Eroica / Overall Summary

Needless to say, this is totally provisional and open to discussion and even radical change.

On the attachment, you see the image of the whole work in skeletal form. Each of the three world narratives has six sets of seven screens, or, to state it another way, six episodes. The sets of seven are as before: four narrative, two psychological and one mythical. The diamond shaped icons represent a passage screen that leads from one two-episode set to the next. At the beginning of the work is a large diamond representing the Ur-map and other front matter that Ben helps us figure out. At the end of the work is the second of two large diamonds, representing in this case a broad-canvas summing up or epilogue for the work.

Arrows SUGGEST a set of rules of movement that we can play with. From the Eroica diamond you can enter any one of the three worlds, but you must enter at the beginning episode. Once in the episode you can visit the seven screens in any order you like, but you cannot depart the episode until you have visited all seven. At that point you may proceed to the next episode in the world where you are or you may make a "horizontal" move to another world. Once there you are obliged to visit the seven screens of that episode. You can never skip downward leapfrogging over episodes. Passage (diamond) screens lead only downward and do not permit horizontal movement. No matter where you are, you can always go back to the Eroica diamond and see where you have been and what moves are currently open to you. From the Eroica diamond you can always choose to revisit any screen where you have already been. Anyway, here's a first crack at a system of freedom and constraint that we can play with.

THE UR PLOT

The fundamental plot is the same in each of the three worlds.

Episodes 1 and 2: An artist and his/her putative soulmate join in a love relationship that is also an aesthetic compact in which the two dedicate themselves to the creation of a masterwork. The masterwork is both musical and architectural: a great symphony or choral work housed in a new temple erected to enshrine the musical work, though the two are seen as inseparable, a Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, an all-encompassing work that essentially creates a new culture and consciousness.

Episodes 3 and 4: The creation of the masterwork begins, inevitably exciting the counterforces of reaction. The artist reaches deep into his/her inner resources for both artistic inspiration and courage to combat the forces of destruction. The soulmate plays an important role. So do friends.

Episodes 5 and 6: The masterwork is erected or virtually erected. But by now the opposition has fully gathered its forces and there is a pitch battle for the soul of the culture. The narrative/dramatic issue here is whether the temple/symphony is successfully defended or destroyed. Another possibility is that it is physically destroyed but leaves such a potent aesthetic residue that its work is essentially implanted in the culture for future flowering. Or . . .?

CHARACTERS

Each world has four speaking characters. Other personages may be referred to and even described, and there may be "voices" from the unconscious or mythic world, but there are only four principal dramatis personae in each world.

Vienna The artist: Jakob Davidsohn The Soulmate: Eva Engel The Artist's Friend and Supporter: Franz Lehmann The Leader of the Opposition: Bettina Helke

Tarrytown The Artist: Eric Nordquist The Soulmate: Helene Wedekind The Artist's Friend and Supporter: Berndt Stauber The Leader of the Opposition: Ruth Elliott

Amazon The Artist: Essella The Soulmate: Aaron Rothman The Artist's Friend and Supporter: Nusara The Leader of the Opposition: Reverend John Smiley

NOTE: All three friends are painters: Franz of friezes in the Kunsttempel, Berndt of labyrinthine decorations, arabesques and the like in the House of Nordquist, and Nusara of bodies for the rituals of renewal.

CONCEPTION OF CHARACTERS

On the surface the set-up looks ripe for melodrama, and in hands less deft than ours would be. But consider. Our artists are not knights in shining armor. They are iconoclasts, and those who break icons, however necessary and heroic the act, are also cruel and cause pain to defenders of tradition. They can themselves be somewhat tyrannous (a quality often exaggerated in their followers, e.g., Schoenbergians). Consider also the ambiguities inherent in the soulmate. The attachment may be extreme--the soulmate becomes a parasite. Or the soulmate leads too deep into Eros and distracts the artist. Or the soulmate has artistic proclivities of his/her own that run counter to the artist's deeper impulses. Etc. Some of the same kinds of things can be said about friends. Finally, the complexities inherent in the oppositional characters interest me greatly. I have been dealing with these people all my life, it seems, and have come to have a grudging respect and maybe even understanding. Take Bettina. For all of the horrors of her hyperboles, her anti-Semitism, she genuinely believes that she must save Eva, and Beethoven, from Jakob if Viennese culture is to survive. Reverend Smiley genuinely believes that his mission to Essella's people is one of salvation, eternal life or eternal death, that the basic hymnody he is teaching them must prevail over this outlandish "jungle music" that Essella and her disciples are inventing. And finally, the sweetist of all the oppositional characters is Ruth, a true Mozartian who believes that Eric's music (the power of which she understands all too well) is a fundamental challenge to order and all the centuries of western humanism.

VOICES

How many voices will this take? I don't know. If you like the idea of repeated timbres a la TALES OF HOFFMAN (see above), here's a possibility:

Voice A: Jakob, Eric, Aaron Voice B: Eva, Helene, Essella Voice C: Franz, Berndt, Smiley Voice D: Bettina, Ruth, Nusara

But this is a decision for later, after consultation maybe with actors.

MOTIFS AND THEMES

In all of the worlds the following pertain, with no doubt varying intensity, foregrounding, backgrounding, etc. I add selected, not full, gloss.

1. Genocide Jewishness The Holocaust. In Vienna this is already obvious from what we've done together. In Tarrytown (probably not exactly the right town, but my pitch is for a liminal place just up the Hudson from NYC at the beginning of the Catskills, a sort of charged mix of the Manhattan avant garde music scene and the Schwarzwald) Helene and Berndt are survivors of Nazi concentration camps. An important part of Eric's musical iconoclasm comes from revulsion at what traditional western values led to in WWII and in Germany in particular. In the Amazon the genocide is aimed at the indigenous people, perhaps more subtle than the Holocaust but with essentially the same goal. Aaron Rothman is a Jewish anthropologist who bears witness to the analogous features of the two genocides.

2. The Ambiguous Human Body. It can be a work of art or grotesque. Franz, a visual artist cum anatomist, is fascinated by Jakob's body, its mixture of tics and powerful symmetries, almost catlike in its lithe musculature. Eva, like Alma, is powerfully erotic and mothering at the same time. Eric is red (see the etymology of his name), powerful, nordic, almost troll-like in certain aspects. Helene is war-wounded. We don't know exactly how because she wears a wild variety of costumery--sexy veilings and tulle, Pierrot-like clown pantaloons, jellabas, other exoticism of habiliment, covering some no doubt ghastly wounding. She sings, she utters Sprechstimme, she never just talks. For Eric her body bears the stigmata of recent human history. Berndt is the perfect androgyne, marbelesque, beautiful to the point of obscenity. To make his music Eric will wire these two bodies and take from them bodily "instruments" with which to compose the saving music of the future, a music both of awful memory and prophetic hope. Among Essella's people the body is painted in various ways for different purposes: for marriage, for making war, for hunting, for making a manioc garden, etc. She, like Eric will orchestrate these bodies for music and ritual. A lot of her music is based on chant, chest-pounding, slapping, clapping, lipping, but also instruments made from forest objects and animal bones.

3. Visitants from the Spirit World. The spirit world is both psychological and ontological--where the mind in its depths meets the deepest purposes and powers of the universe. It is a very dangerous place because there dwell not only tutelary spirits (gods, godesses, angels) but also witches, golems, dybbuks, satyrs. I don't know if this means that this universe is not monotheistic after all (pace Schoenberg and Moses) but Manichean or whether the dark spirits are really God in special disguise or are manifestations of human darkness. (If I knew I'd be a great seer and not be farting around with you guys making art.) We've already seen some manisfestations of the spirit world in Vienna, and it seems to me pretty easy to see how the other two worlds will invite them as well.

4. The Temple. In Vienna the temple is something like the Secession House with Franz's great quasi-allegorical friezes and a rotunda-like place for performance of Jakob's symphony--only unlike the actual Secession House on the Ringstrasse, this temple overlooks the Danube. In Tarrytown it is a labyrinthine house built above the Hudson like an old Rhine castle by Eric's eccentric and gloomy father in the late 20's as a sort of site for the coming Goetterdaemerung. Eric is making it into a temple for his music with the help of Berndt, the master decorator. In the Amazon it is one of those circular thatch buildings, similar to the one that the people live in but way out on the river and dedicated entirely to the gods.

5. Animal World. I'm not so sure about this one, but I'm thinking of things like Klimt's ape in the Beethoven Frieze in the Secession House and the howler monkeys of the Amazon. And the toucans and macaws of the Amazon, and the caimans (crocodiles) and anacondas. They are all quasi-totemic or allegorical. They obviously don't live in Vienna or along the Hudson. They have to be there through artistic representation or residing metaphorically in the characters of the narratives. But somehow it seems to me that we humans have always tried to understand what we are by our paradoxical closeness to and distance from the animal world.

6. Waters That Are Life-giving or Polluted. As in Eliot's Wasteland you could say that everything depends on the condition of the water. Without clean water we die. In Vienna it's the Danube (and maybe with reference to the Woerthersee nearby). In Tarrytown it's the Hudson. In the Amazon it's the whole great basin, largest in the world. In every case the temple is beside the water and draws its power in part from the river.

7. A Flower or Plant. I haven't digested this. My trip to the Amazon made me aware that, though the endangered animals and to a lesser extent insects, get lots of attention, the real root loss is of the plant life because of its medicinal health-giving powers, its effects on climate, its mothering of all the phyla of the animal world. So I was thinking of a sort of magical or talismanic plant or golden bough kind of thing for our work, but maybe we are already overcrowded with motifs. We can talk about this.

ARCHITECTONICS

You may be thinking, my God, this is all too geometrical and full of mirrors, some kind of Euclid/Escher/Bach nightmare. And maybe I have gone too far with the fugal thing. But here's my thinking. Though the work is tightly symmetrical, the user, because of the hyperlinking and her freedom, WILL NOT EXPERIENCE IT AS EUCLIDEAN, but will rather have to struggle somewhat to understand the system of analogies and correspondences. And even when the architecture of the piece is mastered, the residue of the reading process will militate against a perception of mechanicalness. Further, the relationships among visuals, music, voices, texts are not those of the exact correspondences of popular musical theatre, say, but contain some inevitable dissonaces that are very interesting and that again militate against too much tightness. So I'm arguing that very tight architectonics gives us safe haven for interesting obliquities within and among the detailed elements of the work. Another topic for discussion.