Grosser Saal, Mozarteum
Michaela – Sarah Aristidou
Jasmin – Pia Davila
Alexander, Mother – Daniel Gloger
Michael – Peter Schöne
Dr Auer – Susanne Gritschneder
Dr Schönbühl – Henriette Gödde
Nurse Jonas – Karl Huml
Nurse Nikos – Benjamin Chamandy
Nurse Zdravko – Raphael Sigling
Klangforum Wien
Bas Wiegers (conductor)
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| Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli |
One of Alexander Pereira’s most successful innovations at the Salzburg Festival was the introduction of an ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’ at its beginning. Pereira’s practice, long since discarded, was to open that opening, as it were, with a performance of Haydn’s Creation; if memory serves me correctly, I recall him saying that he was a descendant of an original subscriber. (I attended ten years ago, fortunate to hear Bernard Haitink as the conductor.) On first glance, the idea of a smaller, related festival of sacred music, utilising Salzburg’s array of churches, might by now seem to have been stretched to or beyond breaking point into a vague selection of ‘spiritually’ inclined works. What music, the sceptic might ask, is not in some sense ‘spiritual’? There is, I think, some force to that objection. However, if one looks to the more specific theme or motto this year adopted by Markus Hinterhäuser, ‘Et exspecto’, there is perhaps a similar drawing of order, if not out of chaos, then out of its perceived danger.
It certainly helps us to understand the inclusion of a concert performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’s one-act, two-hour-long opera, Koma, concerned, as its name suggests, with the liminal experience of a patient, possibly following a suicide attempt, in a coma, gaining and losing consciousness. The opera is told and, I think, experienced from the standpoint of Michaela, the outstanding Sarah Aristidou, placed quite separately from the rest of the cast: tellingly, unseen to us (at least to me and I assume to everyone else), somehow both inverting and yet strengthening the idea of an out-of-body experience. But the most striking element, at least initially so, both of work and performance, is that much of it – about half – takes place in the dark. Music in ‘complete’ darkness has long been a Haas preoccupation. Twenty minutes of in vain, one of the last great musical works of the twentieth century take place in darkness; so does the entirety of the composer’s Third String Quartet.
In our world, darkness is rarely if ever ‘complete’. Here, in the Mozarteum’s Grosser Saal, there were a few signs of light, once one’s eyes adjusted, and not only from glimpses of fluorescent watches that must now be in vogue. (Recurrent sight of one would prove aggravating in another festival performance, in which lights were only dimmed. Are these the new mobile telephones?) One’s sight, like other senses, can play tricks too, which I think comes closer to the point or to one of them. The principal point, however, remains darkness: what and how one experiences things in it, and its transition to other states, be they light, something more crepuscular, or death.
This, the second in a series of three chamber operas Haas wrote with Händl Klaus for Schwetzingen – to his delight, he found the old theatre highly appropriate for darkness – naturally also explores, and raises questions, concerning how music might be made in such conditions, and others. Haas acknowledges it must be a ‘nightmare’ for the conductor, having to wait for the light once again to come to do his thing, having to pick up from where the musicians have brought him. Yet, as with many aspects of this work, one might say that such helplessness is simply a heightened experience of what is already the case. After all, the conductor almost never makes music directly at all; he is both all powerful and entirely in the musicians’ power. I use ‘he’ here, simply because it is the appropriate pronoun for Bas Wiegers, whose accomplishment in leading the musicians of Klangforum Wien was every bit as remarkable, in a good way, as theirs—and the singers’. Doctors, nurses, members of Michaela’s family, with memories they wished and most certainly did not wish, to dredge up or have dredged up, came and went, transformed: fascinatingly, in the case of her brother-in-law Alexander metamorphosing into a countertenor Mother, given an often visceral performance from Daniel Gloger.
That seemed to be almost a visual counterpart or instantiation (Wagner’s ‘deeds of music made visible’ even) of Haas’s musical language and method. Clearly, one cannot write music for the darkness just as one might for the light, but that is probably not as such the point, or at least my point. The post-spectralist spaces opened up, inhabited, and extended by what we may think of as microtonality but Haas, not unreasonably, prefers to consider as music beyond the twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounded as a necessary realm for this drama of states, transitions, memories, and more. I was put in mind also of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in which a moment in perception is stretched out to thirty minutes and experienced as such. There is no suggestion that this is taking place here in any literal sense, but such heightened states perhaps hold something in common. Ultimately, though, this was a singular, yet very human experience, whose lack of staging for Haas proved an advantage rather than a compromise. We may or may not agree; in all such cases, there is gain and loss. But then such is life. Such also are death and, doubtless, a host of states in between.
