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Home , Epifanie (Berio), Harrison Birtwistle, Inori (Stockhausen), Mauricio Kagel, Music theatre, The Bassarids

11

Music Theatre

In the 1950s, when attention generally was fi xed on musical funda- mentals, few young composers wanted to work in the theatre. Indeed, to express that want was almost enough, as in the case of Henze, to separate oneself from the avant-garde. Boulez, while earning his living as a theatre musician, kept his creative work almost entirely separate until near the end of his time with Jean-Louis Barrault, when he wrote a score for a production of the Oresteia (1955), and even that work he never published or otherwise accepted into his offi cial oeuvre. Things began to change on both sides of the Atlantic around 1960, the year when Cage produced his Theatre Piece and Nono began Intolleranza, the fi rst from inside the circle. However, opportunities to present new remained rare: even in Germany, where there were dozens of theatres producing opera, and where the new operas of the 1920s had found support, the , under the direction of Rolf Liebermann from 1959 to 1973, was unusual in com- missioning works from Penderecki, Kagel, and others. Also, most com- posers who had lived through the analytical 1950s were suspicious of standard genres, and when they turned to dramatic composition it was in the interests of new musical-theatrical forms that sprang from new material rather than from what appeared a long-moribund tradition. (It was already a truism that no opera since had joined the regular international repertory. What was not realized until the late 1970s was that there could be a living operatic culture based on rapid obsolescence.) Meanwhile, Cage’s work—especially the pieces he

190 Music Theatre 191 had written for Tudor in the 1950s—had shown that no new kind of music theatre was necessary, that all music is by nature theatre, that all performance is drama.

Opera and ‘Opera’ Ligeti no doubt spoke for most of his colleagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he declared that ‘I cannot, will not compose a tradi- tional “opera”; for me the operatic genre is irrelevant today—it belongs to a historical period utterly different from the present compositional situation.’ No doubt he spoke for many, too, in going on to say that, nevertheless, ‘I do not mean at all that I cannot compose a work for the facilities an opera house offers.’1 (At this point he had written Aven- tures and its sequel Nouvelles Aventures, two pieces for three singers and that can be staged, though their fl ux of minuscule wordless dramas, careering from comedy to pathos, is freer and more immedi- ate without theatrical trappings. They show how he was able to profi t from his position as a mature student of the Western European avant- garde: by following his models—in this case, Kagel’s Anagrama—while at the same time exaggerating them, and bringing to them his own charm and perfectionism.) But by the time he came to write his ‘Opern- haus-Stück’, (1975–76), there had been a change in his view, and a change too in the musical climate. The age of anti-opera had passed; the new work would have to be, as he said, an ‘anti- anti-opera’. During the decade or so before Le Grand Macabre opera had been the preserve of composers willing and able to deal in some way with the genre’s traditions, whether by following them (Henze and Zimmer- mann), by analysing them (Berio), by countering them (Kagel), or by seizing on the single truth that opera gives music a tongue with which to speak (Nono). Nono’s was a rare escape. Why the power of tradi- tion should have been felt so much more strongly in opera than in, say, orchestral or piano music (there are no operatic equivalents to or the sonatas of Boulez and Barraqué) is a complex matter, having to do, perhaps, with the rigidity and smallness of the standard opera repertory, and therefore with the costs of experiment (fi nancial and aesthetic costs) and the pressure to conform. The great lesson of the standard repertory is that the story is paramount, that the music should be in synchrony with the story’s narrative fl ow. Diatonic music, with its progressive narratives of harmonic movement and thematic - formation, is very good at that, which is why opera fl ourished during the era of diatonic music’s supremacy, from Monteverdi to Puccini and Strauss. Atonal opera is opera in crisis: Erwartung, Wozzeck. And crisis is

1. Ursula Stürzbecher, Werkstattgespräche mit Komponisten (, 1971), 43. 192 Modern Music and After hard to perpetuate. Hence the need for later composers either to ac- knowledge tradition in writing operas, or else to fi nd new forms and new kinds of narrative, whether in oriental theatre, in folklore, in con- temporary Western drama, or in unstructured ‘happenings’ of the kind enabled by Cage and the composers. Henze, the most prolifi c and most performed opera composer since Britten, remained so by virtue of his warm, thorough-going acceptance of opera’s history and conditions. Where Berg in Wozzeck wrote a sym- phony at some ironic remove from the action, as if to suggest how the normal world of diatonic-thematic narrative was now broken and sus- pended, Henze’s in (1965)—a reworking of of , for which W. H. Auden and wrote the —is plushly in the foreground. As he has explained, the fi rst movement is a sonata which establishes the confl ict between the principals, and , as a musical confl ict between fl uid, unmeasured, ululating voice (the call of Dionysus, a ) and staccato fanfare.2 The second movement is a scherzo in the form of a suite of Dionysian dances; the third, incorporating Dionysus’s hypnotizing of Pentheus, is an adagio succeeded by a fugue; and the fi nale is a passacaglia. The Bassarids was the culmination of the sensuous, unashamedly nostalgic style Henze had pursued since moving to Italy a decade be- fore. The symphonic structure, recalling not so much Berg as Mahler, is ample enough to include gestures made in diverse directions, from the knowing, deliberately vulgarized pastiche of Baroque French can- tata style in the interrupting the slow movement to quota- tions from Bach, both as an earlier master of the siciliana rhythm on which the opera fl oats (Henze belongs squarely, even self-consciously, in the line of German artists rhapsodizing the Mediterranean) and as a source of references to support a parallel between the Crucifi xion and the sacrifi ce of Adonis. (Here is an example of how what are being treated here as separate waves—historicism, theatre, politics—were fl owing together and interpenetrating.) The integration of varied ma- terials and opposed themes, as displayed in the opera, is in Henze’s view a characteristic of the ‘segregated’ artist, the ‘outlaw’. Undoubt- edly he saw himself in this role, at odds with conventional society by virtue of his homosexuality, and artistically contrary both to tradition (though ever less so) and (ever more so) to the avant-garde, since he turned aside from the tentative approach to total he had es- sayed in his Second Quartet (1952). His inclusion in 1958 in the issue of Die Reihe devoted to ‘young composers’—along with Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, and the rest—had already been an anachronism; by the time of The Bassarids the divide was absolute: had already been

2. See ‘The Bassarids: talks to Paul Griffi ths’, Musical Times, 115 (1974), 831–32. Music Theatre 193 written. ‘Never would he aim at an accord with the basic tendencies of his time’, Henze writes of his chosen type; instead he must devote him- self to a minority ‘which merits his sympathy and which excites his sensual and spiritual substance’.3 Henze’s concern with the individual as a feeling being—even with himself as a feeling being—was part of his grand Romantic inheritance, and it inclined him, as it did the Romantics, to another genre in which these relationships with sympathetic minorities and uncomprehending masses could be played out: the concerto. The Bassarids was followed by a rush of such works: chamber concertos for double and for and harp (several such works were written by various composers for the marital duo of Heinz and Ursula Holliger), and the determinedly autobiographical Second Piano Concerto. But then this absorption in his own personal and artistic situation was joined by a commitment to the interests of all those ignored or oppressed by bourgeois society. The darling of the , for which The Bassarids had been writ- ten, became a revolutionary; the poet of the soul began to shout about social iniquities. It was 1968. In the quasi-operatic Das Floss der ‘Medusa’ of that year, dedicated to Che Guevara, Henze dealt with the historical episode in which a group of shipwrecked men were abandoned to a raft by their offi cers, and left to face the perils of drowning and starvation. After the experience of its abortive Berlin première, lost amid struggles between police and left-wing students, Henze spent a year in Cuba, writing his Sixth Symphony, and expressing in that score his delight in the sonori- ties and rhythms of Cuban music, as well as reaffi rming his alignment with socialism by including in the elaborate polyphony quotations from Vietnamese and Greek protest songs. But apart from the appearance of a new edge and anger in the music, and a partial, momentary relinquishment of continuity, not so much had changed. The Caribbean was a new Mediterranean: a new south, a new sensuality, a new escape. And the revolutionary activist— whether appearing as a character in the works or writing them—was a new guise for the Romantic hero. Henze’s awareness of this is perhaps signalled by his preoccupation not so much with revolution as with the problems of being a revolutionary artist—problems he addressed in his fi rst post-1968 piece designed for stage presentation, the ‘show’ Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971), scored for and several ensembles. How, this work asks, can the left-wing intellectual justify the part-way commitment of pushing for revolution in his work but taking no active part in the class struggle? The music, like much that Henze wrote during this period, abounds in quotations and opportunities for more or less directed improvisation, as well as in broader references to cultural types, bringing out the nature and force

3. Hans Werner Henze, Essays (Mainz, 1964), 32. 194 Modern Music and After of the alternative siren songs by which the artist hero is beset. A Pierrot quintet, dressed in hospital overalls, represents the sick bourgeoisie (as so often for composers of this generation—not least Boulez—Schoenberg is a Freudian-Oedipal father). A brass quintet, with police helmets, are the agents of the oppressive state machine, a role the brass in The Bas- sarids perform for Pentheus. A rock group provides the voice of the underground. And there are two instrumental soloists: a percussionist, whose violent, physical activity is a metaphor for the complete engage- ment from which the hero withholds himself, and a Hammond organist as plutocrat. Henze took up the contradictions exposed in this perhaps neces- sarily confused score in another concerto—his Second Concerto of the same year—and dealt with them on a more abstract level, though still theatrically. The soloist is here cast, in a dramatization of what had been the case in this composer’s earlier concertos, as the self-willed Romantic virtuoso, trying at once to relate to the system (the orches- tra) and to prove his independence: his quixotic condition (and a male soloist does seem to be necessarily implied) is displayed in his being costumed as the Baron von Münchhausen of German story. He plays; he speaks. And the music unwinds around a poetic commentary by Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Gödel’s theorem, that any complex system contains propositions which, within that system, can be neither proved nor refuted. From this the work conjures the extrapolation that any system—especially any musical or social system, one is led to infer— must destroy itself. Undoubtedly Henze’s own system of political expression was doing so. The allurements he felt were, perhaps beyond those of Natascha Ungeheuer, the dreams and fantasies and pleasures of his earlier music— things he had carried with him, as he had carried his southern attach- ments to the New World. His Cuba, as sung in his Sixth Symphony, in his dramatic ‘recital’ El Cimarrón (1969–70) and in his ‘vaudeville’ La Cubana (1973), is not that of Castro and the struggle to build a socialist society but that of the tropical forest, of plantations lying under the beating sun, of seedy urban night life and exotic dance rhythms. His sympathies, as expressed in Das Floss der ‘Medusa’, El Cimarrón, Natascha Ungeheuer, La Cubana, and the Second Violin Concerto, are with the in- dividual rather than the mass, which is customarily presented, Roman- tically, as wanting to have a restraining infl uence on the fl ood of life and love in the individual’s breast (Der Prinz von Homburg) or else as fol- lowing blindly in the charismatic leader’s wake (The Bassarids). Henze’s personal and artistic apartnesses remain, of course, relevant. The single striking difference in his explicitly revolutionary output was the absence of opera, as if that most bourgeois of musical institu- tions had to be spurned, and replaced by the alternative concert-hall theatrical forms of such works as El Cimarrón, Natascha Ungeheuer, and the Second Violin Concerto. Not until a decade after The Bassarids did Music Theatre 195

Henze return to opera with (1974–76), and by then his political alignment was becoming moderated. His decisive, if still uneasy, rapprochement with German tradition was marked by a new batch of string quartets at the same time. For Henze, opera became a problematic medium at the time of his political engagement; for Nono and Berio, it was the proper arena for controversy and provocation. Nono’s commitment seems to have led him to opera even at a time when the genre seemed most outmoded: Intolleranza was a spurt of energy against the nature of the medium, doing away with story and display, insisting on the powerful presence of the chorus, and introducing into the theatre the brutally new sound world of . In the case of Berio, his theatre works of the 1960s are more overtly political than anything else in his output, even if the message gets more complexly overlaid along the line from Passag- gio to Laborintus II (1965) to Opera (1970). Laborintus II is a double labyrinth of words and music, one in which the Ariadne’s thread is a spoken narration written by Edoardo Sangui- neti around phrases and images from Dante’s Inferno. As this line of text unwinds, so it triggers music from an ensemble of and instru- ments covering a broad spectrum of styles from madrigalian euphony to contemporary jazz: we hear the voice of a lover, of a mob, of a fl ute, a trumpet or a harp, of the electronic constructs on tape. The ranging is typical of the time, but where Henze in Natascha Ungeheuer, for in- stance, used different styles as distinct social tokens, Berio’s purpose is to tease out musical connections: what most distinguishes the score is the fl uid movement from one situation to another, the hazy in-between rather than the specifi c reference. The work lies also in between music and language, in an area Berio had already explored in such works as , , and Epifanie. As in his Chemins series, where a previously composed instrumental is surrounded by music for ensemble, the voices and instruments of Laborintus II provide an oblique commentary on the spoken text, while at the same time the text is an oblique com- mentary on the music—a kind of running poetic programme note. Yet another in-betweenness of this opalescent score is its midway status between concert hall and theatre. It has no explicit action, but in con- cert it tends to sound like an unstaged opera. Perhaps its home is in the medium for which it was written, and to which so much of this period’s music appeals, in grateful thanks: radio. The maze structure of Laborintus II—another constant of the time, as witness Boulez’s Third Sonata or Stockhausen’s Momente—is also a feature of Berio’s fi rst opera, whose title is a signal that its concern is with the genre itself. Berio probably would have echoed Ligeti’s state- ment about the impossibility of writing just another opera, a contribu- tion to a history. His answer was to take that history as his subject, both by self-consciously creating operatic forms, as Berg had done in Lulu, and by searching back to the origins of opera, beginning each act with 196 Modern Music and After an ‘Air’ to a text from Striggio’s libretto for Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Opera is a celebration of opera, and also—because it refuses to abide by the rules it entertains—an implicit criticism. The history of opera is to be seen as a history of dissolution and decline, going on in parallel with other sliding catastrophes the work presents: the history of Western capitalism and the sinking of the Titanic.

Music Theatre If opera seemed to progressive spirits in the mid-1960s to be in its dot- age, there appeared to be new possibilities in smaller, more fl exible combinations of music and drama, often denoted as ‘music theatre’. A sporadic history of such works was claimed: Pierrot lunaire and Histoire du soldat were the classic twentieth-century examples ubiquitously cited; Monteverdi’s Combattimento was a distant ancestor. But there was no precedent for the sudden and brief fl owering that happened now, and that could be seen in the work of composers as removed from the avant- garde as Britten (in his church parables). The explosion of music theatre out of opera was more than a meta- phor in the case of the new genre’s most active proponent, Davies, whose work on his opera Taverner sparked off an interrupting suc- cession of dramatic pieces for smaller forces, beginning with Revelation and Fall for and sixteen players (1965–66). His model was de- cisively Schoenberg rather than Stravinsky or Monteverdi, and he was instrumental in founding a performing ensemble—originally called the Pierrot Players, later the —based on the Pierrot lineup, for which most of his later music-theatre pieces were composed. Reve- lation and Fall, though scored for a larger group, makes musical refer- ence to Schoenberg, and also enters that Viennese period by way of its Trakl text and its allusion additionally to Lehár, in a characteristic love- hate embrace of light music. It is also typical of Davies in taking the expression of extreme emotion as by itself dramatic. He is a dramatist of the individual (and especially of the individual under stress), not of relationships, and all his best theatre pieces are for soloists: the scarlet- habited nun of Revelation and Fall, screaming into a megaphone at the moment of crisis, the even more unhinged male vocalist of Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), the nude male dancer of Vesalii icones (also 1969). Based on a story that King George III in his madness tried to teach birds to sing, Eight Songs places its instrumentalists in giant cages to wit- ness and suffer the manic ravings of the soloist, whose part calls for a huge range, both in pitch and in vocal colour. If this is the most spec- tacular of Davies’s dramatic inventions, Vesalii icones is the most intense. The dancer, whose gestures mirror both the engravings in the sixteenth- century anatomy text by Vesalius and the Stations of the Cross, lays bare the agonies of Christ, while the instruments—among which the cello has the principal role as the dancer’s shadow, partner, or ideal— Music Theatre 197 add further layers of analysis and distortion, in which Davies’s character- istic use of hidden and overt parody keeps the music on the disquieting border between commitment and mockery.4 At the eighth station, for instance, there is a complex masquerade of musical images stimulated by the episode in which St Veronica wipes Christ’s face and receives the imprint of his features on her cloth. The opening of this section has the cello declaiming a theme from Davies’s Ecce manus tradentis for soloists, chorus, and instruments (1965), a work itself based on the plainsong setting of those words: the chant of betrayal is thus doubly betrayed by the time it reaches Vesalii icones. At the same time the piano decorates a second plainsong theme in the style of a nineteenth-century salon piece. Subsequently the material is bent to allude to the scherzos of two Beethoven , to Pierre de la Rue’s L’Homme armé mass, and to Davies’s own Missa super L’Homme armé. There are also more fl agrant, even exhibitionist parodies, as at the sixth Station, where the mocking of Christ is the occasion for twisting the L’Homme armé tune into a comfortable Victorian-style hymn (that style itself a sort of blas- phemy, the music insists) and later into a foxtrot, which the dancer is to play on a honky-tonk piano. Parody and drama in this work spring from the same source: the violence shown on stage is a violence the music is doing to itself. Davies’s dependence on Schoenberg is parallelled by the relation to Stravinsky in the work of his colleague Birtwistle—to the clear-cut forms of such works as the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Agon, and to the rustic theatre of Renard and Histoire du soldat. (The com- posers continued their association after : the Pierrot Players were founded under their joint direction.) Birtwistle’s fi rst major the- atre work was the chamber opera (1966), which is based on the old puppet shows, and which presents a gallery of characters who are part clown, part monster, all of them still puppetlike in their abrupt and grotesque behaviour, their appalling passions and their mur- derous savagery. Parody was part of Birtwistle’s arsenal too, but more important was a pure fury of gesture: for example, the high woodwind chords of screeching alarm that entered his music in Tragoedia for en- semble (1965). Punch and Judy is, like Stravinsky’s Renard, closed and cyclic: a rite of death and resurrection, night and day, winter and summer. Its highly symmetrical structure includes, for example, four ‘Melodrama’ sec- tions in which Punch traps his victims in wordplay, each followed by a ‘Murder Ensemble’ which is the celebration of a ritual execution; and these larger sections are fi lled with tiny, compact forms, often strung together in patterns of verse and . Though the work is nominally an opera, it relates to the music-theater tradition not only in its links

4. See Michael Taylor, ‘Maxwell Davies’s Vesalii icones’, Tempo, 92 (1970), 22–27. 198 Modern Music and After with Renard but also in its reduced scale and its dramatic style. The action is to be presented as if from a puppet booth, in which the char- acters go through their motions and in which also a is seated, the pit consisting of just ten further players. As for dramatic style, the cyclic ceremonial necessarily discards narrative con- tinuity, and the characters are sharp-featured, bright-coloured fi gures in formal patterns of ferocious hate and consuming lust.

Instrumental Theatre The antiphony in Punch and Judy between the stage quintet and the pit band is just one example of how Birtwistle’s drama is as much instru- mental as sung, projecting ideas of display, signal, independence, com- bat, and repetition to be found in such concert works of his as Tragoedia and Verses for Ensembles (1969), the latter a ritual play for instrumental- ists on different platforms. Three percussionists have one level for their noise instruments and another for their and ; fi ve woodwind players are seated at the left when playing high instru- ments and at the right when using their lower equivalents; a brass quintet has its own station; and there are also antiphonally separated desks for trumpet duets and for woodwind solos accompanied by the horn. Example 39 shows the opening of the fi rst of two climactic sec- tions of echoing and answer placed within the sequence of ‘verses’ for different groupings—sections which in their severe pulsation look for- ward to the time-measuring that underlies many of Birtwistle’s works of the next decade. The arresting quality of the music in performance can be imagined. Musicians in movement had already appeared in, for example, works by Berio (Circles) and Boulez (Domaines), but the more funda- mental idea here is that musical performance is by nature dramatic, and that a soloist in concert dress, playing on a platform, is an actor. The drama of performance is a current in all of Birtwistle and in all of Berio, even where it is not emphasized by movement or by unusual orchestral layouts. It is a current, too, in all of Kagel, though often spill- ing over into a drama of situation. His Match (1964), for example, is a musical contest between rival cellists, refereed by a percussionist: the extreme diffi culty of the cello parts may be judged from example 40, and if the calculated absurdity of the enterprise is not evident from the score, it is abundantly clear in the composer’s fi lm version. (Match is one of several Kagel pieces that seem to demand the close-up, deadpan inspection of the camera, and that belong to a cinematic tradition of wordless comic shorts.) Another Kagel piece, Der Atem (1970), is one of many works in which he addressed the pathology of performance and performance as pathology. According to his description: ‘A retired wind player devotes himself to the continual repetition of the same thing: maintaining his Music Theatre 199

Example 39 , Verses for Ensembles , Match Example 40

200 Music Theatre 201 instruments. At each moment he goes to the cupboard, takes out the instruments and puts them back, oils them, blows into them, wipes the saliva traps, warms the reeds and the mouthpieces, silently does some exercises; often he talks to himself while polishing away all the time. Occasionally he happens to play, properly speaking.’ It was Kagel, almost inevitably, who created the anti-opera that Ligeti had anticipated and been obliged to go beyond, for Kagel’s amused, ironic eye could hardly fail to turn the opera house inside out. His Staatstheater (1967–70) uses all the resources of such an institution —principals, chorus, orchestra, corps de ballet, scenery, costumes—in activities that satirize, ignore, or contravene customary purpose, the soloists being brought together in a crazy sixteen-part ensemble, the dancers put through their paces in gymnastic exercises. But not all Kagel’s theatre works of the period were so absurd or so loosely struc- tured. In Tremens (1963–65) he considered the effect of hallucinogenic drugs on aural experience: the subject was presented in a hospital cu- bicle, forcibly encouraged by a doctor to listen to tapes of music which a live ensemble distorted, as if projecting the subject’s imagined ver- sions. And in Mare nostrum (1973–75) he played with the idea of a party of Amazonians trying to make sense of Mediterranean culture, so that the work displays the relativity of norms, musical and social, and the danger of condescension in anthropology. Stockhausen, his sense of spectacle already apparent in Gruppen and , exemplifi es the post-1945 history of neglect followed by abundance in the sphere of dramatic music, since until 1968 he had composed almost nothing with a theatrical component (the single ex- ception was , a 1961 version of Kontakte that took the form of a regulated happening, with contributions from Cologne artists and other ‘originals’), whereas after 1971 almost all his works were repre- sentational dramas. The fi rst was Trans, which presents its audience with the awesome spectacle of a string orchestra seated in close rows behind a magenta-lit gauze, solemnly unfolding a sequence of still, dense harmonies. From further back come the amplifi ed but indistinct sounds of wind and percussion groups in marching chords or swirling melo- dies, this music impervious to the implacable crashes of a weaving shuttle (heard at irregular intervals from loudspeakers), to which the strings respond each time with a change of chord. All this, like Kagel’s Match, came to its composer in a dream, and there is a further connec- tion with Kagel in the four moments of surreal comedy that are super- imposed on the rest: the fi rst of these has a viola player performing a virtuoso cadenza, ‘like a little wound-up toy instrument’5 switched on by a marching drummer. What is indelibly Stockhausen’s is how the piece is at once bold and tacky, magnifi cent and failing.

5. Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (London, 1974), 63. 202 Modern Music and After

The larger (1973–74) is comparable in this respect, and in its massive orchestral sonorities, which map out the development of a melody through a two-hour span in phases concentrating on rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and polyphony, as if in a résumé of mu- sical history. But where Trans made theatre out of orchestral perfor- mance, Inori adds the actions of a mime, or pair of mimes, in attitudes of worship taken from many different cultures, these actions of prayer seeming to be amplifi ed by the orchestra: the Japanese title has the meaning of ‘Adorations’. Soon after, in for dancing clarinetist (1975), the composer introduced the concept of the instrumentalist- actor, performing in costume, and so prepared the way for his , in which the main characters are more likely to be represented by instru- mentalists than by singers. Opera and instrumental theatre are one.