Opera Houses

Driving out of Oslo, from its shiny glass and steel centre towards a country that still doesn't really have anything you could call a motorway and only 60 km of high speed rail (principally, from Oslo to Oslo Airport), one is offered a panoramic view of rapidly encroaching modernisation. From the soon-to-be-replaced E18 highway, overlooking the once-rundown dockland area of Bjørvika, you can see that the only thing separating the enormous 1960s container port from the "€500 million stone behemoth" (Icon) of the new opera house is a wasteland of cranes, half-built bridges, and projects in-development. Google "Bjørvika" today and you'll be offered an awful lot of hotel rooms and not much else.

A great deal of very interesting stuff has been written about container ports as vectors of contemporary capital, heralds of the hypermodern, in the wake of series two of The Wire. The curious thing about driving out of Oslo, however, is that it draws your attention to what might otherwise seem an absurd collocation: container ports and opera houses.

Baron Hatherley suggested to me, via email (well, Facebook actually...), that, "Opera and ornament do seem linked in some manner..." But although Oslo Opera House's architects, Snøhetta, may be most famous for the super-ornamental new Alexandria Library (dismissed by Charles Jencks here), this particular building doesn't really evoke either the swishy expressionism of Zaha Hadid, nor the "doily-tecture" pooh-poohed in Douglas Murphy's post on the Shanghai Expo. Actually, particularly from behind, the Operahuset has a rather South Bank-esque stark blockiness to it. It's an edifice, "a rogue iceberg" as the Icon piece linked above puts it, "crashed into the eastern edge of Oslo's harbour." It resembles in some ways a cracked open freight container - or a series of them, badly stacked, as if by some automated robotic crane gone haywire.

Markedly similar in its jutting frame - if somewhat more decorative in the detail of its surfaces - is Copenhagen Opera House. Completed three years earlier than Oslo's, in 2004, the Operaen occupies a similar space in the city's harbour, separated form the container port only by an expanse of empty polluted land that was, last year, the subject of a Reclaim the Streets-style action. Reffen, described as a "utopian building project," involved the temporary occupation of the land by "constructors" who built ad-hoc dwellings out of found materials. If anything, the link between the opera house and the port is made even more explicit in Copenhagen by the fact that the $500 million required to build it were donated by Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world.

How to make sense of this juxtaposition of the totally inhuman face of freight transportation with perhaps the quintessential humanist art? Of course, there is an issue of gentrification, which was the focus of the Reffen occupation. And of the attempt to paper over (and launder the proceeds of) "dirty" industry with supposedly elevated culture, which we might relate to the presence of the Cité de la Musique and Parc de la Villette in Paris at the site of the old (pre-containerisation) Port de la Villette, glimpsed in Jean Vigo's poetic realist masterpiece L'Atalante. I would by no means wish to diminish the force of such explanations with the perhaps more figurative exploration that follows.

An hour's walk, south of La Villette, will take you to the Opéra Bastille, a building which, as much as the Oslo Operahuset, seems to invite the public onto its great slopes and surfaces as much as it lurchingly imposes itself on its surroundings. A project initiated in 1968 by Pierre Boulez and inaugurated on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, it is significant that the very site of the violent surging forth of the modern world should be marked by an opera house.

Opera may be associated in public consciousness with fusty old-fashioned ideas, and of course it is true that the form became established in the baroque period and the first opera houses were built at this time - even many late-nineteenth century opera houses were built in a neo-baroque style (so the esteemed Mr Hatherley is, of course, right, as usual). But the rococo was really a period of opera's sedimentation and formalisation. As a genre, it emerged out of the Renaissance and arguably flowered into maturity in the revolutionary period from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, broadly between Gluck and Wagner. Revolutionary governments in France and Russia placed enormous stress on the importance of opera (to Lenin, it was second in importance, amongst the arts, only to cinema).

As Gary Tomlinson points out, "No artistic genre... has more often called for purgation," no genre has so frequently called for its own transformation and reformation, no genre has spoken so much and so consistently about its own future. One of the major vectors of this permanent revolution is its relation to the notion of the human - principally in terms of the voice as the medium of operatic truth. From the Florentine Camerata's development of monody to emphasise the solo melodic line of the individual subject, through the successive reforms of Gluck, Cherubini and Spontini in France, placing greater emphasis on the massed singing of the chorus and away from the virtuoso soloist, and on into the twentieth century.

Over the last century, from Berg's Wozzeck to Birtwistle's Minotaur, the operatic voice has become increasingly monstrous and inhuman. In the midst of which we find Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's musique concrète opera, Orphée 53. The only fragment of this last I have been able to find is Henry's Le Voile d'Orphée, which was later used standalone as the music to a Maurice Bejart ballet. In this fragment, the voice emerges only at the end, painfully rupturing the already fraught texture of Alan Splet-esque electronic ululations, barking the Greek Orphic hymn like Marinetti, only transfigured and distorted by concrète tape manipulation techniques. Orpheus, the emblematic figure of the opera, moves from voice as transcendence to voice as trauma.

The roots of the new anti- and/or post-humanism of twentieth century opera are to be found in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, where for the first time, the orchestra itself becomes a privileged vehicle of the truth, in competition with the voice. It may be no coincidence that, today, the most recognisable element of the Ring Cycle is the so-called Wurm-Motiv that accompanies Alberich's transformation into a dragon with slow menacing tritones. From Max Steiner's (1933) music for King Kong to the alien invasion cycles of the 50s and 60s, various subtle transformations of this Wurm-Motiv became the go-to riff for virtually all movie monsters.

Tivoli and Environs

"Non-place," says Augé, "is the opposite of utopia." Yet sometimes the two are not so far away. Just over half an hour before checking in at Kastrup Airport, I was standing at the gates of Tivoli, the Danish pleasure garden, founded in 1843, that, a hundred years later, would inspire Uncle Walt's conception of his own Disneyland park.

Originally named "Vauxhall & Tivoli", the design of the park was evidently as much inspired by the faux-classicism of the fake ruins to be found at Paris's Jardins de Tivoli (whose third incarnation, founded by Phantasmagoria inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robert, had closed just a few years before), as by the orientalism of the 'Turkish Tent' and other chinoiseries at London's Vauxhall Gardens.

The gates to Tivoli proudly declare its dedication to the fourth muse, garlanded on each side with musician gargoyles playing lutes, lyres and various horns. From its opening until 1872, the gardens' musical director was the composer Hans Christian Lumbye. Lumbye, a popular composer of waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, was converted upon hearing a Viennese orchestra in 1839 into an immediate fan of the music of Johann Strauss (as was Disney, who would dedicate an episode of Disney's Wonderful World of Color to the "Waltz King").

Though often dubbed the "Strauss of the North," there is something about pieces like the Drømmebilleder ("Dream Pictures") and the Champagne Galop (which opens with a brass flurry followed by an actual popping champagne cork) which looks forward to the dreamily sophisticated programmatic lounge music of Frank Chacksfield.

Situated in the south of the city, there is a curious selection of buildings and businesses to be found in Tivoli's immediate vicinity, including a casino named after the Scala opera house in Milan; a Scientology recruiting office; the rather gaily coloured art deco Palads cinema; and the Tycho Brahe Planetarium.

The IMAX-fitted planetarium building is scarcely more than twenty years old, but its dedicatee was a sixteenth century astronomer and alchemist whose publication of De Nova Stella punctured the orthodoxy of Aristotlean celestial immutability at a time when the Copernican system was still controversial to the point of illegality.

Brahe's place in the history of science fiction is assured by his inclusion as a character in a work by one of his students, Johannes Kepler. Kepler had assisted Brahe in his observations of Mars, while resident in Prague towards the end of his life. His post-humously published, Somnium, a "dream" about a trip to the moon by a bridge of darkness, would later be characterised by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov as the first ever work of the genre.

Immediately opposite the planetarium, is a go-go dancing club called the Venue Bar. Its name exploiting a semiotic slippage already mined by the naming of the red light district in Total Recall ("Venusville"), and the lurid descriptions of the planet Venus, and the "fleshpots" of its capital, Venusberg, in Robert Heinlein's Podkayne on Mars.

In Brahe's time, the connection between music and "the spheres" would have been all too self-evident. Ironically, the father of Galileo, Vincenzo Galilei, as a composer and member of the Floretine Camerata, was amongst those chiefly responsible for bringing melody back down to earth, in the form of the more human-centred monody that would form the backbone of the operas of Peri and Monteverdi.

Kastrup

"Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?"

"No. I'm fine, thanks." I was sat, reading a pulp science fiction novel in paperback, waiting for a plane that I had just found out had been delayed for forty-five minutes.

"This is a restaurant." He informed me curtly, the implication clear.

"No, this is an airport."

"This is not an airport," he insisted. "This is a restaurant."

"How odd, then," I mused. "To see all those aeroplanes just beyond the window, and why does that screen just above us list all those destinations, departure times ...?"

"The restaurant has nothing to do with the airport."

The problem with Copenhagen Kastrup Airport is that there are in fact no seats anywhere that are not connected to some sort of food vendor. Therefore the implication of the above conversation is that the passenger awaiting his flight must purchase some horrendously over-priced comestibles in order to earn the right to sit and read and wait.

Connecting these eateries are a number of very narrow walkways, in imitation perhaps of the winding, boutique-lined streets of parts of the town's medieval inner city. Due to the enormous crowds and vast profusion of signs, the glare of lights, the feeling, however, weighed downed by hand luggage, is of being hustled and assaulted by brands and bustling shoppers from all angles.

In contrast to the still relatively anonymous spaces of most southern European airports, the shops and food and drink vendors of Kastrup are almost all connected to well-known brand names: Starbucks Coffee, Domino's Pizza....

Airports remain the classic example of the non-places diagnosed in Marc Augé's book on the "anthropology of supermodernity", spaces "to be passed through ... measured in units of time." Augé's book (first published in 1992), with its line about "a person entering the space of non-place [being] relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver" seemed eerily prophetic on that morning in August, 2006, when the thwarting of an alleged terror attack in London led to pandemonium at Britain's airports, while passengers were stripped of all their possessions bar wallet and passport. "You can't un-invent the liquid bomb" we were told as bottles of water, that near ubiquitous modern accessory became, for the first time, a potential weapon of mass destruction.

What sticks in the mind from that time was the absolute comic book absurdity of the situation. The paperback book I kept in my jacket book was confiscated because, as the security official said, I might have concealed something amongst its pages, like in some Boy's Own adventure story.

"Due to security reasons, and the risk of theft, please do not leave your baggage unattended at any time."

Augé tells us that that the non-places of supermodernity are defined by their words and texts, their "instructions for use". What is astonishing about the above announcement is the curious reminder of how unusual the second clause is in this now oppressively over-familiar demand. I could even detect a slight lift to the tone of voice of the announcer at this reminder of the possibility of crime, as if to say, "Look on the bright side, you might not get blown to pieces by a dirty bomb or tortured into a false confession in some far-away prison - you might just be the victim of a simple theft!"

In a way, for an aiport totally colonised by the ethics of the shopping centre (just as shopping centres were long ago colonised by the aesthetics of airports), having your luggage stolen from you really is the greatest possible boon - offering you the chance to re-purchase all that you have just lost in an ecstatic Groundhog Day of consumerism.