The Banality of Love (Die Banalitaet der Liebe)

The Banality of Love

An Opera by Ella Milch-Sheriff
Libretto: Savyon Liebrecht

About the Opera and the Music by Ella Milch-Sheriff

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger were two of the 20th Century’s best-known and most significant thinkers. Their protracted love story gripped me as I set out to find a subject for a new opera, just as it fascinated the playwright Savyon Liebrecht when she wrote the successful play “The Banality of Love”. 

The theme of my opera is love and guilt. Loneliness and detachment. In the opera, I conceptualized Hannah Arendt as a tragic figure. As a young Jewish student with deep roots in German culture, she met the charismatic professor Martin Heidegger, who was much older and married with children. Heidegger falls in love with the brilliant young student and the two have a passionate affair. This tale is familiar and banal. Except these are two great geniuses of the 20th century, the impact of whose philosophies and theories is felt to this day. We might have expected such individuals to transcend the banal relationships and sentiments of average people. However, “The heart has a life of its own”, as Hannah Arendt said. Yet still, they are Arendt and Heidegger - we scrutinize them as we do our political or cultural leaders. 
The opera presents several indictments - one trial entwined with another.
First, an indictment against Heidegger who collaborated with the Nazis in their 1933 rise to power. As rector of Freiburg University, he called upon all students to join the Nazi party and even forbade Jewish lecturers, some his own mentors (Edmund Husserl) from entering the university.

Second, an indictment against the Nazi Germans and their collaborators. Above all, Adolf Eichmann, of whose trial Hannah Arendt wrote a book in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, setting the entire Jewish Establishment against her to this day. The argument she had with Gideon Hausner, Eichmann’s prosecutor, is portrayed in the opera as a fictional dialogue between the two. Hausner sings his famous prosecution speech while Arendt argues with him.
Third, an indictment against the church that, rather than actively saving Jews and prosecuting Eichmann and his ilk, chose to do nothing. To imply this connection, Hausner, a Jewish prosecutor, appears in the opera as a sort of grand inquisitor prosecuting Eichmann.

Fourth, an indictment against many Jews who remained admirers of the German culture and of their own murderers.
Last and foremost, an indictment against Hannah Arendt. Despite everything she saw and witnessed and knew, she could not cut off her ties with Heidegger and even helped him publish his doctrines in America after the war.
Musically, I chose an ironic standpoint to describe many of the opera’s situations and characters. Even in those cases where the text was not intended to be ironic, I deliberately emphasized the ironic and the comical. To achieve this, I sometimes inserted musical associations from the core of German music. To me, this sharply highlights the absurd contradiction between the great and sublime German musical culture that Heidegger admired and his theories that seep of nationalism and antisemitism. For instance, to the bewilderment of his students, Heidegger first arrives at the classroom and takes out a mandolin to sing a serenade that is a twisted combination of Don Giovanni and Wagner’s Beckmesser. His words are complex, complicated, and incomprehensible. In contrast, the music is simple, easy to digest, sometimes to the point of chuckling, which creates a comical situation.

In another scene, Heidegger refers to Raphael, who is in love with Hannah, a “Jew”. Hannah is appalled and understands for the first time the extent of Heidegger’s antisemitism. She bursts out and he responds by singing a beautiful aria in waltz rhythm that echoes Mackie Messer from Weil and Brecht’s ‘Three Penny Opera’. Again, the contrast stands between the painfully seriously theme and Heidegger’s love poem set to words from his original letter to Arendt.
One of the opera’s dramatic climaxes is Heidegger’s explanation to Hannah that he believes Hitler will restore Germany’s lost culture, language, and international stature. For many days I struggled to express this difficult-to-digest text in music. To communicate the ironic and twisted dimension of Heidegger’s Hitler speech, I composed a seemingly-impossible combination of the Jewish Gustav Mahler’s first symphony and the German anthem.
In a significant aria towards the end of the opera, Michael accuses Arendt and all the Jews who left Europe of “loving and admiring their murderers”.  The text by Savyon Liebrecht is sharp, strong, and is an indictment against myself and others who admire German culture to this day. “What magic has he worked on you?”, so begins Michael’s song as the music suggests Wagnerian and even Mahlerian associations.

The process of composition led me to draw insights about Heidegger, Arendt, and how I felt about them. My opera’s Heidegger is a genius opportunist, naive even though he realized early on that his dream of Hitler is fading and that the Nazis have, in fact, used him for their own purposes. He resigned, remained a professor, and never apologized for his actions. His coronation speech as Rector of Freiburg University, intermeshed with student riots and book burning, is a challenging scene. The music radicalizes his character intentionally, even though he has some human and even banal moments. He loved and appreciated Hannah Arendt, but essentially was only interested in himself and his own ideas. I have no pity for him.

Hannah Arendt is without question the protagonist of this opera. We observe her life’s events from the perspective of older Arendt. As a young, enthusiastic, and innocent girl she evokes much sympathy. As she ages, her many doubts about her chosen path reveal themselves. Midway through composing the opera, I realized that more than anything, I am showcasing a trial against Hannah Arendt. She, and not Heidegger, is the one on the defendant’s bench. Hannah has several moments of grace in the opera. First, as a young girl in love. Later, as an adult, still in love, trying to explain “the banality of evil”. Finally, as she sings her ‘contempt’ aria to Heidegger, demanding him to apologize for his actions, which he refuses. For this last aria, I wrote in the style of Bach’s choral-preludes, perhaps the most admired of all German-born composers and furthest from controversy. Bach is above all, he is Germany, and she, an American citizen at this point, uses him and his musical language to reinforce her words. Do I have compassion for Hannah Arendt? Even now, I can’t answer that question. This childless woman, detached from her people, both German and Jewish, is, in fact, the tragic figure of this opera. 

The choir in this opera has a key and central role. The choir is students, journalist, and an audience but mostly it is the inner voice of older Arendt. She tells the story of her thoughts and feelings and so advances the plot. The women’s choir sings of the heart who has a life of its own, an independent life, and so opens and also closes the opera. 
As previously stated, the opera has many indictments but are there also judges? The audience in my opera has an active role. They are the judges and they must judge several defendants and perhaps themselves as well.
This prelude would not be complete if I did not thank Savyon Liebrecht for the absolute freedom she allowed in letting me edit the libretto, Itay Tiran, the stage director, whose conversations with me accompanied the composition process and helped me glean insight into these complex characters, and first and foremost my husband Noam Sheriff who has accompanied me throughout the complicated birth process of this opera.

Ella Milch-sheriff
January 2018