Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

was reading the translation of Piave’s libretto of Ernani, published in Zurich in 1952, and in the foreword I came upon the breathtakingly idiotic comment that the most blatantly unbelievable passages had been deleted—when in fact it is precisely the incredible elements that account for the beauty of the story, or rather of opera as a genre, because those elements that cannot be accounted for even by the most exotic probability calculations appear in opera as the most natural, thanks to the powerful transformation of an entire world into music. And the Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotions. That is what opera and the jungle have in common.