the power supply; he talks — half stage direction, half melancholy reminiscence — about a woman walking down the street holding her shoes in her hand. A train goes past, we hear the characteristic bells and whistles of a North American locomotive, familiar from a thousand film scenes we have seen or not seen. The point of departure for this piece was a collection of around one hundred much played but well looked after opera records found by the artists in a junk shop in rural Canada, every one of which had the owner's name written on it. They bought these records and it was as if they had acquired part of the memory, the longing, the life of this man who really existed but who remained unknown to them. What does someone in an isolated country house in the endless expanses of Canada feel when listening to recordings from La Scala in Milan or the Met in New York? Such a person must be driven by a double longing, for a sense of musical contact (with all its amorous overtones) and for metropolitan grandeur, the kind of longing also felt by the hero of Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" (1982). This man is obsessed with the idea of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. This longing, then, is for faraway things: the city and its promises of good company and free love. The satirist Eckhard Henscheid once gave the following definition: "Opera is when he sings up to her that she should come down." Opera is both evoking and desiring what is endlessly absent. This basic structure, reflected in his rural isolation among the vinyl-spinning machines of desire, is summed up by the shadow man when he puts on three records at once: Leontyne Price singing Verdi with her unmistakably warm and rich voice, Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman", and the characteristically weird murmuring of the hypnotizer Peter Reveen, an Australian who achieved fame in the sixties in Vancouver as a stage hypnotizer and who later also performed in Las Vegas: "Your arms are getting heavy, my voice is the only thing you hear..." (sixties hypnosis LPs are the infinitely more amusing precursors to the New Age CDs of today). Soon after, there begins a promiscuous, polymorphic cacophony of what must be seven or eight opera records played at the same time, a confusion of coloraturas and strident heroics, sometimes getting tangled up, sometimes embracing — a veritable orgy of arias. But with all these means of seduction, hypnotization, and augmentation, Cardiff and Miller are not aiming for a perfectly overpowering illusion, in the sense that its technological prerequisites are concealed. On the contrary: standing at the cabin door, one can see that the man's shadow is created by a cardboard silhouette set in motion electromechanically. It also becomes apparent that the protagonist does not necessarily have to remain in this rural isolation forever, since his longing has other objects besides the bourgeois opera luster of the past: the dramatic climax of his performance is a rock song featuring a string arrangement, more in the tradition of doom-laden rock poets from Leonard Cohen through Nick Cave than that of classical music theater. And at the curtain, thunderous applause from the big opera house. Excerpt from Jörg Heiser, "The Making Of Imagination," trans. Nicholas Grindell, in Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Secret Hotel, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2006. Opera for a Small Room2005
Lost in the Memory Palace | Opera for a Small Room