| art.description.project | Hälfte des Lebens Half of Life
Mit gelben Birnen hänget With yellow pears hangs down
Und voll mit wilden Rosen And full of wild roses
Das Land in den See, The land into the lake,
Ihr holden Schwäne, You loving swans,
Und Trunken von Küssen And drunk with kisses
Tunkt ihr das Haupt You dip your heads
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser. Into water, the holy-and-sober.
Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn But oh, where shall I find
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo When winter comes, the flowers, and where
Den Sonnenschein, The sunshine
Und Schatten der Erde? And shade of the earth?
Die Mauern stehn The walls loom
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Speechless and cold, in the wind
Klirren die Fahnen. Weathercocks clatter.
The more Hölderlin in his late work came close to the things of the world (and his ability to capture their essence in poetic images), the more he experienced their separateness and their disparateness (and separation from any kind of narrative through paratactic constructions) approaching the danger that they may signify nothing, pointing only to themselves: as walls, weathervanes. Through paratactic constructions of which the two stanzas of Hälfte des Lebens is an example, he discovers relations, correspondences, constellations of meaning within the field of history and finally within language itself.
Serenade, composed for Gageego!, combines this late poem of Hölderlin with elements of Schoenberg’s own Serenade where he too uses parataxis to justapose a light serenade style (such as the opening Marsch) with the Sonett Seine Seele besucht sie im Schlaf (His soul visits her in sleep) by Petrarca of Movement 4 as well as with the meditative Lied ohne Worte (Song without words) of Movement 6. Such juxtapositions in Schoenberg’s work open up spaces charged with “tenderness and violence” that reveals repressed and concealed relations between discourses. I pick up the residue from Schoenberg’s work, the moments that are expelled from such concealed relations, as fragments to frame Hölderlin’s text. Such a framing, I hope, brings out the materiality of the music which bridges extreme expressionistic abstraction with a ‘documentary’ distanciation of noise and spoken voice. | sv |
