Last month, I was asked to speak at a concert in Berlin as part of the series Make Freedom Ring. The concert, part of a series across the UK and Germany this year that have been raising funds for Palestinian causes (in this case, SOS Children’s Villages Palestine), has been a rarity in Berlin where German loyalty to Israel has left many cultural institutions mute towards the genocide in Gaza and many performers — even those who support the cause of Palestinian liberation or, at the very least, agree that bombing the shit out of children is generally a bad idea — equally silent on the issue. The brutal police crackdown on civic life here has been well-documented as well. (I’ve written about it. Multiple times.)
What follows is the brief speech I gave to the audience at Kühlhaus Berlin. I began by asking by a show of hands how many people were there primarily for the music and how many were there for the cause (the series in Berlin has included performances from Michael Barenboim, Isabelle Faust, Albrecht Mayer, and Nicolas Altstaedt, so this was something the organizers and I were genuinely curious about). I was surprised to see that no one raised their hand for the former. Many also applauded for the third option on my list: having a foot in both worlds. The rest continues below.
I happen to owe both my own Arab identity and my love of opera to my Syrian grandmother, who arrived in the United States as a refugee in the wake of the French Mandate, a counterpart to the same British Mandate that helped to establish the contours of everything we know today: Balfour, the Nakba, the occupation, the genocide. My grandmother was Syrian Orthodox, the first woman in her family — the first person altogether — to go to university. She signed up for a summer trip to France and Italy through her school and, on learning this, the aunties and uncles — along with the priest — descended on her parents’ house.
“How can you let her go? She’ll come back a loose woman!”
My grandmother listened to this fight in the bedroom. She had to ask her older sister what a “loose woman” was. She had never heard this phrase before. “I think it means you see a lot of men,” her sister replied.
“Oh, that sounds pretty good to me.”
Instead of seeing a lot of men that summer, my grandmother saw a lot of opera. One of the stories she often told me was how she saw Ingrid Bergman in the audience for a performance of Aida in Verona. What strikes me now about that story isn’t the image Ingrid; it’s the image of my grandmother, nearly killed twice before her first birthday and driven out of her homeland by imperialism, watching an opera about imperialism. That’s not a moment of having one foot in both worlds, that’s a moment of realizing that both worlds are one and the same.
To me, that is the essence of opera. The artform itself was the product of a Renaissance obsession with Greek mythology. The members of the Florentine Camerata turned to Greek tragedy because they were inspired by what one scholar calls “a change of paradigm from the world of myth to an ethical dialogue between men’s world and the will of heaven.” Greek tragedy centered ethics in the face of full-blown catastrophe, and that was something the composers of the first operas wanted to revive in Renaissance Italy. It’s not that the purpose of art was to tell us how to behave or what to do, but rather to reflect our world back to us so that we might be able to figure out those bigger questions on our own.
I’m about to invert that very brief history of opera a little bit, because the value of drama, of a story well told, is in the details that buttress that moral and ethical epicenter.
In the 1950s, archaeologists in the ancient city of Ugarit, about four hours north of Damascus, discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets that they estimated to be about 3,400 years old. They went through several hands before they landed with an Assyriologist, Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, and a musicologist, Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, who were able to divine their meaning. They found that one detailed tuning intervals for a Babylonian lyre, the other, surviving in fragments, was the music for an ancient cultic hymn, the first surviving notated music we have. (I name these two scholars specifically because, as we continue to argue about the gender disparity in classical music, I like to point out that we have two women to thank for this landmark of music history.)
I’m also not trying to overstate the significance of this discovery: When the Hurrian hymn was first performed in 1974, it received a front-page story in the New York Times, which quoted one expert as saying: “This has revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of Western music.”
1974. That was 50 years ago. Yet many music theory and history discussions continue to revolve around ancient Greece. They overlook the fact that two separate BC-era Greek occupations of modern-day Syria — as well as Palestine — brought many of the cultural practices of Babylon and Mesopotamia up through the fertile crescent, along the Mediterranean and along time, into Athens. And on to Rome. And on to Florence. If you listen to the Hurrian hymn, to any ancient Arabic music, you can hear the dovetails between maqam and the lines of bel canto. You can trace the threads of history through these musical legacies. You can see where the Middle East plays a pivotal role in the foundation of “Western” civilization.
But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure how many people want to see those connections. Over the last seven months in Berlin, I’ve heard a Gesamtkunstwerk-level of silence coming out of the classical music community when it comes to Palestine. The same world that can’t mention the likes of Beethoven, Wagner, or Verdi without bringing up their politics has remained tacet and compartmentalized when it has come to Gaza, to Palestine writ large. What I have heard has been dozens of variations on: “Can’t you just talk about music without bringing up politics?”
And yet, as I have gone to performances over the last seven months, it has been impossible to separate the material circumstances of listening to music from the music itself. Since late October, Saturday afternoons here in Berlin have been for marching, which at times has led me to go from a demonstration straight to a concert. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, just a few hours after I saw the police brutally arrest several pro-Palestinian demonstrators, I heard the American baritone Davóne Tines sing Julius Eastman’s Prelude to the Holy Presence of Jeanne d’Arc. The piece concludes with Saints Catherine, Michael, and Margaret imploring a pre-trial Joan of Arc to “Speak boldly when they question you.”
In December, the day after the humanitarian pause ended, I was at the Staatsoper — a building that has been along the route of many protest marches in the last seven months — to see Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Medée, one of two operas the company produced last fall based on the same myth. And how can seeing an opera based on Medea be anything but a political act when you see it just hours after chanting “Kindermord ist Kindermord”?
Medea, in all of her iterations, is a refugee. An Other. A savage who must be controlled by Creon’s civilized society. Director Peter Sellars makes this vividly obvious in his staging. We first see Magdalena Kožená’s Medea in an orange jumpsuit. She and her children are in a cage, reminiscent of the scenes at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. “Why are you always forced to flee?” one of the female soldiers asks Medea. Creon later tells her: “As an immigrant you bring us misfortune.”
And yet, at intermission, in the wood-paneled bar of the Staatsoper, as I watched my fellow audience members drink overpriced champagne and sympathize with Kozena’s Medea, I know I have seen these same people wonder why “those people” are always forced to flee, especially when that act of fleeing lands them on Europe’s doorstep. Certain immigrants, they will argue, bring Germany misfortune. I used to work with a singer, one whom most Staatsoper audiences would know on sight, who once told me that anyone coming from Syria into Germany should be required to sign a loyalty document to prove that they won’t commit any acts of terror on European soil. This same singer later became an outspoken advocate for refugees — when those refugees were coming into Europe from Ukraine.
When you become a part of this diaspora, you enlist yourself in the task of telling the story of us. I knew the story of music history’s Syrian roots long before I started studying music, thanks to a litany of aunties and uncles who told me about how the first musical notes were Syrian. This bold act of telling becomes the moral condition of every exit visa and residency permit; it’s a responsibility that moves intergenerationally.
Why are we so obsessed with this version of events? With boldly telling the story of us? Because it is just as easy for people to ignore these connections. To compartmentalize. To watch a work like Medea and ignore the ethics in favor of the myth. To see the “west” as its own cradle of civilization and to see the “east” as “human animals,” completely devoid of culture. To use art as a tool for refraction versus reflection.
As you listen to tonight’s program, I encourage you to forego the easy way. We aren’t here simply to listen to music. On the other hand, we aren’t here simply as a political act. We are, in this moment, resting on a palimpsest of history, where both worlds are one and the same. And that interdependence will continue even after the last notes of the evening are played. All we are asked to do is listen.
Within and Without
At what point do our narratives become our identity? And what determines which of our manifold narratives becomes the one to which we pin that identity?
A brilliant speech!