Pure Gold: A stage essay

Elfriede Jelinek, 2004

Pure Gold: A stage essay (spelling pure GOLD ) is a prose work by Elfriede Jelinek . The original reading took place on July 1st, 2012 in the Prinzregententheater in Munich, it was published on March 8th, 2013 by Rowohlt Verlag and evoked descriptions of intense reading experiences.

Rein Gold is a debate between "B: Brünnhilde" and "W: Wotan, the Wanderer", in which, from Brünnhilde's point of view, it is about the prevailing conditions, about the abdication of her father Wotan and about the importance and effectiveness of gold and money in the Capitalism .

The text, on the trail of Richard Wagner's work Der Ring des Nibelungen , establishes connections between economic and political corruption and shows how power , capital , theft , heroism and guilt are related. Specifically, two German scandals from winter 2011/12 are taken up: the real estate borrowing of the then German Federal President Christian Wulff and the assaults and murders of the NSU . In this work, Jelinek puts German heroic symbolism and economic abstinence into the limelight, in a polemical, artistic way and with a high degree of intertextual density, which the director updated again on the day of the original reading.

The world premiere as a musical theater piece took place on March 9, 2014 at the Berlin State Opera , on September 11, 2014 the production premiered at the Wiesbaden State Theater .

content

At the beginning Brünnhilde accuses her father Wotan of having financially taken over for the construction of his castle - "A situation like in every second family" - whereupon there is an exchange between B and W. You have 4 speeches from 1.5 to 56 pages in length. B begins, W has the final word. In it he navigates between the announcement of his departure and his desire to continue following various stimuli in an experimental mood: "Let's see what will become of it."

In the course of the dispute, Wotan evades his responsibility with caustic exaggeration and a vision is formulated in which money gradually takes on a godlike function. The work is a "nightmare of the end-time vision of the capitalist age," said the scientist Susanne Vill in her analysis.

References to other works

title

With the title of the work, Rein Gold , Jelinek alludes to Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold (1869), the first of four operas in his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen . However, Brünnhilde does not appear in Wagner's personal constellation on the previous evening . The dialogue between B and W refers to Die Walküre (1870), the second opera in the ring tetralogy, and there to the third dialogue between Brünnhilde and Wotan, in the last scene of the last act, a moment of intensity and endlessness. At Wagner's, Brünnhilde is punished by Wotan. As an intertext, the title of Jelinek's work has the function of dealing with the story from Wagner's Rheingold in two words , before the dialogue between B and W begins with Jelinek, which then makes up the actual text of Rein Gold .

Further intertextual references

Jelinek's text relates to the Nibelungen saga by fusing different horizons with one another: the horizons of the mythical figures with those of Wagner's protagonists, and the religious-historical sphere of influence of the first with the reception history of the second.

In Wagner's work, Wotan arbitrarily and pseudo-judicially judges his daughter Brünnhilde, while Jelinek overwrites this father-daughter relationship in such a way that B in a protest position forces W to justify himself. B disparagingly describes Ws Burg Walhall as a single-family house, which B, conversely, punishes W. With quotations from Marx's Capital, Jelinek interprets the ring as an analysis of the euro and national debt crisis as a result of the stock exchange and banking crisis and thus ties in with an interpretation that reads Wagner's ring as an anti-capitalist allegory and refers to Wagner's participation in the revolution of 1848 / 49 professions. In question would George Bernard Shaw with his work The Perfect Wagnerite. A commentary on The Ring of the Nibelungs (1898) and the interpretation of the Ring that Patrice Chéreau had presented with his production at the Salzburg Festival in 1976. Marx's political economy is applied to the ring . Nicolas Stemann sees a parallel between the home equity loan that has not been paid back in Jelinek's text and the wages that the giants have not been paid for their work in Wagner's work, which is the starting point of the story that is told in the ring . The topic is "the greed for gold and power and their pitfalls." To repay the building debts, the Rheingold is stolen and wage labor remains unpaid. Jelinek's text focuses on work, capital and value creation, and Marx's criticism of capitalism, which dates from Wagner's time, is confronted with the current economic conditions of 2011/12, where the constitutive connections between these three components are increasingly being dissolved.

Further associations refer to the crime comedy The Pink Panther from 1963, which is also about looted property, in this case a diamond. As a counterpart to Brünnhilde's rebellion against Wotan, this comedy is ambiguously combined with the civil rights motivated Black Panther Party for Self-Defense , but then pointed to the NSU and the contempt for death of the soldiers of the "father of the gods in the Führerbunker".

Burlesque, coarseness and non-stop, rap-like tirades also counteract the monumental gestures of Wagner's music.

style

Pure gold consists of linguistic surfaces in the style of a stream of consciousness that allows free association. The pull of Wagner's music is carried over into the structure of the text. Jelinek lets the pathetic plunge into the banal, opens up a muddy abyss and uses this height of fall to let the music of the operas resonate in the text. The themes of Wagner's tetralogy are "repeatedly superimposed on each other by Jelinek and muddled together in ever new language games," says the director of the original reading, Nicholas Stemann. In the course of the work, the present increasingly mingles with this flow of language, with daily news about the racist murders of the NSU and the financial / euro crisis. The monstrous forms of unrestrained digressions and puns, together with the hateful tirades, correspond to Wagner's not-to-be-able-to-stop.

As if it were supposed to be an equivalent to Wagner's compositional technique, the art of transition , Jelinek imitated musical processes using ramified intertexts that were mysteriously alienated. In language games with children's counting verses, with assonances and alliterations that parody Wagner's all-round rhymes, contexts would be faded out and the meaning of a message made unrecognizable.

Discourse example (a text area develops)

The following passages are suitable as an example of how topics are dealt with in Pure Gold , apparently associative and yet stringent. Only salutations or possessive pronouns indicate whose contribution it is. First a woman speaks as it is ascribed to the historical figure Jesus, in the feminine ("I am the one you are looking for"). Then the statement in masculine is used in connection with not being searched, then again in feminine in connection with a feminine modification of Jesus, and again in feminine the “words of Jesus”. Then it comes to locking up and hiring an unsolicited person, again a female Jesus is named, disguised as a bride with apparent clumsiness. Soon the hero girl becomes a role model for the hero, then the sentence of Jesus is reproduced verbatim in the feminine and Wotan predicts that his child can be Jesus. Finally, instead of the police emergency number, the nation of Germany becomes the addressee for the testimony of the hero girl.

• W: “I'm the one you're looking for, says the Nazi bride, who was not believed and trusted on the phone when she dialed the police emergency number. Anyone who trusts us should be cut. She says the same thing that Jesus said to his captors. Exactly: They are Jesus' words! ”(Page 58).
• W: “And in the end he did the most: gave himself, the greatest sacrifice. A very special idiot, no doubt about it. You have to sacrifice others, never yourself! I am the one you are looking for, as many have already said, even those who were not wanted at all ”(page 89).
• B: “This woman, the heroine, was treated nicely, bathroom rugs and curtains, we heroes need them already, the woman? Yes, this female Jesus paperback edition with this 'I am the one you are looking for!' More Gutrune than Brünnhilde. Gentler. Much gentler than me ”(p. 138).
• B: “She says: I am the one you are looking for. She speaks the words of Jesus, I said it, but I think that's so cool ”(p. 167).
• B: "She says nothing, she does not deny anything, and is imprisoned for being the one who is not wanted" (p. 167).
• B: “They would never have found if they had not come by themselves, a female Jesus, well, a variety of him, Jesus' bride, not bad either. It is the one being sought and is about to be hired ”(page 168).
• W: “When they ring, you open the door, hero. and then you say: what do you want? Just as the hero girl will say: I am the one you are looking for ”(p. 202).
• W: “I will give you the words, child, that you too can be Jesus if you want to. When the hero comes through the fire, or when he will have walked through the fire for you, you simply say to him what Jesus himself said back then: I am the one you are looking for ”(p. 204).
• W: “Germany. I am the one you are looking for, you will say that, that my hero girl will say, in the words of the Lord Jesus, which he spoke ”(page 207).

In the course of the text, between pages 58 and 207, Jesus is evolving into a Nazi bride, because she speaks in a similar situation to that of the other. Your actions will be a role model for heroes and you will face - or duel - with the state.

Origin and sources

Pure Gold was created at the suggestion of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and, according to the author, is based on the libretto and the prose draft of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen , on a contemporary historical study by the legal historian Wolfgang Schild entitled State Twilight. On Richard Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" (2007), on Das Kapital (1867-1894) by Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto (London, 1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , on "Something Sigmund Freud , but don't know anymore , what ”, on the analysis of a beverage can to estimate the energy requirements during its manufacture , a specialist work by Felix Doeleke, on Hermann Jellinek's work Critical History of the Vienna Revolution from March 13th to the constituent Reichstag (Vienna, 1848) and on“ Nothing else . A couple of newspapers. Everything nothing".

Reviews

In pure gold , the myths that the composer Wagner had appropriated would be critically linked to the current present and its realities, in which Wotan had a dispute with his Marxist daughter Brünnhilde, according to Tim Caspar Boehme in his review for the taz . In her reading of the third act of the Walküre, Jelinek undertook a media change from music to text. Boehme was impressed by Jelinek's contribution to the Wagner year 2013.

Ina Hartwig has reviewed Rein Gold for Die Zeit and writes that this work is not only about the rule of money, but also about that of man. The reviewer thinks it is original how new hate chants in the context of the NSU murders are intertwined with the mutual accusation and nagging of Brünnhilde and Wotan, and she encourages reading the book, a sparkling impertinence.

Judith von Sternburg says in her review "Der Hort der Niegelungenen", which was published in the Frankfurter Rundschau , that Jelinek expanded the epic in pure gold with details that caricature Wagner's ring cycle. The author is in no way inferior to the composer and his massive power to explain the world, but the music is missing and this reduces the clout. In the most grandiose of the hate speeches, the text targets the German tendency to heroism and greed.

Dirk Pilz finds in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the stage essay is one of Jelinek's best texts, due to its strictly composed density and urgency, which is overflowing with allusions, and because no offer of reconciliation is made to the present. On the subtitle A stage essay, Pilz thinks that Jelinek's works defy conventional categories and that the reader therefore decides what pure gold is. His idea is that W's final sentence “Let's see what will come of it” could also be the first.

Reading experiences

While reading, Pilz found himself in a wild undergrowth that didn't allow you to breathe deeply and didn't feel good. He illustrates his feelings with a dialogue: You want to “stop. Stop! ”Shouted Brünnhilde:“ Thank you guys, I'll try, honestly. ”At the beginning of his review, Pilz reproduced a statement by director Steman from a few years ago: As a reader of Jelinek's texts, you get caught up in one Self-defense situation because the overloaded texts were extremely annoying. That is why one can only deal with Jelinek's texts stubbornly when staging, namely as freely as possible. To Tim Caspar Boehme, the stage essay seems like excessive language and Christine Ammann, who is stunned by Jelinek's visual power, says that one probably doesn't read the book “in one go”, but here and there, “about Jelinek's art of language and her peculiar secret joy to enjoy in bites. ”Amman was surprised by the association chains with which Jelinek lets worlds collide in a crash. In addition, there are puns that are so abysmal that it sometimes turns out to be speechless. For Judith von Sternburg, the text jumps alongside the ring tetralogy and comes out here and there from behind her. She feels the text in its quantity and mass as a crowd with which the bourgeois-classical theater material is encircled. She read the stage essay as a circumnavigation of the ring , in which associations with the swampy NSU murders interfere, which are based on the events in the ring , which are characterized by murder, manslaughter and brutal righteousness. Sometimes it also seems to her that the gods are finally telling the truth about Jelinek: Wotan sees it as proof of his godliness that he can show a paper - signed by himself. Von Sternburg is amazed at how Jelinek's text manages to be connected with the tetralogy and to exist beyond it. When reading pure gold , according to Arno Widmann, Wotan's thoughts fall upon each other “like the massive players in American football” and they are “finally as fast as we experience them in our heads.” And they are not controlled by a reason that that discussed. While reading, he performed parts of the text in the Gaumentheater in his mouth (Ginka Steinwachs) and found that the text did not exaggerate anything, that he “talked like we all do” and that he was therefore “easily pissed off”. While speaking Brünnhilde's text, one does not understand how she came up with the talk of heroes and regulars. You suddenly end up in a passage that says, as Widmann puts it, “Germans are heroes, welded into heroes from human material, like metal into a can.” This sequence “in the voluptuous fabric of Elfriede Jelinek's sentences” is this one “Thoughts that wander around in the head at the same time”: “Each reader has to distribute them to the votes himself.” Hartwig states that reading Rein Gold stimulates productive thinking. It is teeming with counter-talk and accusations, she perceives the dialogues as "lively music of thoughts with poisonous tones," for which you need patience at the beginning until you can appreciate the flow of language. To do this, you have to “open the floodgates of consciousness”, is how Hartwig describes her path to the reading experience, in which she can only then “absorb the wild streams of associations”. The book itself is beautifully compact.

output

• Pure gold. a stage essay . 223 p., Hardcover, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-03339-2 The dust jacket shows a gold bar on a black background ( cover of the first edition ), the book itself has a gold-colored cover.

Original reading

During the original reading at the Munich Opera Festival on July 1, 2012 in the Prinzregententheater, the text was split up live; there were no rehearsals beforehand. The 133 pages of text were counted down on a scoreboard. Nicolas Stemann had announced the performance to those involved as "a large (music) theatrical jam session" with actors, four singers, a répétiteur and a symphony orchestra. When speaking, singing, silent reading, computer voice or just video should also be possible. Not everyone has to be in constant action. The doors stayed open during the performance and the audience could come and go whenever they wanted. In this way, Stemann wanted to use a theatrical energy that is fed by “forlornness, confusion and panic” and which he rates as good. The interim results of the final of the European Football Championship 2012 were displayed and the game, which was taking place in Kiev , could be followed on a television screen from the stage . Overall, Stemann wanted the audience to experience how the ensemble “dealt with the text live and at the moment”. The original reading lasted six hours and Birgit Minichmayr , Irm Hermann and Josef Ostendorf were involved . In addition to Birgit Minichmayr, Myriam Schröder and Sebastian Rudolph can also be seen on a photo from the Bavarian State Opera .

Productions

• Staatsoper Berlin, staging: Nicolas Stemann, premiere on March 9, 2014
• Staatstheater Wiesbaden, production: Tina Lanik, premiere on September 11, 2014
• Münchner Kammerspiele / Otto-Falckenberg-Schule, production: Christiane Pohle, premiere on February 5, 2020

Discussions of the stage versions

• Annette Poppenhäger, Paulchen Panther in Walhall , die-deutsche-buehne.de , September 15, 2014
• Jan Brachmann, “Theses, riddles. Jelinek: Pure gold. Dittrich: The Blind / The Metamorphosis. Berlin / State Opera in the Schiller Theater ”, in: Opernwelt , May 12, 2014, pp. 40–41
• Christine Lemke-Matwey, Elfriede Jelinek "Pure Gold". Murx the Marx. Nicolas Stemann directs Jelinek's stage essay "Rein Gold" in Berlin , zeit.de , March 13, 2014
• Jan Brachmann, Jelinek's “Rhein Gold” in Berlin. Either the woman comes or she doesn't. The director Nicolas Stemann brings Elfriede Jelinek's “Rein Gold” essay to the stage for the second time in Berlin. Does the original Wagner music make more sense of the text? , faz.net , March 12, 2014
• (AP), Much applause for Jelinek's “Rein Gold” in Berlin , augsburger-allgemeine.de , March 10, 2014

Literature on the text

• Susanne Vill (2013): From Rheingold to Pure Gold. Intertexts from Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Elfriede Jelinek's stage essay. In: JELINEK [YEAR] BOOK 2013 , pp. 73–89.
• Wolfgang Schmitt and Franziska Schößler (2013): What happened to the revolution? Criticism of capitalism and the intellectual craft of art in Elfriede Jelinek's stage essay Rein Gold. In: JELINEK [YEAR] BUCH 2013 , pp. 90-106.
• Nicolas Stemann (2013): Instead of a conceptual sample. To those involved in the original reading of Rein Gold on July 1, 2012 in the Prinzregententheater. In: JELINEK [YEAR] BUCH 2013 , pp. 107–112.
• Pia Janke (ed.) (2013): Jelinek-Handbuch , Metzler, Stuttgart, ISBN 978-3-476-02367-4

Web links

• Berlin State Opera, REIN GOLD by Elfriede Jelinek. Music theater by Nicolas Steman, Staatsoper Berlin , trailer including statements by Nicolas Steman (production) and Markus Poschner (musical director), 3′11 ″, youtube.com , March 18, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, Section Economics in the Chapter Central Issues and Discourses , in: Pia Janke (Ed.), Jelinek-Handbuch , Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-476-02367-4 , p. 262 -266.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Moira Mertens, section Continuation of the criticism of capitalism in the chapter The Contracts of the Merchant; Rein Gold by Franziska Schößler, in: Pia Janke (Ed.), Jelinek-Handbuch , Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-476-02367-4 , pp. 198–203.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Rein Gold: A stage essay. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-03339-2 , p. 7, p. 122.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Susanne Vill (2013): From Rheingold to Rein Gold. Intertexts from Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in Elfriede Jelinek's stage essay. In: JELINEK [YEAR] BOOK 2013, pp. 73–89.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Judith von Sternburg: The Hort of the Niegelungenen. Elfriede Jelinek reads in "pure gold" Wotan, Wagner, us and all the riot act in Frankfurter Rundschau , July 16, 2013, p. 31.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Nicolas Stemann (2013): Instead of a conceptual sample. To those involved in the original reading of Rein Gold on July 1, 2012 in the Prinzregententheater. In: JELINEK [YEAR] BUCH 2013 , pp. 107–112.
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Tim Caspar Boehme: When gods dawn before them. OHE! OHE! Even on his 200th birthday, Richard Wagner remains a composer that is as controversial as it is stimulating: his "Ring des Nibelungen" even inspired writers from the late Romantic period to the present day, as new publications by Elfriede Jelinek, Eckhard Henscheid and Élémir Bourges show , taz.de , 18. May 2013.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Ina Hartwig: Valkyries ride through the theory mountains. Elfriede Jelinek's sarcastic, highly topical Wagner interpretation “Rein Gold” , in Die Zeit , June 13, 2013, p. 53.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Dirk Pilz, “When the people are gone. Continuing anger song: Elfriede Jelinek's stage essay Rein Gold ”, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 26, 2013, p. 36.
10. ↑ Christine Ammann, "Elfriede Jelinek meets Richard Wagner" , belletristik-couch.de , May 2013
11. ^ Arno Widmann, Elfriede Jelinek: Rein Gold. Then nothing. A couple of newspapers. , berliner-zeitung.de , May 29, 2013
12. ↑ ^{a b} Christine Ammann, "Elfriede Jelinek meets Richard Wagner" , belletristik-couch.de , May 2013
13. ↑ Acting. Pure Gold by Elfriede Jelinek ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Staatstheater-wiesbaden.de 
14. ↑ PURE GOLD. A stage essay by Elfriede Jelinek // VINTAGE PRODUCTION OF THE 3rd YEAR OF STUDIES AT THE OTTO FALCKENBERG SCHOOL Staging by Christiane Pohle. Retrieved April 6, 2020 .