| art.description.project | Mirandas Atemwende can be considered as the second act to my opera Die Geisterinsel and is structured in twelve tableaus, of which three are instrumental and nine sung or spoken by either Miranda or Caliban.
The first eight tableaus of Mirandas Atemwende focus on Miranda through a radical reworking of Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung, but over-layered with composed noise – a way of composing explored in Die Geisterinsel. A sense of expectation (Erwartung) for the possibilities of a radically new language, musical and poetic, away from Prospero’s influence (and in Schönberg’s case, from tonality) condition these tableaus. Miranda recites poems from Paul Celan’s Atemwende, poems that question the very possibility of building a renewed poetic expression from the ashes of Prospero’s language. In a similar vain, by quoting expressionist gestures rather than building upon a psychologically rooted expressionism, the music could be regarded as a “documentary about expressionism”, where expression is placed in the materials themselves, their blending with noise, and their often delicate balance between extreme rigor and chaos.
The last third of the opera, tableaus nine through twelve, focus on Caliban who is portrayed by two speakers in order to reflect the “two feelings” of Caliban as either cultivated by Prospero or as closer to the wilderness of the island. Tableaus nine and ten, in particular, are a reworking of a part from Mouvement (-vor der Erstarrung) by Helmut Lachenmann. Lachenmann’s idea by the time of composing in the early 1980’s was to take the material of “noise” and to bring it into a compositional sound structure. Taking this as a metaphor of taming or of colonizing through a compositional “language”, and with poems from The White Stones and Word Order by J. H. Prynne, I attempt to further enrich Caliban’s consciousness to “dissolve the bars to it and let run the hopes, that preserve the holy fruit on the tree”. That is, for Caliban to become more acutely aware of the material processes of the island from which Prospero’s language had alienated him.
My musical endeavor in these two related operas can be seen as a critique of musical and compositional languages that strive for a clear psychologized intension in the drama and musical ideas. Instead he strives for finding the subjectivity in the material itself by bringing their “dialectical energies” together into a “field of composition”.
The compression and intensification of verbal and musical language in Mirandas Atemwende are ways of engaging with a late modernist form of expressionism that makes the connections between romanticism and formal rigor, extreme expressionistic abstraction and documentary “authenticity”. | sv |
