The Devil's Pleasure Palace. Michael Walsh
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of 1) atheist cultural Marxism that sprang up amid the physical and intellectual detritus of Europe after the calamity of World War I, and its practical, battering-ram application, Critical Theory; and 2) the Book of Genesis, from which our cultural self-understanding flows, and Milton’s great explicative epic poem, in which a God who reigns supreme is also a strangely absent and largely offstage Prime Mover; and 3) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s emblematic reworking of the man caught in the middle between Heaven and Hell, between God and Mephistopheles: Faust.
It is the story of humanity’s journey, of roads taken and not taken, and about the choices we must make. Let us begin, then, in Hell.
OF THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE
In 1813, the sixteen-year-old Viennese composer Franz Peter Schubert began work on his first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace), with a libretto by August von Kotzebue. The work remained unperformed until 1978, when it finally was staged in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. To say that Schubert was young when he composed this youthful but culturally seminal work partially obscures that he also proved middle-aged, dying at thirty-one in 1828. People got older younger then, grew up faster, and perhaps lived life more fully. In any case, the creative force embodied by Schubert was in a hurry to meet its negation, which is to say, its completion.
In Des Teufels Lustschloss, Oswald, a poor knight, marries Luitgarde, an aristocrat’s niece who is promptly disinherited. Heading for a new life, they are caught in a raging storm and take refuge in a nearby inn. When superstitious villagers tell of a strange, haunted castle in the vicinity, Oswald and his faithful squire, Robert, set off to investigate the manor house, which indeed turns out to be bristling with terrors and temptations. One of the latter takes the form of a shapely Amazon who tries to seduce Oswald, warning him of dire consequences should he not succumb. (He does not.) The more adamantly faithful Oswald is, though, the more terrors rise up to threaten him. He is finally saved by the timely arrival of Luitgarde, who, when threatened with death herself, stands fast—and suddenly the castle crumbles.
In the end, it all turns out to have been an illusion. The spirits were the villagers in disguise, hired by Luitgarde’s uncle to test Oswald’s courage under fire and prove him worthy of Luitgarde.
Conventional musical wisdom has long held that Kotzebue’s libretto is the principal reason for the opera’s neglect—an explanation applied to all Schubert operas, as it happens. More likely, the cause is Schubert’s inexpert handling of the dramatic necessities inherent in operatic composition; what works so brilliantly for him in songs and song cycles failed him as a composer in the larger forms of vocal compositions (although, curiously, not in his symphonies, each of which grew in sophistication and scope).
But, seen in another light, Kotzebue’s work is entirely in line with European philosophical thought of the time as expressed through art. Recall that this is the early nineteenth century, not the twentieth; the horrors of 1914 and 1939 are still far in the future. The happy ending (a victory of love over death) is not a cop-out but the proof of the promise of redemption—that we must suffer the temptations and travails of Christ and face our worst fears in order to win in the end. That its conclusion (“And then I woke up . . . and it was all a dream!”) has since become a groan-worthy cliché is not Kotzebue’s fault, given that he wrote in a less cynical age, but anyone ever tempted to throw a shoe at the end of Fritz Lang’s 1944 film noir, The Woman in the Window, knows what I mean. Not to mention Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
And who represents the saving power of divine grace? Almost invariably, the woman, whose own self-sacrifice rescues and transfigures the flawed male hero. In Goethe’s famous words from the second part of Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan,” or, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward.” The Eternal Feminine, a sexually anti-egalitarian concept that feminists of both sexes today would regard as laughable, is one of the organizing principles of the cosmos, and a crucial factor in the hero’s journey. Even the pansexuality of today, try though it might, cannot replace this naturally primal force: the union of opposites into a harmonious, generative whole.
Crucially, then, Oswald is saved by the love of a good woman; so is the Flying Dutchman in Wagner’s opera; so is Robert le diable in Meyerbeer’s opera of the same name; so is Max the Freischütz in Weber’s masterpiece. And so, in another Wagner work, is Parsifal, whose sexual rejection of Kundry (the Magdalene figure) and her alluring Flower Maidens ultimately releases Kundry from Klingsor’s curse; without her compelled attempt at seduction, Parsifal could never have found strength through sexual sublimation, a potency that allows him to conquer the evil magician and regain the Spear, thus causing Klingsor’s own infernal pleasure palace to crumble into dust.
In short, in these tales, the twentieth-century cynicism of the interwar generation does not yet hold sway in the larger culture. The age of anxiety, alienation, nihilism, and anomie still lies in the future. But it will come, creating along the way its own secular Xanadu, another poetic Lustschloss, to tempt and seduce Western civilization into self-destruction, with shame and self-doubt its principal snares.
Two years after this ambitious but abortive effort, Schubert wrote the song that made his reputation, “Erlkönig,” based on a text by Goethe. The hammering octaves and rolling bass line in the piano would later inspire silent-movie pianists around the world, but they perfectly express the song’s terrifying tale of a desperate father, his deathly ill son in his arms, riding furiously on horseback to bring the boy to safety, and chased by the Erlkönig, the Elf King, the figure of Death, who sings beguilingly to the boy in a voice that only the child can hear:
Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir,
Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.
(Darling child, come away with me!
Such beautiful games I can play with you,
So many colorful flowers on the beach,
My mother has many a golden robe.)
The music grows in intensity as the father speeds for safety, but Death’s seductive song is faster, his blandishments richer, and the boy is so desirable. The child cries that the Elf King has grabbed him, the anguished father arrives at his destination, and . . . “in seinem Armen das Kind war tot” (“in his arms, the child was dead”). In one stroke of youthful genius, Romanticism in music had begun.
Des Teufels Lustschloss may never have found its place in the operatic repertory (nor has any other Schubert stage work). It is important nevertheless for what it tells us about the state of European theatrical thinking at the beginning of the philosophically tumultuous, watershed nineteenth century—what the taste of the audience was and what effect the work had upon later generations of creative artists. A straight line runs from the penultimate sequence of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with its whiff of the diabolical, and the entirety of The Magic Flute, with its battle between good and evil, through Schubert’s youthful works to Meyerbeer’s Parisian spectacular, Robert le diable, and Marschner’s supernatural Hans Heiling, and ahead to the spooky German landscapes of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, the haunted seacoast of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, and right through to the end of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle—which is to say, the end of the world.
Or, to put it another way, these operas convey mankind’s innate desire to come face to face with the hidden forces behind our origins: good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and Satan. From this primal conflict emerges our yearning for dramatic narrative and the daemonic in art (“daemonic” in the sense of uncanny or supernatural)—signposts pointing the way toward a meaning of life that science (which rejects the daemonic) cannot provide, if only we pay attention and follow where they lead.
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