Emerging from stupor

Abstract

When thunder strikes, Papageno cries out and drops to the ground: “A terrible chord with all instruments. Thunder, lightning, and banging; at the same time two powerful thunderclaps . . . Papageno: ‘Alas! Alas! Alas!’ He falls to the ground.” When asked to get up, he refuses: “I am lying in a faint!” Tamino, however, remains unshaken. Thunder and lightning, fear and terror—nothing can turn the hero of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) from the course of virtue and wisdom. This article will tell the Enlightenment’s story of humanity’s emergence from thunder: from a terrible thunder storm in the German town of Greifswald to despotic rulers on the opera stage and finally to the spectacles of the so-called thunder house. Thunder is not a single acoustic event but an interplay of several sounds that can be distinguished as bangs, rollings, and echoes. The actual thunderclap, which suddenly startles us, is produced by an explosion. When lightning passes through humid air, it heats up very quickly and expands in a shock wave. These shocks can occur in quick succession, and individual components of their frequency travel at various speeds to create the characteristic rumbling of thunder that invites anthropomorphization (as a roar, for instance). This unique sound quality is central to the cultural history of thunder, as is its multimodality: thunder is necessarily preceded by lightning, with its enormous destructive potential. Thus, thunder appears as an acoustic indicator of impending destruction. Even