April 14, 2008 Program Notes

by Paul Griffiths

“What I want is always the same: a music whose cognizance is not a question of some privileged intellectual training but just of compositional clarity and consistency, a music at once the expression and the aesthetic shape of a curiosity willing to reflect on everything, but also so placed as to unmask any progressive illusion—art as freedom effected in a time of unfreedom.” (Helmut Lachenmann, 1971)

In a composing career of over half a century, Lachenmann has pursued his ideals with heartening determination. He has, in particular, cherished sounds that were marginal and overlooked, sounds with a lot of noise in them, sounds that in earlier music would have been regarded as extraneous or accidental, and he has brought to those sounds an extraordinary care for precise utterance and placing, made them the vectors of a dynamism as sure as that of Brahms. His achievement is at once aesthetic and moral. He honors the neglected, holds out an image of music—of life—released from prejudice and hierarchy.


1. Hänschen klein [Little Hansel]
2. Wolken im eisigen Mondlicht [Clouds in Icy Moonlight]
3. Akiko
4. Falscher Chinese (ein wenig besoffen) [Fake Chinese (slightly drunk)]
5. Filter-Schaukel [Filter-Swing]
6. Glockenturm [Bell Tower]
7. Schattentanz [Shadow Dance]

Children’s music? Lachenmann heads this suite of miniatures, composed in 1980 and dedicated to his son David, with something Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin about a “children’s opera” he was composing: “it is still more about pointing toward a childlike model than of conjuring up childhood.” These pieces are composed so that young pianists could play them, but the music does not underplay what the world of a child might encompass. Simplicity is found not by forgetting but by moving to the edges—the edges, not least, of the keyboard, for much of the activity takes place in the extreme treble with resonances in the extreme bass, where the keys of the bottom octave of the piano are often silently depressed, so releasing the corresponding strings to reverberate. Qualities typical of Lachenmann’s music—intensity, exquisite noise, astonishing innovation—are present here as much as in his other works.

Hansel and Gretel, we may remember, leave a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods. The “icy moonlight” depends on quick, intermittent pedal effects, “Akiko” on the use of the sostenuto pedal to capture—or not—the notes of tunes skipping by. In “Filter Swing” the pianist’s fingers determine which notes to hold on to.

Several pianists have recorded Ein Kinderspiel, not least the composer (Montaigne MO 782075).


German has different words for the senses of “movement” as a musical piece (Satz) and as motion (Bewegung). French, like English, combines these senses in one term, which Lachenmann uses here, pointedly with both connotations. Mouvement is a genuine movement, a piece that, without anything approaching conventional harmony at work, has very traditional qualities of continuity, shape, and wholeness. It also moves—often at lightning speed, though regions of stillness are also to be found.

Lachenmann has called it “a music of dead movements, almost final spasms,” but we should note that “almost.” This is, after all, movement before paralysis. Music here is in an acute condition, but not a hopeless one. The old harmonic means have been outworn and their twentieth-century replacements exhausted. Those paths along which earlier music traveled have become polished shiny-smooth, so that there is now no purchase on them. Yet still there is action, if flailing in the air. Still there is a coursing rhythmic energy, often in insistently pulsed patterns. Still there are gestures of beginning, of challenge, of upward sweep through the orchestra, of disintegration. And these things, miraculously, create a new kind of movement, in both senses.

Avoiding what he calls an “exoticism of the alienated,” Lachenmann makes unusual effects sound fresh, beautiful, and inviting, as well as meaningful. We may have the impression at times of the strong propulsive force of a symphonic allegro, the strenuous conflict of a development, the liveliness of a scherzo, the calm and consolation of an adagio. Toward the end, the movement becomes one of rapid triplets, perhaps to suggest a kind of finale going back to Bach’s gigues, except that this is only the penultimate section, giving way to the work’s luminous close. So various, so versatile, so able to embody new musical thought and yet so richly, positively connected to the past, Lachenmann’s sounds are neither alienated nor alienating. They may remind us that our voices do not always sing but can also gasp, groan, hush, and quietly breathe—and that these other sounds can be a kind of song.

Composed in 1983-4 for the Ensemble InterContemporain, Mouvement (—vor der Erstarrung) has been recorded by the Ensemble Modern under Peter Eötvös (ECM 1789) and Klangforum Wien under Hans Zender (Kairos 0012202KAI). The composer recently made an alternative setting for three “rattle violins” of a passage previously involving electric keyboards. This version was given its first performance last month in New York by tonight’s performers.


Again the title has to do with movement, since allegro implies music going at speed. But sostenuto (sustained) has contrary connotations of motionlessness—of tone being maintained either artifically (by constant blowing or bowing) or naturally, as resonance. The marking Allegro sostenuto was occasionally used in the past, notably by Chopin for his “Aeolian Harp” étude, but Lachenmann was interested, as so often, in the semantic contradiction—in exploring it and overcoming it. “The musical material,” he has said, “is born from the mediation between the experience of ‘resonance,’ on the one hand, and ‘movement’ on the other. Both these aspects of the sound meet in the notion of structure as, in many different ways, ‘arpeggio.’ ” On the most local scale, the arpeggio might be a musical figure, whether in one of the instruments or bouncing between them. Over larger stretches of time, erratic movement in one direction or another may be the guise of an underlying stasis, or stasis a momentary arrest, encapsulation, of movement.

The work was commissioned by the German clarinettist Eduard Brunner, a longstanding friend of the composer and his music, and it was Brunner who gave the first performance, with Walter Grimmer on cello and Gerhard Oppitz on piano, in Cologne in 1989, the score having been composed in 1987-8. Though Lachenmann asks the pianist to operate on the frame of the instrument and inside it, the piano brings with it a preponderance of “normal” sounds, and the soundscape is certainly more conventional than was the case in Mouvement—though, again, the clarinettist and cellist introduce a lot of exceptional sonorities. There are even common chords and recognizable shreds (Papageno’s panpipes?), gently reminding us that these three instruments came together in works by Beethoven and Brahms. Such glimpses of the past—and this is typical of Lachenmann—may be playful, perhaps sometimes waspish, but they are not oppressive. This is music that has grown up, and can acknowledge its parents from a secure position of equality.

Lachenmann in his note distinguishes six major sections, or “zones,” each about five minutes long:

1. A “broad opening sequence” whose opening includes a string of simple and beautiful resonance effects: piano attacks magically projected by the other instruments, piano notes and chords made to reverberate within the instrument by the use of the pedals and of silently depressed keys, and loud assertions from the clarinet and cello that, again, are brought into the piano by the pianist’s pedals. The clarinettist at times will stand, to project sound into the open piano; the cellist is seated within the piano’s curve. As the music goes on, the spaces of long notes (sostenuto) are more and more filled with activity (allegro) until a standstill is reached.

2. Then comes “a many-sectioned play of graduated levels of desiccation between secchissimo and full pedaling.” The secchissimo music uses a lot of non-standard sounds; the other extreme, washed with reverberation, is represented by a suddenly loud furioso passage. After this the music becomes, in soft and shadowy march tempo, increasingly wispy.

3. Now comes “the actual allegro,” introduced by fast, furious triplets. Rapid arpeggios and repeated notes convey the effect of echo together with movement, and are punctuated by—and combined with—static, whispering material.

4. This music is “interrupted and redirected through a sort of ‘emptied hymn,’ ” slow and initiated by the piano in fortissimo high notes slowly repeating. Taken up by the clarinet playing into the piano, and passed from one instrument to another, the hymn unfolds as a “recitative of calls in various resonating spaces, some of them ‘dead,’ ” with stray threads of earlier music reappearing.

5. Bright signal figures from the piano introduce a return to movement, and soon to the allegro, “escalating all the while” and reaching a crisis, appassionato.

6. A crescendo from the cello, speaking “normally,” leads into the finale solenne, at the start of which both clarinet and cello similarly project “normal” notes over clusters and chords from the piano. We arrive at “a final cadence of mixtures, in whose inner life resonance and movement open, renewed in each other.”

Allegro sostenuto has been recorded several times, including by tonight’s clarinettist with Lucas Fels on cello and Yukiko Sugawara on piano (Kairos 0012212KAI).


Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.