There is no question that the capacity of financial markets to turn nasty and present themselves with all the irresistible and apparently natural force of a hurricane or an earthquake - and these are the metaphors that we tend to use - is a compelling illustration of Marx's notion of alienation. We take human desires and needs, progressively abstract and denominate them, freeze them, as money, stocks, futures, the whole range of complex derivatives, and they then turn against us with all the fury of a Golem.
This is something that those who were in on the first stirrings of modern financial markets already worried about. Daniel Defoe, trader, novelist and journalist, didn't only detect the "villainy of stockjobbers", he also saw something Other and diabolical in the new, disembodied practices on Exchange Alley in the late 17th century. It was tantamount to witchcraft: what was real, men's goods and honour, was rendered imaginary; and what was imaginary, the current price of stocks, became real. Apparitions were conjured up, imaginations manipulated, with the "strange and unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names."
Performing the riches of the past, one is always looking for new ways to bring them alive to oneself and to the audience. I sang Winterreise, Schubert's great cycle of 24 Lieder to poems by Wilhelm Müller, last month in the Barbican - in the heart of the City - and one of the songs struck me with a new force. Im Dorfe, in the village, the wanderer, a loner, an outsider, rejected in love and rejecting bourgeois society, hears dogs bark and chains rattling and imagines the sleepers inside in bed, "träumen sich Manches, was sie nicht haben, Tun sich im Guten und Argen erlaben: und morgen früh ist Alles zerflossen" - dreaming of much that they don't have, delighting in good things and bad, and early in the morning it has all melted away. The bubble-bursting flourish with which Schubert brings that phrase to an end says it all - the bourgeois dream and its inevitable evaporation.
