Blue Self-Portrait

the overture I told my sister, why of course, my sister said, you knew it, Papa always listened to the overture while he was alive, when Papa was alive, do you remember how alive he was in his car, Papa, conducting the overture with his right hand and steering with his left, how could I forget, it’s fresh as day my sister said, and nothing will ever stop us remembering that, Papa and the Tannhäuser overture, first Papa and us and the overture, not Tannhäuser here or there, neither at the Deutsche Oper nor the Staatsoper but as conducted by Papa, way back when, when he was living life to the full, remember, he was living to the full by daybreak already, don’t get your knickers in a twist, my sister said who never lets anyone tweak hers, but I went on getting them twisted, I judge Wagner by his reputation but not Ligeti, Wagner’s Wirkung makes me afraid of Wagner, Ligeti’s doesn’t put me off Ligeti, and yet I booked those tickets for Tannhäuser with the sole aim of undergoing Wagner’s famous Wirkung, indeed I wanted to feel the famous effect generally known as Wirkung, a transformation not an effect, at the Deutsche Oper which isn’t Bayreuth but still more suited to Wagner than Papa’s old banger, to undergo the Wirkung pure, unmediated and without preparation must be possible at the Deutsche Oper, yet I’d only partly experienced it due to lateness. Well played said my sister just as I was thinking it.

Crouched in the semi-darkness of the upper circle, second row, for we couldn’t hope to attain our excellent seats before the interval without sparking a major contra-Wagnerian incident, I was struggling with the handle of my Woolworths plastic bag which I couldn’t get off my wrist, each attempt at disentanglement of Woolworths from my person producing a horrifying storm of plastic-bag rustle, I had to wait for the brass to come in to disengage my wrist millimeter by millimeter, luckily, I considered, it’s not a Mozart divertimento, I was simultaneously attempting to undergo the full Wagnerian impact in the least calculated and most immediate way, tried to allow myself to be intimately moved by the Leitmotif, almost managed it but not quite, occasionally I was pretty sure, trying to feel the full unmitigated Wagnerian effect, there, that’s it, that’s the true-blue Wagnerian effect, but with these words in my head could hear myself thinking them and that in itself created a severe anti-Wagnerian distancing to be thinking about the Wagnerian effect even while undergoing it. I tried to think of myself as a cow, given my musical affinity with cows since the notorious nocturnal bellowing which had even surprised me in my car and somewhat frightened me, I thought the Wagnerian effect on a cow would be Wagner’s effect in its purest condition, that Wagner’s music and the cow’s lowing might have something in common perhaps surprise or alarm and that the cow was therefore the animal most able to understand Tannhäuser, that an audience entirely made up of cattle at the Deutsche Oper, a herd of cattle all recently parted from their calves and gathered in the Deutsche Oper would have made the best possible audience, for no single cow would have been trying to feel Wagner’s effect nor have sated themselves with the famous Wagnerian effect, rather the cattle in general and each individual cow would have undergone the full Wagnerian effect without having a single thought on the subject, whereas the Deutsche Oper’s audience naturally had a much more problematic experience of Tannhäuser, an experience packed full of intelligence no matter how sensitive and stuffed with a wealth of Wagnerian musical references rendering direct sense experience impossible. However absurdly diminutive the claims of human intelligence, it is always to a greater or lesser extent human, I concluded still trying to shed my own humanity. I finally managed to detach my wrist from the Woolworths bag, a first step, now I needed to slough off all human thoughts and replace them with bovine thoughts, the setting is appropriate, I felt, noting the papier-mâché castle, the backcloth of mountains and sky and the choir done up in medieval garb, here we were fairly gone rural and perfectly accessible to a cow, the castle is a castle, the mountains mountains, the sky a sky, medieval times medieval times, a rabbit would have got it so a cow quite as well as a rabbit, this is a set equally suited to rodents as to ruminants, I’ve almost managed bovinely to submit to the Wagnerian effect when my sister who’s a violinist, not only a violinist but a musician, leaned up to my almost-cow ear to complain about the awful flute which was buggering up every one of her entrances, that flautist should be sacked, said my sister, better Tannhäuser without a single flute than that flute in Tannhäuser, it’s unreal a flute so out of tune, she said in my ear with such disgust that the humanity sitting nearby reacted with a show of perfectly intelligible annoyance, the human public was less bothered by that bugger of a flute than by your remark on the flute’s buggering up, I whispered to my sister who shrugged, I’m right, my sister said, and the audience is wrong. I get a huge kick out of my sister’s capacity for fearlessly stating that she’s right when she’s right and also for blamelessly pointing out that the audience is wrong when it’s wrong. This incredible facility my sister has for asserting she’s right and the rest are wrong is what I most like about my sister, truly it’s the very essence of my sister, not once has my sister compromised in her determination to have right on her side even in opposition to the audience, she’s never been a victim of the education for collective happiness which she has nevertheless shared with me yet which never had the effect on her that it