Chris Swithinbank

Hel­mut Lachen­mann in Stuttgart, 13.02.2009

I was vis­it­ing Stuttgart, home­town of com­poser Hel­mut Lachen­mann, to hear a con­cert of his music pre­sented in the Stadtkirche of the sub­urb Bad-Canstatt. It seemed like a good omen when, at the head of the menu in the tra­di­tional Schwäbis­che Stube (I sup­pose this the local equiv­a­lent of an Amer­i­can burger bar or an Eng­lish tea shop) where we ate, I found a John Cage quo­ta­tion:

I can’t un­der­stand why peo­ple are fright­ened of new ideas.
I’m fright­ened of the old ones.

‘Fan­tas­tic, even the dirndl-wear­ing wait­resses are fa­mil­iar with their avant-garde com­posers,’ I thought, tuck­ing into creamy spätzle and rich pork (noth­ing too new there then, Stock­hausen would have been dis­ap­pointed).

Stuttgart is also the birth­place of G. W. F. Hegel and Max Horkheimer, es­tab­lish­ing its philo­soph­i­cal cre­den­tials, in a sense it is the home of di­alec­ti­cal think­ing. To po­ten­tial Marx­ist cha­grin how­ever, per­haps Stuttgart’s most fa­mous prod­ucts are cars, es­pe­cially those tend­ing to­wards the lux­u­ri­ous (both Porsche and Mer­cedes orig­i­nate here). This is also the heart­land of Lutheranism and Labour move­ments – Lachen­mann the lat­est in a long line of up­right ‘L’s.

On a cold evening I found the church host­ing the con­cert early and slipped in­side out of the icy air. A few peo­ple had al­ready gath­ered: a group of white-haired ladies and a cou­ple of eager young fans. On stage sat Lachen­mann deep in dis­cus­sion with Ewald Liska, a com­poser, singer and radio pro­ducer just two years Lachen­mann’s ju­nior, who would in­ter­view the com­poser in be­tween pieces dur­ing the con­cert. By the ad­ver­tised start time of 8 o’clock the church had filled, with an au­di­ence of all ages spilling onto the bal­conies above – an en­thu­si­asm per­haps ex­plained by the fact that this was, so to speak, a home crowd, but nonethe­less an en­thu­si­asm dif­fi­cult to imag­ine on Eng­lish shores for Har­ri­son Birtwistle or Robin Hol­loway, for ex­am­ple. Nor is Stuttgart a cul­tural desert. That evening Krist­jan Järvi was con­duct­ing the Ra­dio-Sin­fonieorch­ester Stuttgart in a pro­gramme of Bern­stein, Rach­mani­nov and – as is the laud­able wont of Ger­man or­ches­tras – a pre­miere: a per­cus­sion con­certo en­ti­tled In­dus­trial by 43-year-old Moritz Eg­gert.

At 73, Lachen­mann is an elder states­man of the avant-garde music scene. Since the death of Stock­hausen, some see him as the de facto leader of new music in Ger­many, but he was never cut out for lead­er­ship. Lachen­mann’s music is noth­ing if not sub­ver­sive and the wry glint in his eye as he speaks hints at a deep-rooted wish to upset the amassed ap­ple­carts of the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, this is never an aim­less drive to de­struc­tion but a keenly fo­cused and thor­oughly an­a­lytic ex­am­i­na­tion of con­ven­tion and how it must change – how it can be res­cued from the ‘orgy of stu­pe­fac­tion’ that is the every­day. All very con­cep­tual, per­haps, but the music is beau­ti­ful and the trans­for­ma­tions it sub­jects its lis­ten­ers and per­form­ers to are un­de­ni­able, matched only by Lachen­mann’s tech­ni­cal bril­liance in build­ing be­guil­ing and dra­matic struc­tures through pure proces­sual trans­for­ma­tions of sound ma­te­r­ial.

It is rare to see Lachen­mann still per­form at the piano as he used to around the world, but in Stuttgart he gave a per­for­mance of Ein Kinder­spiel [Child’s Play], seven short pieces for piano, which he pre­miered at the key­board in Toronto in 1982. They may be his among his sim­plest works, writ­ten for his daugh­ter Akiko, but as he pointed out af­ter­wards, though child­like and often play­ful, they are often too tir­ing for chil­dren to per­form, and cer­tainly weren’t in­tended as ped­a­gog­i­cal ex­er­cises. They are thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tions into the pos­si­bil­i­ties of piano res­o­nance (a realm he has ex­plored fur­ther in his mon­u­men­tal Ausklang for piano and or­ches­tra) and he com­pared the piece with Mor­ton Feld­man’s The Viola in My Life. Ein Kinder­spiel, he said, was ‘the piano in my life, and at a par­tic­u­lar time as well’ – the piece be­longs to a par­tic­u­lar pe­riod of ex­per­i­men­ta­tion with sound pos­si­bil­i­ties. His per­for­mance was crys­tal clear – quite an achieve­ment given the church acoustic – though he spoke later of the dif­fi­cul­ties in mak­ing such dense pieces work in this acoustic. Iron­i­cally, only Glock­en­turm [Bell Tower] of the move­ments was re­ally marred by the wet acoustic. The move­ment ex­ists more or less en­tirely in the vary­ing res­o­nances that emerge from a chro­matic clus­ter that re­mains con­stant through­out, but by the time the clus­ter chord echoed away into the eaves, the al­tered res­o­nance had also flown its ivory nest.

The core of the evening’s pro­gramme was Lachen­mann’s Sec­ond String Quar­tet Reigen seliger Geis­ter per­formed by the Lotus Quar­tet on a cross-shaped plat­form (no sym­bol­ism in­tended, I don’t think) in the cen­tre aisle of the church, with the per­form­ers at the cross’ tips fac­ing each other. Lachen­mann spoke of the quar­tet as the ‘grad­ual trans­for­ma­tion from flau­tato play­ing to pizzi­cato’, but a purely tech­ni­cal analy­sis can­not do jus­tice to the spir­i­tual na­ture of this ‘at­tempt at com­po­si­tion’. The open­ing pas­sages re­turn re­peat­edly to the scor­datura open strings of the in­stru­ments, which Lachen­mann con­ceives more and more as a ‘su­per-in­stru­ment’ over the course of the work. This re­turn seems – de­spite the un­con­ven­tional tun­ing – to hint at more tune­ful climes, per­haps purely through the open string tim­bre, which for most of the time is shrouded by breathy, over­tone-laden bow strokes. This widens into an elec­tric glit­ter­ing of har­monic glis­sandi that must be one of the sin­gle most beau­ti­ful pas­sages in music of the last 50 years. What fol­lows might be seen as the real drama, where di­alec­ti­cal processes are trig­gered and the trans­for­ma­tion from bow to hand takes place. One-by-one the play­ers de-tune their strings and lower their in­stru­ments to their knees to use what looked like old credit cards to strum the strings – a pas­sage in which Lachen­mann treats the quar­tet as a ‘su­per-gui­tar’. The drama here is pal­pa­ble as the music’s heart­beat slows al­most to a stand­still and oc­ca­sional cracks and crunches break a tense si­lence. The creak­ing of pews and the dis­tant tolling of the church bells (which in fact seemed to serve only to heighten the at­mos­phere) were made pal­pa­ble by the strug­gle to an­tic­i­pate the next sound. Here, a story Lachen­mann had told ear­lier about record­ing John Cage’s 4’33” with a class at the Päda­gogis­che Hochschule in Lud­wigs­burg seemed to res­onate. He had asked stu­dents to per­form Cage’s piece and he recorded this per­for­mance. This so­licited two re­ac­tions: first some would laugh at the si­lence, but then oth­ers began to lis­ten. Once recorded, he played the class the tape of the piece sev­eral times. Soon, they be­came aware of the sounds pre­sent in the si­lence and the logic that con­nected them be­came clear. The Lud­wigs­burg train would crescendo in and then out, there was the hum of traf­fic, all sounds that we sup­press from our con­scious per­cep­tion, but once recorded and heard re­peat­edly began to be re­alised as music.

For­tu­nately, Reigen seliger Geis­ter need not be lis­tened to re­peat­edly to work its magic. After ap­par­ently shat­ter­ing at the lis­tener’s feet, it grad­u­ally re­assem­bles and glides up­wards with a gra­cious creak­ing be­fore van­ish­ing into a high breath­ing of vi­o­lin har­mon­ics in an un­de­ni­ably af­fect­ing con­clu­sion. Sofia Gubaidulina has writ­ten about the spir­i­tual im­pli­ca­tions of up­wards move­ment in music and has cat­e­go­rized it as tech­nique in her own music for sym­bol­is­ing the move­ment to­wards heaven. She has even re­ferred to Lachen­mann’s music when try­ing to ex­plain her own con­cep­tion of spir­i­tu­al­ity in music. Lachen­mann’s re­li­gious be­liefs are some­thing he has not touched on in his ex­ten­sive writ­ings, though his early Marx­ist ten­den­cies and skil­ful avoid­ance of a ques­tion about church music from con­cert or­gan­iser Jörg Hannes Hahn sug­gest they are cer­tainly not straight­for­ward, but the sub­ject of the Sec­ond String Quar­tet does in­cor­po­rate spir­i­tual el­e­ments – the ‘seliger Geis­ter’ of the title – and in the church con­text it was hard to avoid a feel­ing that the work some­how re­vealed a tran­scen­den­tal jour­ney.

‘Some music is speech,’ Lachen­mann later said, ‘Bach, Schoen­berg or Boulez for ex­am­ple,’ but he would rather cre­ate music where what was im­por­tant was ‘ob­ser­va­tion’, where there was ‘no text, but a sit­u­a­tion, al­most a me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tion’. He spoke of the string quar­tet as a ‘walk, where the land­scape grad­u­ally changes’ as we move through it and then sud­denly ‘the mo­ment comes where one stands still, where one re­ally hears the land­scape for the first time’. This mo­ment in Reigen seliger Geis­ter he pin­points as the gen­tle scratch-tone bow­ing that leads up­wards and out of the piece (bb. 366 – 384). Lachen­mann de­fines this as a mo­ment that oc­curs in most of his works where the mu­si­cal ma­te­r­ial falls into a nat­ural quasi-os­ti­nato. He be­lieves this mo­ment is reached through a di­alec­ti­cal, al­most or­ganic process where the ma­te­r­ial works through its im­pli­ca­tions to­wards a more or less in­evitable rest­ing point (like an or­dered ther­mo­dy­namic sys­tem find­ing its way back to its nat­ural dis­or­der). De­spite this con­cep­tion, the process is never ob­vi­ous nor does the music be­tray its even­tual des­ti­na­tion; it is only on ar­rival that we per­ceive the ori­gins of our jour­ney as lead­ing in­evitably to this point. Per­haps this is a bad case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc in the mind of the lis­tener, but the ef­fect is un­de­ni­able. Lachen­mann main­tains that with­out the pre­ced­ing music these states would be non­sen­si­cal, like a tree, de­void of ground to grow from, float­ing in the air. De­spite all its con­ven­tion-flip­ping sounds, the music does pos­sess an al­most Beethoven­ian logic. It is the mu­si­cal-syn­tac­ti­cal ne­ces­sity of each and every sound that binds the work to­gether and it is this that makes us hear music, not a scat­ter­ing of strange ef­fects for the ear’s delec­ta­tion. In a fash­ion sim­i­lar to that of musique concrète, sounds are lib­er­ated in an egal­i­tar­ian sys­tem where no one sonic at­tribute is given au­to­matic pref­er­ence (as pitch is in tonal sys­tems); sounds are treated as in­di­vis­i­ble en­ti­ties, whose com­po­nents are dis­tin­guish­able in analy­sis, but to the ear func­tion atom­i­cally. The music lies in the alchemy, turn­ing lead to gold.

The final two pieces of the evening’s pro­gramme were Con­so­la­tion I and Con­so­la­tion II, two small-scale choral works from 1967 and 1968, per­formed with panache by singers from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstel­lende Kunst Stuttgart. Con­tem­po­rary with some of Lu­ciano Berio’s ex­per­i­ments in pho­net­ics, both these works demon­strate an in­ter­est in dis­as­sem­bling their re­spec­tive texts through pho­netic analy­sis that aims to re­veal an in­her­ent logic of sound con­struc­tion. Con­so­la­tion II is par­tic­u­larly ef­fec­tive in its set­ting of an 8th Cen­tury prayer, the Wes­so­brun­ner Gebet:

Mir ge­s­tand der Sterblichen Staunen als Höchstes
Das Erde nicht war, noch oben Him­mel
Noch Baum, noch ir­gend ein Berg nicht war
Noch die Sonne, nicht Licht war
Noch der Mond nicht leuchtete
Noch das gewaltige Meer
Da noch nir­gends nichts war
An Enden und Wen­den
Da war der eine allmächtige Gott

This med­i­ta­tion on find­ing God in the noth­ing­ness be­fore time is dis­solved into a shud­der­ing land­scape of let­ters, hiss­ing with a hol­low wind, shiv­er­ing with rolled ‘R’s, stut­ter­ing away into the noth­ing­ness where God can per­haps be found, end­ing on the ‘t’ of ‘Gott’, not sung but struck: two fin­gers com­ing to­gether in a quiet clap.

Quiet, as­sured end­ings. No thun­der­claps (though thun­der­ous ap­plause). Bom­bast negated. Con­ven­tion chal­lenged. Where to next? ‘Com­po­si­tion it­self,’ reads Lachen­mann’s pro­gramme note, ‘as a form of human seek­ing, is flight […] a flight straight into the lion’s den. And therein lies the only way out.’