As part of a cartel at the ECF on the subject of "The Voice" based on the opera Wozzeck, I encountered for the first time in music a major obstacle, a disruption, due to atonal technique.
Whereas I had previously been exposed to classical music and singing that sought beauty in balance, perfection in melody and harmony, this work on the voice through listening to the opera Wozzeck challenged my relation to music, dislodging my way of listening and leaving a void in its place.
It was a shock! Not the slightest pleasure! Moreover, the impossibility of listening to this opera without the support of the text became so apparent that there was no way to listen to the singing without reading the libretto at the same time.
And so, at a specific moment in time, atonal music came to challenge my world.
In "The Freudian Thing," Lacan places Vienna at a particular moment in the history of psychoanalysis, a moment when Freud's voice set off for America.1 It was also around 1913 that Alban Berg staged his opera Wozzeck. These were years marked by what is known as the "Second Viennese School" with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. This was the moment when the technique of serialism made it possible to compose atonal works: "Without the support of tonality, I found myself faced with a completely new task, at least harmonically speaking," said A. Berg in Avant-Scène Opéra, no. 36.
Büchner, dead at the age of twenty-four, left his last play, Woyzeck, unfinished. It was written without cuts or silences that would allow for a breath. Temporality is introduced by articulating the play in three acts, each covering one day, and the staging is by Berg.
This first experience, although difficult, had some positive effects of an opening, since, thanks to the emptying that took place, other events were produced in the listening to atonal music, giving silence another place.
[1] Cf. Lacan J., "The Freudian Thing", in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York, Norton: 2006, p. 334. "At a time when Vienna, in making itself heard again through the voice of its Opera…"
