Holliger at 60: Keeping the faith

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Whittall, Arnold

In his recording of the Scardanelli-Zyklus, Holligers placement of these early Seasons settings underlines his concern to destabilise any simple ideas about gradual, logical progression from relatively traditional to thoroughly progressive textures. `Spring I' is not actually heard until no.14 of the 22-movement sequence, but the movement placed first - `Spring 2' (composed in July 1979) can be interpreted as a kind of mainstream stylistic statement, with its centrifugal, temporallyfractured homophony and unambiguously atonal harmony dissolving into whispered near-silence, especially at points of phrasal closure (ex.3 shows its ending). This is one of Holderlin's most sublimely serene poems, with its references to songs in praise of the harmony of the seasons, and the (quite unironic) aura of awed discovery created by Holliger's music sets the scene for the entire Scardanelli-Zyklus, as it moves to its ending (as far as the recording goes) with the setting of `Winter II'. This integrates canon and chorale, but its requirement that all singers use the `straw bass' register drains the sound of virtually all colour and resonance: the image of desolation, in which nature itself lacks all differentiation and life, is complete and unambiguous (ex.4).

THE world of the Scardanelli-Zyklus as a whole, and as completed (so far) in 1991, is one of late-modernist paradox, nicely encapsulated in Roman Brotbeck's description of the music as `composed hypothermia' (auskomponierten Unterkihlung).12 The commitment embodied in making determinate signs on music paper is countered, if not entirely cancelled out, by the use of vocal techniques to push sound to the margins of what is singable and audible. Brotbeck makes great play with the resulting paradoxes:

On the one hand, the greatest effort is made to deprive the musical structures of energy in order to generate a sound vacuum and a kind of echoless space. On the other hand, with almost violent relentlessness, a minimum of energy is still squeezed out of the few, modest shapes in this vacuum.

As noted above, even such a positive response to generic tradition as combining canon and chorale (`Winter II') is completely negated by instructing all the singers to employ the `straw-bass' register. Brotbeck's response is apocalyptic: `here the traditional task of the author, namely the production of messages about life, has atrophied to the point of autism, to terminally composed preliminary stages of death.' And Brotbeck is only able to find a way back from such certainty to paradox by seizing on the role of the solo flute in Glocken Alphabet and (t)air(e), two of the cycle's instru mental movements: `on the one hand it is a hypo stasis of the autism which governs virtually all o the musical structures; on the other, it demonstrates that this autism is probably the only means of developing and justifying speech in a society in which communication has been multiplied to the point of suffocation.'

Brotbeck (the shade of Adorno much in evidence) is building up to a judgement concerning the `profound social criticism' embodied in the Scardanelli-Zyklus. It is nevertheless in the nature of works of art - even Nono's Promoteo - that they can actually be performed, and 'received' by listeners, that they affirm as well as deny, assert as well as subvert. In reviewing Holliger's recording of the Scardanelli-Zyklus in 1993 I found myself referring to 'a refined expressiveness' which `attains a poised gravity worthy of the texts'.13 It is deeply unsettling, and moving, to recall that Holderlin's gently eloquent poems in praise of the seasons were the product of an unstable mind, and in this context Holliger's musical response makes sense as an extraordinarily successful identification with an artist who remained creatively active while no longer able to function in 'society'. While Brotbeck comes dangerously close to arguing that, in a contemporary society where `communication' is promiscuously multiple, only the autistic (or the insane) can communicate authentically, Holliger's music can be heard as an argument for communicating by means of the field of tension between well-established generic traditions and a language whose echoes of tradition can, after Scardanelli, be made more explicit and more concrete. In this respect, at least, Holliger is not so different from those experimental composers - Cardew comes to mind - whose ideological development obliged them to reject avantgarde idioms and rediscover tonality It might even appear that, after Scardinelli, Holliger has proceeded, in Schoenberg's famous phrase, to `compose as before': to abandon the costume of autism and dig out the cloak of lyric expressionism from the back of the wardrobe. But, as the Scardanelli-Zyklus as a whole makes clear - see again ex.3 from `Spring II' - the lyric expressionism never really went away It was reduced to a shadow of its real self under the extreme pressure of the Holderlin-inspired design: yet, had that shadow not been there, it is difficult to see how Holliger could have found any music for Holderlin at all.