Holliger at 60: Keeping the faith

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Whittall, Arnold

ARNOLD WHITTALL detects avant-garde echoes in the music of Heinz Holliger, whose 60th birthday fell in May

WHILE IT MIGHT NOT literally be the case that Heinz Holliger's phenomenal achievements as an oboe player have actively inhibited recognition of his virtues as a composer, his music is not as well known - at least outside Switzerland - as it deserves to be. Sixty this year (21 May), Holliger has confronted the multivalent landscape of a Western European musical culture which splintered in the light of its failure, after 1945, to establish universal, sustained commitment either to continued conservatism or to renewed, `year zero` radicalism: and he has remained as resourcefully true to an avant-garde spirit as the most striking of his near-contemporaries born between 1928 and 1939 - Kurtag, Castiglioni, Birtwistle, and Jonathan Harvey, this last born in the same month of the same year. What is most distinctive to Holliger - in certain works, at least - is an intensely engaged evocation of an early-20th-century musical style that most latter-day modernists would acknowledge as seminal but (no doubt for that very reason) make every attempt not to recreate so directly This is the essentially lyric expressionism found in Schoenberg, Berg and, especially, Webern (from op.3 onwards) in the years after 1908.

The notion that Webern `was perhaps first and foremost a lyricist" is now well established, whether or not one thinks in terms of Adorno's vision of an `absolute lyricism: the attempt to dissolve all musical principles and all objective elements of the subject,2 or of the more obvious context of a particular concern with the song-like and the melodic.3 The connection between lyricism and expressionism, at least in Webern's post-tonal but pre-12-note songs, has also been well set out,4 and surely survives any salient agonising about what, exactly expressionism in music can mean.5 One recent definition - `musical expressionism means espressivo in music without manifest underpinnings in traditional compositional means, whether syntactical, formal or tonal; a music that is, as it were, beside itself'6 - can therefore be applied to both Webern and Holliger in the discussion which follows. In any case, the stylistic, technical connection is too important to be called into question by arguments about terminology: in particular, it appears to link on to Holliger's confession (from 1991) that `there aren't many composers who really fascinate me today. For example, a few days ago I heard a recent work by Lachenmann - Allegro sostenuto. Well, that'll do me for a year! There was such a creative force there that I felt overwhelmed.'7

As will emerge, Holliger's mention of Lachenmann may not be quite the declaration of distance (but not indifference) that is intended. Indeed, it might be the difficult task of keeping faith with expressionist lyricism in the last three decades of the 20th century that has at times driven Holliger towards the negative pole of avant-gardism - music which seems to seek its own dissolution into silence. If that is so, however, the principal, purgative effect of such dark nights of the musical soul has been to renew the appeal of preserving early 20th-century lyric expressionism, not by way of a self-conscious, guilt-ridden act of 'remaking the past', but out of the need to demonstrate that music will indeed die away in silence if the continuous, living presence of that inexhaustible, magical Viennese source is not regularly acknowledged.

Holliger's early composition studies in Berne with Sandor Veress could well have given him fundamental insights into the way composers might adapt to change - in Veress's case, moving beyond a sprightly neo-classicism - while making a virtue of the consequent tensions between 'older' and 'newer' procedures and possibilities. By contrast, working with Boulez (1961-63) encouraged the embrace of international modernism, and although a degree of stylistic anonymity, of conforming to widely-accepted norms rather than challenging them, undoubtedly affected Holliger's work between the mid-60s and the mid-70s, there was also an early indication that his response to writers he found sympathetic - for example, Nelly Sachs in Der magische Tanzer (1963-65) - would open up paths to something more personal, more provocative. Der magische Tanzer could even be said to attempt a homage to Schoenberg's Die gluckliche Hand comparable to Boulez's transformational appropriation of Pienot lunaire in Le Marteau sans maitre. Yet the result is paradoxical, at least with hindsight: in awkwardly attempting a wider expressive and dramatic range than that of the Boulez, Der magische Tanzer seems to indicate that Holliger's gifts would develop more naturally in the wake of Webernian lyricism than by working with the kind of musico-dramatic rhetoric that proved so useful to Schoenberg - as it also did, later, to Berg. Nevertheless, it is Webern who comes most immediately to mind in Holliger's most familiar early work, Siebengesang (1966-67), in part because the text to which the music refers, and whose closing lines it sets in its final stages, is a poem by Georg Trakl.