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Far larger than the old one in the just-demolished Metropolitan Opera House, the new stage at Lincoln Center would require far more “supers” than before. And the house's opening production was to be particularly lavish.

The word “super” comes from supernumerary—often just called a “spear carrier.” Supers are costumed figures in the opera who neither sing, speak, nor dance, but who fill out the stage picture in the lavish, colorful spectacles.

Supers were not paid for rehearsal.

But they were given fifteen dollars a performance. And so, one afternoon, with Ed and Paul, I reported to the stage door in the white marbled wall of the new theater building to attend the first of half a dozen rehearsals for the world premiere of Samuel Barber's
Anthony and Cleopatra
, starring Leontyne Price and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with black dancer Alvin Ailey both as choreographer and assistant director.

The music from Barber's opera was not popular either with the singers nor—once it premiered—with the public. Largely for technical reasons the production itself was something of a fiasco. A giant turntable that was supposed to be on geared metal wheels had been put on rubber rollers instead to save money—and turned out not to be able to move under the weight of the actors and scenery. Machinery that was to roll a scenic construction from the back of the city-block-deep stage up to the footlights failed to function on opening night. But though I played an angry merchant in the first act's market scene and an Egyptian slave in Act Two (where, with Paul, under the bluest of blue lights, I carried a couch to center stage and left it there), this is not the place to detail the calamities that deviled the production from rehearsals on through its half-dozen performances. What it meant, however, was that I was allowed to super in a subsequent production of Wagner's
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
, which the Met mounted only a little later that same season.

I was only required in Act Three, where I was one of the burghers who
gathers with the others to hear Hans Sachs's “prize song.” My part was quintessentially simple, and so required that I attend only two rehearsals—one of which I believe I missed. At the cue, I entered with a dozen other black-costumed burghers to stand at one side of a small bridge. We waited through the prize song. At a certain point, drummers entered over the same bridge and stood beside us, while the chorus sang the finale.

Very simple.

The production's opening night, however, was as dramatic and even more fraught than the Barber. I lingered in the wings, looking out on the broad stage all through Act One. Twenty minutes into it, Justino Diaz, who sang Hans Sachs, developed an extraordinary bloody nose. One of the technicians, lounging beside a TV monitor flickering beside me, commented that Diaz was singing with his face staring almost straight into the flies. Minutes later, in an unscheduled exit, he rushed off, leaving Walter and Beckmesser to sing on alone, and practically bumped into me. I looked around as he grabbed a towel from a distraught dresser, dropped his head, and seemed to spew out mouthfuls of blood! Smearing his face with gore, he spat out more blood; blood ran in cascades from his nose, while the whole, huge backstage area went into spreading chaos among the dozens of technicians, stagehands, administrators, friends—and supers—who fill the cavernous wings of such a theater at any moment in a performance. There were whispers of halting the production, of bringing in the understudy—all of which Diaz protested, vehemently, hoarsely, quietly. A few minutes later, he rushed back out on the stage to sing again.

It went on this way, with exits every five or ten minutes to unload the blood that had collected in the back of his throat: he still sang with his face up, each time more and more streaked with red. In the intermission between Acts One and Two, the bleeding was finally stopped. But all through Act Two, a doctor and nurses waited with us, on the chance that it might start up again, under the part's considerable physical strain.

Hearing an opera from backstage, especially in a house the size of the Met, is almost a wholly vacuous experience—even when there is no medical emergency. No meaningful stage picture is visible from the wings. The performance is not directed toward you. And there are a lot of ugly sounds—gasped breaths, rough attacks, and what-have-you—that ordinarily do not make it past the footlights over the orchestra pit but which become egregiously noticeable from so near. Even though various assistants and technical directors are constantly shushing stagehands and technicians, there is so much extraneous noise from
the setting of props and the moving of scenery that from so close it is impossible really to hear—or to concentrate on what you hear. The balance between orchestra and principals is so far off as to be ludicrous. The proscenium is not before you to frame what you see: costumed chorus members in their intense make-up mingle with workmen in their greens and blues and technicians in sweaters and jeans, with metal scaffolding all around (invisible from the seats), lights hung every which where, and music always playing through the lights and motion and general hubbub, so that the effect is more like watching a circus rehearsal scattered about the floor of some vast hangar than an artistic performance.

The lights from the flies and from the balconies completely blind anyone out on the stage to the audience. From the center, gazing out into the auditorium, you seem to look only at a dead-black curtain, hung just beyond the apron. Blazing about in it, here and there, are blinding white magnesium flares—so that, in the third act, after I'd filed out to stand on our little bridge, I wasn't sure, for the first minute or so, if the curtain were open or closed—if, indeed, the music I heard were from the Act Three prelude (outside the curtain) or from the act proper. Were the characters moving around below me getting in place for the act's beginning, I wondered, or, indeed, had the curtain opened already with the act already in progress . . .?

It was, of course.

But from inside such a production is simply not the way to experience an opera—especially one new to you; even if, as I had, you've read the libretto in preparation.

Now the drummers came out to stand beside us. In rehearsal everyone had been in street clothes. Nor had they carried any actual drums. The great bass instruments they hauled out on their bellies now were streaked with paint to dull their stretched skins. Their rims were blotched with brown and gilt. One of the drummers stood no more than eighteen inches from me.

Diaz rendered the prize song.

Eva presented him with the medallion.

There was a terrifying roar—

Because of the paint, I'd assumed the drums were props (to the extent I'd thought of it at all)—and that any actual drumming would occur down in the percussion section of the orchestra pit. But, no. These drums were real; they were played by on-stage costumed musicians!

The sound of six bass drums in a
fortissimo
roll, starting all at once, no more than two feet from your ear, is louder than any cannon-shot or thunderclap!

I nearly vaulted over the edge of the bridge in heart-thudding astonishment, sure that something huge had fallen onto the stage. I lost my balance, staggered from one of the bridge's steps to the step below, and had to be steadied by the burgher behind me.

The chorus began its joyful “
Ehrt eure deutschen Meister . . .
” and soon the real curtain closed, its inner lining for the first few feet of its journey before us looking no different from the black into which I'd been staring and at which, since the drum roll, I'd been blinking and panting—till suddenly it swung into the light and turned gold.

It was my last Met production.

But how can one really speak of one's first exposure to Wagner's music? How can one speak of a first exposure to “Here Comes the Bride,” that, in the years since it first opened the second act of
Lohengrin
at the Weimer premiere on the 28th of August in 1850 (during Wagner's Zurich exile after his part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849), has wound throughout our lives, now seriously, now as parody, from childhood on? How can one speak of a first exposure to the
Liebestod
that has yearned throughout the three acts of
Tristan und Isolde
since its first performance—commanded by young King Ludwig of his idol—in 1866? When I was a child, played on a diapasoned studio console it was the radio, then television, theme song for two different soap operas! As an adult, I've encountered its strains, uncredited, on the soundtracks of at least three “adult” movies. How can one speak of a first exposure to “The Ride of the Valkyries,” that opens the third act of the
Ring
cycle's second opera,
Die Walküre
? Such music is so ubiquitous that to quote it anywhere outside a production of the opera in which it initially occurred is to lampoon it in much the same way that the opening bars of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony
or Rossini's William Tell Overture produce a similar air of self-mockery.

What is being mocked in all these cases is, of course, the very concept of High Art as expressed by opera—just as the Venus de Milo or the
Mona Lisa
are, at this point, self-parodic works, as they are brought round to represent art itself.

Wagner's influence as a shaper of the notion of art that all these icons both present at the level of sublime experience and re-present in satiric self-pollution (and buxom sopranos in horned helmets—Wagner's virginal warrior goddesses—are another image from the same gallery) is totally pervasive. Indeed, one reason it is sometimes so hard to evaluate Wagner's influence is because we are always within it. We can never get outside it, never see it as an organized stage picture. There is no vantage from which we can slip into the audience and look at it objectively. We try to contain it by saying that Wagner's legacy
(along with Baudelaire's and Flaubert's) is that which we call modernism in art. But, for better or worse, it would be more accurate to say that Wagner's legacy is that which any modern or post-modern—at the gut level—recognizes as art itself, whether our response is to go nodding off in boredom at the whole scattered operation, whether we wander about, gazing appreciatively up at this or that grandly engineered effect, or whether, now and again, some aesthetic thunderclap galvanizes us for moments, hours, or years, shaking us to our footsoles.

In 1982, I began to listen seriously to
Tristan und Isolde
and the four operas of the
Ring
. But there were (and still are) at least a dozen composers, classical and modern, who, in terms of pleasure and significance, have meant more to me for years—and will always mean more. Today, we must remember that in the marketplace of culture, all judgments of taste are personal; none are fixedly canonical, and it is only illiterates either in the synchronic array of artistic rhetorical provender or the diachronic sweep of developing cultural discursive practices, who, hoping to achieve some dubious authority if not mere momentary stability before nearchaos, let themselves think that great art and not-great art, major art and minor art, or strength and weakness in poets has any meaning outside a given community, communities which themselves are always partial, which by themselves never constitute a people: that is one of Artaud's lessons.

Listening to Wagner, I have found him instructive, definitely. He is enjoyable, certainly. His music is beautiful, undeniably—in the terms in which he chose to make it so. Yet for me he remains a kind of super kitsch, and his philosophical aspirations far outdistance any possible achievement. But of such philosophical failures our age makes heroes: that is Artaud's other lesson.

* * *

So far, in writing of Artaud, I have written only of Artaud-the-Myth. I have quoted him, synopsized him, and narrated his life only to highlight Artaud-the-Personality: the obscene, sensitive, energetic man, obsessed with the sensual, repelled by the sexual, critical, crusading, and at once hopelessly wounded, who is Artaud-le-Mômo.

But till now I have purposely avoided writing of Artaud-the-Mind—the
problem
of Artaud-the-Mind. For that problem, especially when paced at the center of such a personality, as it manifests itself (once we have located it) with each Artaudian sentence that strays to the edge of coherence to claw its way across into a derangement that, hopelessly mixed with the poetic, nevertheless signs itself as something outside of
craft, consciousness, or considered reflection, that problem is what keeps Artaud outside of literature as well—hence outside of art. And, hence, allows us to use Artaud to construct a dialogue with all that is art itself, all that resides within the precincts of art, all that is Wagnerism in the broadest sense.

. . . the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.

And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.

That is the twenty-seven-year-old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious
Nouvelle Revue Française
, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud's senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem's core we have from Artaud himself. The story of the
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière
(1923-24) has often been recounted. But it is necessary to review it here, in order to locate precisely how the problem it atomizes so astutely finally allows, informs, and encourages the dialogue we must trace out.