ABSTRACT
Alban Berg's 'signal' chord, the disenchanted form of the seductive distant sound, marks an operatic echo of the Kittlerian collapse of the Romantic discourse network. The inexorable development of the technologies and bureaucracies of capitalist Modernism brings forth the destruction of the Benjaminian aura and the commercial ruination of erotic relationships. Nonetheless, a trace of the alluring, enchanting, sirenic (Wagnerian) voice remains. The charm and resonance of the chord reverberates in early twentieth-century music. It is incarnate, for example, in the exotic-erotic sound worlds of Karol Szymanowski. In Brahms's music the inspiring image has become an admirable amalgam of Robert and Clara, or a sort of 'doppio pentimento' – the musical image of Schumann's theme first covered by Clara, then imagined again by Brahms. A fine example of the erotic disenchantment of the leading-note seventh dissonance is the end of Kurt Weill's setting of Ivan Golfs Der neue Orpheus.
