural fundamentalists - the site of their <i>hadj</i>, sacred pilgrimage - you have to do it at least once in lifetime if you want your soul saved. And the core of this fundamentalists is no longer composed by hard-core conservatives: as an American critic recently remarked, Wagner's Ring was in the last years almost kidnapped by Leftist Jewish directors - in a weird case of poetic justice, you have to go to the American West (to Seattle) in order to enjoy the "authentic" Teutonic Ring...<br><br>
There was, in the last months, after the public letters from Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and other philosophers, a lot of talk about the revival of the core European values as an antidote to the Americanized New World Order. If there is a cultural event in which, today, this European tradition condenses and embodies itself, it is Bayreuth - so, to paraphrase Max Horkheimer, those who do not want to talk about Bayreuth should also keep silent about Europe.<br><br>
<b><i>La Clemenza di Tito</i>,<br> or the Ridiculously-Obscene Excess of Mercy</b></fontbr></td></trbr>
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of the people bombarding me with their demands<br>
Have mercy, one after the other<br>
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TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable, is worth more than constant fidelity.</fonti></pfont>
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<font face="BOOKMAN" size="3">This couplet from the finale blurts out the obscene secret of <i>clemenza</i>: the pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it infinite - we are FOREVER indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers repentance to fidelity: in fidelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect, while in repentance, what attached me to the Master is the infinite indelible guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master.<br><br>
The obverse, the truth, of the continuous celebration of the wisdom and mercy displayed by Tito is therefore the fact that Tito as a ruler is a fiasco. Instead of relying on the support of faithful subjects, he ends up surrounded by sick and tormented people condemned to eternal guilt. And this sickness is reflected back into Tito himself: far from radiating the dignity of the severe but merciful rulers from the early Mozart's operas, Tito's acts display features of hysterical self-staging: Tito is PLAYING himself all the time, narcissistically fascinated by the faked generosity of his acts. In short, the passage from Basha Selim in <i>Die Entfuehrung</i> to Tito in <i>Clemenza</i> is the passage from the naïve to the sentimental. And, as is usual with Mozart, this falsity of Tito's position is rendered by the music itself which, in a supreme dislay of the much-praised Mozartean irony, effectively undermines the opera's explicit ideological project.<br><br>
Perhaps, then, the fact that <i>La clemenza</i> was composed in the midst of the work on <i>The Magic Flute</i> is more than a meaningless coincidence: one is tempted to risk the hypothesis that <i>La clemenza</i> is the obverse, the hidden truth, of <i>The Magic Flute</i>, its necessary shadowy double, the obscene reactionary political reality that underlies the reinvented "magic" of the Flute universe. Back in the 1930s, Max Horkheimer wrote that those who do not want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about fascism. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, one should say to those who detract <i>La clemenza</i> as a failure in comparison with <i>The Magic Flute</i>: those who do not want to engage critically with <i>The Magic Flute</i> should also keep silent about <i>La Clemenza di Tito</i>. <br><br>
<b>The Sex of Orpheus</b>
