1. Alexander Kluge, Der Macht der Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984), 170–78.

2. Koch, "Alexander Kluge's Phantom of the Opera," 84–85.

3. Op. 118, no. 3, 1892–93, one of the composer's last works.

4. Edgar Boehlke, a German television actor, portrays the singer.

5. Kluge, "On Opera, Form, and Feelings," New German Critique 49 (winter 1990), 108.

6. Miriam Hansen, "Introduction," 9.

7. See Slavoj Žižek, "‘The Wound Is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You’: The Operatic Subject and Its Vicissitudes," in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 177–214.

8. The German "miracle" benefits from the term's loose connotations of divine benediction, whereas "recovery" suggests a restorative process, perhaps one that recaptures the fantasy of prelapsarian wholeness—with the help of banks, public policy, and culture.

9. Kluge's footage is taken from the state funeral for former Hessian minister Heinz Herbert Karry.

10. Hoger also appears as the matchmaker, as well as the woman on trial for shooting her husband.

11. Alexander Kluge, "On Film and the Public Sphere," 218, n. 5.

12. See his interview with Rainer Lewandowski, Die Filme von Alexander Kluge (Hildesheim: Olms Presse, 1980), esp. 30–31.

13. Ibid., 30.

14. Lutze, Alexander Kluge, 86.

15. Kluge, "On Opera, Form, and Feelings," 105.

16. Quoted in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 283.

17. Ralph P. Locke, "Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East," in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 119.

18. Liebman, "Interview with Alexander Kluge," 17.

19. Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

20. Materialism is primarily concerned with economic facets of production and consumption, materiality with the concrete formal details of textuality. While separate phenomena, they are not unrelated, and a number of scholars have explored the conditions under which material forms might point to the material conditions of, say, filmmaking. Richard Dyer pursued this line of thought in "Entertainment and Utopia," where he maintained that cinema's "nonrepresentational signs"—e.g., textures, colors, and music—can convey the "impression of utopia," which offers a form of "elsewhereness" formed in response to historically specific material conditions and perceived social injustices or deficiencies. The sparkle, glitter, and coins that adorn the chorines in the 1933 musical number, "We're in the Money," and the piece's sense of abundance is, he argues, a response to the scarcity and poverty of the Depression era. In drawing attention to the formal mechanisms by which film is made, style is a material device that can engender materialist and historically sensitive readings. In Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman (London: Routledge, 1981), 175–89.

21. The couple that provides this labor takes on some of Parsifal's role of redeemer, bringing an ailing older man—Allewisch/Amfortas—back to life. Still, it remains curious (especially given Kluge's cynicism about heterosexual romance) that the savior figure is a heterosexual couple. Moreover, this couple

22. See Žižek, "The Wound Is Healed," for a fuller elaboration of this point. Some of my observations are indebted to his analysis of Parsifal and other operas.

23. Kluge, by contrast, shows us its bankruptcy via the empty chalice exposed in the opera house fire.

24. For a discussion of anti-Semitism in Parsifal when the opera was initially performed, see Paul Lindau, "Parsifal von Richard Wagner," Kölnische Zeitung, nos. 208, 210, 212 (29 and 31 July and 2 August 1882), reprinted in vol. 2 of S. Grossmann-Vendrey, ed., Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse: Dokumentenband (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1977), 30–40. Referenced in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 346. For more recent discussions, see Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology, and Film (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); in addition to Nattiez.

25. Syberberg, Parsifal: Ein Filmessay (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1982), 11, 56, and 161. Quoted in Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, 168.

26. Frederich Nietzsche, "The Case of Wagner," in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 160.

27. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5.

28. Kluge, Der Macht der Gefühle, 176.

29. Clément, Opera,6.

30. Ralph P. Locke, "What Are These Women Doing in Opera?" in En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 63.

31. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, Opera, 12. The Hutcheons state,

Opera has always been an art form obsessed with death: Monteverdi's La favola d'Orfeo (1607) establishes a story pattern of love and loss that influences the staged representations of operatic death from the very start. In most nineteenth-and twentieth-century operas of the tragic variety … the deaths are most frequently violent [the authors list Rigoletto, Pagliacci, Wozzeck, Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor, Eugene Onegein, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and others]. Catherine Clément has suggested in Opera, or the Undoing of Women, that the victims are most frequently female. Frequently they are, but by no means always, as the lists above suggest. … In short,… the gender question in opera is more complex than some people have suggested: it may be that for every Senta who leaps to her death … there is a Peter Grimes who rows out to sea to die. (11–12)

32. Samuel Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1996), 10.

33. Some excellent discussions include Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca Pope, The Diva's Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996); and Terry Castle, "In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva-Worship," in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 20–58.

34. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 285.

35. Sander, "‘You Can't Always Get What You Want’ " 62.

36. Kluge created a variety of what he called, after Adorno's proposal in 1964, "imaginary operas" and "imaginary opera guides."

37. Leonardi and Pope, The Diva's Mouth, 16.