Holliger at 60: Keeping the faith

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Whittall, Arnold

ALTERNATIVE voices can also be heard, however. Of the other six pieces, three depend on the kind of simple rhythmic ostinatos which are at the opposite stylistic extreme from the freely evolving 'prose' of the remainder. No.2 (Intermezzo I) and no.4 (Intermezzo 2), studies in the coordination of rapid, and generally very soft contrapuntal lines, hint at the folk-like Bartok, while no.7, `Berceuse matinale' (in memory of Gertrud Demenga, and dating from 1987) is a set of variations on a Schoenbergian dance-theme whose final stages, both serene and sorrowful, move back towards the more fragmented and suppressive world of the Scardanelli-Zyklus. Nos. 5 and 6 form a contrasting pair, their expressionistic gestures - and musical materials - following on from those of no.l, and its essentially Webernian aura. As the opening of no.6, '(Flammen ... Schnee)', shows (ex.7), the continuity with no.l's [0,1,6] collection is explicit. But there is even greater concentration here, and an even greater sense of positive accommodation between the avant-garde aspirations, most determinedly pursued in the Scardanelli-Zyklus, and lyric expressionism. In music like '(Flammen ... Schnee)' Holliger confirms the potency of a retrospectiveness which never loses contact with the present time. Holliger therefore keeps his distance from Nono, and even from Kurtag - not to mention Lachenmann - by embracing rather than erasing this historic avant-garde, and high-modernist aura. After all, although the ending of '(Flammen ... Schnee)' appears to abandon the explicit diversity of the competing lines with which the piece has been concerned - the snow finally extinguishing the fire - the effect of this quasi-integration is simply to create a space within which the essential tensions and interactions can be revived and renewed (ex.8). For Holliger, the 20th-century project goes on.

Notes

1. Kathryn Bailey: Webern studies (Cambridge, 1996), p.xvi.

2. Cited in Webern studies, p.xvii.

3. See in particular Anne C. Shreffler: Webern and the lyric impulse (Oxford, 1994).

4. See, for example, Chapter 5 of John C. Crawford dz Dorothy L. Crawford: Expressionism in 20th-century music (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1993). 5. See S. Behr, D. Fanning, D. Jarman, edd.: Expressionism reassessed

(Manchester, 1993). 6. Stephen Hinton in Expressionism reassessed, p.126. 7. `Interview with Philippe Albera' in Mary Bryden, ed.: Samuel Beckett and music (Oxford, 1998) p.97.

8. In Samuel Beckett and music (see n.7).

9. Beckett and music, p.128. 10. Beckett and music, p.l29. 11. Holderlin's 'modernism' has been widely discussed by Germanists. For example, Eric L. Santer: Friedrich Holderlin's narrative vigilance and the poetic imagination (New Brunswick & London, 1986); Otto Lorenz: Schweigen in der Dichtung: Holderlin - Rilke - Celan (Gottingen, 1989); Anselm Haverkamp (trans. V Chadwick): Leaves of mourning.: Holderlin's late work (Albany, 1996).

12. See booklet with ECM recording, 437 441-2 (1993), p.31.

ls. olsri (July 1993), p.76. 14. See Mark Harman, ed.: Robert Walser rediscovered (Hanover, NH, & London, 1985). Recently Holliger has based an opera, Schneewittchen, on a text by Walser. It might also be noted that one of Kurtag's works in progress during the 1990s has been a set of Holderlin-Gesdnge op.35.