Ariadne auf Naxos: A Study in Nymphification | Covidian Æsthetics
An exceptional crossover, by popular request
“…and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.” —Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
I’ve never pulled a piece from Covidian Æsthetics to The Bride Stripped, but I have been asked by several readers to make the exception with this one, which seems to have proven especially affecting or meaningful to some. It is clear that a few of you are definitely well aware of where we’ve going with the (All Is Fair In) Love and War series, of which this is part three.
I expect there will be many more, as I begin to formalise my theory of theatre.
If some episodes in (All Is Fair In) War & Theatre serve the Covidian Æsthetics thesis in less obvious ways, patience is called for. Once more, the purpose of my writing is to explore, not to convince. At this point in time, what we’re having here, through different channels, is an active conversation restricted to a handful of people who are not only interested in the changing affect of our times, but in how to parse, make and interpret art through it.
Today we will talk about opera, a genre of limited interest that, for all the misgivings around it, is also identified —and for good reason— as the most effective manner of Gesammtkunstwerk.1 The term itself may have been separately coined by Humboldt’s nemesis, Carl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff, and —more popularly, if later— by Nietzsche’s twilit one-time idol Richard Wagner, the satrap of Bayreuth, who twice wrote of drama as the grand unifying theory for all the arts. If anything, he was only mistaken in placing his emphasis on it being music drama, rather than drama music, as —with rare exceptions, including the one we will now analyse— the drama is what guides every other element of the performance.2
The term drama itself is a vow —from the Classic Greek δράω, for “I act/I do”— which can be read contractually as signaling a conscious commitment to representation. It is, in short, the commitment to play one’s part. Beside this syncretistic take —which Wagner may have found acceptable— there is the fact that drama, thus understood, is poised to be poietic —by which I mean to say, not mimetic. Though they can be inspired —and we will get to this, enthusiasm, shortly— neither re-presentation nor performance are imitation, nor is drama mimicry: they are the intersubjective interpretation of everyone participating in a work, from creators to performers through the audience itself which, no matter how transient, affords a possible form of consensus reality. Drama is a Gestalt and a medium, a way of knowledge more than a technique, which is why it can tolerate containing multitudes and contradictions in ways no other artform can.
Our most recent guest columnist Duncan Reyburn described it well in his own substack a few days ago, when he wrote:
the real is recovered precisely in embracing mediation as its central feature. What happens between things, in their relationships, is what matter; how we relate to the real through our attention is what matters. The real is not just a thing, then, but a principle: it renders being intelligible as being.
Drama provides this mediation in truly remarkable ways.
One wonders what Adorno would have thought, let alone felt, about Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, a schizoid admixture of opera seria and commedia de’llarte that does not, however, really seek to force a reconciliation between the high and the lowbrow. More to the point, it shows the interactions between the tragic princess Ariadne and the comic actress Zerbinetta as ineffectually frictionless. At moments, they take place in the same space to absolutely no effect on the protagonist, whose atolllike loneliness is only underscored by the profuse and polyphonic action taking place around her, to which she is entirely inured. There is a distinction with a difference at work here, because although it is unclear if her surroundings and the other players are in fact perceptible to Ariadne, what is clear is that they are not intelligible to her, at all.
There is one level in which Ariadne auf Naxos functions like the midwit meme in operatic shape. It sorts itself out meta-mimetically by showing that, even whilst sharing the floor, the two classical extremes of tragedy and comedy —though perceived to be in agreement by the comic, for whom the tragic has no bandwith whatsoever— shall never really meet on the same plane —even if the comic’s underlying thesis (in this case, that “one lover replaces another”) holds true on both ends— lest it be through the lenience of the middling/meddling audience, whose purpose —like that of the dinner guests being hosted by “the richest man in Vienna” in the first act— is to stomach and spectate the two competing discourses at once. You can thank Hugo von Hoffmanstahl’s oddly insidious libretto for setting up the audience as Gesammtkunstarbeiter. And, contrary to Wagner’s theory, Strauss’ music is the glue that holds this otherwise unwieldy shape together. As a play it would be completely incongruous without musical continuity —and virtuosity.3
Despite Zerbinetta’s admonitions, no mere man will appear godlike to a woman who, like Ariadne, has loved great men. A mistress of great men can only be repaired through consecration, the gods must appear —and appeal— to her. Ariadne was the bride of a hero who is eventually upgraded to being the wife of a god; she has no interest in Zerbinetta’s swarm of simps. The women —who also play themselves as actresses— coexist, in character, onstage —Zerbinetta palpably wishes to console Ariadne at points— but the latter is always irresponsive to her, not only because they are in, and belong to, different ‘planes’, but because it is entirely possible that, at least in some respect, Ariadne is already dead. During the aforesaid first act, the Composer expresses this concern in “Sie hält ihn für den Todesgott: “She believes she is going to die. She truly does die.”
Ariadne’s deracination —for that is what she has undergone, a complete uprooting— also locks her into the peculiar space that is Naxos, the boundaries of which are curious, as the 2022 staging is superlatively artificious: the floor reminiscent of Superstudio’s Supersuperficie grid, the nightsky an astral chart with —if memory serves correctly— the future names of constellations, contouring Greek myth in a way that highlights the events at Naxos are unfolding outside time or in their own time, in medias res. The implication is that Ariadne is unwittingly suffering something akin to a nymphification —she literally exits (and exists) pursued by a god whom she mistakes, and may mistake throughout, for another god —Hermes— in his role as messenger of death. She is becoming anchored, not situated; devolving into something smaller than herself. If a nymph, subject to the unwanted advances of a god, is frequently ‘naturalised’ to evade capture, the abandoned princess is experiencing a similar reduction whilst still human: which is why she is succumbing to place, not becoming of it. Nymphification, in humans, is a form of anomie and atomisation —in Ariadne’s case, a total surrender to grief. Were she not spirited away at the end, she would have become Ariadne of Naxos, not in Naxos —in the ghostliest of possible ways.
In Ovid’s Epistles, which take after Hesiod, Ariadne pines for death. The opera shows how, drowned by desertion —a paradoxical demise— her memory begins to fail her; as her grief becomes entrained to the inhuman rhythms of rocks, tides, seasons. And so it begins to take on unusual shapes: through periodicity, that of a (perhaps agrarian) calendar, but also that of a rocaille or a grotesque, a form that in some manner echoes that of the labyrinth (and also that of her original betrayal of dynasty for destiny). This last point is especially reinforced by the cave she now inhabits, which is the opposite of anything that might befit a Cretan princess. The wayfinder has lost her way: she is becoming one with her surrounds; a crowned mirage on a desert island that is increasingly more invisible to her, even as she herself becomes more apparent to it, though unawares, through the presence of three nymphs.
The nymphs are a towering, temenos-spanning chorus on the scale of landscape, geology, climate. As presented in this year’s rendition by the Met, Naiad, Dryad and Echo are also part mechanical-elves, perched on enormous stilts slightly reminiscent of Duchamp’s hinge-like Bride; part atmospheric beasts corresponding to their respective features in timespace. They are rendered as both omnipresent and too vast to apprehend. They are real and of the Real, but —like Zerbinetta— they cannot establish direct communication with the tragic heroine: they are, again, not on the same plane, even if they occupy the same place. And so they become Ariadne’s constant if unseen companions, not because they are invisible, but because they are, pervasively, the spirits of the place, and place is all that Naxos is.
Dionysus was, of course, a native of Naxos —and it is even possible he was behind Theseus’ desertion of Ariadne, through a dream in which he basically instructed the hero: “I’ll take it from here”. Zeus received his thunderbolts there. In the 6th century BC, a temple of Apollo was erected on the island, but Ariadne’s 9-8th century BC Naxos has no bounded space for worship, no sacred grove, no safe or magic frame for Jungian encounters with any un-personal unconscious contents.4 Ariadne’s nymphification is thus a kind of involuted ἐνθουσιασμός.5
When nymphification happens to a human, it is the opposite of not only deification (the Ariadnian solution, which can be thought of as a prefiguration of Mary’s ascension in body and soul), but dehumanising. It is paramount to objectification, which is what happens to nymphs when they reach their final post-persecutory forms or become, as it were, ‘re-natured.’ The only other similar instance to this devolution that I call nymphification I have found in recent literature is in Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, where the protagonist is miraculously, if not too happily, ensconced within a leaf with her beloved father after his death:
As soon as she was in the leaf, she knew she had made a mistake. She had wanted to go to a better place, but her spirit got caught in the leaf. That it could be contained within a leaf made her wonder at how small her spirit was, when she had been so sure, in life, that her spirit was huge.6
Indeed, Heti’s Mira thought of herself as an enthusiast, and fell short of her expectations. She was not possessed by a god, and so became nymphified. There is also, actually, no ἐνθουσιασμός whatsoever in Ariadne auf Naxos until she accepts what the nymphs so often do not: the god’s advances, her induction as his spouse and —with it— her possession by the god.
Calasso starts La follia che viene dalle Ninfe with this striking recount:
“Il primo essere a cui Apollo parlò sulla terra fu una Ninfa. Shi chiamava Telfusa e subito ingannò il dio. Apollo aveva attraversato la Beozia venendo da Calcide. La vasta piana che fu poi ricca di grano era coperta allora da una densa foresta. Tebe non esisteva. Non c’erano strade, né sentieri. E Apollo cercava il suo luogo. Voleva fondarvi il suo culto. Secondo l’inno omerico ne rifiutò più d’uno. Poi vide un “luogo intatto” (chō̂ros apḗmōn), dice l’inno. Apollo gli rivolse la parola. Nell’inno el passagio è brusco: quel luogo è un essere.7
The presence, essence and absence of locus in this story are extraordinarily telling. On the one hand, this virgin pursuit of the nymph —the first creature that Apollo, the rhetor, addresses on Earth— is unique for three reasons. First: it predates time in the cultivated sense I mentioned earlier: the forest and the future have yet to be domesticated, conquered. Apollo’s interaction with Telfusa somehow also predates time itself: it is, like reality, a matter of principle. Second: it is about real estate. Apollo does not have a cult yet, but he is building up the enclosure laws for it —preparing his temenos in the same way an animal builds up its nest. It is early. Thebes does not exist yet. There are no paths nor roads, in which sense Apollo precedes even Hermes, “the messenger of death” whom Ariadne welcomes, perhaps only because he drives off-road.
Apollo is, however, something not dissimilar to death to Telfusa; which is ironic, as her spring is pestilential. Her name represents still-waters of the sort that bring forth larvae.8 Calasso further reminds us that apḗmōn stands for “intatto”, “incolume”, “illeso” —intact, unscathed, uninjured— by both man or god.9As the genius of her place, Telfusa wishes to remain untouched, and so she fools the god enough to set him on the path to Delphi, and to Python —a deception she is caught out on and punished for, but which is also his becoming, to the point Telfusio ranks among his epithets.
In a similar spirit, Ariadne’s Dionysian Naxos is, as we said, all place, but it is not only place, and so the required hierophany —Ariadne’s rescue and restoration by the god Dionysus— can take place. This possibility space is not, however, provided by Ariadne herself, nor even by her courtship: it is attained through divine consummation, at the hands of perhaps the most aggressive of divine consumers since Kronos. This is, again, a princess, not a nymph; which means she is herself a kenning of civilisation, much like the nymphs are kennings for nature.
To me this brings to mind Robinson Crusoe, where the surname Crusoe is an English “corruption” of the German Kreutznaer, with a polysemic ambiguity that refers not only to the Cross,10but also to crusading and crossing (of rivers and roads). The toponymic implications are at least implied, as is the hermetic spectre, “the messenger of messengers” whom Ariadne summons and even mistakes Dionysus for. Crusoe may spend 28 years in a desert island, but he is not —for one— alone, and he brings with him a completely humanising agency that does not want for heroism or resourcefulness, in the same way that it isn’t lacking in barbarity.11
Ariadne auf Naxos is ultimately a work about temenos understood not as placemaking but as placetaking. She is a kind of Robinson Crusoe for whom the footprints in the sand are evocative of the godlike “other set” in that old, contemporary Christian meme. As the woman who leads her elect through and out of the labyrinth, she is abandoned to another, crueler fate: the empty island, the unbounded desert,12the broken heart. Only the gods and nature can sort that out.
Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Griechische religion der archaischen und klassichen Epoche, trans. John Raffan). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1977],
Roberto Calasso. La follia che viene dalle Ninfe. Milano: Adelphi Edizione, 2005.
Sheila Heti. Pure Colour: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022.
Jeff Malpas. Heidegger and the Thinking of Place. Explorations in the Topology of Being. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012.
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (trans. Ronald Spiers). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1872], p. 8.
Wagner, Richard. The Art-Work of the Future, and Other Works (Das Kunstwerk du Zukunft, trans. by William Ashton Ellis). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Which Wagner mentions as such on just two —historically related— occasions, in his 1849 essays “Art and Revolution”, and in “The Artwork of the Future”. It is but another way of describing the total work of art through his idea of unifying all works of art through drama —or, to put it simply, through action.
Apropos music, in particular, one for —and against— the Beauty absolutists. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes: “On the basis of this most significant way of understanding all aesthetics, which, taken seriously, marks the first beginning of aesthetics, Richard Wagner, to confirm its lasting truth, set his stamp, when he established in his Beethoven that music must be assessed on aesthetic principles entirely different from those for all fine arts and not at all according to the category of beauty, although an erroneous aesthetics, in the service of a misleading and degenerate art, has become accustomed to the idea of beauty asserting itself in the world of images and to demand from music an effect similar to the effect of plastic arts, namely, the arousal of satisfaction in beautiful forms.”
This particular staging of Ariadne also has the proscenium, which serves as a sort of katabatic chorus of non-speakers who are, nonetheless, very much players themselves. As above, so before. It is an interesting evolution —one of many with this especially tetchy opera—: “Though Hofmannsthal had originally envisioned the orchestra on stage as part of the action, (…) Strauss knew that musicians who could do justice to the score would not consent to ‘play-acting’ as he put it.” In this sense, the 2022 solution reconciles what was once impossible: a largely masked orchestra filmed in close quarters, that reads like a masked chorus. Though the orchestra is not on stage, it is in on the staging; both the originally desired and the most (c)Ovidian possible take on the work.
This will be our first reference to the concept of imago in this essay, in its psychoanalytic meaning: Jung refers to the imago to describe how people form their personalities by identifying with images that arise from the collective unconscious. Ariadne’s nymphification makes her unable to do so. She must become reincorporated to the mythic tissue of the world to move past her fixation with Theseus. In Lacan, the imago correlates to the mirror-state, an early, relational dramatisation through the other that is experienced as —what else— a Gestalt.
There is, as ever, a baroque take on the matter, in which Bernard Bösel demonstrates a rather less enthusiastic understanding of the term, which classically and romantically tends to carry ecstatic connotations, by exacerbating its polarities with melancholy and reason. Stand in the well of enthusiasm for long and it will become a Blakean stillwater, a hatchery for reptiles of the mind. Bösel’s tension was eventually recalibrated to spectacular effect by Warburg, who basically restored the term to us as an “internal transport” (Pathosformel) between the formal forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: a dynamic he designated as Erinnerungsspuren, and which is the backbone of the synthesis I am developing as the Orphic.
Sheila Heti. Pure Colour: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022, p. 94.
Walter Burkert. Greek Religion. (Griechische religion der archaischen und klassichen Epoche, trans. John Raffan). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1977], p. 174. “When in the Illiad Zeus summons the gods into assembly on Mount Olympus, it is not only the well-known Olympians who come along, but also all the nymphs and all the rivers; Okeanos alone remains at his station. The idea that rivers are gods and springs divine nymphs is deeply rooted not only in poetry, but also in belief and ritual; the worship of these deities is limited only by the fact that they are inseparably identified with a specific locality. Each city worships its river or spring. The river is accorded a temenos and occasionally even a temple…”. (Italics are mine.) That the worship of these deities is delimited responds to Malpas on Heidegger as: “to be within, to be somehow enclosed, but in a way that at the same time opens up, that makes possible. Already this indicates some of the directions on which any thinking on place must move—towards ideas of opening and closing, of concealing and revealing, of focus and horizon, of finitude and ‘transcendence,’ of limit and possibility, of mutual relationality and coconstitution.” The place is (of) the nymph, the nymph is (of) the place.
Nor should the entomological irony of larva also being referred to as nymphs escape us. The adult, often winged, insect with mature sex organs —the nymph that has completed metamorphosis— is known as the imago, or Latin for “image” (a concept not too far from that of eidolon, which I discuss with relation to Helen of Troy here, but which can well extend to Ariadne’s haunted state in the opera).
Which returns us to the possibility of the ‘unmarked’ hierophany insinuated by Eliade that I mentioned in my 2020 essay on the work of Julien Nguyen.
In a way I find exceedingly reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s equally “possessed” Stavrogin.
I consider the genre that came to be known as the Robinsonade a preamble to the conflict Domingo Faustino Sarmiento set forth in Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845). The sensibility to the tension between Kultur und Zivilisation evolved convergently in Latin America and in the modern dramatic German imagination —much as the term Gessamtkunswerk did, in its own time and place. (The fact that Crusoe was a castaway somewhere near Tobago is just icing on the take.)
See Borges’ “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”.