Heiner Goebbels

Heiner Goebbels: Eislermaterial (ECM New Series 1779)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Eislermaterial

Ensemble Modern
Joseph Bierbichler voice
Recorded live October 1998 at Hebbel-Theater, Berlin
Engineer: Max Federhofer, SWR
ECM Records co-production with Ensemble Modern, Südwestrundfunk, Deutschlandfunk

“Fear is a false expression.”
–Hanns Eisler

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) is the subject of Heiner Goebbels’s fascinating homage, which has become as beloved as the music that inspired it. Eisler was the third protégé, after Berg and Webern, of the Schönberg dodecaphonic school, and a German expatriate who fled with close friend/collaborator Bertold Brecht in the 1930s to the United States, where he would go on to compose two Oscar-nominated film scores (1943’s Hangmen Also Die!, for which Brecht also wrote the script, and None but The Lonely Heart one year later). Just as he was settling into his exile, however, Eisler was deported (he was among the first to find his name on the Hollywood blacklist), but not before a series of benefit concerts—sponsored by Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, and Leonard Bernstein, to name an illustrious few—were given to raise funds for his defense. Virgil Thomson, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, said of the final program on 11 March 1948:

The impressiveness is due less to any profound originality, as in the case of his master, Arnold Schönberg, or in that of his sometime model, the German-language works of Kurt Weill, than to his graceful and to his delicate taste. Eisler’s music, whether the style of it is chromatic and emotional, diatonic and formalist, or strictly atonal in the dodecaphonic manner, always has charm. It has charm because the tunes are pretty, the textures bright and light, the expressive intentions thoroughly straightforward and clear. Eisler is that rare specimen, a German composer without weight. He uses no heaviness, makes no insistence.

When Eisler returned to East Berlin he penned the GDR’s national anthem amid a spate of intense musical activity, culminating in a Faustian opera that was characterized by Neues Deutschland as “a slap in the face of German national feeling” and therefore never completed. After the death of Brecht, Eisler’s disillusionment intensified and plunged him into depression, during which time he breathed his last.

Eisler and Brecht, 21 March 1950 (Bundesarchiv)

The dramaturgy of Eislermaterial calls for a small statue of its namesake to be placed at the center of the performance space: the surrogate conductor, standing in a field plotted like some gridless Go board. Befittingly, Eisler’s compositions make up the piece’s entirety. The resulting “assemblage” uses his many voices as raw materials for a tribute that shuns ideological heavy-handedness in favor of a bittersweet portrait comprised of lieder and relatively unknown instrumental pieces. The latter are artfully arranged and performed here by the discerning musicians of Ensemble Modern, who crack open the kinetic energy residing within. Of these, Suite for Septet No. 1 provides particularly delightful insight into this eclectic mind, while a fragment for string quartet is rendered all the more moving for being juxtaposed with a turn from his Orchestral Suite No. 3, which sounds like a big band falling down a flight of stairs. Wonderful.

Eisler statue, up close and in situ (photos by Matthias Cruetziger)

Surrounded as these are by nine of Eisler’s songs, they take on more than mere interludinal quality, rather embedding themselves like nodules of concentration. Eight of these are settings of poems by Brecht. Tones range from patriotic (Children’s Anthem) and nostalgic (And I shall never again see) to proletarian (Four Lullabies for Working Mothers), and cover such themes as adaptability (The Grey Goose), the visibility of privacy (Mother Beimlein), renewal (Of Sprinkling the Garden), and fatalism (War Song). On Suicide unfurls the set’s most pensive backdrop, both lyrically and musically:

In such a country and at such a time
There should be fewer melancholy evenings
And lofty bridges over the rivers
While the hours that link the night to morning
And the winter season too each year, are full of danger.
For having seen all this misery
People won’t linger
But will decide at once
To fling their too heavy life away.

A verse by Peter Altenberg closes the set with a melancholic picture of resignation: “Eventually, longing dies, too, / as blossoms languish in a cellar / waiting daily for a little sun.” The interpretations are sometimes augmented by stark contrasts, such as the scratchy free jazz solo of The Grey Goose and the morose rubato of Mother Beimlein. Singer Joseph Bierbichler makes no attempt to sing like Eisler and instead brings out subjective and endearing performances that are as genuine as they are vulnerable. Goebbels also includes two “Audio dramas,” making use of clips from the Eisler archive in true Glenn Gould fashion. In these we are treated to his thoughts on sound, culture, science, and contemplation, evoking an age of black and white imposed upon a world of horrid color.

The comprehensive booklet for Eislermaterial includes an interview with Goebbels, who credits Eisler with having jumpstarted his life in sound. Certainly, one need hardly look deeply to see the affinity. Not only did Goebbels find his own Brecht in Heiner Müller, but both he and Eisler have successfully united politics and music in such a way that one finds them impossible to separate in the listening and likewise to dilute in the thinking. Eisler was more than a Marxist cog with a creative streak, and no one is better suited than Goebbels to tell that story to its fullest. This is the most “filmic” of Goebbels projects and lends itself wisely to an aural and textual world bound by an undying love for theatre. A masterpiece on all counts and a crowd favorite among fans and newcomers alike.

<< Valentin Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa (ECM 1778 NS)
>> Keith Jarrett Trio: Inside Out (ECM 1780)

Heiner Goebbels: Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (ECM 1552)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Ou bien le débarquement désastreux

André Wilms voice
Sira Djebate vocals
Boubakar Djebate kora, vocals
Yves Robert trombone
Alexandre Meyer electric guitar, table-guitar, daxophone
Xavier Garcia keyboards, sampling and programming
Heiner Goebbels sampling and programming
Moussa Sissoko djembe
Recorded June 1994 at Studios De La Grande Armee, Paris

If we have entered into familiarity with these particular offices of nature, if they have acquired the chance to be born in the world, it isn’t merely so that we may offer anthropomorphically an account of this sensual pleasure, it is so that there may result from it a more serious co-naissance (being born together/knowing). Let’s go deeper then.
–Francis Ponge, Le Carnet du Bois de Pins (The Notebook of the Pine Wood)

Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (Or the hapless landing) is another intriguing entry in ECM’s growing Heiner Goebbels lexicon. As a piece intended for the stage, one gets only half the experience, if even that, on disc, though minimal scoring ensures that the text (all of it in French) remains absolute. In this regard, Ou bien… requires only one actor (André Wilms) in the narrative role, and represents a direction that Goebbels has now taken further with his recent Stifters Dinge, which has need of neither actors nor musicians, per se, and relies instead on mechanically controlled “performers,” with Goebbels as their brain.

The present composition is based on texts by Joseph Conrad (from his Congo Diary), playwright and frequent Goebbels collaborator Heiner Müller, and essayist/poet Francis Ponge (from the work epigraphed above). All of these texts intersect at the site of the forest, which emerges as the primary visual field in this postcolonial space. Goebbels ruthlessly combines Senegalese and “Western” musical strands. The former emerges as refined and anything but primitive, while the latter by turns titillates and grates on the ears with its aggressive tendencies. The vivid kora of Griot Boubakar Djebate is the album’s alpha and omega and cuts out, in negative image, a porous backdrop for otherwise opaque texts. The ensemble is completed by instruments both familiar (trombone, electric guitar, djembe, keyboard, and sampler) and not (such as the daxophone, an amplified piece of wood brought to life when a bow is drawn across it). Instrumental interludes are rendered with the rougher textures of guitar and croaking brass. Conversely, the kora cuts through with the smoothness of a scalpel, even if closer inspection reveals a handle with decades of violence burnished into its grooves. Conrad’s diaristic structure contributes to the underlying unease, so that Djebate’s glorious rendition of “Il eut du mal” lifts us only partially from its surface like a scab. The range of emotional registers is pure Goebbels. From the drone of “Dangoma” to the upbeat pastiche of “Haches, Couteaux, Tentacules” and the banal charm of “Le Soir,” this album carries us through a journey as didactic as it is self-destructive, so that by its end we are in a grove of shattered intentions and piecemeal recollections.

In reference to this piece, Rodney Milnes observes: “As in all melodrama there is a conflict between word and note: it is more difficult for the human brain to absorb the two when the words are not simply set to music.” This is precisely what one finds enacted through the colonial process, the mindset behind which seems to bleed through Ou bien…, regardless of whether one understands its texts or not. Such is Goebbels’s gift for evocation. Still, a lack of French knowledge or translations at hand, not to mention of a stage upon which to view the comportment of the work as a whole, gives us an album that is but one reflective facet of a larger crystalline whole. Ultimately, I don’t believe Goebbels so reductive as to reenact oppression through the encroachment of his own musical ideas upon the lineages he exploits therein. Rather, he is interested in the ways in which lingering traces of such oppression may be refashioned into a new mode of speech, one both painfully aware of its roots while also hopeful for an amalgamated future.

<< Stephan Micus: Athos (ECM 1551)
>> Surman/Krog/Rypdal/Storaas: Nordic Quartet (ECM 1553)

Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities (ECM New Series 1688/89)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Heiner Goebbels
Surrogate Cities

Junge Deutsche Philharmonie
Peter Rundel conductor
Jocelyn B. Smith vocals
David Moss vocals
Recorded 1996, Bayerische Rundfunk, Munich / 1999, Frankfurt
Engineer: Peter Jütte
Produced by Heiner Goebbels & Manfred Eicher

As a longtime fan of David Moss, I needed only to learn of his involvement in Surrogate Cities before rushing out to buy the CD. Sadly, at the time I had no idea who Heiner Goebbels was. I couldn’t have asked for a more comprehensive introduction. The reader will forgive my penchant for abstract analogies when I say that Surrogate Cities is like pricking a piece of paper with a pin and shining a metropolitan nightscape through it so that one may connect those rays of light with brittle chalk. Practically speaking, the project is meant to be an ode to the city of Frankfurt in celebration of its 1200th year. As such, it is an amalgam of atmospheres, moods, and sensual provocations. This project unfolds like a massive suite with instruments drawn from architecture and flesh alike. Each section reads like a novella in the grander scheme of its binding.

Suite for Sampler and Orchestra
Preluded by snippets of cantorial singing, computer-controlled voices seek dominance over the imperialistic power of the orchestra in a kaleidoscopic and utterly focused vision of the urban sprawl. Rather than penetrating the city, Goebbels turns it inside out for our inspection. The samples are not so much quotations as they are memories shaken loose from long-neglected nooks and crannies. The digital flick of “Menuett/L’ingénieur” is haunting in its subtlety, appropriated like so much data flowing through the airwaves. The conclusion, “Air/Compression,” is a chamber piece for the overlooked sounds of our post-industrial comfort. Admirers of John Zorn’s Kristallnacht will find themselves on familiar ground here, as the archival instinct is similarly apparent.

The Horatian – Three Songs
Based on words by Heiner Müller, this song cycle relates a conflict between Rome and neighboring Alba. A lot is cast to determine who will fight as representative of each city. A Horatian is chosen for Rome, a Curiation for Alba. During the course of the ensuing battle, the Horatian strikes down the Curiation and does not spare his life. His sister, who is betrothed to the Curiation, weeps upon his return. He rewards her grief by slaying her. Thus is the victor’s valiant heart tainted with murder. According to Müller, Goebbels “proposes a new form of reading, a different, no longer touristic approach to the landscape of a text.” In this sense, The Horatian is far from the bombastic cantata it could have been. Rather, it heaves with the weight of its own moral conundrum. Joselyn B. Smith is superb as the voice of bipartisanship, weaving in and out of its allegiances with the acuity of a practiced raconteuse. She emotes with a confident Broadway twang that is gorgeously appealing against Goebbels’s orchestral backdrop.

D & C sounds like someone knocking at the outside of a building with no entrance; a book one has been dying to read, but which opens to reveal rain-soaked pages. It is a film noir standing on its head, loose change and candy wrappers falling out of its pockets. The music circles until it loses hope and collapses onto the wet asphalt.

Surrogate, with words by Hugo Hamilton, is the moment I was waiting for during my first listen. Over a lush carpet of piano, Moss runs into the night along with the nameless character of Hamilton’s text. His indulgent enunciation of “surrogate” is priceless, prelude to a tranquil, breathy fade.

In the Country of Last Things
The words here are by Paul Auster. Bleak and morose, they paint a fatalistic picture of urban living. Moss provides the narration here as Smith wails plaintively in the background: “A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today…” The city has become the ephemeral soldier, running AWOL from the army of its own becoming. All convictions remain unrequited, leaving the barest puffs of cigarette smoke as the only indications that they ever breathed.

Smith and Moss are the clear winners here. Not to be outdone, however, is the superb orchestra. The presentation is sharp, the sound so crisp you want to teethe on it, and the arrangements fantastically varied. Probably not the best album to play in your greenhouse, but for our psychological biota it does the trick.

<< Veljo Tormis: Litany To Thunder (ECM 1687 NS)
>> Gudmundson/Möller/Willemark: Frifot (ECM 1690)