Away, yon devils!

Enigma deliver their sermon on the mount

by Michael Freedberg

Perhaps the critical race theorists are right. Perhaps Americans of various descent do not have anything in common, cannot understand one another, and therefore ought to listen only to their own inner ear. If this is our future -- to hide our common humanity behind a crazy-quilt of competing ethnic Hassidisms -- then Enigma 3: Le roi est mort, vive le roi! (Virgin) will certainly serve a Torah-like function for us. Its 14 symphonic art poems make up the most militantly Eurocentric CD yet issued on these shores. The high wails of Kate Bush, Mylene Farmer's chilly Gothic melancholy, Phil Spector's wall of sound, Italian Eurodisco, Dead Can Dance, and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner -- auteur Michael Cretu definitely knows his recipe. Even the African beats that underpin "T.N.T. for the Brain" (reborrowed from the music of Deep Forest, who owe their jungle version of Cretu's sound to Enigma's first CD) take on a European, symphonic shape. And given the history here -- alive again in the Bosnian killing fields -- it's wrong to disparage.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!'s huge Wagnerian walls of sound reach out to all the unreachable infinities that have beguiled German Romantics since the Napoleonic era. In "I'm Asking Why," the CD's opening aria, Cretu sings anxiously up through the murk and the echo like the archetypal lonely soul longing for his myths. You've seen this picture before. It's a Caspar David Friedrich. A single man, sitting on a rock, is seen from behind, in silhouette. He gazes upward, across the cold Baltic, toward the even chillier, impersonal stars. Insisting on the point, Cretu reprises the motif in "Beyond the Invisible."

Euro-trash, this is your destiny: "Prism of Life," as the CD's most melodically shattered song calls it. Who else but you bears the birthmark of "Almost Full Moon," the CD's most melancholy song, the rhythm a Siegfried-like motif shambling forward as a baby cries from far, far away?

Enigma 3 is how you Euros dance disco. The music of Enigma has always played best in bombed-out cathedrals rebuilt as turntable palaces. From the first CD's "Sadeness Pt. 1" and "Mea culpa" (on the 1990 Charisma debut MCMXC a.D.) to all of Enigma 2: The Cross of Changes (Charisma, 1993) to throbbing, wordlessly lyrical diva poems like the new "The Roundabout," Cretu's huge, dark music has always blossomed within thick stone walls and high, peaked ceilings. Its high notes bounce off the buttresses. The Dietrich-like evocations of Sandra, Cretu's wife and diva, slither onto you like a cool draft from cracks in the wall stones. Huge and distant, choruses of monks chant into the music the old Roman imperial lawgiver-worship that underlies all things Gothic.

Dark and heavy, phantasmal, laden with memory and loss, the million-marching-feet, bittersweet love music of Enigma certainly captivates those who need capturing. There is no doubt that if you are a Euro-boy, this is your honey trap. Not for you the suavity and idealism of Babyface, the slim and naked honesty of samba, the no-time-like-the-present, adventure-seeking guitar chords of rock and roll.

Euros, too, will easiest psych out the CD's title. Doesn't Le roi est mort, vive le roi! suggest that Elvis, the king, and rock and roll, his music, are dead, and that Enigma's Wagnerian, completely Euro music is the new king? It might be just that. From introduction to grand finale, the CD pursues a largeness of vision as fully realized as Jimi Hendrix's as it seeks out past, present, and future through the eyes of a single soul and the collective unconscious.

One can easily hail Enigma as anthem music for the Euro-tribe and say no more. To go no further, however, would be to miss the whole significance of Cretu's imperial style. In European history, the imperial vision -- the Pax romana -- stood for the common humanity of all men, a unifying force transcending the babble of warring tribalisms it had conquered. The deepest message of Le roi est mort, vive le roi!, therefore, deeper than the sadness and the Sade-ness, mightier than the CD's Euro-memory, is that we are all burdened by the past and, as Sandra says in "Prism of Life," "haunted by the future." We are all on what the CD's finale titles an "Odyssey of the Mind," together in the same boat whether we journey alone or in battalions. It would be a shame if Le roi est mort, vive le roi! became nothing more than another brick in the tribal walls now being masoned by the devils among us.