Chris Swithinbank

This ar­ti­cle first ap­peared as Chris Swith­in­bank, ‘Into the Lion’s Den: Hel­mut Lachen­mann at 75,’ Tempo, lxv/257 (July 2011), 52-61.

In April 2010, the Guild­hall School of Music recog­nised Ger­man com­poser Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s ex­per­tise in ex­tended in­stru­men­tal tech­niques, invit­ing him to give the keynote speech at a re­search day ded­i­cated to con­tem­po­rary per­for­mance prac­tice; in May, he had a Fel­low­ship of the Royal Col­lege of Music con­ferred upon him for his achieve­ments as a com­poser; in June, the Lon­don Sym­phony Or­ches­tra per­formed Lachen­mann’s Dou­ble (Grido II) for string or­ches­tra, in doing so be­com­ing the first non-BBC British or­ches­tra to have per­formed his music; and in Oc­to­ber, the South­bank Cen­tre pre­sented two days of Lachen­mann’s music in­clud­ing per­for­mances by the Arditti String Quar­tet and a much ex­panded Lon­don Sin­foni­etta, the lat­ter broad­cast on Radio 3. Out­side Lon­don, Birm­ing­ham Con­tem­po­rary Music Group gave a per­for­mance of his most re­cent work, Got Lost for so­prano and piano, and the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter pre­sented a mini-fes­ti­val ded­i­cated to his music. This roll call of events might be seen then as the cel­e­bra­tion to be ex­pected as a noted com­poser passes a mile­stone,

but Lachen­mann is a com­poser who — de­spite his age — could until re­cently have es­caped such at­ten­tion in Britain. In 1995, Elke Hock­ings wrote in these pages that, while en­joy­ing ‘an ex­alted rep­u­ta­tion among a small cir­cle of Eng­lish con­tem­po­rary music en­thu­si­asts, […] to the wider Eng­lish music pub­lic he [Lachen­mann] is lit­tle known’ and crit­i­cal re­cep­tion has been mixed, often ex­tremely neg­a­tive. In­tro­duc­ing Lachen­mann to an au­di­ence at the South­bank Cen­tre in Oc­to­ber, Ivan He­witt de­scribed him as ‘a com­poser we don’t know well in this coun­try, an omis­sion we are grad­u­ally re­pair­ing’.

Out­side of fes­ti­val ret­ro­spec­tives — at the Hud­der­s­field Con­tem­po­rary Music Fes­ti­val in both 1986 and 2005, and Tran­scen­dent, a week-long fes­ti­val at the Royal Col­lege of Music in 2006 — Lachen­mann’s music has not re­ceived much stage time. For ex­am­ple, it was not until 2005 that the Lon­don Sin­foni­etta played any of his works.

When it has been per­formed, it has evoked mixed re­ac­tions. Until the per­for­mance of Ausklang, his mon­u­men­tal piano con­certo, at Hud­der­s­field in 2000 (and Richard Steinitz’s per­sis­tent vi­sion seems to have played a large part in turn­ing these views around) crit­ics tended to damn his music as ‘more con­cerned with mu­si­cal noise than ac­tual music […] an ap­par­ently neg­a­tive, des­per­ately ex­treme pre­oc­cu­pa­tion,’ ‘bet­ter heard about than heard’ or ‘earnest, dreary “mod­ern music”’ — with the no­table ex­cep­tions of Paul Grif­fiths, who found it ‘dif­fi­cult to re­main en­tirely im­per­vi­ous to beauty’ as early as a 1986 per­for­mance of Salut für Caud­well, for two gui­tarists, at the ICA, and David Power, who was ‘struck pri­mar­ily by the amaz­ing wealth of in­ven­tion’ in Pres­sion, for solo cello, that same year at the Hud­der­s­field Fes­ti­val, though Power was writ­ing in a spe­cial­ist pe­ri­od­i­cal rather than the main­stream press. Au­di­ences could be sim­i­larly am­biva­lent. Ian Pace re­ported ‘fu­ri­ous re­ac­tions’ to a per­for­mance of „… zwei Gefühle …“, Musik mit Leonardo, for speaker and en­sem­ble, at the South­bank Cen­tre in 1994. More re­cently, opin­ions have shifted. In par­tic­u­lar, An­drew Clements and Tom Ser­vice writ­ing in The Guardian have be­come ad­vo­cates, but tren­chant views still re­main. In 2008, Robin Hol­loway fumed at the ‘colos­sal self-in­dul­gence’ and ‘con­spic­u­ous waste­ful­ness’ of Lachen­mann’s opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwe­felhölzern (as seen in Madrid — the opera has, un­sur­pris­ingly, yet to ar­rive on British shores), de­scrib­ing Lachen­mann as hav­ing ‘in­her­ited the Em­peror’s man­tle of grandiose in­vis­i­bil­ity’ from Karl­heinz Stock­hausen.

In the aca­d­e­mic arena, dis­cus­sions of Lachen­mann’s music have been lim­ited in part by the fact that the ma­jor­ity of his ex­ten­sive writ­ings have not been trans­lated into Eng­lish (though no doubt also due largely to the paucity of per­for­mances). A few trans­la­tions are scat­tered in var­i­ous An­glo­phone pe­ri­od­i­cals, in­clud­ing the two is­sues of Con­tem­po­rary Music Re­view (xxiii/3 and xxiv/1) ded­i­cated to Lachen­mann’s music, but mother-tongue Ger­man speaker Elke Hock­ings’s lucid in­tro­duc­tion to cer­tain as­pects of his writ­ings re­mains the only ar­ti­cle to en­gage with the evo­lu­tion of his aes­thetic thought.

Sim­i­larly, in­creas­ingly so­phis­ti­cated di­a­logues with Lachen­mann’s writ­ings by Ger­man-speak­ing com­men­ta­tors have tended to be be­yond the scope of most An­glo­phone dis­cus­sion. Mean­while, Ian Pace’s fairly com­pre­hen­sive, two-part overview of Lachen­mann’s oeu­vre in The Mu­si­cal Times rep­re­sents the only at­tempt to offer a sum­mary of the com­poser’s mu­si­cal de­vel­op­ment.

The pub­li­ca­tion in 1996 of the ma­jor­ity of Lachen­mann’s writ­ings in Musik als ex­is­ten­tielle Er­fahrung [Music as ex­is­ten­tial ex­pe­ri­ence] per­mit­ted Ger­man-speak­ing com­men­ta­tors to re­fresh their dis­cus­sions of Lachen­mann’s music through the prism of his aes­thetic thought, but has also sparked the re­al­i­sa­tion that the mu­si­col­o­gist must tread care­fully when it comes to a com­poser’s writ­ings, es­pe­cially those tend­ing to­wards the self-an­a­lyt­i­cal. In the pref­ace to a col­lec­tion of es­says whose pub­li­ca­tion co­in­cided with Lachen­mann’s 70th birth­day, Jörn Peter Hiekel and Siegried Mauser called for a widen­ing of per­spec­tives be­yond the — some­what naïve — ten­dency to write in a way such that ‘most of what was stated about the com­poser was lit­tle more than an ex­tended para­phrase of the com­poser’s own ideas.’

This is a prob­lem aris­ing more fre­quently as com­posers ac­com­pany their music with words of­fer­ing a de­f­i­n­i­tion of the mu­si­cal con­tent; this guide to in­ter­pre­ta­tion ‘ap­pears as au­then­tic and ap­par­ently ar­rives from the same mys­te­ri­ous cre­ative world [as the music]’ and so is all too often ac­cepted with­out much fur­ther thought. How­ever, cau­tion is cru­cial. De­spite feel­ing the need to put his aes­thetic thought down on paper, Lachen­mann him­self is wary that any­thing he says is ‘the de­bris of sense and feel­ings’ and that much of his own writ­ing has fallen vic­tim to ‘the silly per­cep­tion that the ver­bal medium is more co­her­ent than the aes­thetic’.

If one com­bines these uni­ver­sal in­ter­pre­ta­tive dan­gers with the dif­fi­cul­ties of trans­lat­ing for An­glo­phone au­di­ences the philo­soph­i­cal-aes­thetic de­bates that have been part of Ger­manic mu­si­cal life since the 18th Cen­tury, it should per­haps come as no sur­prise to find that Lachen­mann’s mu­si­cal and ver­bal out­puts have be­come tan­gled, not to men­tion that his aes­thetic the­o­ries have con­tin­ued to de­velop in con­cert with his music, a fact not so eas­ily dis­cerned from those of his es­says avail­able in trans­la­tion. Lachen­mann has writ­ten ex­ten­sively on music in a tra­di­tion that does not shy away from dras­tic aes­thetic con­clu­sions, a tra­di­tion whose ‘di­alec­tic rhetoric has sel­dom been at­trac­tive to Eng­lish-speak­ing music en­thu­si­asts.’

As Richard Steinitz put it, ‘the British are health­ily sus­pi­cious of art, or in­deed any­thing, pressed into the ser­vice of ide­ol­ogy’ and while Lachen­mann’s music is any­thing but dog­matic, his aes­thetic con­clu­sions and en­su­ing com­po­si­tional ap­proach were — at least ini­tially — un­de­ni­ably formed by ide­ol­ogy. In con­ti­nen­tal Eu­rope (and es­pe­cially Ger­many) on the other hand aes­thetic writ­ings have been used as ‘mer­chan­dise’ for the music, and Lachen­mann’s birth­place, Stuttgart, boasts a rich lin­eage of di­alec­ti­cal thinkers, in­clud­ing Max Horkheimer, run­ning back to Hegel him­self. Alex Ross’s re­ac­tion to his im­pres­sion of Lachen­mann’s writ­ings is scathing, in­ter­pret­ing them as straight­for­ward re­jec­tions of the pop­u­lar that, in­debted to Adorno, threaten a con­stricted emo­tional range. De­spite this, Ross has the sense to de­tach his lis­ten­ing from his read­ing and con­cedes that Lachen­mann ‘is a sen­si­tive com­poser who places his cries and whis­pers with ex­tra­or­di­nary care and keeps the lis­tener in a tensely riv­eted state.’ It seems highly likely that mis­com­pre­hen­sion of stated goals — in Lachen­mann’s writ­ings — has led to mis­com­pre­hen­sion of the mu­si­cal re­sult, or that some crit­i­cisms of the music are founded in dis­agree­ments with Lachen­mann’s aes­thetic the­ory, even when cor­rectly un­der­stood, rather than in dis­like of the mu­si­cal ma­te­r­ial. That the writ­ings might con­tinue to repel po­ten­tial au­di­ences seems a shame; they re­main sign­posts that may in­form our un­der­stand­ing of the music and il­lu­mi­nate our por­trait of the man, but Lachen­mann re­mains fore­most a com­poser, not a philoso­pher or aes­theti­cian. We should hear his music and read his writ­ings in that con­text. As he has ob­served — per­haps sur­pris­ingly given his ver­bal out­put — ‘The com­poser has noth­ing to say; he has some­thing to cre­ate.’

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Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s music is rooted firmly in the jud­der­ing, frag­mented lan­guage of the post-war Eu­ro­pean avant-garde. It un­earths log­ics in eerie, un­fa­mil­iar sounds as if the sur­face of music has cracked open and the frag­ile scratch­ing be­hind every note is re­vealed. It is a music whose every fibre is con­cen­trated on find­ing beauty, often in places oth­ers may have turned their backs on in dis­gust. It is a music of its time, in­vested in the Marx­ist aes­thet­ics of Theodor Adorno and Wal­ter Ben­jamin, with a per­ma­nent fugi­tive eye on the past and an eager gaze for­wards to the fu­ture, but writ­ten with an un­flinch­ing ear unswayed by dog­matic tenets and in­formed by acoustic re­al­ity.

Born in 1935, Lachen­mann was nine years old when the Sec­ond World War came to its end. Ever the ec­cen­tric, Ger­man film di­rec­tor Werner Her­zog (b. 1942) has spo­ken of the bizarre, ex­cit­ing play­ground bomb-flat­tened Mu­nich pro­vided as ‘the most beau­ti­ful en­vi­ron­ment you could ever find for chil­dren,’ and Lachen­mann’s child­hood in Stuttgart may have con­tained some sim­i­lar ex­pe­ri­ences.

While in Her­zog’s early cin­ema these in­flu­ences sur­face in sur­real scenes and bizarre jux­ta­po­si­tions often in­formed by ac­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, but al­ways linked by a more tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive logic, in Lachen­mann de­stroyed and frag­mented land­scapes are in­escapable and the newly in­clu­sive pan­theon of sounds has un­cov­ered a dif­fer­ent, com­pelling logic from that of tonal­ity or even ex­tended se­ri­al­ism. Per­haps com­pa­ra­ble are the vast can­vases of Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) whose thick al­lu­vial lay­ers of grey-brown oil paint bury fields of scorched earth and dis­torted sym­bols of Chris­tian­ity in near-ab­stract grotes­query, pro­vid­ing ‘frontal en­gage­ments with the totems of Ger­man his­tory,’ or the ac­tion-dri­ven sculp­tural land­scapes con­structed from beeswax, felt, rub­ber and wood by Joseph Beuys (b. 1921) that at­tempt to place the cre­ative act at the fore­front, rel­e­gat­ing its ma­te­r­ial trace to a mere sign to­wards its orig­i­nal en­ergy. Any di­rect par­al­lel with the rep­re­sen­ta­tive arts would be fool­ish, but there are dis­tinct sim­i­lar­i­ties in the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of artists from all fields, rang­ing from total re­jec­tion of to crit­i­cal en­gage­ment with tra­di­tion and re­flect­ing Ger­man so­ci­ety’s strug­gle to un­der­stand, di­gest and move on from the hor­rors of Nazi rule.

While in paint­ing or sculp­ture de­pic­tions of a cru­ci­fix or a trench sys­tem (or, for that mat­ter, rep­re­sen­ta­tion’s total dis­in­te­gra­tion into ab­strac­tion) usu­ally carry sym­bolic mean­ing and are in­tended to do so, music’s re­la­tion­ship with the sym­bolic or with ver­balised mean­ing of any kind is by its na­ture ob­scure. It is not pos­si­ble for a purely mu­si­cal work to place the ac­tions of a civ­i­liza­tion on trial, as is ar­guably pos­si­ble in rep­re­sen­ta­tive art and un­de­ni­ably pos­si­ble in works of the­atre and lit­er­a­ture. For ex­am­ple, a play such as Friedrich Dürren­matt’s Der Be­such der alten Dame (1956) chill­ingly drama­tises the ex­tent to which ap­par­ently good so­ci­eties can be cor­rupted until pre­vi­ously am­i­ca­ble neigh­bours turn on each other. Nonethe­less, it may be pos­si­ble for music to en­gage with its so­cial hi­er­ar­chies in a fash­ion that chal­lenges the sta­tus quo.

Per­haps some of the most im­por­tant ex­pe­ri­ences for Lachen­mann as a young mu­si­cian were his vis­its to the Darm­stadt In­ter­na­tionale Fe­rienkurse für Neue Musik and his con­tact there with the per­son­al­i­ties that made up the avant-garde of the 1950s — a truly in­ter­na­tional pan­theon of po­ten­tial in­flu­ences. Among the fig­ures such as Karl­heinz Stock­hausen, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur and Theodor Adorno, who Lachen­mann met or heard speak at the 1957 Sum­mer Course, none had as large an im­pact as Luigi Nono.

Hav­ing seen him speak about the de­vel­op­ment of se­ri­al­ism at Darm­stadt and then heard his Vari­anti at the 1957 Donaueschinger Musik­tage, Lachen­mann trav­elled to Venice be­tween 1958 and 1960, where he lived and stud­ied with Nono, who be­came not only his teacher but a life-long friend as well. From Nono, Lachen­mann de­vel­oped the be­lief that music had a so­cial func­tion, be­com­ing so fa­mil­iar with Nono’s music and thought that he acted as ghost­writer for two lec­tures Nono gave at Darm­stadt and pro­duced the of­fi­cial piano re­duc­tion of Nono’s opera In­toller­anza 1960. In one of his ear­li­est pub­lished es­says, ‘Luigi Nono oder Rück­blick auf die se­rielle Musik’, Lachen­mann speaks about the dif­fi­culty a com­poser faces, as he is forced to rely on the in­sti­tu­tions that make up the so­ci­ety that he would change. The core ques­tion for any con­tem­po­rary com­poser is: ‘How do I free the tech­ni­cal-com­po­si­tional ma­te­r­ial from the mis­taken in­ter­pre­ta­tions that have been es­tab­lished by so­ci­ety, so that I can reach a sit­u­a­tion in which I can freely and crit­i­cally en­gage with this so­ci­ety as a cre­ative artist?’ This urge to en­gage in some way with so­ci­ety is clearly fun­da­men­tal to Lachen­mann’s early con­cep­tion of artis­tic ac­tiv­ity, in line with Marx­ist lit­er­ary the­o­rist Christo­pher Caud­well’s idea of lit­er­a­ture as ‘func­tion­ing to in­crease man’s free­dom.’ In this par­a­digm, so­ci­ety is a process, which an artist can ei­ther em­brace or re­ject and, fol­low­ing Marx­ist di­alec­tic, the lat­ter is the only route to change (in this world­view: progress). This at­tempt at a re­jec­tion of or re­ac­tion against so­cial mores through music seems symp­to­matic of a need to avoid ‘thought­less con­ven­tion­al­ity’ that has strong his­tor­i­cal roots in the artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal af­ter­math of World War II, but while his­tor­i­cal roots are cer­tainly part of this at­ti­tude to cre­ativ­ity and the artis­tic im­pulse, they often can­not ex­plain the styl­is­tic mode an in­di­vid­ual chooses. De­spite a the­o­ret­i­cally sim­i­lar po­si­tion on the po­lit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal spec­tra, Hans Werner Henze at­tacked Lachen­mann as a ‘rep­re­sen­ta­tive of mu­sica neg­a­tiva’ fix­ated on the ugly and the bro­ken, demon­strat­ing how po­lit­i­cal-his­tor­i­cal affini­ties do not nec­es­sar­ily lead to aes­thetic sim­i­lar­i­ties.

In the wake of World War II, the pre­vail­ing, ar­tic­u­lated wish at in­ter­na­tional events such as the sum­mer courses in Darm­stadt and the fes­ti­vals in Donaueschin­gen, was to move away from tra­di­tional cat­e­gories of aes­thetic value. Adorno’s much quoted state­ment, ‘to write po­etry after Auschwitz is bar­baric’, may be an ex­treme voic­ing of this crit­i­cal loss of faith in the struc­tures of hu­man­ist so­ci­ety, and Adorno was cer­tainly more polem­i­cal than most, but it nonethe­less shows the depth of feel­ing run­ning through the artis­tic and, in par­tic­u­lar, the mu­si­cal com­mu­nity at this time.

The ex­trem­ity of this re­ac­tion has since been heav­ily crit­i­cised, but it is valu­able to re­mem­ber the per­sonal feel­ings that en­gen­dered ad­vo­cacy for an aes­thetic sea change. Speak­ing in 2010, Lachen­mann re­called hear­ing the radio play­ing Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­phony to ac­com­pany an­nounce­ments about sol­diers’ deaths at Stal­in­grad and ‘Siegfrieds Tod’ from Götterdämmerung to mourn Hitler’s death, ‘like a magic to paral­yse brains’. Given the strength of these per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tions, it is per­haps no won­der that artists of all per­sua­sions felt it nec­es­sary to dis­tance them­selves from tra­di­tions ap­par­ently in­ex­tri­ca­bly tan­gled in the wreck­age of Nazism.

Once they had had time to glance back on their ac­tions, lead­ers of the rev­o­lu­tion like Pierre Boulez were able glibly to sum­ma­rize their at­ti­tudes with pithy com­ments about blow­ing up opera houses, but such throw­away re­marks belie the com­plex­ity in the bud­ding avant-garde’s re­la­tion­ship with tra­di­tion.

The ob­vi­ous link be­tween the post-war avant-garde and older music lies in the ex­ten­sion of the se­r­ial tech­niques de­vel­oped by the Sec­ond Vi­en­nese School pre-WWII, but­there are also links in the at­tempts at tex­tural and per­for­mance-tech­ni­cal in­no­va­tion. The ghostly stream­ing of chro­matic sul pon­ti­cello lines, clouds of pizzi­cati and skele­tal rat­tling of ric­o­chet bow­ing in the Al­le­gro mis­te­rioso of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite hint at many later de­vel­op­ments, not least the hushed, shad­owy pitches of Hel­mut Lachen­mann’s Sec­ond String Quar­tet.How­ever, where the Sec­ond Vi­en­nese School had re­ferred to the clas­si­cal tra­di­tion by writ­ing for es­tab­lished in­stru­men­ta­tions and gen­res to es­tab­lish their cre­den­tials (po­ten­tially under scrutiny due to their rad­i­cal atonal­ity) and viewed them­selves as an in­evitable de­vel­op­ment of the tra­di­tion of Wag­ner and Brahms, the post-war avant-garde were far more in­ter­ested in pro­mot­ing them­selves as a fresh start. In the late 1940s the works per­formed at the Darm­stadt Sum­mer Courses shifted rapidly from ‘ti­tles such as Sonatine, Suite for Piano, Cham­ber Sym­phony, Scherzo, and Con­certo in E Flat’ to ‘“Music in Two Di­men­sions,” “Schipot,” “Poly­phonie X,” “Syn­taxis,” “Anepigraphe” […] “Per­spec­tives,” “Struc­tures,” “Quan­ti­ties,” “Con­fig­u­ra­tions,” “In­ter­po­la­tions”’. These ab­strac­tions — wor­thy of a sci­ence fic­tion film or an elec­tron­ics man­ual — went hand in hand with rad­i­cal re­think­ings of tra­di­tional means of sound pro­duc­tion. In works such as Lu­ciano Berio’s For­mazioni and Karl­heinz Stock­hausen’s Grup­pen, the spa­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties of the or­ches­tra were ex­plored by re­ar­rang­ing the stan­dard on-stage or­ches­tral lay­out (in the for­mer) or break­ing the or­ches­tra up into three sep­a­rately-con­ducted groups placed around the au­di­ence (in the lat­ter), while un­con­ven­tional play­ing tech­niques or in­stru­ments be­came in­creas­ingly com­mon. Lachen­mann’s Kon­trakadenz (1971) is a 20-minute or­ches­tral work that looks at home in this land­scape. In ad­di­tion to a stan­dard sym­phony or­ches­tra in­clud­ing six per­cus­sion­ists, the score calls for four ‘ad-hoc play­ers’ whose ar­moury of sound sources in­cludes ping-pong balls (and a suit­able sur­face for bounc­ing), ra­dios, scrap metal, coins, zinc tubs of water (for slosh­ing), poly­styrene (for rub­bing to­gether) and sev­eral more con­ven­tional items. Much of the wind sec­tion also re­quires recorder heads to pro­duce pierc­ing whistling sounds and there is more poly­styrene dis­trib­uted about the or­ches­tra, not to men­tion a Ham­mond organ, an elec­tric gui­tar and a tape part, which seem rel­a­tively tame in com­par­i­son. The use of a recorded an­nounce­ment mid-piece in­form­ing the au­di­ence that they are lis­ten­ing to ‘Kon­trakadenz by Hel­mut Lachen­mann per­formed by…’ is also of its time, pro­vok­ing com­par­isons with sim­i­lar self-ref­er­ence in Berio’s Sin­fo­nia (1968) for ex­am­ple.

There is a risk that this bes­tiary of un­usual rasps, rat­tles, shrieks and pops might seem lu­di­crous, the prod­uct of a junk­yard rather than an or­ches­tra. This risk is dealt with con­sum­mately on an au­di­tory level in Kon­trakadenz: the sounds add up to a con­vinc­ing mu­si­cal dis­course — the sud­den still­ness filled only with the lap­ping of water (b. 236) af­fect­ingly lives up to musique concrète’s ap­pro­pri­a­tion of the con­no­ta­tions we at­tach to spe­cific sounds, and bounc­ing ping-pong balls join get­tato bow­ing and other per­cus­sive rat­tlings in co­her­ent tex­tures (e.g. bb. 22-26). In his pro­gramme note to temA (1968), for flute, voice and cello, Lachen­mann writes of want­ing to avoid his use of un­fa­mil­iar sounds and tech­niques being ‘tol­er­ated as hu­mor­ous, Dadaist or ex­pres­sion­ist el­e­ments’. The shock should in­stead de­rive from these el­e­ments’ in­te­gra­tion into the work’s fab­ric, ren­der­ing them se­ri­ous rather than amus­ing.

This struc­tural­ist ap­proach in some ways points up Lachen­mann’s tra­di­tion­al­ism: he is a com­poser deeply con­cerned with form, process and co­her­ent ex­pe­ri­ence and feels his roots lie deep in the canon.

A key pe­riod of Lachen­mann’s early out­put, roughly span­ning 1968-1980 (be­gin­ning with temA), he self-de­fines as being char­ac­terised by ‘rigidly con­structed de­nial’.

This de­nial is the re­fusal to sub­mit to the lis­ten­ing habits that Lachen­mann be­lieved be­come ha­bit­u­ated in the struc­tures of so­ci­ety and there­fore re­quire di­alec­ti­cal op­po­si­tion. How­ever, this is not a cruel ten­dency to­wards alien­ated grotes­query, but an hon­est wish to pro­voke a ques­tion­ing of habit and con­ven­tion. In an in­tro­duc­tory text to Pres­sion (1970), he wrote of his music of­fer­ing the au­di­ence a chance ‘to lis­ten dif­fer­ently and to make them aware of and test their lis­ten­ing habits and the aes­thetic taboos these hide through a dis­tinc­tive provo­ca­tion’. So Pres­sion, a study for solo cello, rarely uses the con­ven­tional sound of the in­stru­ment, in­stead choos­ing to ex­am­ine every other phys­i­cal re­la­tion­ship be­tween the player’s hands, the bow, the strings and the in­stru­ment body. Sounds are linked in a highly ra­tio­nal fash­ion not by their acoustic at­trib­utes, but in­stead by the phys­i­cal ac­tions which cause them. Lachen­mann viewed this as il­lu­mi­nat­ing his per­cep­tion that: ‘In the case of the beau­ti­ful, pro­fes­sional cello tone, the re­la­tion­ship of ac­tion and re­sult is — as with all sounds con­sid­ered “beau­ti­ful” in our so­ci­ety — par­tic­u­larly ob­scured re­gard­ing ef­fort and re­sis­tance, whereas with the ex­treme pres­sure of the fin­ger­tips slid­ing along the wood of the bow the re­la­tion­ship is much more com­pli­cated: an al­most in­audi­ble re­sult speaks, as it were, of a max­i­mum ef­fort.’

In at­tempt­ing to es­cape an ‘in­vis­i­ble prison’ of tra­di­tion, Lachen­mann sought to re­ject all sounds al­ready cat­e­gorised as beau­ti­ful by using a palette of new in­stru­men­tal tech­niques, com­bi­na­tions of sound, sound sources and (to a lesser ex­tent) elec­tron­ics.

How­ever, the re­jec­tion of tra­di­tional meth­ods of sound pro­duc­tion dur­ing this phase of Lachen­mann’s out­put is not the type of ninety-de­gree aes­thetic break that John Cage es­poused with his de­sire to cre­ate music ‘free of in­di­vid­ual taste and mem­ory (psy­chol­ogy) and also [free] of the lit­er­a­ture and “tra­di­tions” of art’. De­spite its role as an ‘in­vis­i­ble prison’, tra­di­tion is em­bod­ied for Lachen­mann by works that ‘form those his­tor­i­cal ex­am­ples and artis­tic ex­pe­ri­ences that at­tempts at break­ing out of this prison can in­voke, if they re­quire jus­ti­fi­ca­tion at all’. In his writ­ings and pub­lic ap­pear­ances Lachen­mann again and again ref­er­ences Beethoven and Mahler in par­tic­u­lar. His 1976 work for solo clar­inet and or­ches­tra, Ac­canto, makes use of a record­ing of Mozart’s Clar­inet Con­certo to form a — for the most part un­heard — frame­work. Iyad Mo­ham­mad de­scribes Lachen­mann as hav­ing ‘cru­ci­fied it [Mozart’s Clar­inet Con­certo] in order to res­ur­rect it, to bring it back to life. He sac­ri­ficed it for the sake of re­veal­ing to us its true value’. While re­ject­ing tra­di­tional sound-pro­duc­tion tech­niques, Lachen­mann re­mains em­bed­ded within the tra­di­tion by con­tin­u­ing to write for or­ches­tras, string quar­tets, pi­anos, clar­inets and even per­haps the most re­ac­tionary of all, opera houses. It is pre­cisely the sit­u­a­tions with the longest and rich­est tra­di­tions that he seeks out and seeks to renew through sub­ver­sion.

Lachen­mann’s con­cept of re­jec­tion has prob­a­bly been the el­e­ment of his aes­thetic thought most often re­cy­cled and re­gur­gi­tated by com­men­ta­tors, but he has in­creas­ingly moved away from it since the 1980s.

His three string quar­tets, writ­ten in 1972, 1989 and 2001 re­spec­tively, demon­strate very clearly his shift­ing ap­proaches and in­ter­ests from an early im­ple­men­ta­tion of ‘musique concrète in­stru­men­tale’ to a later, in­creas­ingly in­clu­sive aes­thetic that no longer re­jects tra­di­tional play­ing meth­ods as a mat­ter of course. The First String Quar­tet, Gran Torso, pre­sents a sound­scape of creaks, cracks and finely dif­fer­en­ti­ated, pitch­less bow­ing on var­i­ous parts of the in­stru­ments. An ex­treme in­stance of re­ject­ing tra­di­tional sound pro­duc­tion, Gran Torso pro­vides a pow­er­ful ex­am­ple of the struc­tural po­ten­tial of new sound pos­si­bil­i­ties, lead­ing au­di­ences into an in­tense cen­tral pas­sage of near si­lence ar­tic­u­lated by a slow-breath­ing ‘ca­denza’ on the tail­piece of the viola. Be­fore the pre­miere of his Sec­ond String Quar­tet ‘Reigen seliger Geis­ter’, Lachen­mann stated that ‘since the issue is not about new sounds but about new ways of lis­ten­ing, this must also be pos­si­ble with the “beau­ti­ful tone” of a cello string,’ and con­se­quently we find a work whose ma­te­r­ial no longer comes ex­clu­sively from the realm of ex­treme ex­tended tech­niques. Nonethe­less, ‘Reigen seliger Geis­ter’ does not en­tirely dis­avow the sound world es­tab­lished by its pre­de­ces­sor, mak­ing heavy use of half-stopped flau­tato to pro­duce a shad­owy, veiled pitch that he de­scribes as ‘sphärisch’ [of the spheres] and con­tin­u­ing to use scratch-tones, though to a lesser ex­tent. A fur­ther twelve years later with Lachen­mann’s Third String Quar­tet, ‘Grido’, we find a work whose focus on pitch in­flec­tions and ges­tures has al­most com­pletely sup­planted the ear­lier in­ter­est in build­ing struc­ture from tim­bral processes. This is the case to such an ex­tent that it was pos­si­ble for him to pro­duce Dou­ble (Grido II) for string or­ches­tra, a tran­scrip­tion of the string quar­tet with very min­i­mal struc­tural al­ter­ations. The pre­vi­ous two quar­tets rely so specif­i­cally on the tim­bre and en­er­getic sit­u­a­tion of a quar­tet of solo strings that it would be im­pos­si­ble to at­tempt to trans­late these works for a larger en­sem­ble. The Third String Quar­tet’s char­ac­ter­is­tic sounds are high, clear, wail­ing har­mon­ics — fields of pitch throb­bing with quar­ter­tone dis­so­nances rem­i­nis­cent of Gi­ac­into Scelsi. Un­like its pre­de­ces­sors, the strings are left tuned in fifths and ‘Grido’ is truly loud, filled with for­tis­si­mos and sharp punc­tu­a­tions of the tex­ture. One re­viewer joked that ‘even Hel­mut Lachen­mann has gone soft with old age’, while Paul Grif­fiths recog­nised the com­ple­tion of ‘a de­vel­op­ment to­ward more nor­mal sounds’.

In May 2004, Lachen­mann was awarded the Royal Phil­har­monic So­ci­ety Music Award for Cham­ber-Scale Com­po­si­tion for ‘Grido’. He had re­ceived prizes be­fore: in the 1960s he was awarded prizes by the cities of Mu­nich and Stuttgart and in 1997 re­ceived the pres­ti­gious Ernst von Siemens Foun­da­tion Music Prize, but this was the first time he had ever been ho­n­oured in Britain. It is pos­si­ble that this award is sim­ply a re­flec­tion of a jury’s ap­pre­ci­a­tion for Lachen­mann’s use of more fa­mil­iar ma­te­r­ial — the flick­er­ing ges­tures, pul­sat­ing tremolandi and scur­ry­ing scales of ‘Grido’ may re­call the stormy ex­cite­ment of a wild Shostakovich fugue, and the hu­mor­ous light­ness of the final dyad — a major third, no less — seem sur­pris­ingly rem­i­nis­cent of the wit of Haydn — but more than any­thing the award seems a re­flec­tion of a wider ac­cep­tance of his music. His most re­cent work, Got Lost, is a half-hour duet for so­prano and piano that com­bines the ex­tended tech­niques from ear­lier works such as strik­ing the frame of the piano with a ham­mer or the so­prano spit­ting out iso­lated syl­la­bles, with full-bod­ied op­er­atic singing and ex­ten­sive, Liszt­ian runs on the key­board. The use of the voice is per­haps the most sur­pris­ing el­e­ment, given the more or less total ab­sence of the tra­di­tional op­er­atic mode from Lachen­mann’s opera, com­pleted in 1996, but its 2010 per­for­mance in Birm­ing­ham was re­ceived as ‘a tour de force’

and heard as con­fir­ma­tion of Lachen­mann’s ‘mu­si­cal­ity, his sense of rhyth­mic im­me­di­acy al­lied to broad dra­matic pac­ing, his imag­i­na­tive grasp of the the­atre of per­for­mance, and not least his sheer wit’. In fact, these re­ac­tions are per­haps over-en­thu­si­as­tic. Ivan Hewett’s per­cep­tion of Got Lost at its British pre­miere in Alde­burgh as ‘vastly im­pres­sive but […] over-ex­tended’ seems a more plau­si­ble eval­u­a­tion, but it speaks vol­umes that other re­view­ers didn’t turn to what would once have been a knee-jerk re­ac­tion of dis­missal. Else­where last au­tumn, Lachen­mann was de­scribed as hav­ing moved ‘from awk­ward-squad to se­nior com­poser,’ while the week­end of per­for­mances at the South­bank Cen­tre was de­scribed as ‘ce­ment­ing his rep­u­ta­tion as a true orig­i­nal’.

Is the change in crit­i­cal re­cep­tion over the last thirty years due to chang­ing lis­ten­ing habits or a change in Lachen­mann’s music? It seems most likely that it has taken time for his music to be­come in­te­grated into our aural land­scape. Yes, more re­cent com­po­si­tions do take a less ex­treme ap­proach to some ex­tent, but major, un­com­pro­mis­ing works from the 1970s and 80s such as Gran Torso or Ausklang con­tinue to ex­cite au­di­ences with the as­ton­ish­ing wealth of ex­pres­sion they offer. Per­haps the way has even been cleared by com­posers em­ploy­ing var­i­ous ex­tended tech­niques ‘as hu­mor­ous, Dadaist or ex­pres­sion­ist el­e­ments’, al­low­ing au­di­ences to be­come fa­mil­iar with and hear the struc­tural be­hav­iour of those sounds. What­ever it is that has changed opin­ions, what one must hope for in the com­ing years is that it doesn’t con­tinue to re­quire a mile­stone such as a 75th birth­day for this music to be pro­grammed. Lachen­mann writes, ‘hear­ing, no dif­fer­ent from com­po­si­tion it­self a form of human seek­ing, is, ei­ther way, cer­tainly a flight: as flight into the in­te­rior of the dam­aged ego but a flight di­rectly into the lion’s den. And therein lies prob­a­bly the only way out.’

If music is to touch us, we must face the full fury of the demons of tra­di­tion and to do so we re­quire great com­posers. Lachen­mann is one.