OPERA FOR THE PRESENT
Helmut Lachenmann’s "Little Match Girl"
“Music is dead” was Helmut Lachenmann’s diagnosis, when he began to plan his first contribution to music-theatre in the mid 1970s. He felt that the means of classical and romantic tradition were spent and that the possibilities of musical expression were also exhausted. With his specific intellectual sharpness Lachenmann concluded, “‘Music is dead’ means that it constantly has to be brought to life again”. From the end of the 1960s this resolution led him in his œuvre to adopt a pioneering new aestheticism of sound that is consistently being extended by exploring the border zones between sound and noise.
Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy-Tale
as the basis
After a long period of planning lasting from 1990 to 1997 Lachenmann created his first work of music-theatre Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl) in which he aimed to achieve a synthesis not only of his compositional language but also a summary of his artistic and social criticism. In this context the choice of a fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen as the basis for the subject matter may at first seem surprising. However, the moving and poetic story about the fate of a little girl who, on a snowy New Year’s Eve tries in vain to sell matches and who finally, disregarded by everyone, lights one match after another to warm herself one last time before she dies of cold – contains explosive material in the truest sense of the word. Lachenmann interprets it as criticism of civilisation and as an indictment against a cold and indifferent society. When he was working on the piece it was not by chance that he was inspired by Ernst Toller’s revolutionary drama Masse Mensch, written in 1919. It contains a passage, “Yesterday you were up against the wall [..] Man, that is you / recognise yourself / that is you.”
References to Gudrun Ensslin
Lachenmann went one step further in drawing together the fate of the little girl, who as a social outsider is “up against the wall”, with the biography of the Red Army Faction activist Gudrun Ennslin (1940-1977). Unlike Andersen’s fairy-tale figure Ensslin opposed social conditions with terror and in 1968 set two department stores in Frankfurt on fire. Lachenmann recalls, “I knew Gudrun Ensslin as a child. She took her ethics from her Christian upbringing. […] We as the post-war society forcing ourselves to forget injustice all around us are also to blame for her going off the rails, her culpable entanglement and the suffering of her victims”.
Alone and abandoned
Besides social criticism Lachenmann’s work also contains a philosophical message. The sense of abandonment as experienced by the little girl in Andersen’s fairy-tale on the cold winter’s night is interpreted with the help of Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise Demand for Knowledge as a general existential loneliness, as a feeling of ignorance and despond-ency in view of the unsolved question as to the sense of existence. May a light be ignited for man and even if it is only the modest flame of a match …
Lachenmann’s multi-layered music theatre thus becomes what opera in its best moments of its long history always was: a reflection of exterior and inner states of being, analysis and criticism of existing conditions and their aesthetic counterpart. In a word: opera for the present.
Christian Wildhagen
Alfred Hrdlicka,
Bajazzo, 1990
Helmut Lachenmann
Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern
A Sound-Scene Installation
Conductor Sylvain Cambreling
Scene Installation Hideaki Yamanabe
Film Harue Nonaka, Ichiro Kajiki
Musical preparation Matthias Hermann
Soprano Eiko Morikawa
Soprano Nicole Tibbels
Piano Yukiko Sugawara
Piano Tomoko Hemmi
Sho player Mayumi Miyata
Narrator Helmut Lachenmann
South-West German Radio
Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg
South-West German Radio Vocal
Ensemble Stuttgart
Experimental Studio of the Heinrich-Strobel Foundation
of South-West German Radio
Sound director André Richard
Felsenreitschule 2002
30 August 2002, 7.30 p.m.
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