Don Giovanni König Kandaules Die Zauberflöte Turandot Die Liebe der Danae Roméo et Juliette La Donna del Lago Helmut Lachenmann Jedermann Daponte in Santa Fe Das weite Land Young Directors Joachim Schlömer Concerts 2002 The Unfinished

RADICAL EXPERIMENT AND SENSUOUS ADVENTURE
Helmut Lachenmann about music after the end of music

An opera without a story or libretto, music emerging from silence, full of sounds and with the first resonant sound developing gradually: Helmut Lachenmann’s epoch-making music theatre Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern dispenses completely with the traditional conditions of the opera genre. The work was given its world premiere in 1997; the Salzburg Festival is to present it in 2002 as a multi-visual sound-scene installation.

Can you understand the widespread fear of modern music?

Lachenmann: Certainly, and I have respect for those who admit to such fear. However, the question remains as to how this fear is dealt with, especially when it includes the uncertain curiosity towards the unknown. The question is, “Do I bury my head under the bedclothes or am I prepared to expose myself to something “frightening” and recognise this as a chance?

Well we are indeed faced with a dilemma in that there is no compulsion to go to concerts. People have to spend money so as to be able to surrender to this aspect of fear …

Lachenmann: They also do that every time they go to see a horror film. I feel that “fear” is not the problem. The entertainment industry survives very well from making people afraid, so as to suppress our real fears.

Is it important to you to reach as many people as possible with your music or do you prefer to have fewer listeners who follow the sound events more intensively?

Lachenmann: If the latter were true then I would not be able to write any operas. However, I am well aware that there are forms of reception in the case of a work like Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern that cannot be effect-ive. I cannot offer any tried and tested samples of understanding, no déjà-entendu experiences that create familiarity but instead a form of radically perceptive listening. Point of reference, starting point, highlight, key aspect, from which the sound event of course often distances itself, is an intensive form of silence precisely defined by the context. And I cling to the dream that as many people as possible open up to such silence which they indeed help to create and have to make possible, in order to be able to follow the event – the sound and the visual occurrence – from that perspective all the more intensively.

Why does it always have to be only a few, why cannot it be many, why in a “cultural nation” cannot it be everyone? “As many as possible” – however, a single malicious person can destroy the situation. What is the point of a no-smoking compartment when someone sits in it and puffs away inconsiderately? My music presupposes an intelligence, a sensitivity towards fragility and an art of perception that goes beyond casually listening to and watching a piece, a form of hearing and seeing that perhaps cannot be taken for granted.

Besides being inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy-tale for your opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern you were also influenced by the story of Gudrun Ensslin, the little girl who played with matches and set a department store on fire. What would you feel if your work were to be described as a “Red Army Fraction Opera”?

Lachenmann: It would be ridiculous but symptomatic of the prevailing superficiality in dealing with one another in our society. Faced with such superficiality, the harmless reverse of a paralysing indifference, admittedly in more explosive dimensions, Gudrun Ensslin became what she was at the end. My opera focuses on Andersen’s little girl. But the archetype of being made an outsider that merges with this fairy-tale figure, who by helping herself destroys herself, includes for me the “criminal, mad, suicide”, evoked in Gudrun Ensslin’s letter. She was perhaps referring to herself in a visionary way. Under a totally different perspective there is also the one who is driven by “burning desire”, referred to in another text, one by Leonardo da Vinci, when he says, “anyone who would like to see with his own eyes before the dark cave ‘in the sense of not knowing’ fearful and desirous, wondering what ‘wonderful things might be inside’”.

For me this is the extent of human experience of being and the Leonardo text and the Ensslin text complement each other. At the same time they preserve the appearance of the Andersen fairy tale from being merely harmless and non-committal poetry. The encounter with both texts affected me inwardly in a similar way. I knew Gudrun Ensslin as a child. As a minister of the church my father was superior in office to her father and her picture is one of my childhood memories. She took her ethos from her Christian education. The circumstances of her death were never completely clarified. I find it irritating how people stare at her name without questioning the context. In any case there is no room for heroes and saints in my opera.

Interview: Susanne Stähr

Helmut Lachenmann
Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern
Sound-Scene Installation

Felsenreitschule

30 August 2002
7.30 p.m.

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