jwilzewske: aporias

Showing posts with label aporias. Show all posts

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Enjambing with Kurtág: Lyricism Doesn’t Need Imagery, Only Rhythm

Jakobson once showed how Pushkin’s famous two-stanza poem ‘I Loved You Once’ (Ia vas liubil) depends only on sound rhythms, not on imagery. The same can be true of minimalist chamber music.

It’s possible to make music with practically nothing.”
— György Kurtág.

If you’ve not already done so, you may like to look at the DVD Matchstick Man, Judit Kele’s biographical documentary of renowned composer György Kurtág. Among other things, Matchstick Man sheds light on Kurtág’s sessions in 1957 with psychoanalyst Marianne Stein, who led him to explore his creativity by putting matchsticks together. This simple exercise of arranging matchsticks made a strong impression. Kurtág avers that he still knows nothing about composing, but from time to time his muse or alter ego—some mysterious entity who does apparently know things about composing—pinch-hits for him. Empirical composing, using ‘found’ materials, including rhythmic materials such as poems: the epitome of minimalism.

Here in this DVD we have Kurtág as experimentalist, laboratorian, empiricist—here is Kurtág delighted by his ‘found objects’, fascinated by happenstantial relationships among them, passionately engaged by the symbolic connections that they suggest. The film enables us to see and hear how this self-effacing and modest composer creates. What matters to Kurtág is mostly the present, not the past. He rehearses two young players in Schubert’s ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata D.821 in A minor. Ideally, rehearsal is a paradigm in which all participants (the composer, the librettist, the conductor, and the performers) have a ‘say’ in the creative process. But it often doesn’t turn out that way, as this segment of the film suggests.

I understand music really only if I teach it.”
— György Kurtág.

In Játékok, Kurtág finds freedom in minimalism. There are interesting enjambments—rhythmic staggerings and offsets between the parts; couplets and tercets; staggered lines. Just as in poetry where the appeal is partly in the visual instability that the enjambments cause for the eye as we scan the page, so too in this music the appeal is partly in the auditory/motivic instability that Kurtág sets in motion. A tercet always feels that it’s pulling toward the missing line, pulling the eye down with urgency to the next thing, to the thing that must happen. Such imbalance seems appropriate to poems about the human condition. Likewise, Kurtág’s instrumental enjambed phrasing feels like pulling, one line for the next, pulling the ear onward with urgency. The rhythmic ‘pull’ and imbalance are central to the beauty of the music. In that regard, these Webern-like miniatures interspersed with folk music-derived pieces and citations of Bach have something in common with rhythmic structure in hip-hop and rap.

Something in common, too, in terms of their aphoristic idiom, if you think about it. By now, the aphoristic song cycle is Kurtág’s signature. He has set a number of the poems of Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet who has lived in Hungary since 1970. Dalos grew up in the Ural mountains and studied German history at Lomonossow University in Moscow. She currently works at the Budapest office of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her works include the a volume of lyric poetry entitled ‘Ohne Dich’ (Without You).

Kurtág’s emphasis on metrical qualities of Russian is much broader than the Rimma Dalos settings, though. He borrows epigrams from a number of Russian poets, including Lermontov and Blok. In the 1970s he became deeply fascinated with Russian literature and took courses in Russian to be able to read Dostoyevsky in the original. His compositions are not all Russian gravitas, however. There is humor in Kurtág’s writing; it is not all confessional and dark and sorrowful. ‘O Love, the Edifier!’ (Omaggio a Luigi Nono, Op. 16) and other pieces are passionate and emphatic and and ironic and full of life. (Just the same, ‘Epilogue’, subtitled ‘A dispirited wail’ and marked ‘Desolato’, and other Kurtág meditations do not contradict their dour markings.)

Omaggio a Luigi Nono (poems in Russian, four of the six being by Rimma Dalos) and Eight Choruses to Poems by Dezső Tandori are comprised of short pieces, most of them less than two minutes long. Songs of Despair and Sorrow are much larger; the longest of the seven is about as long as the entire Omaggio a Luigi Nono, whose six movements take just nine minutes. Songs of Despair and Sorrow is scored for accordion, brass, strings, keyboards and percussion—a 28-member ensemble. This orchestration produces a narrative of alienation and angst that is social or ethnic in scale. By contrast, Omaggio is has a highly personal texture.

Kurtág takes each haiku-like aphorism/poem, assimilates its meter, and creates instrumental enjambments that nicely complement the text. Kurtág’s attention to rhythm is extreme. The first foot of the Lermontov piece that opens Songs of Despair and Sorrow, ‘So Weary’, matches the rhythm of the Russian text very closely. The music has a rise and fall that evokes the idea of world-weariness. The Russian rendering is perfect. It’s hard to imagine this being quite as effective in translation into any other language.

The rolling rhythm, the assonance of it, is one of the built-in features of the Russian language. Technically, assonance is the acoustic mimickry between vowels followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables. But here the assonance is architectural for the vocal part and the instrumental parts. The voice is an instrument among equals, and no instrument is sentenced to merely accompany. Kurtág delivers these rhythmic features with crystalline perfection. The stresses are dovetailed between the parts, capturing an important slice of what it means to be Russian.

In other words, these poems—and Kurtág’s setting of them—are perfect icons for the thoughtful use of enjambment, or ‘run-on’ lines. Normally the end of a verse is marked by a syntactic break – the end of a sentence or clause. But with enjambment, the break occurs within the line rather than at the end. In one enjambment in a Dalos poem, the words ‘snow’ and ‘blanket’, linked to form a composite ‘snow-blanket’, are separated by an internal prosodic-syntactic pause. The second line contains a carry-over from the first line, the word ‘pokrova’ (blanket), as well as the first word of a second phrase, ‘came’.

In stanza No. 13, the phrases ‘snow-blanket’ and ‘guest-sorrow’ are structurally parallel, but they also take each other’s metric place in the poem. The enjambment separation of ‘blanket’ from ‘snow’ is deliberate and destabilizing. But blanket-of-snow is a commonplace idiom in a way that juxtaposing ‘guest’ and ‘sorrow’ is not. Dalos doesn’t split them but instead puts them next to each other in the same line. The phrase ‘кo мнe гocтья—тocкa’ (sorrow) is an interesting poetical choice—it easily could’ve been something else: ‘gost’ia-pechal’ (guest-sadness), ‘gost’ia-odinochestvo’ (guest-loneliness), ‘gost’ia-pustota (guest-emptiness). But the rhythm of ‘toska’ is what Dalos selected, and what Kurtág respected.

1.
Пpиди,
я pyкy пpoтянy.
Teплoм cвoим
твoй xoлoд пpoгoню.
O, кaк дaвнo
я в yгoлкax дyши
Xpaню нeнyжныe гpoши.

2.
Oт вcтpeчи
дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

3.
Пpocтитe, милocepдныe,
зa cлaбocть мoю жeнcкyю,
зa тo, чтo пoлюбилa я
дyшoю юpoдивoгo.

4.
Пoзвoль мнe
пpикocнyтьcя к тeбe,
pacплaвитьcя, pacтвopитьcя.

5.
Bce выбиpaлa—
вce пpoглядeлa.
И дocтaлacь мнe любoвь
изpяднo пoтpeпaннaя.

6.
Cнитcя oдин и тoт жe coн:
близocти твoeй пpoшy.
Tы пpиближaeшьcя,
я oттaлкивaю тeбя.

7.
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…
Зa тyмaнoм тex днeй
нe видaть aлыx зopь
зa минyтaми cчacтья—
бoли paзлyки.
Былo cчacтьe y нac,
и paзлyкa былa…
Гoвopилa, нeльзя,
гoвopилa, пpoйдeт,
гoвopилa, гoвopилa…

8.
Пpикpoю дyшy
фигoвым лиcткoм
и yбeгy из paя.

9.
И в пик-чacы
кaтитcя бeз пoмex
тpaмвaй дyши мoeй.

10.
Xoтeлocь явитьcя тeбe
нeбoжитeльницeй
в cиянии звeзднoгo нимбa,
a пpишлocь oтвopить двepь
зaмapaшкoю
c вeникoм в гpязнoй pyкe.

11.
Я cнoвa ждy тeбя.
Kaк дoлгo
нe пpиxoдит пocлeзaвтpa.

12.
Boт oпять
вocкpeceньe пpoшлo.
Знaчит, нacтyпит cлeдyющee.

13.
B бeлoм xoлoдe cнeгa—
пoкpoвa пpишлa
кo мнe гocтья—тocкa.

14.
Умнpeт любoвь,
зaчaтaя
в вeceннeй
cпeшкe.
A y тeбя в caдy
pacтeт
тpaвa
зaбвeнвя.

15.
Oт вcтpeчи
дo paccтaвaния,
oт пpoщaния
дo oжидaния
пpoлeг мoй бaбий вeк.

1.
Come,
here’s my hand:
with my warmth
I melt your frost.
Too long I’ve kept
in my soul’s depths—
these useless cents.

2.
From meeting
to parting,
from leave-taking
to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.

3.
Merciful ones, forgive me
this woman’s weakness,
that I so loved
this holy fool.

4.
Allow me
to touch you;
to melt, to dissolve in you.

5.
Here and there I picked and chose
till all my chances slipped away
and I was left here with this love so
ragged and tattered, torn
   and frayed.

6.
Every night, the same dream:
I beg you to come near,
You approach—
I push you away.

7.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…
Beyond the mist of days,
the purple dawn cannot be seen,
nor can the pain of parting
beyond the moment’s bliss.
Bliss we had,
a parting too.
I said: it cannot be,
I said: it will pass,
I said, I said…

8.
I cover my soul
with a fig-leaf
and flee paradise.

9.
Even in the rush-hour
the tramcar of my soul
cheerfully rolls along.

10.
I wanted you to see me
like some goddess in the glory
of the starry sky:
but then I opened the door
all ragged, a broom in my
dirty hand.

11.
I’m waiting for you again,
How slowly comes
tomorrow.

12.
That’s another
Sunday over.
That means
The next will come.

13.
In a cold blanket of snow
a visitor called: sorrow.

14.
The love
conceived
amid
the haste
of Spring
is dying.
But in your garden
grows
the grass
of oblivion.

15.
From meeting
to parting,
from leave-taking
to awaiting
—that was my woman’s lot.”

  — poems by Rimma Dalos, music by György Kurtág,

     СЦЕHЫ ИЗ POMAHA:
     15 ПЕ СЕH HA СTИXИ
     РИММЬI ДAЛОШ.

In stanza No. 13, ‘gost’ia’ and ‘toska’ are closely connected through the sibilant ‘s’ sound, which is also present in the first line of the poem—the word ‘cнeгa’ (snega, snow). So we get ‘snow’, ‘guest’, and ‘sorrow’ in one evocative metric group. The metaphor ‘gost’ia-toska’ is beautiful, but if the two words were separated from each other on the page, Dalos would have made the reader wonder. If the cimbalom and violin and double-bass parts were separated from the voice in Canto No. 13, Kurtág would’ve made the listener wonder. So Dalos transmutes words: she pairs ‘blanket’ with ‘snow’ and comingles ‘warmth’ with the image of snow and cold; she uses enjambments to separate two opposites while simultaneously uniting them. And Kurtág’s writing can be regarded as doing the same thing—transmuting meanings; pairing cool phrases with warm ones; juxtaposing a phrase that evokes doubt with a phrase that doubts the very validity and worth of the act of doubting.

Maybe Sofia Gubaidulina’s composition ‘Jetzt immer Schnee’ (a setting of poems by Gennady Aigi) is a close comparable in terms of a felicitous pairing of composer and poet and in terms of a composition’s respecting a poem’s enjambment and other metrical features. These enjambments function like the conduction system in the heart. The heart is under a compulsion to beat, up until the moment we die. Diastole on one line leads to a systole when we begin the next line of the poem, the continuation of the phrase in Kurtág’s music or Gubaidulina’s music. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music—especially these existential and rhythmic qualities of it—are significantly enhanced by this Kele film. Our understanding and enjoyment of Kurtág’s music were also enhanced by Marino Formenti’s exquisite performance last April at the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, and by studying the scores from Editio Musica Budapest, in which the rhythmic linkages are readily apparent. Beautiful!

T he only political duty ... is a duty to translate the fiction and poetry of other countries so as to make them available to readers in his/her own language. I consider translation a political act because the relations between any two countries are not determined by economic and political interests alone, but also by the degree to which the inhabitants of each are able to understand what the inhabitants of the other are thinking and feeling, and the novelists and poets of this country are the only people who can give one this understanding.”
— W.H. Auden, The Plough and the Pen, p. 10.

(Beginning at age 14, Kurtág took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits at Temesvár. When he was 19 he moved to Budapest in hopes of studying with Bartók at the Franz Liszt Academy, a hope that was preempted by Bartók’s death. Kurtág and György Ligeti became friends during their time together as students in Budapest. At the Budapest Academy, Kurtág studied the piano with Pál Kadosa, composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and chamber music with Leó Weiner. Kurtág graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951 (at age 25), and received his graduate degree in composition in 1955 (age 29). In 1957 Kurtág worked in Paris with the Hungarian psychologist Marianne Stein and did coursework with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. Between 1960 and 1968, he worked as répétiteur for the Hungarian National Philharmonia. In 1967, he became Professor of piano and chamber music at the Budapest Academy. He retired from those positions in 1986. )

W as wissen wir von Rußland und den Russen? Daß die Russen eine »bipolar Mentalität« besitzen, die in sich die widersprüchlichsten Gefühle der »rätselhaften russischen Seele« vereinigt und widerspiegelt, und zwar mit einer Spannweite des Verhaltens, die »von Sanftmut bis zum Zorn, von der Erstarrung bis zum Aktionismus, von der Entsagung bis zum zügellosen Genuß, von der Entwicklung großer Ideen bis zum Phlegma« reicht? Und daß diese Widersprüchlichkeit und Zerrissenheit, die Koexistenz extremer Polaritäten, ein immerwährendes charakteristisches Merkmal der russischen Kultur sind? Dies alles kann man auch heute in verschiedenen westlichen »Reiseführern durch die Labyrinthe der russischen Seele«. Da findet man wieder die beliebigen Stereotypen und Klischees vom ewigen exotischen Russen, eine alte Erfindung des Westens.

[ What do we know of Russia and the Russian? That Russians possess a ‘bipolar mentality’ that unites and is reflected in the contradictory feelings of the ‘mysterious Russian soul’ and expansive behavior, from meekness to wrath, from stiffness to berserking, from self-mortification to unrestrained hedonism, from big ideas to the phlegmatic picayune? Is the coexistence of extreme polarity a fundamental characteristic feature of the Russian culture? One can read this and more in different western guides through the mazes of the ‘Russian Soul’. There one finds again the perennial stereotype and cliché of the eternal exotic Russian, an old invention of the West. ]”
— Russische Dichtung.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Górecki on Loss: Progressive Disability in the Shadow of Canonic Agency

W hen horses die, they breathe,
When grasses die, they wither,
When suns die, they go out,
When people die, songs are sung.”
— Velimir Khlebnikov.

CMT: Listen. Górecki started with techniques that somewhat resemble Messiaen. But in his later works, his atonal practices disappear. They’re replaced by tonal minimalism of gently mounting thematic phrases.

DSM: His String Quartet No. 3, ‘...songs are sung,’ performed by Kronos Quartet, is songlike and thematic. But it’s not purely sorrowful, like his Third Symphony. This String Quartet No. 3 is filled with soul-searching melancholy, it’s true—music that seldom rises above mezzo piano. The opening Adagio builds on a pernicious metrical theme borrowed from Beethoven’s Seventh—over which we have this “breathing” violin melody. The violin part resembles a dying person’s breathing in and breathing out, progressively more labored—inspiring, expiring. It ascends to a tense climax and then dissolves into an angst-filled stillness.

CMT: That’s followed by an even more subdued Largo, interspersed with major-key plateaus. The brief third movement, Allegro, suggests a recovery, but that is short-lived and gives way to the thematically related Deciso and Finale with their continued progression and deterioration.

DSM: There’s a pervasive melancholy followed by a cathartic peacefulness, created by Górecki’s repetition of figures. It reminds me of my experiences taking care of people in hospice, close to the end of their lives.

CMT: Górecki’s slow tempos are very occasionally supplanted by faster ones—ironic or defiant outbursts. These exacerbations and remissions are surely characteristic of the course of many people at life’s end. Górecki’s mildly dissonant minor key chorale textures that tend toward harmonic stasis—those too are symbolically consistent with palliation of pain, with the incurability of failing organ systems in the body, with the clinging to hopes and spiritual concepts, with the dying person’s effort to maintain an emotional stasis up to the last.

DSM: Górecki’s five-movement quartet is a loose, arch-like form. Material from the first two movements is repeated in the last two movements in a way that clarifies or revises the meaning that was imparted at the outset.

CMT: The ending that mirrors the beginning is something of a T.S. Eliot-esque Four Quartets ‘Little Gidding’ (‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’) return, a cycle. Górecki’s surprises, such as the romantic theme that appears in the third and fourth movements, are wonderfully narrative: the temporary recovery; the suspense you feel when it becomes increasingly clear that the recovery won’t last, but it’s not yet clear what will happen next. But I think some listeners may have a hard time noticing or appreciating the narrative. It takes some effort on the listener’s part to grasp it—the listener must be in an imaginative mood, must be open to hearing a song about morbidity and mortality. Górecki has this glacial lyricism—long, long projective lines—mounting tensions conducted on a glacial timescale of minutes. Having worked in palliative care, this String Quartet No. 3 immediately spoke to me, spoke poignant truth. But I wonder how many listeners will be receptive and hear in it the things that I hear.

DSM: The hospice or palliative care interpretation is supported, I believe, by the positive, transient major-key melodies undermined by negative harmonies and dissonances. The negative material suggests doubt, and possibly a difficulty remembering.

CMT: Or even a relinquishing, a letting-go of trying anymore to remember. As the circulation begins to fail, as the perfusion of the brain diminishes—the person has less and less ability to keep up the effort to be wakeful and lucid. In fact, this Quartet as a whole seems preoccupied with the elusiveness of memory, with the mind’s ability to repeat ideas but to lose itself in them through that very repetition, through its periodic development and both exact and inexact recall. An excellent example is the rather sweet, rising melodic idea just after the start of the only fast movement (III Allegro, sempre ben marcato), which at the end falters and flickers and fades away. Its closing cadence barely registers. The symbolism is so strong—the resemblance to the process of dying is so unmistakable—it’s impossible to think that this idea was not behind Górecki’s writing.

DSM: Your example also reveals Górecki’s symphonic style—the lack of expressive closure in the Allegro third movement propels the listener forward. Then he quotes from the first movement of Szymanowski’s Second Quartet. This quotation—a technique we see in Górecki’s earlier music—also suggests that the person—the singer, the narrator of this Quartet—is remembering or trying to recall specific things that are outside this Quartet; is successfully remembering the Szymanowski snippet and then losing it.

CMT: Besides the Szymanowski quotation, the features of Górecki’s String Quartet No. 3 include its strategic use of melodic thirds, both minor and major; its chordal patterns with strong diatonic and sometimes cadential features; its conflictual dissonances between melody and harmony.

DSM: Górecki’s slow tempi produce moments of peace and resolution, introspective meditations during periods of lucidity. The music makes you urgently hope that the subject of the Quartet can somehow sustain the peaceful state of such moments. But no such luck—for the most part the work is characterized by an organic restlessness—like the agitation of an elderly person who has a cognitive disorder, like Alzheimer’s Disease. In effect, the Quartet is like the memorial testimony of a family member or other caregiver, summarizing the progress of their loved one’s prolonged deterioration and eventual death. It is a memorial to the person, but the person who gives this account is ennobled by the act of giving it. It is an unsentimental testimonial to the nature of the human condition, and to the innate goodness in humankind as members of our species try in extremis to cope with our condition. In the sense that the four string voices are rendering what amounts to a song or story of one person, this Quartet is far less discursive or conversational than most other string quartets.

CMT: Having cared for people at the end of life, including dementia patients, I identify viscerally with the expressive world that this Quartet evokes—the music transports me far beyond the literal musical content of the Quartet.

DSM: This String Quartet No. 3 convinces me that Górecki’s retreat from serialism in his earlier work to his more recent minimalism was really a positive move. The Quartet’s underlying morbidity somehow carries optimism. The writing is well paced and unrelentingly intense.

CMT: In terms of pacing, the length of the first movement, and maybe the fourth, would be a bit much for a listener who is not grasping or identifying with the morbidity-mortality themes, I think. The minimalist violin sighing-inspiring-expiring might annoy such a listener, especially when it continues for more than 10 minutes. This Quartet is 56 minutes long, after all. Most of the sections feature cadential silences—very meaningful, if one accepts the interpretation we’re applying to the Quartet—but easily misunderstood by others who are not in a receptive mood, who might feel the silences are gratuitous.

DSM: There are these slow pulses in the viola and cello parts that signify uncertainty and inability to act. Why do you think that ‘agency’—the human capacity to make choices and to act in the world—matter to us and to Górecki?

CMT: You mean why is it so important that our intentions have effects in the world and that they embody what we value? Well, the final, terminal phase of life when we are totally dependent on others and are unable to perform even the simplest activities of daily living like feeding ourselves or bathing or toileting represents a diminution of all of the means we have of establishing our identity and sense of self. It is a period of tremendous loss. With thoughtful end-of-life care, it need not mean the erosion of dignity or worth or integrity as a person. But it is undeniably a time of loss. Vegetables do not have ‘agency’ or intentions. Individuals in a persistent vegetative state do not have ‘agency’. Personhood—being fully alive—is inseparable from ‘agency’. That’s why ‘agency’—the ability to decide and act—is so important, to us and to Górecki. But, beyond that and given that Górecki is Polish, given that he experienced all manner of repression under the old regime, and given that he more or less completed this Quartet in 1995, I wonder whether this Quartet embodies his motivations for political agency and judgment in an age that lacks much enthusiasm for civil rights.

DSM: What are the conditions for being an impactful citizen when the meaning of democracy has become less transparent and nominally democratic governments are filled with corrupt plutocrats? David Kyuman Kim has published a book recently that addresses these issues. He specifically examines the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Kim treats agency as a form of religious experience that reflects implicit and explicit notions of the Good. Kim considers ‘projects of regenerating Agency’ or critical and strategic responses to loss—very relevant to the subject of Górecki’s String Quartet No. 3. Moreover, he says that agency is ‘melancholic freedom’. Such freedom persists through the moral and emotional losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, ethnic and gender discrimination.

CMT: Here are some excerpts from the fifth movement (Largo, Tranquillo) of this Quartet.

[60-sec clip, Kronos Qt, 1.4MB MP3]

W hilst the slow, mournful music fully articulates the weight of death and grief, instead of being catapulted into corresponding misery, it has the surprising effect of throwing the listener into a state of contemplation, reverie and even hope.”
— Charlotte Gardner, BBC Online.

I f Górecki’s works are informed by suffering and grief, they also chronicle courage and vision. There’s an unmistakably political component alongside the music’s spirituality. Górecki, after all, touches on some of the pivotal events of the 20th century: World War II, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Pope John Paul’s return to his native land in the closing years of the Cold War. But if Górecki is resolutely Polish and Roman Catholic, his music surely transcends cultural and spiritual barriers.”
— Cate Hagman, Olsson’s Classical Corner, Bethesda.

L ike the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Henryck Górecki’s music seems cerebral almost to the point of insularity. Stevens wrote: ‘Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.’ Of course, no art exists in a vacuum, carrying as it does an inherent quality of communication. Yet, there are those artists who, through their use of symbolism, create an atmosphere that leads to a profound sense of contemplation and loneliness.”
— ArtAndCulture.

I s my death possible?’ How is this question to be understood? ... One of the aporetic experiences—my own impossible yet unavoidable death—can never be subject to an experience that would be properly mine—an experience that I can have and account for. Yet there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly mine than ‘my death’.”
— Jacques Derrida, Aporias.

DSM: Melancholy and aporias are, of course, perennial subjects in the Arts. For example, you can see melancholy and creative despair in the works of such disparate artists as Peter Brueghel, Albrecht Dürer, Edward Hopper, Jörg Immendorf, Sigmar Polke and Caspar David Friedrich. Suffering and alienation inform Art across all cultures and all centuries. The sublime melancholy Górecki achieves in this Quartet is another masterpiece in that tradition.

CMT: The term ‘melancholy’ comes from the ancient Greek melas (black) and chole (gall). The Greeks believed that it was bile in the body that produced the despair and depression that so characterized the poets and artists of their time. In medieval times, scholars and artists formed ‘melancholy Clubs’ and in 1621, Robert Burton wrote ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ the first systematic review on the subject.

M elancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.”
— Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764.

DSM: For Susan Sontag, the ‘mind as passion’ and the body in pain were central motifs. Her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, considers how images of war and violence mediate our responses to human suffering. Like Górecki, she favored disjunctive forms of
argument; she liked silences. She used aphoristic modes of critical expression and used epigrams not as mere decorations but as encapsulations of the meaning she intends in her text; so does Górecki with his Khlebnikov epigram, although he tries to deny it in his interview with Norman Lebrecht.

CMT: In his delicate portrayal of indelicate aspects of human life—this Quartet with its complex network of multiple surprises and ironies, Górecki achieves a level of authenticity that one rarely encounters in depictions of life. Normal, canonical existence is always suspect, a temporary armistice. . . these fears bleed into successive generations, so that a war or defeat or forced labor or internment are not over when they are ‘over’ but are carried around as this inchoate melancholy the listener recognizes as the backdrop of Górecki’s work.

T he forests were on fire—
they however
wreathed their necks with their hands
like bouquets of roses
People ran to the shelters—
he said his wife had hair
in whose depths one could hide
Covered by one blanket
they whispered shameless words
the litany of those who love
When it got very bad
they leapt into each other’s eyes
and shut them firmly
So firmly they did not feel the flames
when they came up to the eyelashes
To the end they were brave
To the end they were faithful
To the end they were similar
like two drops
stuck at the edge of a face.”
— Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems, 1956-1998.

DSM: You mean that melancholics often keep mental ledgers of help received and given, feel deprived, begrudge others their successes. The elderly in nursing homes keep such ledgers—tend to resent those who are not maintaining their accounts in good standing, resent the family members who are not visiting as frequently as they would like. Yes, there is no ledger-keeping in Górecki. There is the nostalgia, though, that permeates this music. It remits in the Third Movement (Allegro) briefly. And it remits transiently when the tense, dissonant passages give way to sudden, gentle major chords. But even those affirmative moments are fleeting and seem fueled by memories, rather than durable new developments. This reinforces the realistic sense that the character Górecki creates—the individual that this Quartet evokes—is failing, beset by a series of ongoing morbid problems that are incurable and terminal, as with someone in hospice.

CMT: In other words, the nostalgia is not narcissistic. It’s propelled by the morbidities that are driving the rest—spontaneous and organic, not of the character’s choosing.

DSM: Flickering life, belly-up. The sageing flesh, a wrinkled vicedom. The veined reverberation of a life consumed. On corneas imprinted with a thousand dreams, now penumbral plays directed by a sight receding and a brain enraged.

CMT: It’s hard to believe this is the same Górecki who composed serialist music in the 50’s and 60’s. This is the music of a post-modern Romantic.

DSM: His earlier works are sharp, biting; this latest Quartet is sadly, warily wise.

CMT: I wonder why, given that he completed the composition of this Quartet in 1995, he withheld it from Kronos Quartet (who had commissioned it) until 2005. That has got to be unique. Very strange. And the story behind it would, I bet, be worthy of a novel or a screenplay.

DSM: A 10-year hiatus is not explicable in terms of mere editing. Was it that he was waiting, to see whether this Quartet in the end truly said what he intended it to say? Was it that events in Poland or events in Górecki’s life during those years were altering and re-altering what he felt truly needed to be said?

CMT: Or was the delay due to some frailty or health problems of his own?

DSM: No, my hunch is that—as with Polish poets like Zagajewski and Milosz—he wanted to be sure this Quartet did not contain anything that would, in hindsight, diminish it. This is a highly introverted, meditative piece—and there is a risk that compositional gestures in
such a piece could be precious or trite. To create such an inward-looking piece as this is a very subtle, risky thing—it’s deceptively simple-looking on the face of it. But I think it’s inherently harder to be sure when you are ‘finished’ with such a piece—harder, that is, if you deeply care about your decision being right. ‘Ten years hard,’ I don’t know. But hard, anyway.

W rite what you like about the quartet. I am always interested in what people write about my work. I put notes on paper, you put words. What I think about the music, my philosophy, that does not leave my work room. But I am curious to know what others see in it. [...] [W]hat goes into my music stays in my [work] room. The world can hear in it what it likes.”
— Henryk Górecki, interview with Norman Lebrecht, La Scena, 28-FEB-2007, about Quartet No. 3.

I ask why he waited so long before bringing it [Quartet No. 3] out. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he sighs. ‘It’s like wine, some bottles you leave for two years, some for five. This one had to lay a little bit longer.’ ”
— Norman Lebrecht, interview with Henryk Górecki, La Scena, 28-FEB-2007, about Quartet No. 3.