Rosalía and 'Berghain': Mystical Redemption or the Return to the Total Work of Art
BarcelonaThe video clip Berghain, the album's first single Lux (2025) by Rosalía is, without a doubt, one of the most musically and visually elaborate and radical aesthetic offerings on the current art scene. Rosalía is 33 years old, just as she was when Jesus Christ died on the cross. She then rose again, as she will at the end of the Rosalía music video, when her obituary appears.
Berghain literally means "mountain grove" and comes from the names of the Berlin neighborhoods of Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain, on whose border is the Berghain club. This place, a temple of techno music, displays an interdisciplinary and luminous symbolic architecture and serves as an opportunity for Rosalía to experience something that goes beyond metamorphosis, transfiguration and mutation (as she did with Motomami), as she seeks salvation from an irreparable wound in the heart, the most precious pendant of the protagonist of the video, Rosalía herself. It seems that Rosalía is aware of what the heart represents in the Old Testament (lēb either lēbāb in Hebrew), a place where the vital and inner center of the human being is located; it is not only the seat of emotions, but the core from which one thinks, wants and loves (Proverbs 4:23: "Guard your heart more than anything else, because from it flow the springs of life.")
Berghain It is the journey of the conviction that the heart can never be completely remade, only at the end of life, in and with death. The restoration of feeling, of lovesickness, is only found with the passage of time, no matter how much one tries to speed up time by going to a jeweler or watchmaker, never, not with the impatience of immediate, miraculous care, nor with the experience of a medicine that cures the evidence of what appears on an electrocardiogram and its health.
The visual universe of the video oscillates between two apparently opposite spheres: the domestic intimacy of everyday life and the public liturgy of the mass that mortifies, like that thought and memory that never ceases in our mind, with a very lively of the baroque strings (those of a Bach for the spirituality transmitted or those of a Vivaldi for the speed of execution) and of voices that go from the register of an oratorio to the operatic of a soprano who suffers and is afraid and has a heart, the voices that accompany her in her pain, that repeat with her: Seine Angst ist meine Angst / Seine Wut ist meine Wut / Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe / Sein Blut ist mein Blut (Their fear is my fear / Their rage is my rage / Their love is my love / Their blood is my blood). Are these bars in the style of a pure Lutheran chorale? Be that as it may, we move within the breadth of the Christian faith.
Everyone experiences heartbreak and the devastating consequences of a broken (deformed) heart, that small, intimate, interior jewel that is damaged even though it seems incorruptible. At the beginning of the video, when Rosalía enters her home dressed in mourning and with rose-encrusted sandals, the domestic act of ironing her bloody red dress or washing clothes until they are white, unscathed in an attitude of genuflection, becomes penitence, a silent, purifying prayer, which records the deep wound with her thoughts. The vulnerable space of the home is interrupted by the tight eruption of the London Symphony Orchestra (a symbol of Western musical tradition), which oppresses Rosalía and invades the realm of intimacy. The monumental becomes close and necessary; the public is domestic. The interior world (the house, the body, pain, memory) hosts the collective experience of music (life, collectivity, enjoyment, the present). When he goes out again to the street with the top gray you can read "My intrusive thoughts sound like this(My intrusive thoughts sound like this.)
The iconic Berlin club, Berghain, a legendary space in the techno and queer The European club, transformed into a temple and metaphor for an excess of sex, represents a post-secular and mystical darkness, although it may seem contradictory. Is it the end or the beginning? The Berghain club, as a space of dissolution of the self and collective ecstasy, is the nocturnal and expansive face of the same process of unbridled loss-healing and salvation that reaches ecstasy. At the other extreme, the domestic and symbolic space acts as a dam of containment, reflection, and the return to subjectivity. Rosalía transits between these two poles as a liminal figure, neither saint nor sinner, neither pop diva nor techno priestess. Her presence oscillates between the sacred and the sensual, a duality reminiscent of Luce Irigaray's proposals on female corporality as a space of mediation between matter and spirit.
Religious symbols, such as the Sacred Heart and the dove, stage an iconography of suffering and revelation that can be read in both Catholic and Protestant ways. But instead of reproducing traditional mysticism, the artist reinterprets it from the body and sensitivity like Karl Jaspers, making visible what spirituality had hidden: that transcendence can be carnal, that desire can also be a form of knowledge and that the pain and wounds of life guide us back to the point of origin, nature, towards vulnerability. Rosalía will transform into Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White as mythopoetic elements where the physical heart, suffering in silence, is at once organ and symbol, matter and light, as will be the voice of the Icelandic Björk that will accompany her in the form of a bird in this traffic that is reached with the song of The only way I know it's divine intervention / The only way I know it's divine / intervention / Only way I know it's divine / intervention(This is divine intervention / The only way to save us is with divine intervention / The only way I will be saved is with divine intervention).
The animals of the forest invite us to an archetypal reading. They are emanations of a natural unconscious, remnants of a lost and primordial paradise that erupts into human space. Animality is not a threat here, but a memory of communion with the instinctive and rational selves. A deer (a symbol of purity and the believing soul) bleeds black blood from its eyes, because its innocence has been wounded. Living blood is red; black blood is corrupted, diseased; it is a blood that prevents one from seeing clearly, and drags Rosalía into a state of loss, of fall, or mystical suffering in her dreams. In Jungian symbolism, it would represent profound sadness, the emergence of shadow and darkness...
Resurrect like Jesus Christ
Rosalía is not the sleeping maiden waiting to be saved, but rather the being who consciously enters symbolic death to be reborn, to rise again like Jesus Christ. The forest becomes a refuge, an unknown space, transformed into a place of learning and rest. This reinterpretation connects with the idea of the symbolic rewriting of feminine images championed by Hélène Cixous and her need to produce new representations of the body and voice as spaces of freedom.
In the end, Berghain articulates an acoustics of presence and desire, it is the locus amoenus where techno pilgrims arrive and where the subject does not dominate the sound, but rather the sound dominates them and becomes one more element of an affective and sensorial ecosystem. Berghain, with the obsessive ""I'll fuck you until you love me" (I'll Fuck You Until You Love Me) by Yves Tumor is the point of arrival, a cathedral of unbridled rhythm that replaces the blessed atheist by the Christian ritual and is transformed into the new collective prayer. The dance, the collective dance that can be sensed in Berghain It acts as a form of ecstatic dissolution of the self, close to the mystical experiences described by Simone Weil or Teresa of Ávila, but transposed into the language of techno.
With BerghainIn Rosalía's work, she proposes a hybrid and philosophical aesthetic that goes beyond the musical categories of recent years and infuses a spirituality recognized in God (as musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven did in their later years) with a return to the past and a fusion of present-day styles. The total work of art, after Wagner, has returned to the surface of the musical creative plain. Her gesture is, in essence, a vindication of music as a space of communion with the transcendent and of the body as a place of revelation. Music is a form of knowledge that unites instinct and reason, the domestic and the sacred, the human and the animal. Rosalía does not represent metamorphosis, which is a process, but rather fully embodies the final transformation. In this end, when it becomes death, the heart is restored to the flight of a white and black dove, and the sugar is consumed in the coffee as right at the beginning, it begins again by "loving the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your spirit" (Mt. 22:37).
Magda Polo Pujadas is a professor of music at the University of Barcelona.
