Paul Griffiths

Passion and Aftershock

 

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Kele's use of historical mementos- photographs of the composers as boys and young men, film of Eötvös in his early 20s taking part in a rehearsal of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I-suggest that the secret garden is one that has remained untouched, perhaps from the beginning, in perpetual summer florescence. Kurtág might agree. He insists that he knows nothing about music, but that from time to time someone who does know bursts through from within him and vanishes again. Eötvös shows how a piece he wrote as a teenager, Kozmosz for piano, became the model for new compositions more than three decades afterwards. Both Kurtág and Eötvös were late starters, becoming much more productive around the age of fifty. Perhaps they had to wait-and work-to gain some insight into what lay behind that seventh door. The title of the Kurtág film, The Matchstick Man, alludes to the story he has recounted of his treatment, when he was a young man in Paris, by the psychoanalyst Marianne Stein, who had him begin to rediscover his creativity by putting matchsticks together. This was an enduring lesson. "It's possible to make music with practically nothing," he says here, "practically without material, quite simply, because something is happening which transforms nothing into movement." The film allows us to see and hear that happening, as he works with performers on a great range of pieces-with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic on

Stele, or with Csengery on a tiny song ('Farewell'). Kurtág says almost nothing about his past (Ligeti does a bit), and the film's evocations of that past are unnecessary (as is the director's arrival as a dramatic character in one episode). What vigorously engages Kurtág is the present, and in particular the present of coaching performers. In the hour of this film he looks by far the happiest during three or four minutes when he is guiding-with words, gestures and vocalizations-two young players in Schubert's 'Arpeggione' Sonata. "I understand music really only if I teach it," he says immediately afterwards. And one may guess that this is true even when that music is his own. Rehearsal is a process in which all participants-the composer and the performers-are in the dark, trying to enlighten themselves and each other. In contrast with Kurtág, so intense and photogenic, Eötvös is a man of half-lights, and The Seventh Door risks losing him among his manifold activities: conducting Liszt in Budapest and London or at work on his own music, with its unsettling range from humour (a recomposition of Gesualdo madrigal poems) to sonorous richness and even grandeur. Near its end, though, the film begins to make sense of its subject. "The essence of passion escapes me," Eötvös says, and the words seem at once extraordinary (we have just witnessed a scene from the composer's Chekhov opera Three Sisters) and telling. The essence of passion is Kurtág's business. Eötvös is here to collect the puzzling aftershocks.

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One branch of Kurtág's output absent from the film, his choral music, is finely presented by the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart under Marcus Creed on a recent record (Hänssler Classics CD 93.174), with a great range of dynamics and colours, and precision tuning. The three groups of settings were begun almost simultaneously, during the years 1979-81, but one of them, Songs of Despair and Sorrow, took a lot longer than the others to develop, perhaps because it is on a quite different scale. Omaggio a Luigi Nono (to poems in Russian, four of the six being by the composer's frequent collaborator at the time, Rimma Dalos) and Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori are made up of instants, down to under a minute and not exceeding two and a half. The seven Songs of Despair and Sorrow are much bigger; the biggest is almost as long as the whole of Omaggio a Luigi Nono, whose six utterances are over in nine minutes, and the whole cycle runs to twenty-two minutes-longer than the other two works together. There is the difference, too, that the Nono and Tandori sets are unaccompanied, whereas Despair and Sorrow carries the weight of ensembles of accordions, brass, strings, keyboards and percussion, for a

total of twenty-eight players, however sparingly deployed. The extra size of Despair and Sorrow, vertical and horizontal, may make this the most effective of the three in live performance, though by the same token the work is not going to be performed very often. It will always be a special piece-a history of a century of Russian suffering (the poems, again in Russian, are all this time by Russians, from Lermontov, who also led off the Nono cycle, to Tsvetayeva) and also a requiem of contemporary aloneness and disquiet. As much as in his more abundant and better known solo settings, Kurtág time and again seizes the words into graphic musical images. The first foot of the Lermontov piece that opens Despair and Sorrow-'So weary', as it is translated in the booklet, matching the rhythm of the Russian-is given a rise and fall that conveys abject weariness, and that remains almost omnipresent. (Being so much longer, these songs tend to make more use of unifying themes, chords or atmospheres.) The static harmonies given to Akhmatova's 'Crucifixion' sound like the gazes the poem is talking about, how we can look at Mary Magdalen and St. John but must turn our eyes from Christ's mother.

Paul Griffiths
is the author of books on Stravinsky, Bartók, the string quartet, The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2004) and, most recently, A Concise History of Western Music (2006).