Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.
A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),
in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.
Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.
Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.
